At Brighten, we’re passionate about empowering businesses with technology solutions that tackle real-world challenges. Our Digital service line focuses on automating, decentralising, and digitising processes to drive operational excellence.
We’re excited to showcase AppMyQuality, a mobile solution we developed to enhance and simplify quality control checks during raw material receipt for businesses using SAP.
The Challenge: Enhancing Quality Control
A leading pharmaceutical client approached us with a need to elevate their quality control processes. They wanted to extend their ERP with the SAP Quality Management module and empower inspectors to swiftly assess the quality of incoming raw material batches, record critical characteristics, and flag any deficiencies early in the supply chain.
Brighten’s Solution: AppMyQuality
Our objective was clear: create a user-friendly mobile app that seamlessly integrates with SAP, allowing quality workers and inspectors to:
- Efficiently navigate through received raw material batches.
- Collect comprehensive data, as well as characteristics and features from incoming goods.
- Complete quality sheets directly within the app.
- Capture visual evidence of any quality issues using their mobile devices.
To achieve this, our Digital team harnessed a range of cutting-edge technologies:
- Backend?—?Built on?.NET Core with our Brighten core libraries for rapid development, leveraging GenAI and OpenAI APIs to streamline 40% of backend code generation.
- Brighten Core Libraries—We are proud of these building blocks, which grow with each project, have increasingly accelerated our development teams, and provide standardised components for common, mandatory features in all products in our portfolio.
- GenAI and OpenAI APIs?—?Our backend utilizes proprietary in-house tools that leverage generative AI and OpenAI’s language models. These tools automate a significant portion of the code generation process, enhancing efficiency while considering security implications.
- Low-code front-end platform (Flutter/Dart)?—?For rapid development of a sophisticated yet user-friendly and intuitive interface. This enabled us to deploy a native mobile app, optimised for both phones and tablets and a web version. While designing UI/UX for multiple devices and platforms invariably presents unique challenges, this platform allowed us to build a UI that functions and operates consistently across all devices, including laptops and desktop computers.
- Google Firebase?—?Provides secure media storage, detailed app analytics, a real-time database, cloud messaging, and remote configuration.
- SAP integration?—?Ensuring optimal data flow, transaction logging and resilience between the app and the client’s ERP system.
Implementation and Benefits
Our backend utilised our in-house libraries to accelerate development. These libraries leverage the power of GenAI to connect to databases, produce documentation, and generate backend code for models, DTOs, repositories, and services through specially engineered prompts using OpenAI APIs, significantly reducing development time.
- Rapid Development?—?The combination of?.NET Core, Brighten libraries, and AI-powered code generation significantly sped up the backend development process, allowing our engineers to focus on higher-level logic and customisation. This streamlined approach accelerated development and presented a unique opportunity to evolve and mature our libraries and in-house tools. Refining these during the project made them even more efficient for future endeavours and further harmonised our framework.
- Streamlined Code Generation—Automating 40% of the backend code through AI means less manual work, fewer bugs, and faster iteration cycles. This was a major efficiency boost and yet another step in the right direction.
For the front end, we chose a low-code platform based on Flutter/Dart. This enabled us to quickly create the complex user flows required for quality assurance controls while maintaining a simple, visually appealing, and user-friendly design.
As for the Data layer, Google Firebase provided a secure and scalable solution for storing media captured by the device while gathering valuable usage data.
AppMyQuality has delivered significant benefits:
- Streamlined Quality Control?—?Data collected in the app seamlessly integrates with SAP’s Quality Management module, enabling real-time quality assessments and early detection of issues.
- Enhanced Visibility?—?The solution provides a comprehensive overview of quality control status across various stages. It is accessible to everyone who participates in the quality process, promoting better and faster procedures within the organization.
- Empowered Workforce?—?Quality workers, operators and inspectors can easily perform checks, document findings, and raise concerns, promoting a proactive approach to quality assurance.
Some challenges were faced during development along the way:
- SAP Integration?—?Mapping data models between AppMyQuality and the client’s specific SAP version and building a robust solution for securely transferring media from Firebase to the ERP required meticulous attention to detail.
- User Interface Refinement?—?We worked closely with quality control workers to fine-tune the app’s interface, ensuring optimal usability and efficiency in their daily tasks.
- Customisation for a wide range of industries—The pharmaceutical industry's sheer volume, variety of raw materials, and batch characteristics demanded extensive ERP customisation and flexibility in the app’s survey capabilities. We worked closely with the client and SAP consultants to tailor these surveys to their needs while maintaining the app’s applicability to industry-general usage.
We overcame these challenges through a combination of strategic planning, collaborative teamwork, and persistent effort, resulting in:
- Collaborative Problem-Solving?—?Close collaboration between our development team, SAP consultants, and the client ensured smooth integration and effective solutions.
- Iterative Design?—?Regular feedback from SAP consultants and users guided the refinement of the app’s interface, ensuring it met their needs and workflow.
- Flexible Configuration?—?We implemented a flexible survey system within the app to accommodate ERP standards and custom functions.
We’re excited about AppMyQuality’s potential to transform quality control processes further. We envision analytics for quality insights, deeper integration with SAP’s Quality Management module, computer vision to enhance and automate the detection of deficiencies faster, and many more cool features.
AppMyQuality is more than just an app; it’s a powerful tool that enables businesses to proactively manage quality control upon raw material arrival. By combining cutting-edge technology with a user-friendly interface, we’ve empowered quality control teams to work more effectively.
Thank you for following our ongoing series exploring how Brighten Digital’s solutions and vision are simplifying business operations.
*This post is part of our series showcasing how technology is simplifying business at Brighten Digital’s service line.
*Are you curious about our AppMyWork product line? Stay tuned as we explore its full range of features and benefits in the upcoming posts in this series.
