ERP Software Development for Chemical Manufacturers

Leveraging a solid expertise in ERP systems implementation along with the complex enterprise software development, Iflexion delivered a fully functional solution enabling the End Customer to manage their equipment, spare parts, and consumables, as well as control the production lifecycle and employee performance in geographically distributed networks of manufacturing plants.

The solution provides role-based access to all employees, from top managers to technical specialists:

• User. An employee, who manages equipment maintenance tasks, submits purchase orders, and logs working time.
• Manager. In addition to the User functions, managers deal with vendor lists, track employees’ working time and manage vendor invoices.
• Corporate user. A top manager who can access corporate dashboards and reports generated by all departments throughout the corporation.
• Administrator. A user who performs content and user account management, as well as configures the system within their plant(s).​
• System administrator. Having full access to the system, an administrator is responsible for the overall system configuration on the corporate level.

Tailored to the needs of the chemical industry, the custom ERP system supports typical workflows of chemical manufacturing, including equipment maintenance, accounting of consumables and spare parts, procurement management, and employees’ work time tracking.

The ERP system allows for keeping track of all tasks related to the equipment maintenance. Built in line with the company’s established business processes, the solution covers the following maintenance types:

• Preventive Maintenance includes equipment tests, adjustments, parts replacement and cleaning, and other actions performed to prevent failures.
• Corrective Maintenance covers the repair of failed equipment in order to restore its operability.

Apart from that, end users can create, edit and remove emerging tasks on equipment repairing, log time spent on these tasks in individual timesheets, mark task statuses (in progress, delayed, fixed, overdue etc.), leave comments, upload files and more.

Applying our experience of supply-chain solutions implementation, Iflexion automated the accounting of spare parts and consumables.

The system stores an extended list of spare parts and consumables, each one attributed a full name, catalog 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 can also access batch header reports describing banking transactions within each purchase order.

To support manufacturing workflows, Iflexion implemented an issue tracking engine that enables users to organize tasks, assign tasks to defined employees, as well as follow employee, department and plant activities. Based on the manually logged information (time spent on a task, issue status etc.), the system generates extended time reports for the top and middle management:

• Individual timesheet reports
• Group timesheet reports for a period of time (for departments and plants)
• Biweekly reports summarizing employees’ general performance across a plant

To ensure the system’s high quality and to align it with the project requirements, our quality assurance specialists monitored and tested the software at the pre-development, development and post-development stages.

Iflexion allocated an independent quality assurance department to perform comprehensive quality assurance of the system. Within each iteration, the team fulfilled unit, acceptance, regression and compatibility testing, and defect validation.