Advanced Plastics
EDI System
About the Company
Advanced Plastics are a plastics manufacturer based in Hull, UK, who provide a diverse range of technical injection molded products for blue chip clients across a range of market sectors. These sectors include Automotive, HVAC, Filtration and Technical Plastics.
The company was founded in 1992 by three engineers and had just four employees, with a sales revenue of £100k. Fast forward to 2022, they recently celebrated 30 years in business and now employ 242 staff turning over £30m.
Requirements Overview
We were approached by Advanced Plastics in 2020 to discuss a project for an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), between their Manufacturing Resource Planning System (MRP) 123Insight and a customer of theirs, to eliminate the manual entry of orders and the sending of dispatch information. The sole purpose of this particular software development was to achieve a saving of time and cost and to reduce human errors.
Solution
After an extensive investigative phase that established specific requirements, we developed and implemented a purpose-built EDI system, in the form of bespoke tasks for The Data Bridge® service and a despatch overlay desktop application, that automated the entire order and despatch process. We worked closely with Lobster who provided a system to broker the connection between Advanced Plastic’s customer and their own internal network. Lobster worked so that it received DELFOR messages and translated them into a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file. Conversely, Lobster would receive a CSV file from The Data Bridge® and translate that into an (Advanced Shipping Notice) ASN, for sending back to Advanced Plastic’s customer.
We then utilised The Data Bridge® product to process the CSV files produced by Lobster, creating forecasts and sales orders within 123Insight. The Data Bridge® also produced the CSV files, containing despatch information, which is converted into an ASM file by Lobster.
Outcome
Advanced Plastics now have a fully automated process, whereby all sales orders and despatch information are processed without the need for manual intervention. The system has also been designed to be scalable so additional channels can be opened up should existing or new customers of Advanced Plastics require the same automated service. We have added 5 new customers of Advanced Plastics since the original development was completed. We have also provided numerous functionality updates for the system, based upon customer change requests or to amend changes to processes within Advance Plastics.
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