CUSTOMER PROFILE

InventoryCTRL was developed as one of a series of products targeted at the fleet/equipment maintenance industry. The system is a distributed application that allows for complete tracking of any consumable inventory. This product is used in association with VehicleCtrl, designed to help the user control maintenance operations. InventoryCtrl maintains year-to-date records for all inventories of the user's warehouse. More importantly, InventoryCTRL analyzes this data to print reports, which can help the user in planning future orders more accurately.

SITUATION

The client wanted their inventory system to be Web-based, which would allow them to complete tracking of any consumable inventory (stocked or non-stocked) from suggested order through product receipts and issuances.

The system was to provide the following functionality:

• Work as Internet/Intranet solutions
• Control and monitor any type of consumable inventory item
• Provide suggested orders based on actual history of usage
• Automatically create purchase orders and provide for blanket purchase orders if established on the system
• Maintain history for both stocked and non-stocked parts
• Help minimize inventory overhead by providing suggested phase-in or phase-out according to usage
• Provide automatic markup for cost analysis
• Provide cost analysis based on either LIFO or rolling average costing, and provide complete investment analysis
• Provide a flexible reporting mechanism

Apart from above functional requirements of InventoryCTRL the system needed to:

• Be able to work over the Internet
• Be scalable and customizable
• Be user-friendly and intuitive to use
• Be reliable and manageable
• Provide acknowledgements wherever required
• Be accurate and reliable

OUR SOLUTION

Based on the requirements of InventoryCTRL we proposed that the system be developed as a browser-based application using Active Server Pages (generated automatically by the IIS application template based on Visual Basic 6.0), HTML and DHTML. The Web server used is Internet Information Server 4.0 Web server, running on Windows NT 4.0. MS Access was used as the database. Both VBScript and JavaScript were used for the validation at the client side.

The system has all the functionality of the client's existing DOS-based system as desired and provides a Web-based user-friendly interface.

FEATURES

• Web-based inventory, spread across multiple locations
• Uses component architecture, hence very secure and maintainable
• Web-based customizable reporting capabilities
• Automated Purchase Order generation
• Continuous monitoring of all the consumables in the Inventory
• Maintains history for both stocked and non-stocked parts
• Provides suggested orders based on actual history of usage
• Provides automatic markup for cost analysis
• Provide complete investment analysis

Setups and Adjustments: This module helps in setting up and adjusting users, parts, vendors, inventory locations, bins, etc. or new entities related to the system as well as modify existing ones. This module is accessible by only the administrator.

Transactions Basic transactions include:

• Issue part
• Receive parts
• Order parts
• End of day inventory
• Physical inventory
• End of period inventory

Reporting: This module is used for generating different reports associated with various entities of the system. The reporting functionality includes:

• Part reports
• Vendor reports
• Transactions report
• End of day reports
• End of period reports

TOOLS & TECHNOLOGIES

• Microsoft Windows 9x/NT Platform
• Internet Information Server 4.0
• Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0
• Visual Basic IIS Application
• Microsoft Access

CUSTOMER BENEFITS

InventoryCTRL effectively minimized the human interaction in maintaining the inventory. In addition, it helped in the ordering of parts by calculating the inventory available, apart from providing the user with time-to-time information in the form of various reports. It maintained the information of various vendors for a given part along with their history in terms of meeting the standards and deliveries, etc. ,which is used in vendor selection.

ESN made significant contributions in the design for this system and adhered to the client's long-term requirements. The system was designed and developed to cater to the needs of the fleet industry, but can be easily customized to be used across different industries. As the system uses the component model, it is easy to maintain and upgrade.