I am designing an application to track government programs.
As a Property Analyst, my job is to manage the Disposition process of government property. There are many steps that take place from creating a "Case", submitting that Case to the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) PIEE System.
I have a limited window of time to dispose of this property, managing 4 programs with thousands of property items is not easy. Eliminating dozens of spreadsheets into one relational system is my goal.
ISSUE I AM TRYING TO RESOLVE:
A Program has a Prime Contractor - Example: Boeing is the Prime Contractor for the FA/18 Super Hornet Program.
Every government Program has multiple awarded Parent Contracts, each defining some type of work or a product.
Each Contract has multiple Contract Orders (child) attached to each Contract.
Every Contract Order will have a Contract Type designation.
I would like the process to flow like this:
User selects a Program from a drop down or pop-up field.
The selection triggers a portal and displays all the major Contracts
Selecting a Contract triggers a second portal displaying all the Contract Orders under the parent Contract.
I suppose I can build this improperly and have a calc field to concatenate both fields, but that defeats the purpose of a relational design.
The primary function of this application is to manage and compile property disposition cases into the government Procurement Integrated Enterprise Environment (PIEE).
I want my application to arrange this data for export into an Excel Spreadsheet to submit into PIEE (Spreadsheet attached)
I welcome any suggestions, thank you.
PlantClearanceTemplate.xlsx (116.5 KB)
From reading the above post, it sounds as though you are clear about what you would like to implement, and also have a good organizational sense about the objective.
What I haven't been able to tell from the above post, however, is if there is a specific task at which you feel blocked or stumped, and if so, what that is.
If there is no such blocker, my suggestions would be:
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Take a few initial steps into building out the UI/UX that you have imagined, and see how it goes.
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If you become blocked by not knowing how to do a specific task, formulate that into a question to share with the forum and see what responses and ideas come back.
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If it starts feeling as though you are having to go to very complex effort (a subjective term, I admit), take a step back to refresh your view to see if a simpler option might become apparent. In this case, you might start a post describing what you have tried so that others can offer feedback about whether the path seems sound, or might benefit from some kind of adjustment/adaptation.
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At the same time as you play around with building out the UI/UX, also spend some of your time working on the export aspect of the solution, so as not to leave that task for last.
Additional Comment:
The solution that you have described sounds like something where FileMaker can be a great fit. There is a long and successful history of using FileMaker to get a workflow beyond using a collection of numerous separate spreadsheets, and my gut feeling is that this could easily be another such case.
The only potential that I see for some slightly more advanced work (again, another subjective term), might be with the export feature. The sample template spreadsheet attached to the above post has a number of sheets, and while certainly possible to implement, doing so with a precision match to the exact same structure of the sample looks to me like it would likely require some extra effort that goes beyond a basic FileMaker export.
Hope this helps, and good luck!
Steve,
Thank you for the response, it does make sense to me.
Unfortunately, I am not authorized to be forthcoming on my work, but I think you understand, and I appreciate this.
I will continue to work on this and provide an update.
