Access question :)

[FloppyPoppy]

Hey guy's

How you all doing? First time posting in here go easy on me.

I have a new project to work on i thought Access would a powerful enough tool for my task however i wanted a second opinion before i start.

I have already made several ms access systems including one for our sister company that helps to manage orders/stock/staff whilst making it a lot simpler than the old systems they had in place and stopped data being entered several times over.

I understand that to most people with vast learning experiences in access this was probably a easy task and i have to say it built on a " learn as i go " basis. That my boss loved because it was cheaper for him

I have a new task now and i think it's going to be a lot more complicated(imo)

The first thing i want to get completed on this is the scheduling of tool manufacturing so this would essentially be something to stop us from waiting many hours per week because its not scheduled properly

So a overview of what we have that will need to be scheduled

about 20 staff
about 15 various machines

This is over a 12 hour shift and the machines can be left to run over night

for example Joe may set up a big job in a cnc machine this could take 3 hours, but then he may be able to leave this machine running for 50 hours

This is where we need to plan better where can joe go for 47 hours, and this machine is clearly not going to be usable for the remaining time.

This has never been a problem before as there was never enough work for us to encounter this. But we have recently made some scarily huge contracts with scarily large empires by the likes of Guinness ect

Would Access be a good enough tool to do this as we would like to stop wasting time to be honest

 

[FloppyPoppy]

Essentially a booking system for machinery and staff?

If the process of booking staff/management doesn't quite exist yet because as you say it's expanding rapidly. I'd probably advocate a good (albeit manual) process first. Figure out what works, what doesn't. What information needs capturing and so on.

Automating/building a good/developed manual process is my preferred way of going about things. You're going to place constraints/logic blindly against a process that doesn't exist and could cause issues.

It sounds like your previous piece of work was exactly that, automating and making robust a process that already existed.

For the actual question though, I wouldn't see why not. As a database engine Access is pretty poor, but it's perfect for small 'island' development like this. You may need to get a little creative though.

Thanks for the reply

We do have some foundation planning in the terms of a length of time

The company a huge combined experience in the industry and they sit around a table for each new tool that needs to be designed and made and they come up with educated estimates that are usually spot on, if they say it will take six hours then it will likely take six hours unless something goes wrong.

this is all logged on a huge spreadsheet there are 16 different activities eg Rough milling/cnc milling/waterways ect that the staff do to completely make a tool. ( injection moulding tools this is btw)

they estimate time spent on each of the 16 activities for every individual part of the tool. Each part has a Est. Act .Over time part. So we do get a idea of how long the tool will take to make within the first week or so.

What's hard is fitting this into a " calendar " schedule along with several other tools that are being made in a way that is as productive as possible. - I will upload a picture of this so you can have a idea of what im talking about.

Sorry for the long winded post

 

[FloppyPoppy]

If you are going to be manually scheduling/allocating then this is a fairly straightforward task, as any business logic is in essence in whatever process you come up with to manage this.

Though you want to design your frontend(use appropriate dynamic controls) and backend with flexibility in mind. What happens for instance if all of a sudden a tool take more activities than previously thought.

If there is going to be some auto-scheduling/allocating then this is where it gets complicated as you need to consider how live the current data needs to be (amongst other things), i.e. if someone logs that a process is finished freeing up a machine, how are you going to ensure that a user using the application on a different pc is made aware that that machine is now free.

It could get very complicated: if you always needs a live view of the situation then you at least want to move your backend to SQL db of one sort or another.

This sounds like one of those projects that sounds great in principle but in practice could turn out really complicated. Go sloq!

As a pointer you probably want to define a lot of your business logic in tables too. For instance have a table which contains all your activities, how long they are expected to take, how many processes per activity etc etc. If anything changes then it is just a matter of changing the data in the tables rather than having to change code and release a new version.

Thanks for the response

One key problem from what you have mentioned is you cant exactly have a table listing how long each activity will take ( Unless you mean for each job after it is quoted )

But for instance

Job 1 may require 2 hours of cnc machining
Job 2 may need 300 hours cnc machining for each bolster

It is a very varied job though we could base it off average times? or add some form of margin of error.

I already have a feeling that it's going to be very complicated due to the nature of work really.

I will be taking my time(they asked me how long it would take and they suggested 3-4 weeks and i laughed and said i can't give a time frame as there are so many variables) and currently trying to think of how to display this information to the end users in a simple way and thinking about how this will be structured in the background.

I have done a absolutely TINY amount of SQL but by TINY i mean probably less code than text in this post.

I have done a fair bit of VBA but would not consider myself in anyway to be educated in it or have any great skill sets in this and would need to be re visiting tutorials ect for this. I know this is not idea for the project however i enjoy learning this stuff and i know that i have the ability to do it. It's just a matter of putting the pieces together