Michael's Stores is a billion dollar crafts store chain. The Accounts Payable Center (APC) in Grand Prairie had an interesting office automation project. When a shipment arrives at a store, a receiver is entered into their computer system. When an invoice arrives at the APC, it is entered in the computer, too. The invoices for which there are no receivers are printed out each week. Then the APC staff prepared faxes for the various stores, and copied the information by hand, and then faxed them by hand. A project manager wanted to automate the process. The application name, Murphy, is a mnemonic based on the job title - Missing Receivers Fax. We were able to reduce the effort needed each week to just a few minutes by one employee - the time it takes to identify the input files, and to push the start button. The faxes were exported to Winfax in about 25 minutes on a slow PC. After that, the PC sent the faxes overnight.
Biggest business challenge: we needed to minimize the data entry - a list of store fax numbers, and the assignments of the stores to the various APC staff, had to be kept current.
Biggest technical challenge: all of the data coming into the program came from excel worksheets. It was important to make the MS Access tables link to different worksheets as easily as possible. We used the Windows APIs to use the familiar File Open dialog boxes for that task. It was also important to have the right libraries referenced on the PC in use, so that the calls to Winfax would work.
Buzzwords: MS Access development, Winfax integration, Excel integration, workflow.