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Good morning SO people,

First a bit of general information: I work in a warehouse with goods we manage with a WMS system which I operate. This program is on a VPN thats hosted in Switserland while i'm in Holland. I get also orders in this program through an EDI. I gather groups of orders together to create a full truck. After that they are picked by the warehouse. and stored until it's ready to be loaded.

As the WMS program is just as stated a WMS program and not designed to have an overview of which good are ready to be loaded with which reference at which dock etc, we've created an excel 2010 table which has the following information: Customer, Truck destination, dock loading, time to be ready, time ready, truck name, additional info, number of colli, Picked today?, load today?, wms groep number and scan-out list.

The above information is entered in the table for each truck and we keep an excelfile for each week which has 7 sheets for each day. I keep track each day what we have picked that day and which have been loaded or not. Because of preformance tracking, this needs to be almost perfect. If an order has been picked today the "picked today?"-flag will be set, and if it has been loaded than the "loaded today"-flag will be set. If the goods are picked, but not loaded that day, that row will be copied to the next day with the "Picked today?"-flag set to false.
In this manner we have an overview what goods needs to be picked and which are still waiting to be loaded. So that we dont loose track of any goods

I now this is a lot of information, but I believe this helps in solving my problem.

The problem is as follows: I'm not the only one in this excel sheet. Each day around 6 people have this file open to either actively edit and save very often (like me and my colleague) or the truck planner who check regularly how far we are. They only do saves
As such we have the file open in "Shared"-mode which you all know is bugged. We get a lot of "File in use"" errors when saving.
Also, searching for a list of trucks to one destination in this manner can't be done, since there are multiple excel files. We can track day to day, but thats about it.
Also preformance over a period is out of the question. Or we have to keep track of the performance per week in a extra excelfile.

So my question now is: Do you guys know any program out there which can do all this, or otherwise has most of the same functionality. Which stores all data in the same database. Also multiuser functionality and per user read-only access would be a nice addition. Also Office 365 Co-authoring is not an option. My internet through the VPN isn't very fast and the cells need to be editted fast to keep the warehouse process from stopping (Time is money etc)

I do have experience with programming in Delphi, so I could in theorie create my own databse program (After a year of programming), but why re-invent the wheel, right ?

Thank you very much for reading this long tekst, and I hope someone can help me. And if you have any questions or need clarification, feel free to ask

Alexander
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  • Short answer to a long question: use a database. When you get this into a database you should do things like: instead of a field called 'picked today' you have a a field called 'picked date' which is empty or contains the date it was picked. It's strange that you have a warehouse system that is incapable of doing whatever you're trying to do. Perhaps you should first investigate if the system supports it – Nick.Mc Jun 01 '18 at 10:16
  • I think in the same way with other users; Excel is not the software you may handle this in a sustainable manner. Within your case, the first option should be solving this with your main database software adding a new unit/module etc. If not possible, it would not be very expensive to create a custom web based application that you may do exactly what you are already doing there. Using such way, performance reports may also be created very easily. As a result; IMHO, there is no harm of inventing a new kind of wheel if we need to :) – Hakan ERDOGAN Jun 01 '18 at 11:17

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Your question will probably be closed since this is not a programming question. (See What can I ask about here?), but an easy answer based on the requirements (basic, typical database functionality) and the fact that this is a programming site:

Microsoft Access can do everything you want.

If co-authoring is a problem then don't co-author or improve your network connection, or else any database's performance will be impacted.

ashleedawg
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