<aside> đź’ˇ Tip: Click any section in the Wiki Headers underneath this notice, it will take you right to the corresponding section!
</aside>
Developed & Maintained by Mike Truong ([email protected]) as a solution to a crucial workflow improvement to support the Johnson Controls International Austin/Waco branch.
This is development version 4.2 of a materials tracking workflow optimization project to assist the Austin Engineering & PM Teams with Automated Reporting of Materials Tracking. The goal of this project is to remain proactive on materials tracking for projects. Each of these script chunks aim to address a distinct task within the materials tracking workflow, with a descriptive title and basic functions detailed before each chunk of code below.
DISCLAIMER: Think of this entire shard as a playground, or a lab notebook, for me dedicated to the Hive project. Each of these chunks is a continuing work in progress, and thus will have unoptimized/non-functional sections that will hopefully be spotted and improved upon within the upcoming future. At the same time, a lot of included chunks are more "playground" chunks to serve as running tests and/or archival documentation to serve my devlopment process (and even some code functionality within certain operational chunks) will be unfinished, completely non-functional, and is being actively worked on as of the time of your last download.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to me regarding any questions you may have with any portion of this project, or any of my projects. My contact details are listed below:
Business Contact Information (personal inquiries please do not contact): Mike Truong [email protected] +1 (737)-235-0175
One of the more annoying hurdles that our Austin Engineering team has spent countless of manual hours on was materials tracking. The amount of time and the number of clicks I have had the misfortune of observing my other teammates waste their valuable engineering brainpower on was tracking their material orders. After designing and programming our systems according to our clients’ plans, proposals, and specifications, we proceed to place orders for the components we would need in order to install these systems. Way more often than desired, this is a process that is more or less outside of our control and supervision. The shipping process is spontaneous and unpredictable, with delays occurring more and more often as some structural changes happen internally. Our challenges regarding this pertain to, but not limited to:
These hurdles make for perfect justification to come up with a one-size-fits-all method to track all of our material shipments for any of our ongoing projects.
As always, my programming-enthusiastic mind hopped straight into asking the rest of my team if I could attempt to come up with a programming script to accomplish this task. After all, my promise to my manager during the hiring process, and as soon as I joined as a new member of the engineering team, was that I would expand and maintain the automated scripts he’s been writing for the Engineering team for a few years already. This collection of scripts, neatly compiled into a GUI .exe file, is dubbed the Engineering Toolbox, and is on its 4th revision of its lifetime already, and contains tabs dedicated to accomplishing one certain workflow optimization task each. I have always had a wish to add more tabs to this very tool, and this seems like the perfect opportunity for me to do so.
In order to accomplish this task, whatever this script is, after multiple meetings with my team and others within our larger Operations team, it needed to be able to generate a report per project, whether active or passive, that can be passed onto our Project Managers so that they have a better idea of how our materials are moving and what they and our clients can expect in terms of fulfillment dates.