Lightweight ERP: Centralized Workflows & Resource Management

Leveraging solid expertise of implementing ERP systems of different complexity, Iflexion developed a powerful, lightweight and high-performance solution enabling management staff to account for all equipment, spare parts and consumables, and control over the production lifecycle and employee performance in geographically distributed networks of manufacturing plants.

The solution unites all participants of manufacturing, from top managers to average executives, providing them with limited availability of the functional features:

• User. Average employees receive access to a particular plant(s), in the frames of which they can manage equipment maintenance tasks, submit purchase orders and log work time.
• Manager. Besides the above-mentioned functions, managers are enabled to deal with vendor lists, track employees’ working timesheets and manage vendor invoices.
• Corporate user. This user role relates to the top management and provides access to the corporate dashboard and all reports generated by the departments of the whole corporation.
• Administrator. Each plant of a corporation has a number of administrators, who perform all-round content and user accounts management, system configuration within their plants.
• System administrator. Having full access to the system, an administrator is responsible for the overall system configuration on the corporate level.

Targeted at specific industry segment, a custom ERP system supports typical workflows of chemical manufacturing, including equipment maintenance, consumables and spare parts accounting, procurement management and employees’ work tracking.

The ERP system allows for keeping track of all tasks related to the equipment maintenance, including repair, modernization, scheduled servicing etc. Our team implemented preventive maintenance master automating tedious repetitive tasks creation according to the predefined pattern.

Meanwhile, end users are enabled to create/ edit/ remove the emerging tasks for equipment repair, log time spent on them in individual timesheets, mark the task status (in progress, delayed, fixed, overdue etc.), comment, upload files and many more.

Having analyzed the chemical manufacturing industry, we recognized the factories’ necessity of efficient procurement management. Applying our experience of supply-chain solutions implementation, we implemented automated spare parts and consumables accounting.

The system stores an extended list of spare parts and consumables, each one attributed a full name, catalogue number, manufacturer, vendor and current amount on stock. A user can also define a threshold amount, upon reaching which the system generates a purchase order automatically.

The system also keeps a full vendor list with all contact information used for purchase orders and invoices generation.

To ensure transparency of all banking operations related to procurement, our team implemented report generation feature. Top and senior managers are provided with Batch Header reports describing banking transactions of each purchase order.

To support manufacturing workflows, our team implemented issue tracking engine that helps to capture and organize tasks, assign work and follow employees’, departments’ and plants’ activity. Based on the manually logged information (the time spent on a task, the issue status etc.), the system generates extended time reports of 3 types for the top and middle management:

• Timesheet reports on individual employees’ work
• Timesheet reports on groups of users (departments, factories) for a period of time
• BI-weekly hours reports giving a summary for employees’ general performance

The solution brings in transparency and order into business processes, which makes it especially valuable for the strict-disciplined chemical plants.