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Extended ERP for Bunkering Information System
Summary
The existing system is a complete MIS for an oil bunkering company. This system has several modules like Marketing, Purchase, Operations, Invoicing, Accounting and Inventory etc. Together the modules cover all the business activities of the company. Since the bunkering company has offices in locations around the world, a need was felt to redesign the existing system in a modular fashion to permit significant portions of it to be accessible over the Internet while retaining a flexibility that accommodated the changing business needs of the company.
Challenge
The Oil Bunkering Company needed a system to keep track of their transactions with customers and vendors and to facilitate the day-today working of the company. At the same time, the company wanted the system to be available at their remote office locations at Rotterdam, Singapore and Manila without the high installation and maintenance costs that go with an in-house ERP.
Solution
Calsoft created a custom ERP solution to fit the client's needs. The Oil bunkering company purchases various specifications of fuel from its vendors. Details of these purchases are stored in the "Purchase" or "Trading" module. On the other side, the company gets "inquiries" for fuel purchase from its customers. Some of these are later converted into orders. This information is maintained in the "Marketing" module. The "Operations" and "Terminalling" modules handle the actual transfer of the fuel for both purchases and sales. All details pertaining to the incoming, outgoing and currently available fuel is available in the "Inventory" module. The "Invoicing" and "Collection" modules take care of the generation of invoices to customers and keeping track of the payments. The "Accounting" module manages the Accounts Payable, Check Printing and also provides an interface to a third party General Ledger.
To meet the requirements of modularity and flexibility, the system is implemented in three tiers. The Client tier is the user interface implemented in Visual Basic. Requests for information are generated by user actions at this end. These requests are then passed on to the middle tier, which houses the business logic components built using the Distributed Component Object Model. The Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) is used as the object manager for scalability. The middle tier in turn passes requests to the Data Tier, which is hosted, on ORACLE 8.1.5. The data tier merely acts as a persistent store for the information. Changes to the business logic can be made at the middle tier by adding new components. Clients not requiring the modifications can still access the old components
Depending on the suitability of the modules to remote access, the business logic components are accessed by the clients in three ways. The sensitive modules like "Accounting", "Invoicing" and "Collections" will be accessed via a LAN or WAN. Modules accessed by remote offices like "Marketing" and "Trading" can be accessed over the Internet using RAS and trusted domains. Essentially this means that persons in these offices can remotely connect to the nearest MTS host server using an installed version of the client. For data of interest to the senior management of the company, static reports of activities are provided in the form of HTML pages accessed through browsers using secure logins.
Technology
The technologies used are Visual Basic 6.0 for the front end, Visual Basic 6.0, DCOM and MTS 2.0 for the middle tier and Oracle 8.1.5 as the database. The solution is implemented on Windows 98(client) and Windows NT 4.0 platform. The team size was five and the effort estimate of the project was 60 man-months.