For departmental projects with low budgets and short development time, we experimented with some of the GUI database and file management tools for the Macintosh, such as Double Helix and FileMaker Pro. In particular, I used FileMaker Pro to develop fairly robust transaction and management support systems for MMAD Service and Salvage and MMAD Central Delivery, both Macintosh shops. To compensate for some of the power offered by fully relational products such as Fox Pro or Access, I made generous use of FileMaker's automated scripting capabilities and probably pushed that product to its limits in developing the following applications.

Central Delivery
Service and Salvage

Central Delivery System top

Central Delivery personnel needed to be able to define campus delivery zones and generate delivery manifests for drivers. They also needed to calculate shipping discounts, re-charge the departments accordingly, and track other statistics regarding freight companies and customers.

Service and Salvage System top

When furniture, equipment and almost anything imaginable is no longer useful to a University department, it gets sent to Service and Salvage for resale to other departments or to the general public. Equipment is often identified by a Purdue Property Accounting Number or PAN with which it was tagged when purchased. Upon arrival at Service and Salvage, an item's PAN is associated with a Warehouse Tag Number. Particularly, Service and Salvage personnel wanted to produce customers receipts, track individual sales to report back to the University Accounting System, and to be able to quickly generate and distribute an uptodate sales list. This application should port quite nicely to the web.