<story><title>Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won&apos;t Die</title><url>https://medium.com/young-coder/microsoft-access-the-zombie-database-software-that-wont-die-5b09e389c166</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bob1029</author><text>Being able to automate forms can absolutely revolutionize some businesses. Many business owners have no idea the extent to which automation is feasible here. I have seen fully manual paper process (printers&amp;#x2F;scanners&amp;#x2F;pen &amp;amp; ink&amp;#x2F;shredders&amp;#x2F;etc.) go into 100% digital realm and the impact it had on the business. It really is incredible the difference it makes. The most interesting factor was the fact that now that the inputs are captured in a computer, we can run business rules against those inputs computationally. I.e., prevent generation of forms you would have to otherwise manually revise and resubmit after the fact. Then someone figured out you could start plugging in other business systems to your rules engine and tracking state...&lt;p&gt;I think it is a fun and compelling challenge to see just how much of the business you can put &amp;quot;on rails&amp;quot; with computers and various integrations. I have some background in semiconductor manufacturing, and the degree of automation I witnessed there got to me in a really deep way. Experiencing a massive factory that can literally run for hours-to-days without a single human inside is something else. I feel a lot of businesses can strive towards similar goals. Being able to fully-automate manufacturing of silicon chips is an incredibly opulent affair, but if you can simply automate a paper-bound business process that is on a hot-path (I.e. used many times a day), it could potentially save a struggling business.</text></item><item><author>jotakami</author><text>A number of years ago I was in the Navy and worked in an electronics shop on an aircraft carrier. We were responsible for calibrating and repairing all the test and measurement equipment for the entire ship as well as the squadrons that we carried with us. Easily over 10k individual pieces of equipment, each of which had to be calibrated on a specific schedule. Most of this data was managed centrally, and we sent&amp;#x2F;received DB updates a couple times a week. However, just managing our workload and operations efficiently required other data which was not part of this database. I had no choice but to build my own solution, and the only real option was MS Access given the barren IT resources available on a deployed aircraft carrier.&lt;p&gt;But man, was it a fucking lifesaver. Just for one example, we often had to send equipment out to different labs since we didn’t have the capability to test them, and shipping stuff required a standard military shipping document with various mundane pieces of information about the stuff being sent. Creating these documents was a tedious process of looking up the data manually and then typing it into a Word file. I just recreated the document as an Access form, with fields that would populate from a query. Creating the shipping documents went from 30-45 mins to essentially the click of a single button.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dreamcompiler</author><text>As a counterexample it&amp;#x27;s easy to get this wrong as well. In my EMT career we switched from doing run reports on paper to doing it on the computer. It was a nightmare. No attention to good UI principles had been paid. In the section on &amp;quot;What drugs did you administer?&amp;quot; we had to choose from a scrolling menu of perhaps 100 items for &lt;i&gt;each&lt;/i&gt; drug we used (including oxygen which we used on everybody). Simply typing in their names would have been easy, but no. Every data element was like that. A report that took me 20 minutes on paper took 45 minutes on the web version. Classic enterprise software.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Above was an attempt at digitization while this thread is about form automation. Understood. My point is that there was a lot of automation that &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; have been employed but wasn&amp;#x27;t. With that and good UI principles, the org could have made us more efficient. They chose not to because what they really wanted was a searchable database of patients treated so they could get more funding. EMT productivity was never a consideration.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won&apos;t Die</title><url>https://medium.com/young-coder/microsoft-access-the-zombie-database-software-that-wont-die-5b09e389c166</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bob1029</author><text>Being able to automate forms can absolutely revolutionize some businesses. Many business owners have no idea the extent to which automation is feasible here. I have seen fully manual paper process (printers&amp;#x2F;scanners&amp;#x2F;pen &amp;amp; ink&amp;#x2F;shredders&amp;#x2F;etc.) go into 100% digital realm and the impact it had on the business. It really is incredible the difference it makes. The most interesting factor was the fact that now that the inputs are captured in a computer, we can run business rules against those inputs computationally. I.e., prevent generation of forms you would have to otherwise manually revise and resubmit after the fact. Then someone figured out you could start plugging in other business systems to your rules engine and tracking state...&lt;p&gt;I think it is a fun and compelling challenge to see just how much of the business you can put &amp;quot;on rails&amp;quot; with computers and various integrations. I have some background in semiconductor manufacturing, and the degree of automation I witnessed there got to me in a really deep way. Experiencing a massive factory that can literally run for hours-to-days without a single human inside is something else. I feel a lot of businesses can strive towards similar goals. Being able to fully-automate manufacturing of silicon chips is an incredibly opulent affair, but if you can simply automate a paper-bound business process that is on a hot-path (I.e. used many times a day), it could potentially save a struggling business.</text></item><item><author>jotakami</author><text>A number of years ago I was in the Navy and worked in an electronics shop on an aircraft carrier. We were responsible for calibrating and repairing all the test and measurement equipment for the entire ship as well as the squadrons that we carried with us. Easily over 10k individual pieces of equipment, each of which had to be calibrated on a specific schedule. Most of this data was managed centrally, and we sent&amp;#x2F;received DB updates a couple times a week. However, just managing our workload and operations efficiently required other data which was not part of this database. I had no choice but to build my own solution, and the only real option was MS Access given the barren IT resources available on a deployed aircraft carrier.&lt;p&gt;But man, was it a fucking lifesaver. Just for one example, we often had to send equipment out to different labs since we didn’t have the capability to test them, and shipping stuff required a standard military shipping document with various mundane pieces of information about the stuff being sent. Creating these documents was a tedious process of looking up the data manually and then typing it into a Word file. I just recreated the document as an Access form, with fields that would populate from a query. Creating the shipping documents went from 30-45 mins to essentially the click of a single button.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>motogpjimbo</author><text>&amp;gt; Being able to automate forms can absolutely revolutionize some businesses&lt;p&gt;I once worked for an insurance brokerage whose in-house CRM had started years before as an effort to automate paper-based forms. The company&amp;#x27;s business model was based on having their sales advisers fill out insurance policy application forms on their customers&amp;#x27; behalf and originally this had been done using pen-and paper, which was obviously time-consuming and laborious.&lt;p&gt;At some point, someone in the IT department had had the idea of scanning the application forms to image files and writing a simple PHP application to insert those images onto web pages with HTML &amp;lt;input&amp;gt; tags superimposed over the form fields, thus allowing advisers to fill in the forms using keyboard entry.&lt;p&gt;They quickly realised that once forms are filled in digitally, (a) you can store the form data into the database and retrieve it later for further editing, (b) some of the data can be filled in automatically from the customer&amp;#x27;s records and (c) when generating quotes across multiple insurance providers, the common parts of each insurer&amp;#x27;s form can be filled in from data previously entered elsewhere.&lt;p&gt;While the idea of superimposing HTML input fields over a scanned paper form isn&amp;#x27;t one I&amp;#x27;ve encountered before or since, that company was turning over $3M per month by the time I joined, so there is clearly mileage in the idea.&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, it turns out that basing your entry forms around scanned paper forms completely kills dead any of the interminable bikeshedding that takes place around UX design with complicated, multi-section forms.</text></comment>