subject: Mapping Your Business Future Into Your Database Design [print this page] Although immediate aims for a good business database design are always to be certain that your requirements for accurate information processing are met, you should seriously consider mapping future needs into your design. This is because improved profits and cost control reporting over time can be improved by reducing some of the complexity that will come to you and your company as time unfolds.
Along these lines of thinking, it is important to maintain a feature checklist or requirements document. This tool will assist you with your planning efforts to help you keep track of the common business transactions. Using this technique, your business database design needs can become enhanced because you have a place to continuously insert future scenarios into the mix.
These features can be thought of as action-nudges and can include such items as common bookkeeping, tax preparations, profit and loss statements, etc. This is the ideal time to consider future changes that will almost certainly occur and make sure your database can be easily expanded to meet those changes.
This also is a good time to be sure that your software will not introduce unnecessary complexity at those moments that these expansions takes place.
For example, inventory monitoring, including tracking and control of matching sales demands, is a design consideration that could require you to accept new electronic input devices. A future with new types of devices often comes into view quicker than we might suspect. Again, the important point here is to design record layouts that can easily be adapted to new inputs, which may come into play, allowing you to remain competitive.
A number of other events could include tracking shipments and creating invoices and receipts to match these activities. These business experiences are also subject to transforming into more complexities in the future and should be viewed with a careful analytic eye and dealt with by considering expandable and software adaptable record layouts.
In addition, You should look for accommodation techniques through new database tables that enhance customer and employee records to reflect a different type of reporting and alert messaging system to meet the pending challenge.
In addition to all of the above, your proposed features will more than likely include order-placement record fields and report layouts along with a careful analysis of establishing well-documented contact with your wholesalers or product and service suppliers. They in turn will be pleased to continue doing business with a company that keeps accurate records and reports transactions on a timely basis.
Since the intent of this article is not to provide an exhaustive list of details and specifications, but rather, give you some flavor of what you can do beyond the technical issues. And by using those brief action-nudges listed above as reminders of where future complexities can arise, you should have a better grasp of where to concentrate your efforts.
And finally, these brief action-nudges might introduce the opportunities for you to insert your own insight and translate your own considerations into the design of your database. After all, the features that you introduce as your own ideas during the pursuit of your goals will often mean the most.
by: Tom Gruich
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