Hello good people!

I work for a company that has a need for an adaptive database that can integrate all of our functions of business, and I'm trying to decide if FileMaker Pro is the right product for us. We are a computer manufacturing company that builds and installs networks for dental offices. We have to have a very flexible inventory, and scheduling will be pretty intensive as well. We would like to maintain several (20+) "warehouses" for items, and have the whole database be scalable for whatever growth we experience.

What I would like from this forum is some advice regarding the suitability of FileMaker Pro for our needs. I've seen a database in action at another company in town, but I'm not sure about the size limitations of this database. We currently sell to about 40 clients per month, many of them new leads. Could anybody please comment on ANYTHING you think I need to consider before jumping into FileMaker (or whatever other program you could recommend)... like I said, my main concern is whether the database structure will be able to handle large amounts of transactions and data. Also, I am fully aware that FileMaker is for BUILDING databases, not ready out-of-the-box...

Thanks for any help you can offer,

Dave Gibson

Generic Answer =YES!

FileMaker is very sutiable for your needs but the real question is do you have a developer/consultant that can accomodate your needs?.

Correct out of the box FileMaker will not do much for your business, you will need yourself or your IT or consultant, develop a solution that meets your needs. With the right foundation and team in place your solution can be scalable for whatever growth you experience.

With FileMaker you can develop almost anything (up to the FM limits 250 users and such stuff) 10 times cheaper, than with other databases.

Running costs will be 20-100 times cheaper.

On HW you can save 10-50% with FileMaker. It does run fast.

On licensing you can save 0-1000%.

If you enable the word processing in FileMaker to users, you'll do not need Word on each machine.

And so on.

To make this happen, hire consultant!

First of all, there is probably no database scalable for "whatever growth you experience". If you expect to become Microsoft in size within a year, you are probably doomed, as your database development is already 5 years behind schedule .

As to the 40 clients per month, this is really fairly small and should be well within the capabilities of FM. File size should not be a limitation in your application.

-bd