Accountant's joke (I probably write this every year): what is the longest day of the year? Most people would probably reply June 21, but the accountant would reply December 31, as she writes journal entries on that date for several weeks. Although I'm not an active accountant, I do have a large amount of work to do at the end of the civil year, mainly concerned with stock-taking. There were also some issues to do with the new year (document numbering) which took some time.
When not working on inventory, I've been programming an interface which receives csv files from the three dimensional design program Solidworks and outputs data in a form which can be read by Priority. The basic idea is that an engineer will design a piece of office furniture in Solidworks, whilst creating a bill of materials semi-automatically. This bom can then be read into Priority which will assign a part number for the piece, build a bom and do all the housework necessary.
I had a prototype of this running in August, but a certain change (which we had long wanted) was only implemented last week, and as a result I had to update both the external interface program (written in Delphi) and the interface internal to Priority. This latter part took most of the effort: it transpires that certain pieces of information can only be known inside Priority once the simple data has been accepted; the Delphi program is unaware (and should be unaware) of this data. This means that the internal interface had to be improved greatly, but now I can define data in a better way.
Until now, the development necessary in Solidworks has only been done by one person, but last week we had a training session, and now certain types of office furniture are expected to be imported via this process. Of course, I will be monitoring the situation closely in order to find the places where my original expectations and assumptions don't match reality.
[SO: 3,282; 2, 12, 30]
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