Inventory Tracking & Purchasing

nimr0d writes "I work for a company is subcontracted entirely to the county government. We write the software in-house. We have approximately 100 different locations we service, and don't expect that to change much, for better or for worse. Currently, we have an archaic, DOS-based, ICOBOL inventory system which tracks every piece of digital equipment we have, by a individually unique serial number, which is further tracked by a 'SystemID', which is a container for each individual workstation. We then have another container for the location where the equipment resides. We currently track around 30,000 individual parts. Problem is, our system is very bug-ridden and is constantly prone to 'losing' equipment. We desperately need a new system for PO's, RA's, and inventory/cost/depreciation tracking desperately. Does anyone have any advice?" "We need to be able to ship an exact copy of the system we originally sold them, in the event of a failure. Some stations serve different functions, so the ability to classify system's and parts by type is also very helpful. We also currently have flags for leased or purchased equipment, and whether that part is covered under warranty or not.

We have looked into several companies that write custom software, but they are looking for upward of $35,000 for a SQL or Access application, which is insane for a company of our size (approximately 25 people) to buy into. There has to be something out there reasonably priced that can do what we need it to, we can't be the only ones."

Comments

Re:ERP.

[PixelJonah]

$35,000 is not expensive for something like that.

Re:you may not believe this

[Karma Farmer]

How will such a system manage depreciation?

$ ncol -2 | join -l, | sed -e 's/^,/$/g'

duh.

Amortization of assets?

vi won't work, but vim includes a macro.

duh.

Automatically deal with purchase orders?

in emacs 'PO' mode, use ctrl-meta-R ctrl-meta-Q crtl-meta-C ctrl-meta-P ctrl-meta-ASDF ctrl-meta-option-alt-command-F5.

duh.

If you can't be bothered to learn how free software works, you have no business on slashdot.

6 step plan.

[complete loony]

Step 1.
Produce DETAILED requirements of ALL the processes that need to be performed and all the reports that are required of the system.

Step 2.
Determine what each part of the application is worth to you. How much business would you lose without it, how much easier would your job be if the software did it for you.

Step 3.
Find any existing products free or otherwise.

Step 4.
Compare the features against your requirements.

Step 5.
Offer to pay someone to implement those feature you want, that the software doesn't have. Possibly the original vendor / author of the software or for free software you could offer the job to someone internally if they're up to it, or well anyone really.

Step 6.
Look at what you've now got, realise that it's totally unworkable, just a buggy if not more so as the last software you used, and pay the $35k to someone else who works in the industry and knows what they are doing to sort out the mess.

Here's some free advice. Getting software to work exactly the way you want can be quite complicated and costly. Don't underestimate it.