The Miraculous MMAD Order System
In 1988 Purdue University's General Stores had 15,000 inventory items in stock, ranging from printing and computer supplies to janitorial supplies and was looking to add on at least twice that many items. General Stores had a mainframe inventory system which was written in the late seventies through the mid-eighties and maintained by the central computer shop on campus. This system left several cumbersome tasks unautomated - and one of them was restocking inventory.
To restock inventory, General Stores personnel had to match up two card files - a vendor file and an item file (on which they manually kept track of order history because the mainframe data was outdated) - with a mainframe low inventory report to manually calculate, total, and type a three part ship order form. This process took the better part of a week, every two weeks.
"Just this ... to produce all this?"
The Order System makes the rounds