IT.UA - home page

Progress Service (Lviv) is one of the leading companies in making high-quality and affordable shoes. Together with IT-Enterprise, it is developing and improving a large-scale project to digitalize its business processes.

For more than 20 years, Progress Service has been making shoes under the brands Progress Service and MAYFED for the markets of Ukraine, Poland, Moldova, Germany, and Romania.

Since 2017, the company has been following the lean manufacturing model.

Project phase 1

The first phase of the digitalization project based on the IT-Enterprise ERP system covered master data management processes (MDM) and product development. Click to find out more

Project phase 2

In the second phase of the Progress Service digitalization project, the IT-Enterprise team implemented the end-to-end digital business process: from receiving a sales order, operation scheduling, product manufacturing and automated material write-off to shipping the finished product to the customer.

End-to-end business process

A sales order is received from the customer with immediate registration in the system and checking for the remaining finished products in the warehouses. While creating a sales order, managers can book finished products for sale for a specific customer.

If some part of the order is not yet available in the warehouses, it is automatically included in the company’s production schedule. After that, the IT-Enterprise ERP system automatically estimates the manufacturing lead times.

Now Progress Service also has tools for tracking order fulfillment stages. By drilling down into the order details, a manager can track each order processing stage: manufactured, prepared for shipment, shipped, and completed.

Next, working with a modern business process management tool Force BPM, which relies on BPMN 2.0 standards, ensures faster implementation of new processes and changes to existing ones.

This approach optimizes the execution of business processes during order processing, using heat maps as a built-in statistical algorithm for analyzing the behavior of employees (executors) and process efficiency.

A sales order is the starting point of communication with the customer, and here starts the business process: "1 Sales order receipt → 2 Manufacturing → 3 Shipment." Also, it serves as a basis for forming a package of other supporting documentation, such as invoices, shipping documents, etc.

The business process involves the following departments:
→ Sales department: communication with customers and sales order creation.
→ Production department: automatic addition of the order to the production schedule, data verification/product development, needed for manufacturing process design.
→ Warehousing department: transfer and shipment of finished products to the warehouse.
→ Sales department: shipment of the order to the customer.

All stages of the business process are end-to-end and interconnected in a single digital environment: the IT-Enterprise ERP system.

Production planning

Based on Progress Service’s specific needs, a dedicated interface was created for planning foundry operations. This is a critical factor in scheduling the work of all previous production shops.

One of the main functions of this process is to support automated and operational calculation and display of the loading of work centers (PVC machines) relative to the planned technological operations. In turn, automated distribution of a certain amount of products to work centers depending on the throughput capacity of each work center significantly speeds up the planning process.

Next, the ERP system automatically schedules work in the cutting and sewing unit. The work sequence depends on the dates of foundry operations and priorities set by the production planner (supervisor).

The system automatically generates analytical data based on work orders. This primarily concerns the visualization of work performance, showing the percentage of the work order completion as a whole, and then one can drill down into each of the planned operations.

Also, the system makes it possible to compare the volume of work estimated by the system calculation and the actual performance.

Work efficiency is maintained by using teamwork methods. There are dedicated interfaces for the operational management of each team’s resources and work distribution to the teams with the following functionality:
a) Creation of mobile teams with the possibility of redistributing workers to different teams at certain time intervals;
b) Calculation of the available resources for each team depending on each team member’s schedule.

Material flow accounting in production

The main objective of this subproject was the prompt write-off of materials based on the results of registering the actual output of technological operations in production units. Materials are immediately written off by the ERP system at the moment of output registration based on the regulatory information (norms) for each manufacturing process.

When output acts are created, direct costs are promptly calculated for respective operations (the cost of materials and wages). In addition, the system has an automatic calculation of wage per employee (executor) involved in these operations, and accounting entries are formed.

As a result, the stock balances of finished products and materials are updated in real-time in the ERP system. In the same way, the WIP inventory is updated based on the production events, reflecting the operational balances of semi-finished products.

The Bill of Materials (BoM) is created with full traceability of material batches, components, etc.

Another implemented feature is the automatic selection of stock balances while forming the write-off documentation based on FIFO (first-in, first-out).

Warehouse accounting (WMS)

The main objective of implementing warehouse accounting is to introduce the business processes of material receipt with traceability and batch-by-batch identification according to the primary incoming batch (from the supplier). Batch traceability is maintained throughout the entire production cycle.

Warehouse accounting (WMS) provides multiple layers of analytics: by contractors, orders, units of measurement, documents, etc.

Goods and materials are issued to the production units based on respective documents (limit card, requisition, work order specification). This approach ensures transparency: one can see which materials are issued to which units, for which work orders, in what quantity, and how much more material is required.

The persons responsible for supplying materials to each production unit receive system-generated requisitions for materials and semi-finished products that have to be physically transferred to the shop floor. The system also clearly shows which warehouse or unit will supply these goods and materials.

Shipment of finished products

The project resulted in organizing the end-to-end shipment processes for finished products specified in sales orders. Also, there are processes for creating shipment invoices and bills of lading based on customer requests. After a customer is selected/entered, the respective price type is imported from the price list. The sale price is calculated automatically depending on the customer type as each order is priced based on the customer type and the price type specified for wholesale or retail trade.

The key stages can be tracked in orders and displayed as separate fields. In this way, the manager can see the quantity of products transferred by the production unit to the warehouse and the quantity of shipped products. An order can contain a different set of items, and as it is manufactured, the manager can quickly see the updated information (stock balances after transfer from production to the warehouse and stock balances after shipment from the warehouse).

The project team also designed special forms for printing shipment documents (bills of lading, invoices with foreign language translations). Quick translation of invoices is supported by custom system directories, which provide the key terms for multilingual printable forms.

Project, phase 3

Ongoing digitalization continues to provide Progress Service with new tools and opportunities to accelerate business development. New requests are being implemented step by step as they emerge.

The current phase covers automation and speeding up the information exchange within the company.

Now the project team is working on implementing the MES, a system using mobile applications for issuing work orders to specific work centers and prompt output registration. Another part of the work in progress is setting up WMS processes to ensure the mobility of warehouse operations.