N. T. wrote:
> That can be normal company's database of parts. Plus all the records
> an engineer gets parts from the stock would build his personal list of
> parts. From time to time, say once a week, the engineer would look
> through the list and mark which parts are in his "personal" stock and
> roughly in what quantities.
>
> Another engineer would search the "personal" stocks for a specific
> part. He would borrow the part and the operation may or may not be
> recorded into the database, that would depend on the part and the
> relations within the team. Some "expert" functionality over that would
> be nice, say to search by part's parameters, not only by name, etc.

That's still a complicated and time consuming system.  We're a small
company, and that kind of record keeping wouldn't be worth the return.
We've got a bench with lots of small parts cabinets on it (probably
1200-1500 individual drawers), with each drawer labeled.  Things are
catagorized well enough so that once someone gets reasonably familiar with
the system, it's pretty clear where a part would be if we have it.  It
doesn't take long to discover whether we do or not, and then if we do how
many we have.  This is within 20 feet of everone's desk, so no big deal to
walk over and take a look.

There are of course some exceptions, which are mostly bulky parts that
wouldn't fit well in small parts drawers.  For those it is more "you just
have to know", but not really that many places they can be either.  Most ar=
e
in a single large metal cabinet.

Even with this system, the biggest problem is keeping up with new parts.  A
label has to be made and a drawer allocated for each part.  This isn't hard=
,
but there's always something better to do.  Usually new parts get dumped on
the bench in front of the small parts cabinets, and when it builds up too
much it bugs me and I spend half a Saturday putting everything away.  If I
had to update a database, it would raise the hassle level even more,
resulting in less order, not more.


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