In other news, I think I have a temporary dataprocessing system demoed at work that will greatly compress the pick-and-pack process for order fulfillment. In essence it allows the pick-and-packer to do a warehouse run in the morning to grab everything in the previous day’s orders, and then to package them by priority and efficiency: multiple orders and special-handling orders first, followed by gangs of single-item orders grouped by the ordered item, which makes labeling and packing much simpler. Yesterday in about three hours of actual packing time I closed and shipped over fifty orders.

Sounds good, right?

Alas, it’s all ricketied together in Excel and Word and relies on mail-merge features. next up is some intimate familiarity with Access. It’s an intimacy I’ve had previously and the prospect of which makes me long for slow, easy-to-design-in FileMaker. A nice hefty reference book was already proving useful this afternoon as I left work.

I would like to note in my own defense that my baling-ware is intended purely as a temporary implementation, and part of the impetus in evolving it was to provide me with enough use-case material that I can develop early-stage design docs as an aid in evaluating third-party prospective solutions for our inventory and fulfillment management stuff.

When FM 7 launched, there was some noise about FM being something like a front-end for [insert fave open source DB here]. Is this in fact the case, FM is now a suite of bolt-on tools for [your database software here]? Cuz it should be, and that would be neat.