Adios Alpha, Buenos Dias Beta! (Inventory Program)

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We've been discussing bushing storage and I need some community feedback.

I had the good fortune to be able to take a look at a very wise gentleman's bushing system he's working on (in the very early stages) and I thought it was great. Oddly enough it turns out we had both been thinking about almost the identical thing this week. His is mostly a physical organizational system but the concept is nearly identical.

What you do is measure the inner diameter of the bushing and the outer diameter. You give each bushing (individually, not as a set) an id number of some kind. Then, you measure the tube sizes and hardware sizes of your kits. At that point, the system can do the matching for you. For instance, I made a corkscrew last night and didn't have the bushing set for it. Turns out that I was able to use the big one from the Gentleman's pen and the small one from a euro-deco or something. Took me about 10 minutes to find that out. If the system was doing it for me I would have known in seconds. It would also be useful for when I decide to try out a new pen kit. I would be able to find out up front if I also need to order the bushings with it.

Physical storage needs to be left up to the user. The collection I saw was neatly organized in a grid box. My collection is a bunch of baggies all thrown in a tin. I want either way to work so I'm still giving some thought to implementation there.

I'm pretty sure I've got it straight in my head on how to make all the programming/database stuff work for this. What I need is ideas on anything I'm overlooking, other things that might be useful, etc.

Thanks in advance!
 
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I see two ways to Inventory Bushings.
I will use Cigar pen Bushings from P.S.I. here simply cause i have the cat. right here and the Ciger pen has varying sizes of bushings.

One is to simply inventory that i have Cigar pen bushing. using PKBIG-BU
this limits me to knowing that I have bushings only for the Cigar Pen kit though.
this set of bushings has eight relative measurments.
Tube Diameter and Barrel diameter for finial, Center band (2 sides) and cap.
could simply entering that i have a set of PKBIG-BU be enough to also have all those other measurments entered?

second would be to inventory each bushing seperatly. giving each bushing in a set it's own inventory number.
PKBIG-BUF (final Bushing)
PKBIG-BUCL (center band Bushing Lower barrel)
PKBIG-BUCU (center band Bushing Upper barrel)
PKBIG-BUCC (cap Bushing)

this would allow you to acually store bushings individually regardless of what kit they where made for.
the program would then spit out every possible bushing you have that would work for the cigar pen center band lower barrel. keep the inventory entries consistant with the suppliers order numbers and how you store them is not a problem. you just have to go to the PKBIG-BU bag and identify which bushing is which. (how many of us get that wrong for the cigar pen or Havana?)
the only problem I see is that not all bushing sets have four bushings. some sets have a single double sided center bushing.
not totally sure if that would be a problem or not.
actually reading what the computer spits out at you may take a tutorial though.
I imagine something like this for the cigar pen from P.S.I. and this is a simple off the top of my head list

Finial Bushings:
PKBIG-BUF (P.S.I. cigar finial bushing)
050-0351F (CSUSA cigar pen finial bushing)
11AF (Berea cigar pen finial bushing)

Center band lower barrel Bushing:
PKBIG-BUCL
050-0351CL
11ACL

Center band Upper barrel Bushing:
PKBIG-BUCU
050-0351CU
11ACU

End Cap bushing:
PKBIG-BUC
050-0351C
11AC

this list only uses bushings from P.S.I., CSUSA and Berea and does not include any bushings that would work from unrelated kits.
 
Another suggestion.

Will it help if you can tie some default values for each kit?

Say Sierra...for sure it is manufactured by Berea, it is twist pen, etc.

It is just a few clicks but makes it a lot easier to users IF this mod is simple enough.

Another way could be to minimize the drop down choices to just the possible options for what was already chosen. If I choose Berea, the pen kit list should only provide only the Berea kits, eliminating all CSUSA kits, etc.

Ofcourse these are only fine tuning suggestions.
 
Heya Dario!

I think I might have something that will do almost exactly that for you, but in a slightly different way. Daniel, the creator of the Giant Pen List has been nice enough to work with me on this project and we've been talking about using that data to allow you to do lookups by part number.

So basically you'd click Add New Kit, go down to the Part Number are, put in what you have, and click LookUp (or something similar to all that). The system would do its best to find it for you and let you pick from the best matches. Then it would autofill the rest of the form for you and allow you to tweak it if needed.

I've got a stack of other stuff I have to get done this weekend, but I'm hoping to find enough time to get something like that done. I'll shout it on the boards if I manage to get it done. ;)

Thanks for the feedback!
 
Just a progress update...

-We've added the ability to track kits other than pens now (I like turning corkscrews).
-You can track your accessories (boxes, custom clips, etc.)
-Lots of other little tweaks.

Possibly this weekend or early next week I'm going to be ready for one more heavy Beta test and if all goes well I'm going to release it as Live. I'll post an announcement when we're ready for the big test.

Thanks to everyone who has helped!
 
Hi Gordon,

The software is essentially live, the only reason I have not removed all the beta remarks is because there are one or two more big things I'm going to add to the system so I don't want people to think it's done. ;) The next big additions will be a bushing tracker that will have a few tricks of its own and then a section to track customers.

I've been remodeling our new house this past month and haven't had much programming time available, but I hope to be back on it in another few weeks.

I'm going to guess at the root of the question and say that you're concerned about losing data or the system changing to the point where that your current data will be useless. Rest assured that we're way past that stage in development and minus the expansion of features, you're using the live system.

Thanks for using it and just shout if there's anything it can do better!
 
Is there any reason that Jeff shouldn't put a link on the penturners home page? Just a thought if you looking to drive users.
 
Hi Dan,

Thanks for the thought! I'm not trying to *drive* users to the site so much as I am just offering a free service that I hope folks find useful. I would be fine (and a bit honored) if the community found the program worthy of that kind of promotion. ;)
 
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