Case example: Inventory Control System
Customer profile
Nature of business: Trading
Purchases consumer products from China and repacks them.
Distributes repackaged products to wholesalers and retailers
in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
♦ Background and problems
Daily business operation involves procurement management, shipment schedule,
consolidating sales orders, and delivery. Shortage of administrative personnel in handling the
growing volume of supplies (Purchase Order), shipment schedule, and sales orders leads to
overwork and increasing number of human errors.
A trading company without a proper inventory control system to automate their manual tasks,
spent more on resources in tracking records, schedules, and delivery information etc.
Increasing the number of administrative staffs does not usually solve the daily operational
problems. In contrast, automation of daily operating tasks can result in higher efficiently and
eliminates business-related errors.
♦ Challenge
1 Build a systematic inventory database for easy collection of product, batch, shipment,
delivery, warehouse, re-ordering, goods return, suppliers, customers, information etc.
2 Enhance daily business operation flow by integrating work processes.
3 Generate quick reporting system for inventory product records, shipment and delivery
schedules, damage and returned goods, sales performance, expenditure statements,
cash-flow, etc.
♦ Reason to the decision Improvement after implementing the system
Point
1 Reasonable price and flexible 1 Improvement of efficiency at min. 300%
customization Point
2 High performance in inventory levels.
2 Strong efficiency improvement for
overall business operation. Point Cost saving business operations using
3
new and improved system processes.
3 Provides critical reporting information
for making important business decisions.
♦ Inventory Business Processes
1. Ordering Procedures (New Items)
Procurement Warehouse management
management
Request from
Agency Create request Set reorder Point Order stock
order for agency
Supplier
Warehouse
Receive stock
2. Stock Replenishment for Warehouse
Run materials requirement Replenish stock? Creates order plans Order stock
planning (MRP) Yes
No
Warehouse Receive stock
♦ Structure of the system
Database Management server,
server web server
Internet connection
♦ Implementation schedule
st nd rd
1 month 2 month 3 month
Analysis and plan Development Deployment
Project planning Design presentation User training
Requirement gathering User acceptance test
Implementation
Analysis Deployment
Design preparation System testing Maintenance
and support
Estimated budget ranges from S$7,000
Considerations about Management System for your company
Regardless of how advanced technology may be, if it does not fit your organization needs, you will not
be able to take full advantage of it.
If you are not sure that you can handle irregular tasks when all the operations are automated.
If you are not sure if a management software can improve your daily tasks.
After using any standard off-the-shelf software, if you have similar impressions as below:
1) there are too many unnecessary functions and I found it troublesome to use
2) our business has unusual (special) processes and standard off-the-shelf software cannot
support.
3) I feel unnecessary operations (handling) are required to complete a task.
Contact our consultant. Every company has different operation flows and managing processes. After
hearing and understand the current situation and objectives from clients, we evaluate and analyze the
management software and the network. We will provide suggestion for cost-effective and flexible
software, which can adapt best to the changes.
