Looking Scheduling/Charting Solution Advice

[kmc1]

Hello

My department is an in-house, full-service ad agency. We have a proprietary system with a sql db that contains production schedules/due dates for all of our projects.

Some reports are generated listing key dates for a project. We have found that many users are taking those reports, pulling only the key dates that are meaningful to their job responsibilities, and hand typing their own production schedules.

We would like to eliminate the hand typing of the "customized" schedules. Either by giving our users a tool to access the information in the db and create reports themselves based on the criteria they specify, or let administrators use the tool to create the reports for them. Additionally, we want to also be able to create Gantt charts based on some of our production schedules.

I'm hoping that some of you have tackled this type of issue in the past, and can offer some advice. Whether you purchased a product or developed a solution, I would love to learn from your efforts.

Thanks in advance for any information you can share.

Kenn

 

[BNPMike]

Some reports are generated listing key dates for a project.

It looks in simple terms as though the reports you generate are not meeting users' requirements so just change them.

To allow users to generate their own reports, a good choice would be Microsoft Access. From this they could also generate plans using Microsoft Project.

There is a reason why Bill Gates is in the top handful of the World's Richest People.

 

[benlinkknilneb]

If you're looking to create a small application that can do these things, check out the ActiveGantt Control at The Source Code Store . This guy made a VB/C# control that is a Gantt Chart. If you have a little programming experience you can customize this thing quite a bit. Our plant uses an app built around this control for scheduling production. I don't know if you wanted to go this way with it, but they're easy to deal with and they offer pretty good support if you get stuck, too.

Ben

There's no place like 127.0.0.1.

 

[kmc1]

I should have mentioned, this department is split with approximately 60 Macinotsh computers and approximately 60 Windows PCs. And that there are three parts to this project


1. Gantt charts: The Gantt charts can be created by PC users and distributed department wide, so that can be a PC based solution. Want to pull key dates from the database, and put them in Gantt chart format. May need the capability to edit the Gantt chart.

2. Schedules of key production dates: Depending on their job responsibilities, each user cares about specific dates in a production schedule, but rarely all of the dates. Want to be able to give Mac and PC users a way to create reports based on the production steps they have determined are meaningful to them.

3. Calendaring: Our department relies on a monthly calendar that is created manually each month. This document is currently an Excel document. The (PC) user receives hard copies of key iformation that is already stored in our database, then keys it into the Excel document. We would like to find a tool that can extract data from the db, and place it in a calendar format. The user would still need to be able to edit the calendar entries, as well as add entries that are not from the databsse.

Thanks for the suggestions so far. If anyone has anything else to add, I would appreciate the advice.

Kenn