The Client
The client is the leading global provider of software solutions for the corrugated and folding carton manufacturing industries. Since its establishment in 1981, the client has been at the forefront of the industry, assisting organizations in achieving operational excellence in key business areas including plant management, production and planning, and sales and customer service.
For more than 800 manufacturing plants, the client is the backbone and offers a business system that is both innovative and comprehensive. With a suite of modules, the client offers the kind of technology that businesses need to remain competitive in an ever-changing industry.
The Challenge
For BI Server Remediation and Maintenance Application:
Due to lack of real-time production monitors and reporting metrics, the client was seeing a lot of waste regarding time and inefficiency issues in their production plants. They were slow to react when various production machines were having issues. These inefficiencies were causing higher expenses, lower profit margins, and customer satisfaction issues.
The business need of the project was to remediate bugs/enhance software in the client’s enterprise-level BI (business intelligence) Server and Reporting Dashboard application for building and using interactive dashboards, reports, scorecards, and more. The dashboard sources data from their core Imaginera ERP platform. The aim was to provide standardized, real-time data links between the plant floor control systems and its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
The client wanted a customizable and extensible dashboard creation platform for data visualization, which not only is web-based and mobile optimized but also enables users to access any data, anywhere with a web connection. So that users can build, share and view fully interactive dashboards directly in their HTML5 browser without any additional desktop application. Apart from code remediation, Excellarate also performed complete functional testing of the entire application, including test case authoring and execution, and documenting findings within client’s Jira instance.
For Custom Digital Signage Application:
In addition to BI Server Remediation and Maintenance project that we developed for the client, Excellarate also developed a custom-tailored, flexible Custom Digital Signage solution for them. The need for an effective and efficient Digital Signage system was felt by the client – a display technology application that will support the overall team atmosphere right from the foremen to the manager as this will be vital to all employees in maintaining a safe, efficient environment at the manufacturing plant.
The client was in search of a solution that will display real-time ERP production data at various display points throughout the plant. The client’s developers will be required to write the data links to the ERP system that will extract required data for use upon execution. On the other hand, Excellarate’s developers will call the extraction mechanism and then manipulate the data to meet the specific signage requirements. These resulting visualizations will be accessible via a browser that displays a web page of the sign with built-in refresh/update mechanisms to refresh data.
For Encore Updater:
Having to deploy code manually to around 300 customers was pain and consumed resources time to log on into customers production machine and to deploy code. There was lot of communication that had to be required with customer in order to deploy code as they had to schedule down time for production environment.
This process was tedious, so customer approached Excellarate to provide an optimal solution which would suit their needs. Customer also tried option like Jenkins, TeamCity etc,but these would not help out.
For Encore/ Imaginera:
Support for code developed in Gupta SQL (Windows Based Application )and Web Based Application developed using WiseJ framework
The Solution
Excellarate implemented a common and generalized data mart that helps in maintaining data from across various products streams and different business areas of the client. A BI dashboard and a reporting system was established that allowed the business users to generate faster and accurate reports that are sent out to their users/customers with 100% accuracy in billing.
We understood that the client needed a little extra help with the solution. We understood their technical environment and served as a single point of contact to resolve issues as they arose. Ultimately, we offered several possibilities for technological changes and room for innovation and flexibility that digital technologies can help manufacturing organizations achieve excellence in manufacturing operations.
Excellarate offered the following solutions for BI Server Remediation and Maintenance implementation:
As part of custom-made Digital Signage solution, Excellarate developed a very slick data visualization tool that allowed monitoring, analyzing, and displaying in a smart way. The user interface does more than just look good; it allows staff to personalize individual dashboards with very little training. By creating personalized dashboards with great visualizations for analysis and planning, our software application came as a good fit for them, facilitating specific, meaningful improvement.
A large part of the BI Dashboard implementation challenge was how to provide the client with easy, smart and intuitive design tools that will make them visualize and data from across their organization on the dashboard, helping them gain valuable insight and drive accurate decision-making.
Ultimately, the challenge for Excellarate was to develop an enterprise-level, self-service dashboard that lets the client monitor and measure performance and business metrics in real-time. The most prominent challenges we faced were how to achieve better data integration, bring more flexibility, and provide easier distribution of data and better visuals. Excellarate provided a solution that provides an engaging experience
and empowers business users to create and/or personalize dashboards and reports on their own.
As part of the Custom Digital Signage solution we developed for the client, the challenge of creating a custom-tailored solution was of a complex undertaking, but Excellarate developed a solution that would provide a more engaging experience through display quality and advanced interactive features to users/customers at the right place and time. Our engineers worked with the client to help streamline the presentation of a diverse collection of data formats, graphs, images, and other message content. In terms of the key challenges we faced in the development phase of the project involved the following:
- Develop a robust technology backbone that ensures the success of the client’s digital signage system
- Display real-time ERP production data at various display points throughout the plant
- Provide a powerful and effective way of visualizing the overall production situation at a high level
- Manage content either on-site or remotely
- Display critical production line alerts and metrics, streamline communications
- Reinforce safety information that makes it an instrumental resource for the client
The Outcome
With the completion of this project – by leveraging our expertise in .Net C# development and the DevExpress framework, in addition to our prior experiences in Business Intelligence development and state-of-the-art QA practices – our client was able to launch a robust BI Dashboard & Reporting and Custom Digital Signage solution to their customer base for immediate use.
At a high-level, some of the client benefits include:
- More diverse ways of accessing and distributing reports and dashboards
- Getting a bird’s eye view of the plant floor
- Plant operations and production saw overall efficiency increases with higher operating margins and decrease in unscheduled downtime
- Plant officers could quickly and effectively respond to demands with information regarding safety, material sources, etc.
- BI software changed the way the client’s businesses handle and leverage data
- Optimized processes and improved efficiency in the manufacturing process
