Quote:Very interesting, Mystic. What method was used for costing the inventory: FIFO, LIFO, or Standard Cost. The inventory being related to manufacturing, I would guess you used Standard Cost. These are my favorite kind of systems. What platform and language were they written in?
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Sorry for not seeing this sooner, this thread got popular and everyhing flashed before my eyes ;-)...They never named their method, it was their own means of control primary matter to evaluate material lost on a per yard of material used basis. We essentially created a system of recipes to create the selected product and in those recipes (for say a size 12 nike running show which was 5" wide or so. once we had the different elements that made up a product, we could calculate how many could be built given X amount of square yard of material. We could also do the opposite and insert X amount of products and based on their recipe we could evaluate (quite accurately I might add) how many yards of materials would be needed for the order. then we could easily calculate the amount of unusable materials we'd end up with :-)..hence the manufacturing losses. We used Oracle Databases with VB Front Ends.
The good trick is that we had the first ever VB project that actually allowed more than one MDI application to be created at a time (a well known restriction in the VB community at the time. one for each of the 14 business modules that the application had. All general DB input screens and search facilities were in independant DLLs and could be accessible from any of the 14 modules as needed. We really pushed VB 5 to it's total limits back then :-).
This was of course integrated with the warehouse so that the main office could control everything that was happening in all of it's warehouse and manufacturing compounds from one desktop. They had manufaturing and warehouse in like 47 countries around the world. The most complicated part of the application was the manufacturing recipes and S.R.P. pricing calculations. And we had all these executing themselves in an average of 1 to 4 seconds (from one side of the continent to the other). Still today, that's pretty impressive. The DBAs did alot on the DB to tweak it like that, but th VB front end was just that.. We used an N-Tier architecture
There was 2 self replicating databases. And we had business objects available in 24 main servers around the world. The front end was calling the business objects to perform their tasks, the business objects sent their requests and queries to the database which returned the data back to the business objects and the business objects processed the data and returned it to the front end stations.
It was one of the most complex systems I've had the priviledge to help create and I learned alot about N-Tier architecture. We developped the system to work on LAN, WAN or Internet and when we were closed to finished we moved it to EDI format so I learned alot about EDI then too.
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