Background to the Equipment and Assets Database

Our client needed a low-cost database to store details of the company’s equipment and assets.  We recommended the free Microsoft Access database template (downloadable from the Microsoft website).  However, we emphasised that an ‘off-the-shelf’ product would not be an exact fit to their needs and that the database would need to be refined.  The refinements could take place once the client had worked with the template for a while.  Therefore, we installed the database and the client entered a period of data management, during which they noted their exact requirements.  In this way, the necessary improvements were defined.

The equipment database is used by several people but the client saw no necessity for either security measures or an audit trail of changes to be included.

Features

The database needed to store details of the company assets: for example, identifier, description, date purchased, manufacturer, supplier, location and serial number.  Of particular importance was a history of the scheduled maintenance and actual maintenance.  These items required the most changes to the original template to meet the client’s needs.  In particular, for each asset, the client needed to schedule two external services, which could be performed by different contractors, and one internal service.  The due dates of all of these services had to be stored, with full descriptions of the type of service.  Similar information needed to be stored for the actual maintenance.

Regular reports were crucial to this client and all of those in the original template database had to be changed.  Drop-down lists and ‘date pickers’ were added wherever possible to aid data validation.  A new table was created for Suppliers.

This database has four main modules: Assets, Suppliers, Contractors and Maintenance.

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