Precaster Case Study

Description of the project

The company Prefaspecs Ltd. produces bespoke concrete parts and, in particular, stairs and balconies. It comprises a 10,000 m² factory occupied by 70 employees.

Requirements

In order to optimize the organization of the office and reinforcing factory, Prefaspecs Ltd. required a solution that would allow it to manage all aspects of customer orders: technical, administration, production, and financial monitoring. For each order, potentially linked to a construction site, the Management wanted the system to generate an automated authorization request depending on the capped amount. This was to ensure the control of work in process inventory. The system was also required to generate stock reservations, the list of components (concrete, rebars and accessories), and calculate the time required for each operation (pouring, drying, removal of the formwork, etc.). The production schedule needed to take into account the manufacturing of all of the orders and generate the necessary documents, including short specs registration of the formwork for the R- and I-beams. The cost calculation also had to be integrated in the offer. Finally, from a more administrative perspective, the edited delivery slips allowed for generating invoices, which were then transferred to the Sage accounting software.

Proposed solution

Precasters Pack + Sage interfaces + Workflow.

We implemented our Precasters solution for this customer. This helped systematize the financial controls, reduce risk, streamline the preparation process, optimize production, and integrate business and financial data.

Deployment

The solution was implemented over a period of 12 weeks and included the following stages:

• Project management with analysis of specific requirements (Sage interfaces).
• Installation and configuration of the database. 
• Generation of macros for the concrete parts.
• Definition of summary statements (stock, construction site and financial monitoring).
• User training on site.

Assessment

This project was conducted efficiently thanks to strict compliance with the specifications on the part of the customer. The test phases were observed, which led to a solution that was fully compliant with the initial expectations. Administrative communication has been considerably improved, providing greater peace of mind for the Management, who have all the elements to hand to facilitate their decision-making process.

Architecture

The A+ Software solution was installed on a dedicated server with MS SQL. Each workstation is connected to the company’s local network and ensures fast and secure access. The Management can also access the data externally via a RDS configuration.