AppMyShopfloor: Helping Businesses Achieve Digital Transformation on the Factory Floor

In today’s digital age, companies must embrace modernisation and digital transformation to drive growth, innovation, and relevance.

Successfully navigating the complexities of integrating disparate systems and ensuring data accuracy on a factory floor is a complicated process due to the many challenges arising from outdated technology, siloed information, and a lack of standardisation.

At Brighten Consulting , our Digital Service Line specialises in tailored digital transformation services that automate, optimise and simplifies shopfloor processes to achieve operational excellence.

Recently, we partnered with a leading seafood company in Portugal to revolutionise its factory floor operations by integrating our digital shopfloor solution, AppMyShopfloor, with its new Sage X3 ERP system. This transformation has significantly improved efficiency and operational performance, enhanced data visibility, and simplified production processes.

In addition, this project has laid the foundations for further digital transformation initiatives, such as exploring advanced data analytics for predictive maintenance, demand forecasting and continuous process optimisation.

The Challenge: Aligning the Shopfloor with ERP

The fast-paced nature of the food industry demands agility and scalability. Our client faced challenges transitioning all their operations to a new enterprise resource planning system while ensuring seamless alignment with shopfloor activities. Transitioning to a new ERP, manual processes, isolated data silos and a lack of real-time insights hindered operational efficiency.

AppMyShopfloor: Our Digital Solution

To address these challenges, Brighten proposed an all-around solution that encompassed:

• Unified Integration — Implementing our shopfloor solution to work harmoniously with Sage X3 ERP.
• Harnessing Manufacturing Data — Enabling real-time data collection across the shopfloor for a holistic view of operations.
• Actionable Insights — Providing increased visibility into manufacturing activity, volumes and inventory levels.

Technology Stack

Our team leveraged an effective combination of technologies to achieve these goals:

• Sage X3 — The central hub for managing core business processes.
• On-premises data centre — Robust data processing and storage.
• IoT — Enabling data acquisition from the shopfloor through a network of handheld devices, stations, scanners, printers and other machinery, utilising appropriate communication protocols.
• Custom Integration Modules — Facilitating data exchange between custom-built systems using modern architecture, message queues, comprehensive observability and telemetry.

Efficient Implementation: Microservices Architecture and Agile Development

The foundation of our solution is a robust microservices architecture, with each back-end service dedicated to a specific business function. This approach offers numerous benefits, including improved performance, enhanced observability, and more efficient resource allocation.

To further streamline our development process, we leveraged our private NuGet repository with Azure DevOps for continuous integration and delivery. This powerful combination automated unit testing and code analysis for both the back and front end and implemented multiple deployment stages. This rigorous approach ensured that each release was thoroughly tested and validated before reaching production, resulting in higher-quality software and faster delivery cycles.

For the front end, we chose Angular, a modern JavaScript framework known for its flexibility and ability to create dynamic, interactive user interfaces. By developing a cross-device front end comprised of multiple pluggable micro-front ends, we achieved a rich yet intuitive UI/UX experience, incorporating animations and web sockets for seamless real-time communication between shopfloor devices and the back end via SignalR hubs. The result is a user-friendly interface that improves workflows and provides operators and supervisors instant access to critical functions and information.

Success in Action: Achievements and Impact

Our solution, tailored to the client’s specific needs, delivered transformative results:

• Simplified Workflows Across the Assembly Line: Simplified processes for operators at every stage of the manufacturing cycle, from unpacking raw materials to packing finished goods, reducing manual effort and errors.
• Precise Tracking: Operators can easily record the quantities of consumed components during each stage, ensuring alignment with the bill of materials and preventing overages or shortages. Production of finished goods is tracked at each station, facilitating accuracy.
• Efficient Sub-Product and Return Management: The creation of sub-products and inventory returns are easily recorded, ensuring a smooth and responsive supply chain.
• Real-time Overview: Supervisors gain a comprehensive, real-time view of manufacturing status, empowering them to identify bottlenecks, optimise workflows and make data-driven decisions.
• Improved logistics: Warehouse operations, such as the receipt and issue of goods, shipping and stock allocation, are simplified, reducing errors and delays.
• Enhanced efficiency: Faster access to data enables swifter decision-making and proactive problem-solving. The efficiency, transparency, and speed with which shopfloor data flows into the ERP system are noticeable. This results in streamlined manufacturing, logistics, procurement, shipping, and financial reporting processes, which leads to substantial time and cost savings.

A Versatile and Adaptable Solution

With three Portuguese factories currently powered by AppMyShopfloor and Sage X3, we continue to actively collaborate with our partners to refine workflows further and automate time-consuming and costly processes. Brighten’s robust and scalable architecture makes our solution versatile and adaptable across industries, and we are eager to explore new opportunities.

Our ambitious roadmap includes enhancing our platform’s capabilities with cutting-edge technologies such as Generative AI, Computer Vision and predictive models. We are also committed to integrating additional devices that will enable us to collect richer data and gain greater control over the manufacturing process.

By continuously innovating and incorporating new technologies, we aim to empower our partners with more efficient, intelligent, and simple manufacturing solutions that drive productivity and profitability.

Thank you for taking the time to read about our experience helping businesses achieve digital transformation.

*This post is part of our series showcasing how technology simplifies business at Brighten Digital’s service line.

*Curious about Brighten Consulting ’s AppMyWork product line? Stay tuned as we explore its full range of features and benefits in the upcoming posts in this series.