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Multi-Billion Dollar Industrial Supplier Improves Scheduling Efficiency Across Multiple Facilities
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This multi-billion dollar industrial company is a global supplier of coatings, glass, fiber glass and chemicals with 50 production facilities in the United States and 120 worldwide. The company needed to increase the operational efficiency of their Flat Glass division. They wanted both short and long-term solutions to take into account their immediate scheduling needs, as well as address complete production-through-shipment logistics.
CEI's two-phase solution included a scheduling system to take schedules and track raw glass orders and a warehouse management system (WMS) to track physical inventory. The Scheduling System scheduled and tracked orders based on different factors, such as raw materials on order, on schedule, on hand and finished goods. The scope of the solution included the design, development, testing and implementation of a raw glass maintenance system, scheduling administration and a security system. The WMS tracked physical inventory from the time of production or receipt from outside the plant or warehouse, up through the shipping of the product to a customer. The scope of this phase included the design, development, testing and implementation of the following applications:
- A transaction manager to distribute information from WMS to all necessary enterprise systems
- An SKU maintenance system
- Performance, Operational, Monitor reports and Data Exports for WMS in Crystal Reports and HTML
- Scheduled traceability to archive the WMS data in a production history database for future reference
- A Warning Monitor background process that periodically checks for possible warehousing and shipping problems and alerts users to these conditions via email
- A technical customer service intranet module where users log in to report problems and bugs encountered
In the development of both systems, CEI designed and created forms, reports, ActiveX DLLs, stored procedures, triggers and views for optimal ease of use.
The client now has a flexible exchange that targets the small-order market segment. The routing of online information to the back-office systems increases order-processing efficiencies and provides convenience to the business purchaser. The Site Server-based architecture allows further personalization and the creation of additional focused sites from the core architecture. As a direct result of the success of this project, the client retained CEI's services to develop similar exchanges for their distributor and OEM channels.
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