Saturday, September 25, 2010

Problem Areas

Please do not mind my succeeding posts, for they might be irrelevant:

SAN-DES/SYSDEVE Problem Areas. HAHA.

Problem 1: Difficulty in Tracking Inventory


MACHINES


They do not use their valve machine to aid in counting the withdrawn raw materials

- valve machine requires constant maintenance

- cost-cutting


They lack an Information System that consistently provides and manages their information needs (old)


- Rainchem is a small company so they cannot afford the subscription costs/inapplicable to them

- NetSuite, an "ideal" system for the company, costs millions per year for maintenance/service cost

- Focus on administration (Finance/Human Resources/Purchasing) rather than Inventory system.

-- inventory monitoring is still manageable (manual checking)

-- it is done by one personnel, doing multiple tasks

---Lack of manpower

---- Cost-cutting


MATERIALS


There are too many raw materials

Their base raw materials are oils/liquids (difficult to measure/count)


METHODS


Inventory records are on separate files/records

Recording and updating of records is difficult

- Production staff withdraws raw materials from the warehouse without informing the warehouse officer

-- warehouse officer is not present

--- flexible workload

---- lack of manpower

----- cost-cutting

- They use one central logbook (cannot be updated by multiple users at the same time)

They cannot consistently update their excel files (inventory records/logbook)

Their excel file (inventory records) isn't systematic/organized yet

- No-one can update it consistently

-- lack of manpower

--- cost-cutting

-- lack of defined system for inventory


MANPOWER


Disorganized task assignments/flexible workload

- lack of manpower (to update and monitor the inventory)

-- cost-cutting


Problem 2: Reliability of their New Information System


They bought an Information System, however, it is difficult to use because it is a generic information system

- There are many unnecessary fields to be filled up / not customized to RAINCHEM's business processes/req'ts

- The information system is, on estimate, 10-years old


Information System is susceptible to malfunction during brownouts

- instance where all database records were deleted at a brownout

- they were doing data conversion and it happened midway

- user accounts were inaccessible

- functionality of the system is dependent on local database



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