Inventory Control Database

Home Page / Description of Functionality

The "Home" page is the first window you see when the database is run.  Each button is a functionality of the database.  Additional buttons will be added when needed.

• Item Inventory - This lets you view and add items, edit details, and view each item's inventory by location, as well as Issue or Recieve quantity for an item, and view its Inventory history.
• Pull List Template - This lets you create a Pull List, which is just a list of items and their quantities that are needed to build a specific structure.  A factory might have a Pull List for an Arial Home that is completely furnished with indoor plumbing and solar power, and another Pull List for an Arial Home that will hook up to the electrical grid and have an out house.
• Run a Pull List - This gives you the options of just printing out a Pull List report, or of also automatically reducing the inventory quantity of all the Pull List's items
• Organizations - This let's you search on and view details of an Organization.  Organizations added as "Manufacturer" and "Vendor" are used in the Item Detail window.
• People - This is an optional functionality to the database.  A person's record can be linked as a primary contact for an Organization.  This is also a great resource for having a centralized contact database, or digital rolodex.

Keeping Track of Items

A number of different filtering options are provided to made it easy to find the item you are looking for.

The screen shot above shows me filtering my item list to just those that are manufactured by Ryobi.  Double-clicking on a specific item will open up the detail window for that item.  The Open Filtered Items button will open up the details window for the five items that are listed, where the first item will be shown, and you can scroll to each of the other items.

If a field name is underlined, that means that double-clicking on it will let you edit the contents of the drop-down list.  E.g., double-clicking on the Category field opens up this window:

Here is a breakdown of what each of the fields in the Item Details window means:

• Inactive - Useful if you don't use an item anymore, but you want to keep it around for historical purposes.
  
• Category - What an item is used for (Plumbing, Electrical, etc.).
  
• Item Type - What an item is (Tool, Material, Supply, etc.).
  
• Description - For best organization of a lot of items, it recommend to use a "Noun - Adjective" structure.  E.g., "Water Pump - 12VDC" & "Water Pump - 120VAC" instead of "12VDC Water Pump" & "120VAC Water Pump".  This will keep a better alphabetical order of your items, which is especially important the larger the database grows.
  
• Expendable - Check this checkbox if the item gets used up during a build (WD-40, Eternabond, Plumbing) instead of getting returned to the factory intact (ladders, hammers, sawhorses).
  
• Manufacturer - Select the manufacturer of the item.  If the manufacturer isn't listed, then double-click on the field to add a new one.  Double-clicking on the field when a manufacturer is selected will bring up that manufacturer's detail page, in case you need to find out more details about it (website, phone number, contact person, etc.)
  
• Model Number - The model number of the item.
  
• Component Of - Used if the item is a subset of a larger item that goes into a house.  Will be used for future functionality (see To Do list).
  
• Issue UM - The Unit of Measurement that the items gets issued (sent out to the field) at.
  
• Unit Price - The cost per "Issue UM".  Useful for per-house cost accounting.
  
• Bin - If applicable, select the bin that this item is stored in when it goes out to the job site.  This is used as a grouping method for the Pull List report.
  
• Vendor - Holds the details of your Primary and Secondary vendor that you purchase the item from.
  
• Item Storage - Generally, an item is stored at one location, but this lets you keep track of quantity of an item across multiple storage locations if that is applicable.  One of the locations must be marked as Primary, as this will be the default location that quantity will be drawn from when you run a pull list.  The only way to change quantity is by pressing the Issue Qty. or Receive Qty.button.  This is done to keep an audit trail, so that a transaction report can be run to show your inventory flow for an item or a location.
  

People & Organizations

Here are screen shots of the current People and Organization detail windows:

Pull Lists

Clicking the Pull List Template button lets you add/change/delete your pull lists.

Clicking the Edit Template buttons opens up this window:

• Add Item(s) - Opens up an Item Search window similar to the one used for Item Inventory.  This window lets you select one or many items to add to your Template.
  
• Delete Item - Deletes the selected item from your Template.
  
• Update Item's Quantity - By default, when an item gets added to a template, its quantity is 0.  Use this button/field combo to update the selected item's quantity.

Clicking the Run Pull List button brings up a window that lets you select a Pull List, and then either print out a Report or also automatically reduce all of your template item's quantities from Inventory.  For any item that is stored at multiple locations, you are asked if you want the quantity to be pulled from its primary storage location (working), or one of its other storage locations (To Do).

A sample report looks like this (screen shot of this report's fifth page):

To Do

• Inventory Report for: All Items; By Storage Location
• Inventory re-order report: If a Pull List is selected, and the number of Pull Lists that you want to to have enough inventory for on hand for each item is specified, print out a report of all item's and their quantities that need to be ordered (e.g., I want to keep enough items on hand for 2 Pull Lists of template "Arial Home with PV & Plumbing"; this report will tell me how many of each item I'll need to order to fullful this).
• Inventory Price report per Pull List:  This will report how expensive each pull list costs.
• Filter search introductory windows for People and Organizations
• Check-in of non-expendable items by Template.  This will be useful to automatically add back to inventory all non-expendable items that are returned to the warehouse after a build.
• Copy Template functionality
• History Report, to show when and why an item's quantity changed over a period of time.
• Make Component Wizard.  A Pull List for an Arial Home would probably have something like "Window Panels; Qty. 5" instead of: "Steel sheets; Qty. 5", "Glasteel sheets; Qty. 5", "Polybau Windows; Qty. 5", "BioBased foam; Qty. 24 cubic feet".  However, it also makes sense to keep inventory track of all of those individual items.  Since it would be a pain for every panel that is made to manually reduce the quantity of all of the individual items, and increase the quantity of component, a wizard that lets you do all of this with just a few mouse clicks would be nice.
• Verify that all combo boxes' values refresh after a child window is initiates that changes the contents of that combo box.
• When a Pull List is run, allow an item's quantity to be reduced from a non-primary location.