Access and touch screen question

[TheunsGoosen]

Hi,

It will be highly appreciated if someone can advice me on the following;
I’m an industrial and do the daily production planning for a company that is making use of about 100 machines, 20 key ones, and four main divisions. Currently I do most of the planning with intermediate excel VBA programming and some access applications due to its intricacy and volume.
To take the planning department to the next level I was thinking of implementing touch screens at key machines to make transactions current.
Can I connect all the screens to the network with access handling the point to point transactions or is access not the right software?

Thanks
Theuns

 

[BNPMike]

Theuns

I can't quite understand your English but you seem to be saying you have an application that is used on 100 terminals and uses Excel and Access (which is pretty heroic). What is the "next level" in functionality you are looking to achieve?

 

[TheunsGoosen]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for replying.
The factory is making use of 100 MECHANICAL machines, Cnc's , multidrills etc. i do the dayly planning on excel and access and print the worker time sheets out for them. but because the of amount of machines and parts per product and each part following it's unique process sequence it becomes quite intricate to manage and to keep track of...i would like to implement something like POS in the factory starting with lets say 3 touch screens at 3 machines..to get the transactions live between them and visible up in my office for better planning and managing.

Hope this makes better sense

Thanks Theuns

 

[BNPMike]

What you are talking about seems quite ambitious. I can imagine this being an expensive project and/or an expensive vendor package if you were going to do it in the normal corporate way. No vendor or internal group would use Access. Having said that I can't think why it wouldn't be a good platform to develop your vision. The worst case is it will be a prototype that could be easily scaled onto more mainstream platforms (particularly .Net and SQL Server). Access is actually quite sophisticated and feature-rich. Its Achilles heal is normally the Jet database is not as robust as server-based databases (like SQL Server, Oracle etc). I would say try it. There is nothing inherently wrong with Access (except its street-cred). Just be careful. Don't raise expectations too much and be very careful about resilience. IT is very much 80:20. You can do an awful lot with minimal effort but to just push that a bit further can be overwhelming.