| re: URGENT HELP REQUIRED
John,
First, bad move trying to get us to do your homework. Second, there are
vetted reference designs for most common database problems around on the
Internet. Because of this and because you posted your request to us without
mentioning if you had done your research to look for existing designs I for
one am not in a big hurry to help you. Third, you can find some good
starting points for basic software for a small business in the Small
Business Tools that came with Office 2000--including database applications
for a retail business like a fictional furniture company.
Now, you said fictional furniture company. You didn't say whether the
business is primarily a sales organization or a manufacturing company. A
sales organization is going to need to know about its inventory, it's sales
and purchasing, and costs associated with selling the service or product. A
furniture manufacturer also needs to know these things but must also
understand whether the components in inventory are sufficient to produce the
finished goods that have been ordered. This means they will also need a
bill of materials and associated code to help them count how many finished
goods they can make with the inventory on hand.
Were I a student with limited time I'd choose a problem I could solve
quickly so I had time to go out with my girlfriend to the local watering
hole. I'd probably map out only a portion of the business processes in a
sales organization--say invoices and some simple materials management and
maybe throw in a straightforward thingy to calculate commissions for my
sales people. Invoices need a header table, a line item table, a products
table, an employee (sales person) table for my commision rates, and perhaps
a few lookup tables for things like invoice status, etc--easily drawn in a
couple hours.
I've given you enough here that you should be able to take my ideas as a
starting point and run with them. BTW--I am a teacher and if you are one of
my students you just failed the assignment.
"John" <rdgambling@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:122809ee.0410271131.6bee202@posting.google.co m...[color=blue]
> Hi there - if anyone has a few spare minutes I could really do with
> some help please.
>
> I'm a student and have been given an exercise using MS Access to
> design a simple database for a fictional furniture company. All I
> have to submit by Friday is an E-R diagram showing the proposed table
> structure.
>
> I have racked my brains to come up with an entity relationship diagram
> but cannot get past the stage of even selecting the entity tables to
> use.
>
> Once I have got my head around which way to go I am quite competent at
> building the database.
>
> Can anyone help a poor student in need of help!
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> John
>
> "A company makes self assembly furniture, for which they buy in ready
> made parts from local workshops, put the parts together in a kit and
> then sell on to retail shops.
>
> Devise an E-R diagram for this application and then create a user
> friendly database using MS Access. For each entity you should justify
> the choice of fields and data types.
>
> The data should include
> List of items of furniture available in kit form
> Parts list for each item of furniture with costs and quantities
> List of stock in stores with values and totals
> List of suppliers of each part with wholesale process, quantities and
> lead times
> List of items sold in typical month with value and gross margin
> (profit)
>
> You should make reasonable estimates of the labour content for each
> item of furniture and selling prices."[/color]
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