Tues. 5/25 - Week2

I scanned in fabrics samples and looked up furniture of the family room for Reisman to get ready for the catalog. The rest of my time for the day was used to find prices of EVERYTHING used in the Reisman project. This included fabrics, rugs, furniture, wall coverings and other such things. We used the vendor’s websites but most don’t have online pricing so we resorted to the vendor catalog pricing books, or calling them. Even though this is a very time consuming task I learned how to find price, and that we use the wholesale price not the retail price.

I also learned something else very important about pricing, that we as students don’t have access to most pricings. DGW (Design Group West) has total access because they have a huge resource library with pricing catalogs, and an account to every vendor that they use. Without an account with a company you usually can’t get prices, because they won’t give them to you or because you can’t access them. This is a problem because when it come to having budgets on projects in school how are we supposed to act like it’s reality when we can’t properly price things? Therefore we don’t actually learn the reality of things like pricing and budgeting in the classroom simply because we don’t learn how to because we don’t have access to it.

With the firm’s computer system, Design Manager Pro, it has every vender and all their information and our account information with that vendor. I am lucky to get to learn how to use this program and to have access to these kind of things so I know how to use them in the real world. I think it would be very useful and practical if our ID program had Design Manager or a system like it. That way we would learn how to use it and prepare us for a real job with a firm, but only if Ball State would be able to have accounts or mock accounts with vendors, that way we would also have access to all their products and prices. It would also give us practice with purchase orders and such things.