1. #1
    Mechagnome Lapetos's Avatar
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    Software or Online diary type thing for booking items out...

    Hello all.

    I work for a tool & plant hire company.

    Looking for some sort of system that I can create or use, or even a diary type system that may already exist for showing what is booked out, perhaps similar to how on phones you can synchronise the diaries so that everyone can see what's going on that day.

    Bit hard to fully describe what I'm after but here goes.

    I work for a tool hire company. Currently we have a whiteboard at 1 depot that has the list of larger plant on it, machine fleet numbers going vertically and date going across the top horizontally. We are trying to eliminate the need for 1 depot to ring the other as to see what plant is available for what days.Looks kinda like this.

    .......date 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 etc
    Plant
    K72..<-Mr Smith->
    PX29 .... ... <-Mr Jones->
    PY29
    A29

    Also problem is that as month ends, we have to wipe off the board the start of the month to book stuff in for the following month. So it gets very messy.

    Now we could use Excel to create a computer version of this, and have it on the main server with both depots being able to edit it. Very simple but we would like something just a little better than this if possible.

    Trying to see if car rental places already use such a system, instead of plant numbers them using registration plate numbers.

    We can't just use an outlook diary itself though, as we have around 50+ bits of plant we aim to put on the system, so just the standard outlook diary would end up messy as hell and waste of time trying to organise.

    Sorry if this is all hard to understand or piece together. Just I know some of you out there are just ace for things like this!

    Ideally we would have a computerised version of the manual whiteboard we have (ideally just not excel though), where instead of having to wipe the board and re-write customer names if we swap their machines, we can instead just drag and drop, or extend their hire days!

    Any suggestions?

    This is to only be accessable by staff wishing to change bookings, not by customers. So therefore doesn't HAVE to be online, can be server based... although online and ability to perhaps even synchronise to a phone would be a HUGE bonus.

    Best easy way to describe it all...
    If a hotel has a system booking out room numbers for dates... we could replace room numbers with plant numbers. So long as we can have a screen that says all of our plant up at once!
    Last edited by Lapetos; 2014-08-13 at 11:17 AM.
    Friendship is like peeing on yourself, everyone can see it, but only you get to feel the warmth it brings.

  2. #2
    Few years ago I'd recommended to look into MS Access and build a little frontend for it locally instead of excel, but today you might want to look into opensource ERP projects if any of those would work for you.

  3. #3
    Mechagnome Lapetos's Avatar
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    May do, just hopefully it's not overly complicated as I don't fancy putting in that much work to have them state "No it won't work".
    I've done an excel example already which will be the back up "if we can't find anything then we will have to use this". Which I can get set on the server, so both depots can access it and edit it. Only downside would be the fact once someone is in the file and leaves it open, the other not being able to access the information.
    Friendship is like peeing on yourself, everyone can see it, but only you get to feel the warmth it brings.

  4. #4
    Mechagnome Lapetos's Avatar
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    Actually we already have a server set up that has software called insphire for anything that is currently booked out on hire, that is used for hire contracts, a certain degree of product information and all history as such. So only thing that would be really needed would be brief descriptions used for categories and subcategories. So main Category for instance would be "Digger"... secondary then would be "5ton, 3.5ton, 3ton, 2.3ton etc" Then to have plant numbers under those.
    So there also means this server is both the depots communication point and therefore would be where the excel file would get stored if we had to resort to that.
    Currently the excel setup has boxes coloured in to say which depot it's out to... then just normal writing for customer name. With appropriate amount of coloured boxes for days it's booked out for.

    So technically most of the rest of the information would be needed.

    Wondering if vehicle rentals use something similar to what may be of use.

    Basically so we don't have to keep ringing the other depot for them to check their white board for future digger bookings whilst we have a customer in the shop waiting on the answer
    Last edited by Lapetos; 2014-08-13 at 06:20 PM.
    Friendship is like peeing on yourself, everyone can see it, but only you get to feel the warmth it brings.

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