Arcade Collecting > Pinball

Need for Pinball Management software?

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Cenobyte:
A pinball club near me with over 70 machines is setting up some kind of maintenance system (volunteers repairing and maintaining the pins) and they are looking for a system to organize things. Because of this, I was wondering if there would be a need for some kind of Pinball management software? People or clubs with large collections of pins might have the need to administrate things like:

- when bought and for how much
- current status (repairs pending? things to do)
- maintenance/repair history with dates, costs, descriptions of malfunctions & solutions, etc.
- high scores?
- other stuff you might want to remember?
- ability to create reports or lists (repair reports for the repair crew in case of a club where repairs are done by volunteers, list of Things To Do per machine or overall, sorted on priority and/or date)

Just brainstorming here and checking if more people would like a similar program (for Windows & Mac) or checking if such a program might already exist?

smartbomb2084:
Sounds like a good idea.  I bet all auto dealerships have such a program to keep track of customer's repairs and scheduled maintenance.  You might be able to start with one of those programs to get the basic format and then tweak it for pinball.

Cenobyte:

--- Quote from: pinballjim on July 11, 2011, 09:44:17 am ---This sounds like an excellent way to clunk up something fun with a whole bunch of politics and rules.
--- End quote ---
:laugh2: What do you mean exactly?

If I understand you correctly, then I think your reply is uncalled for. I'm merely looking for a way to keep things organised for people that are responsible for maintaining bigger collections of pins with more than one person working on these machines.

The problem that this club has is as follows: they have 70 pins and you know what will happen with these machines: malfunctions are being reported, maintenance is needed, some need restorations, in other words: there's always work to do. Fortunately they have volunteers. The problem is getting the right info with the right people. Sometimes a malfuntion gets forgotten, sometimes people start working on a problem that was already solved a week earlier by somebody else, sometimes parts are ordered twice, etc. So they need a system to keep record of all active problems, work progress (one might run into problems fixing something and gets the job half done), parts needed (your work halts when you need a part that you don't have in stock). When this is a private collection and you do all the work alone, it's no problem: you know where you were last time you stopped. But in this club lots of volunteers work on a machine and sometimes somebody else finishes a job that you started.

Sure, you can also take a folder and stuff some papers with notes on it in there, one file or sheet of paper for each machine, but I was thinking of a more elegant solution and was just checking to see if there is any need for such a system. I have 6 pins myself, so I can remember my own things to do  ;D

ed12:
hi
as i do the route service work for a few co's. in my area
what we use is a perty straight foward service repair fourm
u can find them by google electronic reair shop invoicing/repair order's
but bashing aside,i fully agree with this statment

>I'll put aside my natural aversion to clubs involving a bunch of dudes, and give you an answer you don't want.  It's called the "out of order" sign.

Get a stack printed up and put a can of pencils next to it.  When something goes wrong, if the guy is too inept to immediately fix it, he grabs the piece of paper, writes "fliper borken" on it, and slaps it on the game.  As your volunteers feel competent enough to go around and fix these things, they either update or remove the signs.<

for all intensive reason's,it is called the kiss system >keep-it-simple<..
any competent repair tech will have a complete log of repair's-needed/done/factory-up-date's/cleaning time and rotation time etc etc

ed

Cenobyte:
Well oke, that's clear  ;D

The reason I suggested it is that a computer system might get you a more clearer view of the (complete) history of a machine. Repair forms from a year ago will get thrown out or get lost, while a computer allows you to view all of a pin's history. That might help with diagnosing recurring problems.

But it's not that I desperately want to write some program that nobody wants to use, so I'll save myself a bunch of useless programming  ;)

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