I'm new to this stuff, but here's a model of what I'm trying to do...

General description:
The company purchases inventory from overseas, which is then freighted over to the U.S., from there, it is then either stored in a warehouse or purchased (and sent) to a customer via local shipping methods.

The upper right area is the customer order side, along with sales quotes.
An employee can quote a customer for a certain product, which includes freight costs (shipping costs are currently guestimated).

Later on, the customer can call back and refer to that quote to make an order.


The bottom left is purchasing.
The products are ordered by us from overseas suppliers. When the inventory is ordered, it can be freighted from many different overseas ports, and also arrive at many different U.S. ports. The carrier is whoever is doing the freighting.

The top left is suppliers and the products.
Each product has their own specs, can be supplied by many suppliers, and can have many different packagings (e.g. different standardized weights and materials)


Does this model look relatively accurate?

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

btw, this is for an actual small business... not for a homework assignment or anything. Not sure if that matters to you guys or not.

I just want to implement something that works, and won't break down while the employees are using it.

Also, the boss is a bit iffy about trying a new system, but what they use right now are a bunch of Excel files, which the employees don't like much, to say the least.

It is just unusual to deal with a small business working with an inexperienced data architect that is working on a project with global scope and many country or world wide warehouses. We have trouble getting our heads around the idea of a small business even owning many warehouses without already having some kind of systems in place for tracking and billing.

-PatP

Thanks for the reply, Pat.

Yes, I agree that this is a complicated issue. And without having to unload all my issues onto this forum, I'll say that they currently use QuickBooks, but there are certain tasks that the Sales and Purchasing sides do on a routine basis that would be better served by a database.

Eventually, they want to have the ability to export QB data into Access to create more complex reports. For now, though, the goal is to help out sales/purchasing.

Using this design, I've already taken what they're using in Excel, and created some better forms in Access. Of course, being a relative noob to this, I have my doubts.

Thanks, again.