Welding Software (Database)

Date 08-09-2001 13:40

I am a Welding Engineer for a company who out-sources 100% of their fabrication work. For any given project, we might have 10 or more suppliers working on various weldments. These suppliers will submit their welding procedures and NDE procedures for review and approval. Depending on what they are fabrication I may get 2 WPS’s or 20 WPS’s to review from each supplier for that project. Typically, we have 3 or 4 projects going on at one time. As you can see the amount of WPS’s can add up very quickly. The suppliers are located around the world. I have suppliers in the USA, Korea, and Canada just to mention a few.

As you can imagine the welding procedures are generated using various off the shelf software packages and homemade packages (i.e. Access). The procedures are sent to me via e-mail in PDF or TIF format and by snail mail. Once they are reviewed, they are stored in paper format in a filing cabinet. What I would like to do is to be able to have all my suppliers send their procedures via e-mail in any format, be able to open them for review, make comments to them (if necessary), once reviewed store them electronically in a database. In doing so I will be able to retrieve them for the next project, search for specific WPS’s, update the WPS’s when the Rev number changes. I should be able to track weather the WPS’s have been approved or rejected, and what project they are for (since I have multiple projects going on). Obviously, these are minimum requirements. Is there any software available that would allow me to do this? I have worked with Access and have developed some small databases, but time does not allow me to develop something of this magnitude. Any help or suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

By pipewelder_1999 (****)

Date 08-09-2001 15:12

If you are only storing the image of the WPS such as a tiff or pdf file then access allows you to use a field for "Objects" such as pictures or any other registered file formate that supports object linking and embedding.

You can also use a hyperlink field to link to a document. Create a table with information about the document.

This can be done with any relational database. The difficult part is the (Front End) being customized for a specific purpose. The tables below, a few querys, some forms with a little visual basic and your ready to go.

This may already exists from one of the do all wps software developers (Some of which use a Microsoft Access Runtime application and .mdb files). ALso some off the shelf document control applications must be available.

Any way a structure of table would be similar to the below if I had to develop an application

(Table Customers)
Customer Name
Address
Contact

(Table Contracts)
Contract ID (Primary Key, Indexed)
COntract Description
Customer (Lookup to Customers Table)
Project MGR (Lookup to Employees table)

(Table Documents)
Document ID (Indexed Primary Key)
COntract or PO (Preferably a lookup to a datasource)
Vendor ID (Lookup to table of vendors for the above Contract)
WPS Number (indexed)
Link to Documen (Hyperlink field)
view of document (Object Field) Makes your database big

(Table Revisions)
revision ID (Primary Key, Indexed)
document ID (Lookup to Documents)
Revision Number
Revision Description

Good Day and I hope this helps

Gerald AUstin
http://www.weldinginspectionsvcs.com/