Inventory Module for an ERP System to Reduce Procurement Costs

Customer

The Customer invests in sports club businesses and owns a SaaS ERP solution deployed at sports clubs in almost 40 US states.

Challenge

The Customer had its SaaS ERP solution initially developed in 2013. ERP enabled comprehensive management of all sports club business resources. However, the system underrepresented in-house kitchen management aimed at controlling food and beverages that were offered to the players visiting the club properties. The Customer wanted to optimize food production/sales and reduce the number of unsold products, so they needed a new module for extensive food service management.

Solution

In 2019, the Customer turned to ScienceSoft to implement a new large module for food service management. ScienceSoft was responsible f designing the architecture of the module as well as for integrating it with other modules (POS system, ERP) on the back end and front end.

The project team that consisted of 12 specialists: a project manager, a business analysis specialist, 8 developers and 2 QA specialists, worked according to the Scrum methodology. The team used DevOps and agile principles, which contributed to faster delivery and higher code quality.

The new module was called ‘Inventory’ submenu in the ERP administration panel. It let food service managers keep track of and manage the raw materials stock as well as observe how the final products were sold. The module included the following list of items:

• Raw materials – separate items of procured raw materials. Each item had its assigned values, such as manufacturer, unit cost, unit number, and barcode.
• Recipes – items that listed the needed raw material items and their required amount. Every recipe was associated with a Product item.
• Products – items that corresponded with dishes for sale and could be combined to create Product menu items.
• Product menu – product items combined in specific menus (‘lunch menu’, ‘weekend menu’, etc.)
• Manufacturer – manufacturers of raw material procured by the company.

Each of the lists above allowed adding a new item or editing an existing one.

The amount of used raw materials and produced products in the lists was entered and updated by food service specialists, while the number of sold products was updated automatically as the orders were put via client mobile apps. Food service specialists could view detailed statistics of product sales to see the trends and adjust the menus accordingly with the goal of sales optimization.

Results

Thanks to the module’s functionality and its integration with the rest of the system, sports clubs can adjust the procurement of raw materials thus reducing procurement costs and food waste.

Technologies and Tools

Java, Spring, Hibernate, REST Services, Hazelcast, Logback, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, AngularJS, Flyway, Gulp, Grunt, Apache PDFBox.