Order entry and tracking system

[Pat Hartman]

Do you have a template I can look at?

Therein lies the rub. Unless your business is a wholesale florist or a company that paints lines on highways and parking lots, or sells custom kitchen equipment, NO. And I can't give you any of those anyway since they are not mine to give away. Those three have the most unique requirements of any other more ordinary OE application I have created.

The best sample of a basic order entry application is the one you already were given which is Northwinds.

Take that quick list of workflow steps I posted and reproduce it for your specific business process and we can go from there.

What is your timeframe? You may be better off hiring someone sooner rather than later but no matter what, YOU are the subject matter expert and if you can't explain it to us, you will waste a ton of money on consulting services because the programmers will be guessing what the app should do. Only YOU know how this app should work. If you have data entry forms, they are a good place to start but naked forms may be unintelligible to us and so they need to be explained. If you don't have this type of training material, you should because it will make the lives of new hires easier and make them more productive sooner.

I am sure you are familiar with the design principle of "Prototype often".

If you have programmers on staff who are familiar with your business, this model can work. If you hire an outsider, he will have no job knowledge and will only know what you tell him or what he might have seen implemented elsewhere and that may be completely irrelevant.

Have you examined the Northwinds sample and compared it to your needs? What is it lacking? For starters, it assumes a stock inventory with NO customization so it is as basic as it gets but that makes it a good teaching tool. Examples need to be simple and understandable so you can envision how you might stick on your custom parts. As far as the three example go, each had very specific needs.
Wholesale Florist
These people are selling live flowers which have a short lifespan. The inventory is rapidly changing and moves at the speed of light in the early morning. Typically their day starts early as shops place orders that will be filled and delivered in the afternoon. Before I built an app for them, all the sales people worked in a large room with several huge whiteboards of current inventory. As soon as someone took an order, they would go to the whiteboard and update the quantities so that no other order taker would sell the same stock. This of course frequently led to over selling of very popular items and so the sales person would need to call back the customer and see if they could find a substitute. So, the basic thing the app did was to provide them with an always up to date inventory. This is easy with a computer because as soon as the detail item was saved, the inventory was encumbered and so no one else could sell it. Then it also handled future orders for weddings and other special occasions. In these cases, every week the app looked ahead to determine if extra quantities of "red roses" would be needed for next week or items that were not commonly stocked so that the wholesaler could keep on top of what was required for future orders. It also calculated average inventory needs by season so they ordered a lot of Lilies around Easter.

Asphalt Marking
The issue here of course is that although the products are fixed, the quantities are not known until after the job is completed. A company might want its parking lot re-striped and so they would tell a sales person what they wanted and the sales person would estimate the quantity of paint and reflective material and time the job would take so they could schedule the crews efficiently but it was only after the truck came back to base at the end of the day that actual time and materials could be calculated.

Custom Kitchen Equipment
This was actually the largest and most complicated of the three. The process started out with estimates and once an estimate was agreed to, it became an order which was then filled and shipped. But although some of the equipment was stock items, most of it was built to spec so it would fit in the space the customer had. So, there could be different colors, different gages of metal plating, different sizes, etc. Pretty much everything about a "table" or "cabinet" or "sink" for example could be customized.

None of these special requirements is addressed by Northwinds nor should they be. But all the applications had the basic workflow I outlined.

 

[AlexT]

Hi All, One thing that has become apparent (besides the fact that I would be crazy to try and use/learn Access myself), is that I actually do not know what I am looking to do. As I go through the "so called" Order management process we have been using, I have discovered it is a botch up from start to finish and I need to get my house in order before approaching anyone for advise. Although someone suggested I was wasting my time creating flow charts and should just use text, I think in pictures - not sure how programmers think but if I could draw a cartoon it would be a head full up with #'s and formula's. Us simple folk need to see something and then build on it from there. I have found a lot of templates but most of them try to do too much and I want to keep it simple. Once I have something tangible I will ask the question again. Thanks for your patience with me. Cheers
Alex.

 

[LarryE]

Hi All, One thing that has become apparent (besides the fact that I would be crazy to try and use/learn Access myself), is that I actually do not know what I am looking to do. As I go through the "so called" Order management process we have been using, I have discovered it is a botch up from start to finish and I need to get my house in order before approaching anyone for advise. Although someone suggested I was wasting my time creating flow charts and should just use text, I think in pictures - not sure how programmers think but if I could draw a cartoon it would be a head full up with #'s and formula's. Us simple folk need to see something and then build on it from there. I have found a lot of templates but most of them try to do too much and I want to keep it simple. Once I have something tangible I will ask the question again. Thanks for your patience with me. Cheers
Alex.

It's 1000% ok to use flowcharts. I have used them in my consulting practice for at least 35 years. If you don't know what you need, it's impossible for any of us to know. You're on the correct path to righteousness.

 

[Cotswold]

Sigh. I don't normally repeat myself but after 43 posts none of us know anything at all. We don't know what data is to be stored. Nor do we know what information is required from the system.
As I have said, the system starts from the contents of the Tables, not from an airy fairy idea, or an imagined input screen. Write down the use for of each of the tables and the actual data in each table and how they relate. That should have been post #1. If your existing system is a dog's breakfast, copying it might not be a good idea.

Maybe take a step back? What you are doing has been done for thousands of years but maybe for different products. How would you do it 80, or 100 years ago? Probably with books of card indexes, or rolodexes. Stuff would arrive and be posted onto the cards. Sales would be deducted, then a ticket given to a typist to type the invoice and send it. Computers aren't necessary for a business but they should make it more efficient. Unfortunately that is not always the result. As is demonstrated by some of the rubbish we have to use on the internet.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Maybe it's worth a few hundred bucks to hire someone to spend two hours with you to create an outline that you can then flesh out. You seem to be flailing around and getting nowhere as evidenced by the post count. Explaining to professional who is used to making sense out of chaos will help you to focus.