Interior Design Project Management Software

Our Interior Design Project Management System has been recently released.  This system provides complete management and reporting of commercial interior design projects.  Specific features include:

Project Setup Project floors & rooms definition and characterization Furniture database management Management of furniture pictures Assignment of furniture to rooms Definition of furnishing characteristics such as type, model, cost, finish & fabric Cloning of rooms Comprehensive reports with cost analysis Presentation reports

All of our databases use Access's built in toolbars and we do not duplicate standards controls such as, new record, next record, etc if at all possible.  Using Access's standard feature rather than custom features reduces the cost an makes the database less expensive to maintain and less expensive to port to new versions of Access as they are released.  Also, we no not use Macros - we program all form functions using simple visual basic routines and calls to a few subroutines that are required for the database.  Unlike other developers, we don't load in every function we have developed over time 'just incase'.  Our design practices keep the database consistent and simple to enhance and maintain.

Shown below is the simple user interface for the interior design project software.  All functions are accessed through tabs across the top of the main menu.  No popup forms or nested menus to navigate.
 

The first task in all interior design projects is to define the project characteristics.  See the project setup show in the screen below.  Project demographics, participants and other project particulars are entered in this form.

Below is the furniture component of the database.  Each piece of furniture is define to system and can be carried over from project to project.  In addition to the standard characteristics such as cost, type & manufacturer, up to nine photographic images may also be defined for each piece of furniture.  The photograph are stored in a logical manner using the image page (defined at the top of the form) and an assumed sub folder for each manufacturer.  The external storage and dynamic insertion of photos on forms and reports keeps the Access database size to a minimum.

At the top of each form you will see a blue background area.  The area is reserved for filtering and search capability on each form.  This feature allows each form to serve as both data enter and data review forms.

The designer next selects each piece of furniture that goes into each room.  Only unique room setups need to be defined since, further down, you'll see how we can clone furniture from like room to other like rooms with a few presses of the mouse buttons.  Note the popup instructions available on the more complicated forms.  This help feature is available simply by clicking on the Show Instructions button.  On the right side of the form is a filterable sub-form used to find the furniture to be assigned to the rooms selected on the right side of the form.

After the furniture has been added to each room in the form above the next step is to clone the furniture to like rooms.  These rooms could be on the same floor or on multiple floors.  In the form below the user first selects the room to clone on the left side of the form.  Then the user activates for form filters on the right side to come up with a list of rooms.  The check boxes are check to select each room to clone the furniture into.

After the cloning process has been completed then the user can customize room furniture here or go back to the Add Furniture To Rooms tab for complete customization ability.

The form below lists the reports available in the basic system.  Additional reports can be added on a time and material basis.  To run a report the user would activate the filter choices at the top of the form.  The default setting is to include all data from all rooms and floors.  Note that for those report that contain cost/pricing information the user may choose to either hide or show this information.  This is accomplished by simply hiding or displaying the information on the report rather than creating whole new reports for each option - thereby reducing maintenance cost and complexity.

Simply double clicking on a project management report choice will activate the report.

As sample report from the Interior Design Project Management Software is shown below.  Note that the photographs are dynamically inserted into the report.

The data in the report can also be exported to Excel by using Microsoft Access's built in export features.

The last tab in the main menu is perhaps the most important.  The List Maintenance tab allows the user customize and add to all of the drop down lists contained on the other data entry form.  This feature makes the database highly flexible and customizable to your specific types of interior design projects.

Contact us today for an online demo of our Interior Design Project Management Software system.