I don't suppose anyone would be interested in developing an online inventory
management program that we could all use? With piclist.com as an
"applications service provider."

The advantage of your inventory, my inventory and everyone elses all being
in the same database is that when anyone adds information about the part,
everyone benefits. E.g. If Howard takes the time to type in the properties
of a chip, and I happen to have that chip in my inventory, now "my"
inventory program knows more about the device. 

If people were willing to put in what they paid for a part and where, then
everyone could buy from the lowest cost supplier. This is something my wife
does for groceries, etc... And she shares information with a few people in
the neighborhood. They call it a "price book" and it just records what they
paid and where. They share the book around and use it to plan grocery
shopping. One of the advantages of being a "stay at home mom."

In our case, it led to a co-op for purchasing in volume which we do
regularly. There are catalog companies for food that will only accept orders
of $500 or $1000. Our friend Tammy gets everyone's order and money together,
places the order with the company and then sorts out the orders for each of
us when they come. I know there have been times when people on this list
have gone in together on large quantity orders to get a good price or
because the product was restricted to large qty orders.

Anyway, I've been thinking about that sort of thing for a long time and I
have a web page about it:
http://www.piclist.com/idea/website/pricebook.htm Rather than try to explain
everything here, go take a look at the page and see if anything makes sense.

I will copy this one part from the page: "I already have a spread sheet for
each of the kits I sell that knows about minimum orders, shipping costs and
quantity discounts for each part, then it figures out the absolute best set
of orders, from one, or many different distributors, for a given number of
kits I want to put together." It is cool as hell to change the quantity of
kits I want to put together and watch it change from "order everything from
mouser" to "order this stuff from mouser, this from digikey, this from
Jameco" and know that it is always, for sure, the lowest possible total
price without me having to do figuring.

That sort of thing could easily be added to an online inventory program. And
again, sharing the data helps everyone.

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