Date Logistics...

[guyfromfl]

Many of you guys have been a huge help to me while making the Service Department software I am making for work, and I just want to say thanks!

 

The next part of the program is not quite as simple as many of the posts that pop on here.

 

** I'm sorry this post is so long..**

 

A little background: I am writing a program to track warranty repairs for my company.  The program tracks what products are coming in, whats been done, and when they were sent back to the customer. (and alot more things that aren't important for this post)

 

Now I am trying to figure out how to determine how long it takes for the product to be returned to the customer after it arrives.

 

I can't take an average of the entire database since we slow down in the summer and dramatically pick up during the winter.  Also, there is one permanent repair person, where two or three others come on board at random. Another reason is some Return Authorizations will never be sent to us. (These RA's will be cancelled after 6 months...)

 

Our current system is an Access database that only has customer info, date received and returned.  We tally the daily repairs on paper, and if a customer calls for a status we hand count the products in line before him and divide by 25, to get a rough estimate of how long it will take.  3 weeks ago it was 40 products.

 

Does anybody have any suggestions on how to figure a realistic number of weeks to expect from receivedDate to shipDate?  The algorithm/logic would need to take into account the trend of the past few weeks, as well as how many RA's are open and how many are already in queue before it.

 

I'm not asking for the code to figure it out (...it would help), but more importantly suggestions of the logic to how it would work.

 

This question might be more appropriate in another forum, maybe php since that is the language I am writing the whole thing in...

 

Again, thanks for all the help in the past, and if you made it this far...thanks for the time.