Our customer was a new start-up business, to focus of the business was to provide a one stop shop for manufactured products that were customised for their client base. An MRP system deals predominantly with the production planning, scheduling, inventory control. The planning of labour is equally important as it is important that the right staffing is provided at the right time to ensure productivity is efficient. As this was a start up business it also needed a range of integrated standard business services which were provided from our native modules.

The starting point was either to receive a tender document or provide a survey inspection of the requirement namely adding additional structured items to brown based sites. The most challenging module was the creation of the quotation as it made use of the Take Off items that needed to be customer made on specific material types. By integrating into the purchase module an automated vendor quotation function as part of the installed coding which provided a tracker report that calculated the required adjustments. Other features dealt with Risk %, WHT on Taxation, Tax free area. Purchase also included stocked and non-stocked purchasing warehouse requests and 3rd party services linked into the accounts. Warehouse management included GRN processes, Distribution to locations, Stock Management with stock checks and adjustments. Human Resource Planning included times sheet management, certification gap analyses, sub-contractors time sheets and invoicing.

The software design being modular based is linked to the business workflow. By working with the four sub-modules allowed a systematic set of protocols to be applied by both the in-house team and the external development team. As each sub-module was design and developed it was added to a live test server allowing the in-house team to test all aspects of the sub-modules and their integration into the primary module.
Module Development Structures

Development of the solution was applied using PRINCE2 project management methodology to plan each stage of the project this ensured that the project was delivered on time and within the budget. The key deliverables made use of JIRA an Agile framework inclusive with Scrum & Kanban, two of the most prominent methodologies under the agile umbrella. Scrum, focused on planning work in short sprints, while Kanban was geared towards the continuous release of sub-modules that could be tested.

Testing is carried out on a test server. This approach was adopted as the project required a complete replacement of all business modules. Each of the sub-modules were tested by the in-house IT team and selected users of the module, this allowed for rapid adjustments in the workflow should it be needed. Once all sub-modules were completed the main Module was installed. Integration into the associated software processes of the original software applications was achieved using Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) routines for data transfer.