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I figure someone here either uses something like what I need, or has written a solution I can use.
I've got a warehouse full of electrical stuff for building and maintaining power systems - utility scale. There's less than 1000 SKUs, but most are generic, and may have multiple manufacturers and multiple vendors who sell them. Linemen aren't famous for their love of paperwork, especially late at night in the midst of a storm while trying to get the lights back on, so we haven't had much luck getting them to report what they take and when we're low on something. It's no fun to discover that we're out of a part that is needed for a repair right now, but has a 6 week lead time.
I need a solution, an inventory management tool that can do several important things. Among them:
- Track SKUs internally, and keep track of multiple manufacturer part numbers, as well as vendors who carry each.
- Track Quantities on hand in an easy to operate and understand manner.
- Track frequently used items and recommend stocking levels, keeping track of order multiples and quantity break points.
- It should generate Suggested Orders for items that are low in stock, and allow the user to select items from the list to be put into an automatically created Purchase Order.
- As items are received, select each as Received, and have the items (and last costs) added to Inventory
- It should allow items to be withdrawn for a job, and provide a running job cost
- Items with serial numbers should be tracked under a common SKU, but be traceable by serial number in stock and when sold to a job
These are the basic, minimum requirements, but I'm amazed how few commercially available products have all of these features.
Do you know of any that do, or better yet, have you written such a tool?
There's definitely a market for it!
Will Rogers never met me.
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This might be close to what you are looking for: Mikrofax[^]
Been a long time since I looked at it but I think it might cover some or all of your needs.
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It looks like some serious overkill, but it's interesting. They do cover the gamut in features, but appear to be geared toward far larger enterprises. Thanks for the link; I'll explore what they have to offer. 
Will Rogers never met me.
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I used to know the owner of the company - email me if you want his name - would imagine he still owns the business.
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I can't; you don't have email enabled in your profile.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Thx - have updated profile and emailed you.
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Hi Roger,
Thanks for that wonderful project description; I now have a new scenario to challenge my advanced students with ... uhhh ... I should say that I don't have any students right now [1], and that my last "advanced" student is still sulking after receiving some "tough love" regarding their slacker attitude.
Some aspects of that interesting problem remind me of a massive prototype project I did for BHP Australia's Asian Division (Hong Kong) which was done in Win 2005 and Excel using VBA. During the construction period of a multi-lender financed private-sector power-plant, various complex (recursive) calculations need to be performed; the amount of money actually required for direct construction costs is based on a datum called the "s-curve" that, for each month of the project, shows a percentage of total direct construction costs. That's all very straightforward; where it gets tricky is the calculation of compounding interest on the lenders' monies (each lender has a different share of the "pot," each has different interest rates) ... not only must interest be paid on monies spent, but also paid on monies unspent.
cheers, Bill
[1] reasons complex for that, but do involve living as an expatriate in a country currently run by a military junta after a coup ... resulting in it being prudent to carefully conform to the laws of the land regarding expats and employment, and ever more difficult (if not impossible if you are not married to a citizen) to get an official work-permit.
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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I can't imagine living under such conditions, Bill; it makes my complicated life seem rather mundane by comparison. But when you do get some students, let me know what they come up with for a solution. I am reminded of the days when I was in school, in a Control Systems class. My instructor, unknown to me at the time, was the chief engineer for developing the guidance and control systems of the Phalanx gun system, and he was having some really challenging stability problems with the control equations - the prototype tended to "off the rails" for no apparent reason, and he and his team spent most days measuring and recording its behaviors.
I thought our test problems were oddly worded, and the sample values of angles and accelerations and voltages and such were unusually "real", as in academic circles they tend to use nicely rounded, even numbers for test values. These were decidedly not well behaved numbers. The entire final exam was an open-book, ten question test that we were given a week to complete. The answer to each question provided the necessary input to solve the next, so missing one was unacceptable.
I found out later that he had posed the challenges he was dealing with at work as a challenge to students, first to define the actual response transform of the system, given input command values and real world responses. Determine the transfer function of the closed loop system, identify the roots and the errant poles which cause the instability, calculate the pole shifting compensation factors necessary to bring the system into a stable state, and lastly, design a circuit to apply those corrections.
Most of us passed, and he went on to large bonuses for having solved the stability problems, never telling anyone at General Dynamics that he'd used the best of our exam solutions as a foundation for "his" solution to the problem. A creative approach to problem solving, I'd call it, though some might tag it "plagiarism."
Feel free to have your students, when you have some, solve my problem, and I might just be able to pay you something for it.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Are you sure you all took the same exam 
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Easy: SAP.
Pros: It won't get you fired.
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Maybe so, but Roger's not in his 20's. He won't live long enough to see it actually work.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: Maybe so, but Roger's not in his 20's. He won't live long enough to see it actually work.
I was going to comment on SAP as a CMMS but your comment sums it up perfectly 
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My running partner is in IT at our employer, and has been tangentially involved in migrating our line-of-business apps from our Oracle data bases over to the corporate IT's SAP system over the last several years. The last two words in that sentence sum up the situation perfectly.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Out of the frying pan, and into the fire.
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Software Zen: delete this;
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I would count that as a "Pro", too.
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I work for a Water Company, kinda.
We use Maximo to keep track of our stock, issue them for jobs, build up a cost. We also use it for works management.
This is not a recommendation, just saying what we use.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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Hi Bill,
Have you looked at Maximo or any other off-the-shelf CMMS systems? It's quite expensive (around £4,000 per User) but it does everything you could ever want when it comes to a full Maintenance system (Work Planning, Resource Scheduling, Asset Management, Inventory Management etc.). It can also do the Serial Number tracking on Parts while treating them under a common SKU (my background is in the pharma industry where this is a particular bugbear).
I was working on developing a system last year which was put on the back burner which predicts spares usage and recommends stocking levels based on historical &/or estimated failure rates. I would hope to get it finished by the end of the year. If you have any interest in that, let me know.
Dec.
Declan O'Brien
Aldolex Irl ltd
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Declan OBrien wrote: Hi Bill,
It's Roger.
/ravi
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Ha!!
I obviously had "Bill" on the brain after reading BillWoodruff's post!!
Sorry Roger 
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Declan OBrien wrote: I obviously had "Bill" on the brain
I forgive you, and, please, don't worry, it's usually not fatal.
cheers, Bill
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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We use Microsoft Dynamics NAV (with an LS Retail POS add-on) for our retail stores. It handles inventory and sales. It will cover your requirements, but it's not cheap to buy or implement.
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Have you checked Upwork.com or one of the other freelancer sites?
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To be honest, this sounds pretty simple to make. Am I missing something?
I could prolly do that for you.
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What do your competitors use?
Do you have a budget?
Do you have a staff to maintain the data?
Would you consider RFID tagging all 1,000 pieces of inventory.
setting up sensors on the egress locations to ALARM who ever is trying to remove the device,
to remind them to take the RFID off, and fill in the 3-5 Fields of info (who they are, why
they are taking it, what job, etc)?
I would want to bullet-proof the exiting of the inventory. Most of the time, people are too busy trying to avoid the alligators to remember they need to drain the swamp.
Most systems fail, not because the system does not work. But because it does not "flow" (catching things when they need to be caught, helping people to do the right thing), and then because of users or lack of ability to keep the information up to date.
Once the information is there, doing the things you suggested are a matter of:
- Do they need to be automated?
- Is it okay if it is a report or dashboard that shows the status?
Email me if you want to dig deeper.
We implement these kinds of solutions. We use tools that let you dump just about everything to Excel, and perform additional ad hoc analysis as you wish.
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