Hi,

This is a big ask never mind a big question !!!

I would like to get a bit further in the company that I work for, not a large company, Owner, MD, and 14 employees. I have worked there for 18 months and have been elevated to the Quality dept as a Quality assistant.

At the moment we receive in parts that we treat, when we receive them we also receive a purchase order outlining the treatment required for that particular part via part number. The office production staff book these in, firstly they need to find the specification sheet appertaining to that part number (we have hundreds of specifications written up on openoffice.org files). Once they have printed out the required spec sheet they then hand write
A Shop floor process sheet
B Certificate of Conformity
C Purchase order for sending of the required test pieces to a testing house.

What I would like to do is to automate this process as much as possible. I would like to be able to produce something that runs as described in the following.

Left open on the computer screen would be a window with a field to input a part number once inputted you click OK the process would search for the documents appertaining to that part number.

When found another window would open with five buttons
Button 1. View specification sheet (click on this button and the spec sheet would open)
Button 2. View Shop floor flyer (click on this button and the flyer would open)
Button 3. View C of C (click on this button and the C of C would open)
Button 4. View Purchase Order (click on this button and the P/O would open)
Button 5. Print (click on this button and all documents would print)

If none of the files are available for that part number then each button would lead to the correct template ready to fill in the required information and save for the next time. Most of our work (at least 95%) is repeat orders.

I’m not asking for someone to produce this for me. I know what I want visually but I need guidance to get there, be it a point in the right direction to a tutorial or an available programme or someone tutoring me online. I don’t know, so please could you help. I must add that I don’t have a lot of money so programmes costing hundreds of pounds would not be of any assistance to me, I’m doing this off my own back. The company that I am working for (believe it or not) have only had computers for a couple of years so I would need to produce something that maybe the MD would then stump up some money for a programme to run it, again I don’t know. Also one last thing, would this sort of thing be easy enough to use Visual Basics for, I would prefer to use Excel rather than the pretty openoffice,

Thanks for you time,

Andy (Lurch).