Endeavour Speciality Chemicals
Quality Control Database & Integration With MRP
About the Company
Founded in 1991 as a specialist manufacturer of high impact aroma chemicals, Endeavour Speciality Chemicals has been supplying products and services to companies across the globe for nearly 30 years. They supply products in quantities ranging from just 1 gramme to tens of kilograms. In addition to their production laboratories, they have two R&D labs to ensure product development is based on the latest data and that their processes are continually evolving.
When order quantities exceed capacity at their Daventry site, production can be rapidly and seamlessly transferred to the parent company, RBL, also in the UK, where quantities of 1000 metric tonnes can be processed.
Requirements Overview
Because Endeavour supply products to the food industry, strict testing regimes are in place to ensure the quality of all the chemicals.
After seeing the benefits of introducing the 123insight MRP to manage all their manufacturing and quality processes the company wanted their batch testing to integrate with it. Solweb were asked to write a bespoke system for quality control that would automate Endeavour’s batch testing process and interface with their MRP.
They explained that they were using an outdated quality control operating system which was very slow and did not integrate with 123insight. Staff were spending too long inputting data manually and sending emails for repetitive tasks, without having any visibility of the rest of the process, which caused delays.
Custom Software Development
Integrated Systems Allow Your Business To Run More Efficiently
Solution
Solweb’s developers created a bespoke Quality Control Database (QCDB) which integrates smoothly with 123insight and automates many parts of the batch testing process.
Predetermined criteria for testing each product enable the system to select relevant batches of chemicals to be tested from 123insight automatically. Once these batches of chemicals have been tested, staff enter the data into the QCDB which prints out relevant labels.
When the tests are approved, Certificates of Analysis and specifications can be automatically produced and emailed to relevant people including those customers who have recently purchased the products.
The database allows users to create and revise specifications for products, and, importantly, it moves expired products automatically so that they can’t be used.
A notification system records all the activity and flags up any subsequent actions that are required. It also sends email notifications to specified users and produces reports. Version control is set up to allow the team to track any changes.
123insight’s software development kit (SDK) ensures that the two systems remain fully linked regardless of any software updates to either end in future.
Outcome
The QCDB was first implemented nine years ago and has become an integral part of the business and is heavily relied upon by the team to ensure their quality checking process is followed.
Compared with the previous system the company’s processes vastly improved and are now totally streamlined. The much-increased efficiency has brought noticeable cost savings.
The system is regularly reviewed and constantly evolving and has had several upgrades and enhancements which have further increased the benefits to Endeavour.
There were so many jobs that the system took care of that it saved us a full week of one person’s time.
Shawn Dilley, Quality Manager
