Way back when I had my own company, we wrote a dBase II (on CP/M)
inventory control program. The inventory record held a part number,
description, weighted cost, quantity on hand, quantity allocated, and
quantity ordered. It also had fields for 5 manufacturers and their part
numbers. The system had a bill of materials for each product and for each
subassembly. It also kept track of purchase orders and work orders. When a
work order was put into the system (we want to build this many of this
part number), we'd run a "predict shortages" report. It would clear the
quantity allocated and quantity on order fields, then fill them again
based on open purchase orders (lines could be closed one by one, or even
partially closed as shipments arrived) and pending work orders. It would
then add quantity on order to quantity on hand and subtract quantity
allocated to tell us how many of each part we would be short. For those
low value parts that you always seem to lose, we also had it tell us if we
would end up with less than some dollar amount of some part (typically $5
or $10). We'd decide if we wanted to order more.

Purchase orders included quantity, price, and part number for each part on
order from that vendor at that time. As parts arrived, the quantity
received on that PO was increased and the quantity on hand in the
inventory was increased. The cost of the item in inventory was adjusted by
multiplying the quantity on hand by the existing weighted cost (value of
parts in inventory), multiplying the quantity received by the new cost
(value of parts being added), then adding these two together and dividing
by the new total to give a weighted average cost. This was a lot easier
than trying to do LIFO or FIFO costing.

When a work order was completed, the system would ask for the labor cost,
then calculate the new parts and labor cost for the finished subassembly
or final product. This quantity and cost would be put back into inventory
using the same weighted average method.

Anyway, this served me well for 15 or 20 years running off 8 inch floppies
on the Cromemco CP/M system. I still have it the program and run it now
and then under a CP/M emulator when I want details on some old part....

Harold

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