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After eight weeks of globe-trotting, it's been back to more mundane locations this month. Effing Jeff, bless him, had recommended our services to his friend Bob, who owns several factories. As a friend of Jeff's, Bob shares similar linguistic tendencies, although he's not yet attained Jeff's superlative standards of swearing. If my dear Auntie Margaret - who could have given morality instructions to Mother Teresa - had heard him, Bob would get a good tut-tutting every two sentences out of three, whereas Jeff would score 100 per cent every time.

Bob needed some software. When I asked what the project needed to cover, I was told "stock", as if that were all I needed to know. Stock control systems come in a number of different incarnations, some of which are best suited to retail situations, some to storage and distribution and some to manufacturing. There's no one-size-fits-all solution that works in all circumstances. I tried to explain this to Bob, who quickly became bored with the level of detail I wanted and asked me to "bloody well get on with it". Where Jeff effs, Bob blinds.

FIGHT TO THE FINNISH

Like any good businessman, Blinding Bob has an eye for cost-saving wheezes and has taken to providing employment opportunities for Czech workers in his Lancashire factories. He says they're willing to work longer and for less money than the natives. He also introduced me to Katja, a Finnish girl who's going to be in charge of the stock control project. And health and safety. I'm

Katja is intelligent, pretty and enthusiastic. We explored alternatives that included using an off-the-shelf package such as Sage, looking for a specialist package that already exists or starting from scratch. The Sage option didn't really stand a chance. The nature of the materials to be recorded and what we need to know about them precludes that. Bob also wants to use barcoding to track ins, outs, usage and inventory checks, which Sage doesn't support directly.

I searched the net and found a package that includes many of the required features. It's missing a few desirable things and has a pile of stuff that we don't need at all. It costs 24 grand for the base licence, 16 grand for some add-on bits, plus £2,000 per year per user. That's per location, of course, so we need to multiply that by three to cover each factory. If I suggest that, I think Bob's language usage status might undergo an upgrade.

So Katja and I began talking about designing a custom program. Being enthusiastic, she keeps thinking up useful new features and phones me to discuss them. A lot.

When the phone rang for the umpteenth time, Mrs R answered it and transferred the call to me. "It's your Finnish girlfriend," she said. "Again." She said this in a jokey kind of way, but there was a hint of something lurking in the voice. Any man who's had that "What's the matter, dear?" "Nothing" conversation with a woman will know exactly what I mean.

TAKING STOCK

We decided to use a variant of my Vladivostok barcode program (see Under Development, Shopper October 2005 and January 2006) to produce the stock labels and a custom design for managing the stock items. The problem is that sometimes you need to look at stock as individual items, or packs, with specific characteristics, and sometimes you must group packs together in a 'fuzzy logic' kind of way based on dimensions and material characteristics. And sometimes you need to break open the pack and manage the contents.