At the time when beauty and skin boutique Forever Flawless was still beginning its small operations, they handled their stream of information through a stand-alone program called Magnus POS, which effectively managed their minimal amount of data at that time.

But the growth of their business eventually became inevitable--starting with a few 12 branches sprawled across Metro Manila to as much as 30 clinics and a little over four hundred employees to date--and so was the growth of their data, especially their bill of materials.

"Our business is different from others of the same medical nature," explains Reylourd Tinamisan, IT supervisor of Forever Flawless. "Because we provide both products and services, we require a full inventory of our materials."

A full inventory of materials requires the accounting of all the supplies used in their clinics, down to the last kilogram of alcohol or the last ball of cotton. Compared to a whole inventory--which accounts only for the whole units consumed--Ti namisan says the former is harder to do and manage than the latter.

"That is why we are still in the development stage of our ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software," he says. "We are continually adding data for our inventory and constantly fine-tuning the system."