An ancillary wing of an award winning $1B industrial group, with a large presence in the Indian automobile market, suffers from conflicting legacy systems
Qatalys’ client, a principal supplier to many businesses, has put in motion an ambitious program to widen their customer base and expand their product range. To achieve this, an expansion and unification of their supply chain was an essential goal. Their current inventory strategy was to time material resources from vendors with current production schedules. This reduces on-hand inventory while bringing costs and overall waste down. To satisfy these just-in-time requirements, they have established warehousing arrangements throughout the USA. To Qatalys, the global size of our client and the many different moving parts necessitated a unified ERP solution for supply chain management. In other words, what was needed was a comprehensive system which can facilitate, control, and combine data from the various pieces.
Challenge
Our client’s existing systems are disparate, ranging from Unix based Oracle applications, to FoxPro based single user systems, and even Excel based analytical reports. What’s missing was the ability to accumulate information about shipping and receiving processes, aggregate information for the day-to-day operations, and generate reports based on the previous data sets. Qatalys’ job was to essentially create a brand new system; one which in turn would have a significant impact on the people in the organization, the suppliers, and especially the customers. This system would need to:
- Track goods through the complete cycle
From the time they are shipped all the way through to the various worldwide customers. This is a complete end-to-end cycle including payment processing from customer, bank, and client.
- Generate Reports
Not just internal reports based on organizational efficacy but reports to be provided to banks, regulatory agencies. And other state organizations such as foreign exchanges and financial institutions.
- Optimize the supply chain
Management needed to diagnose the stressors that affected sales and service levels. Particularly on issues related to above average processing times, which can affect the entire supply chain.
Solution
A team of Qatalys business analysts carried out a series of discussions with the Auto group’s management, technical, and operational users. We carefully analyzed the whole scenario and interviewed top management in order to establish the expectations and deliverables. Qatalys then came up with a solution: a mini ERP that can help the client with supply chain management, order tracking, and distribution management. The system can monitor all activities starting from procurement and production, to marketing, sales, accounting, and warehousing. Additionally, this proposed system aimed to seamlessly integrate the auto group’s global clients, suppliers, and various departments. Our custom built ERP was scalable, flexible and smoothly integrated with the company-wide ERP.
Results
Qatalys developed a 3 Tier ERP system where the Application layer and Business components were physically separate from the database server and the client’s overall ERP system. Even though .NET technology had just released, Qatalys took advantage of the new technology and used .NET Remoting for successful interaction between the 3 layers of the ERP system Qatalys took the Application live without disturbing the ongoing ERP initiative, thereby enabling the Client unhindered customer service. Qatalys’ Mini ERP crunched cycle times significantly, resulting in tremendous cost savings.
