Re: tracking shipments, inventory

The reason for the separate shipment tables is that they are of different types. All are assumed to be coming from the supplier. But a stock shipment is logically different from a customer delivery. To track inventory levels, a shipment from supplier to stock, or from one stock location to another, or from a stock location to a scheduled delivery all need to be kept apart. At least that's the idea behind the current design. So for any given product I aggregate these shipments to determine what inventory is at any particular stock location, what the delivery remainder is, etc. If all I had were generic source and destination fields, first of all I couldn't RI back to customer location and stock location tables, but I also couldn't determine the meaningful inventory information. If I had separate fields in one big shipment table, I'd be dealing with null values for the unused fields in a given record -- not good form in my mind.

Thank you for the Snodgrass book recommendation... I'm delving into that now. Received on Fri Dec 24 2004 - 06:19:19 CET