M. E. Twigg
mainman2002@msn.com

Maintenance Manager
Supply Tracking System

This version of Maintenance Manager is freeware and comes with no guarantees or warranties of any kind.  This program was developed to track all parts and supplies ordered, received, stocked, issued out, and paid for from multiple suppliers using funds from multiple budgets on multiple projects simultaneously.  It will track everything and supply reports that show where everything is or went, how much it cost, and what the usage has been (so you can track repairs and project future parts usage).  The larger and longer the project, the better this program performs.  It was used successfully for over 4 years to track an inventory of over 1500 different line items with an on hand inventory of about $100K.

It is of value to anyone:

     1) within the supply line from retailer to procurement to supply clerk.

   2) on the maintenance side from the project manager to the individual craftsmen.

     3) monitoring cost or repairs for maintenance or building projects.

Data in these databases are fictitious except for the parts database.  The parts, for the most part, have real manufacturers parts numbers. I manually played with inventory levels so much you will find some really funny levels.

If you use this program you will can add all of your parts from scratch if you want to - but if you leave them in they shouldn't be a problem.  Also, you can treat man hours as a part if you want to track how much time is spent building a house or repairing specific apartments over time.

The program, as originally written, used the FLAG and MARKER fields to tell the program how to treat certain items or requisitions during processing or report generation.  For simplicities sake I have deactivated most of them (also all of the password routines).  Since I wrote the program to work the way that the people worked there was not any real need for help screens to be used - the codes that they used were the same ones that they also used for their manual system.  Unfortunately this strips the program of some of its original power.  If the demand isn't to great I will compile custom versions using these fields.

I only wrote this one for use on a single system, I would need to put in the commands for record and file locking for use on a network.

Also, some printers can be a pain.  My reports are hand coded into the program for a specific output of info, if you want custom printout you should use another program like Access by Microsoft on these databases - just don't change any data unless you know what you are doing.  All of my databases should be dBASE III+ compatible.  Also, reports can be output to text files.

Even though the engine I use supports using and displaying graphic fields (files) I have not used them for this version, only the hassle of making my own parts pics stops me.

For a program like this one I find the keyboard is faster with full screen menus. In this program you will find that a mouse clicked on a menu screen will normally have the same response as pressing the <ENTER> key.  Menu screens will appear as pop up Windows and only recognize keyboard input.  Do not push the up arrow - you will not lose or corrupt any data because the files are closed when menu screens are in use, but you will lose time because you will have to restart the program - be patient, you will not have to reboot but you can end the task via <CNTL><ALT><DEL>.  I can stop this but, again, this is the freeware version and...

The mouse can be used to move you from field to field on the edit screens, just as both the <TAB> and the <ENTER> keys will.  Also of note is that the default edit mode is overstrike.  If you press the <INSERT> key you will toggle insert on and off, but only for the field you are in at the time.

This program produces dBASE compatible files that can be accessed by most database programs, just be sure to reindex if you change any records (you should reindex anytime you do a significant amount of editing or adding of records anyway).

Since I do not expect THIS VERSION of the program to meet the actual needs of anyone (it works great though) I did not spend much time with fine tuning - this is just to show you an example of my programming and the program language I am using.  The original dBASE version had a number of file handling utilities built-in so that the end user was able to work on and query the system just as a 'power user' would.

Even though this engine can handle enough open files to manage the needs of a large city, the system requirements for my program are the same as the minimum required for Windows 3.1 (286, 1 mg of ram).  If you should encounter any please let me know. 

The program is in a self extracting file NMENU.EXE.  Copy this to a sub-directory on your hard drive.  After it explodes into its many files, run NMENU.EXE just like you would any Windows program.

MAKE SURE THAT THE FILES ARE NOT WRITE PROTECTED - YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO CREATE YOUR INDEXES OR EDIT ANY DATABASES 

When you first start the program you will get some error messages because I am not including the index files - from the first actual menu screen REBUILD the indexes.  This creates the indexes from scratch, REINDEX requires that the indexes exist first.  I have taken most of the PACK commands out of the program but if you use another program to PACK any of the databases just remember to reindex (or rebuild if you want to be thorough).  Future versions will create new indexes on starting.

If you need help with any of this I hope I can be of assistance. 

