Newb question: Is Filemaker able/appropriate tool to manage the following data needs

[ldeikis]

Hello.  Please excuse the long-winded first post: I apologize for taking the time to ask such a basic question, but this is a platform I will only delve into if it solves this need.  By the time I can answer that question, I'll have sunk an awful lot of learning into it, so I figured I'd ask in advance and maybe save the labor.  I have no formal programming experience,  but grew up in the kind of family that thinks teaching a little kid BASIC is a fun idea and I don't shy away from challenges.

I do lighting for television and I need to setup a system to manage rental inventory in/out.  I am coming at this from the rentER side, trying to efficiently track and record items received and returned in multiple stages and multiple orders, often overlapping.  The workflow is

1.We submit an order to the rental house of items and quantities of each, with an order name, stage number, and order date.

2.The rental house delivers the equipment to the stage, connected to the order name, stage, and date, and email an ORDER OUT to me, with the discreet SKU of most items, but with only COUNTS of some items (ie, "75 aircraft safety cables" instead of "SN1234567 Arri 300W fresnel" ).  This comes as both pdf and excel, though I have little control on the formatting and accept a fair bit of labor in the conversion.

3.There is a data entry step to import that ORDER OUT into my system

4. My crew scans (with a barcode scanner) the entire order to confirm it is delivered as promised, including entering the manual counts for non-SKU items.  This step should be somewhat idiot proof.

4 1/2.  We shoot some tv.

5. My crew later returns some or all of the order, again scanning it and recording manual counts for non-SKU items.  This step should be somewhat idiot proof.

6. The rental house emails an ORDER IN to me, basically a parallel to the ORDER OUT earlier.

I need to be able to at any time see the original order, what's been returned (as both individual SKU's and also summed by item type), what remains of an order (as both individual SKU's and also summed by item type), and similarly see inventory on the stages as wholes.  I also need to easily compare all the above steps--did the rental house send me as many widgets as I ordered?  Did they confirm as many widgets returned as I scanned as returned?  How many widgets are missing?  How many widgets are on the stage somewhere?  Plus of course to search for an SKU and see what order it is from and what stage it ought to be on.  While scanning in/out I need confirmation that the SKU I've scanned is a match to something the rental house sent us (and a warning that it's an error somehow if not) as well as a dropdown to select an item description for a non-SKU item.  I also need a warning if an SKU is scanned twice--this process is a little mind numbing and sometimes the guy with the scanner beeps a cable twice, and we need to know that...  A complication to this is that while the items with SKU's DO have unique SKU's, we sometimes order an item on one order, use it, return it, and later that season order the item again and coincidentally receive the same item with the same SKU, but now on a new order...  so we need to differentiate a duplicate scan of an SKU that is on THIS order vs a duplicate scan on any order ever.  Since multiple orders end up on the same stage at the same time, though, the various orders for the entire season have to cohabitate in one database.

I built a real pain in the neck excel document that does a lot of this, because that's the program I'm used to from other applications, but after bleeding from the ears with nested arrays and tier upon tier of IF;THEN formula it occurred to me that I'm really not processing this data at all, just comparing long lists of records and bare-bones addition/subtraction and that it is likely more suited to a database than spreadsheet tool.  Obviously there exist inventory management programs which natively do this, but they either cost an ongoing subscription or have very limited asset numbers which make them unsuitable for me (we're tracking between 1,000-10,000 items usually), and they also offer a lot of invoicing and stockkeeping that I don't need. 

Is this something Filemaker is comfortably suited to, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Thank you tremendously for taking the time to read this!

 

Luke in NYC

 

 

[Wim Decorte]

Short answer: yes, nothing in your description begins to even remotely push the envelope on the FileMaker platform.

Ongoing subscription: once you start building software, you're going to end up with a subscription for the tool you use to write that software.  That's not unique to FM, it's just what it is.  Since you mention this explicitly as one of of the disqualifying characteristics I wanted to make sure and call it out and set realistic expectations.

[ldeikis]

1 hour ago, Wim Decorte said:

<snip>Once you start building software, you're going to end up with a subscription for the tool you use to write that software. <snip>

Thanks for the quick reply...  This seemed very much within the novice corner of FM, but I was ears deep into Excel before I realized I had gone down the wrong road, so...

RE subscription, I thought I could buy an individual license that would allow one user/machine to access the software...  That would suffice until the point that paying for it isn't my problem.  Either I'll be the person supervising the checkins/outs, or my boss or our clients would choose to buy a dedicated machine for the purpose or a license to use it on a broader scale.  These jobs are all kind of ad hoc in a few-months-at-a-time way, so an ongoing subscription is too likely to end up on my financial shoulders.

Thanks,

Luke

[Wim Decorte]

Yes, you can buy a single license but in reading your intended workflow it strikes me that parts of the work is done in different places at different times.  Meaning a hosted solution shared on multiple client machines, some of which are probably going to be handheld devices (for the on-stage work).

Since FM is a platform designed for sharing data and collaborating you may find that buying a single license is expensive relative to the entry-level 5-user license-plus-server.  And with the single license I think you'll be challenged in putting the proof-of-concept into testing and eventually production.  Especially safe-guarding the file and its intellectual property and its data integrity.