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Company Profile

The client is engaged in the manufacturing, wholesaling and export business of gemstones, gold and diamond jewelry. The company manufactures precious stones including emeralds, blue & yellow sapphires, rubies. The company is also involved in cutting and polishing of these gems.

Business Situation

Client needed a system that should track all the transactions related to gem stone processing right from the rough to finished state enabling the management to effectively monitor their business by tracking day to day transactions and checking the stock of gem stones at various stages of production & analyzing the operational health of the business regularly.

It was required to customize the predefined stages in the system and add new stages in the production cycle & enable the user to define different gemstones that needed to be manufactured with their cut, shape, size and grade along with the production schedule.

It was required to support the breaking lots into sub-lots and issue it to different workers for processing & matching every receipt with the issue. The objective was to check for the difference in weights after taking into account the expected loss of percentage during processing, the weight of the processed material along with the unprocessed, rejected and waste material and to reduce the scope for pilferage.

It was also required to provide Item Performance Reports- Top selling; most profitable etc. which were to support the Import/export orders and invoices between multiple companies.

It was also required to track the losses throughout the system; identify the stages where the loss percentage was increasing and take necessary actions to reduce the loss. It had to support sending the rejected goods back to earlier stages for re-processing & allowing reallocation of workers to different stages whenever deviations in the plans were observed. It also had to also calculate the worker wages automatically considering the standard labor rate, worker’s rate and the TDS defined at the system level.

The client also wanted that it should handle the different units of weight like Carats, Grams, Kilograms and Milligrams & allow automatic conversion between different units of weights during transactions. It should then transfer the finished gemstones to an inventory of gemstones automatically & generate a Lot-wise profitability and a variety of other powerful reports with different views to analyze the operational health of the production process.

The application required by the client should be such that it should run on any platform and could be accessed from any location without installation process.

 

Challenges

There were many challenges that were faced in the development of this application. The most difficult and challenging part of the application development was to migrate the source code of their existing application. The current application was however built in VB.net but the application overall business was written in stored procedures. So, the difficulty was to take out the business logic from the existing stored procedures and fit them in the business layer.

The second challenge was the selections of UI that would sort their purpose of installation at once and could be accessed from anywhere and yet give desktop experience. Silverlight was selected but then report was also required to be implemented into the same.

Technical Solution

Q3 always emphasize the importance of building the application in a technology that helped its clients to manage the application. To meet all client requirements, Q3 came up with a team of dedicated developers and proposed the N-Tier SOA based architecture with Unity Framework, WCF Services, Silverlight 4.0, and Entity ORM Framework. The whole vast ERP application consisted of various modules which interacted with each other at every stage of transaction. So, the GMS System was organized into four main modules. These modules in combination would answer how a user can set the application settings, manage employees, do the workflow in production, create reports and make use of the utilities. It would describe all the operations that a user could perform using the system. For the Silverlight application, reporting tools were used to display the reports in the Silverlight environment.

 

Technologies

Architectural Component	Technologies/Frameworks
Language	C#
Target Deployment OS	Windows Server 2008
Server Software	IIS 7.0
Client Tier	HTML Silverlight XAML JavaScript
Presentation Tier	WCF Services
Application Tier	Unity Framework 2.0 (Dependency Injection, Transaction Management) Entity ORM Framework
Reporting	Telerik Reporting Tools
Data Tier	MS SQL Server 2008 R2 Database
Tools	Visual Studio 2010 SVN Source Code Control

 

Benefits

• Performance:
  The application performance has gained a lot of popularity after the application is replaced.
• Latest Technologies:
  The application benefited from the various latest technologies. Each of them has their separate benefits.
• Access from anywhere:
  Since the application is developed on the web server along with the Silverlight UI. The application can be run from any location.