The Group Manufactures Precision Components For Automotive And Industrial Customers From Plants In Three States. Production Scheduling, Order Management And Dispatch All Run Through An In-House System Built By The Company's Own Team More Than Two Decades Ago And Extended Continuously Since.
Company Profile
Problem Statement
As Customers Demanded Faster Quotations And Delivery Visibility, The Group Encountered Several Challenges: With The Core System Running On Ageing Servers And Unsupported Technology, Neither New Features Nor New Plants Could Be Accommodated.
New Requirements Could Not Be Added Without Risking Existing Production Workflows.
The Platform Ran On Framework Versions No Longer Receiving Security Updates.
Each Plant Held Its Own Data With No Consolidated View For Head Office.
The Application Had Been Extended By Successive Developers Without Documentation, Version Control Or Test Coverage. It Ran On Servers In A Plant Utility Room Alongside Production Equipment. Each Site Held Its Own Copy Of The Database, Reconciled Manually Through Spreadsheets Exchanged Between Plants Every Week.
Production Scheduling, Order Management And Dispatch Now Run On A Modernised Cloud Hosted Platform With One Consolidated Database Across All Plants. Head Office Sees Live Order And Production Status Without Waiting For Weekly Reconciliation, And New Functionality Reaches Users In Weeks Rather Than Being Declined As Too Risky To Attempt.
Plants On One System
Faster Feature Delivery
Quotation Turnaround
Under Version Control
The Application Was First Moved To Supported Technology And Cloud Hosting With Its Behaviour Preserved Exactly, Establishing Version Control And Automated Tests Before Any Feature Changed. Modernisation Then Proceeded Module By Module Against That Safety Net, With Plant Databases Consolidated Once The Platform Was Stable.
Requests That Were Previously Declined As Too Risky Now Reach Production Within Weeks. Automated Tests And Version Control Give The Team Confidence To Modify Production Workflows Without Fearing Consequences Nobody Can Predict Or Reverse.
The Platform Was Re-Hosted On Cloud Compute With A Managed Database Consolidating Plant Data, Then Modernised Onto Supported Framework Versions. Version Control, Automated Testing And Deployment Pipelines Were Established Before Functional Change Began, With Monitoring And Backup Applied Across The Environment.
Twenty Years Of Undocumented Extensions Is Not A Technology Problem Alone; It Is A Business Constraint. Re-Platforming Onto Supported Technology Before Changing Behaviour Gave The Group A Safety Net First And Modernisation Afterwards, So A System That Blocked Growth Now Accommodates It.
