Job-Shop Enterprise System

The Requirements

This customer supplies manufactured and bulk products to the metal joining industry. Their internal systems were aging and needed replacing. Their requirements included:

• The system had to handle both manufactured part production runs and bulk part sales.

• The system had to support lot-level traceability from the raw alloy through to every part manufactured from it.

• The quoting feature needed to consider metal market prices, manufacturing setup and run costs and profitability.

• The system needed to support part substitution where materials, for example a wire of one diameter, could be drawn into a smaller diameter. It had to support one part being modified into a different part while still providing lot traceability.

The Solution

MindCrafted Systems partnered with Innovative Micro Systems to develop a complete enterprise-wide application for running this company. The system handles the complete customer and order lifecycle including prospecting, quoting, sales orders, releases, production runs and shipments.  

We created an intranet website to provide management reporting. This included sophisticated drill-down for ad-hoc analysis without having to write new code.

This system was instrumental in helping the client gain ISO/9002 certification.

Technology, Tools and Innovations

We used Rational Rose for the analysis and design of the database and objects.  For the more than 90 table databases we used Microsoft SQL Server.

For the client application we used Microsoft Access.  This application has over 80 forms, over 50 reports, and more than 120 classes and modules.

For management reporting we developed an intranet website using Active Server Pages running under IIS on the NT server.  This intranet website provides nearly 150 management reports. 

We used our own proprietary code generator to generate the code for the objects we used in Visual Basic and Access.

Example Screen   

The Customer edit screen for the application organizes a great deal of customer information in a series of 11 tabs.