Re: Natural keys vs Aritficial Keys

paul c <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac> wrote:

>> (Occasionally they would have to rebuild a particular item. The gravel pad at one
>> client where these are stored is about a mile square. Well, if the plant has a
>> large expansion, and there's a lot of snow that winter, you can't find the
>> assemblies. Until the expansion is finished a year or two later and you're
>> looking at the excess assemblies which are laying on the gravel.. And the folks at
>> the plant getting paid $25 and $30 an hour love being told to go through all the
>> items on this gravel pad looking for particular assemblies. A great way to spend a
>> shift rather than hauling stuff around or whatever.)
>
>i also meant to add that the above shows the beginnings of a case study
>that might be useful in general, although it's not clear whether getting
>rid of the union is a system requirement.

Now this was about eight years ago so we didn't have the hand held devices with convenient GPSs that are presumably available these days. It was quite a bit more of a pain to assemble such a ruggedized device. I did a bit of research, not a lot, and couldn't find anything other than external wire attached GPSs.

Nevertheless it was my suggestion to give the guys a device which had a hand held computer of some sort with a bar code reader and a GPS. Every month or two send them out scanning each bar code they could find. If they scanned the same item with the bar code at each end well who cares. Then come back to the office, download the data and now you know exactly where your inventory is.

Tony

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Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
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