Value Plastic - IFS

I F S C u s t o m e r s t o r y
Medical tubing MANUFACTURER extends
IFS Applications using SOA
Value Plastics’ small IT staff has successfully written Web services against its SOA
enabled software suite, opening the applications up to customers and suppliers.
Moreover, documentation has been automated for FDA customer audits.
Lack of integration
“Prior to IFS Applications , we had a home-grown application that we used to
handle our specific way of doing business, but did not have a solution for some
of our business processes,” Value Plastics Vice President of Information Technology
John Gibson said. “Furthermore, we were unable to pull information to
support business decisions and had difficulties ensuring that all of our activities
hit the general ledger so that we could balance our financials in a meaningful way.”
Part of the challenge that Value Plastics faced stemmed from the fact that it
was running several point solutions that were not integrated with each other,
according to Gibson.
“We were running a Great Plains financial application for banking, payroll
and accounts payable/receivable, and that system had no tie-in back to costing.
When it came time to make decisions on capital equipment purchases or the
standards used for costing or inventory evaluation, we were almost running blind.
Meanwhile we were running a homegrown solution in Microsoft Access to
track our shop orders,” Gibson said.
About Value Plastics
Value Plastics ® designs and manufactures
over 3,100 plastic tubing components.
When a catalog product can’t satisfy customer
needs, Value Plastics can design a
solution to exact requirements. Value
Plastics is an authorized distributor of
Burron OEM components for disposable
medical devices.
Single data repository aids FDA compliance
“The IFS platform accommodates specific business functions without a concern
that we will meet barriers within the ERP solution as we make changes to our
business,” Gibson said. “It now helps us capture and disseminate large amounts
of data. We have 4,000 SKUs. All are proprietary items and most are maintained
in inventory. Some of the items involve multiple routers run on separate tools
through separate processes, and we need to track 100 percent of the manufacturing
history for lot-based control because we serve the medical industry.”
Value Plastics submitted to over 240 self-audits and many customer audits
last year to help customers comply with their FDA requirements.
“Our tubing connectors go into devices made by many of the most prominent
device manufacturers in the healthcare industry—who in turn manufacture
FDA-registered devices,” Gibson said. “Each part in their devices must be religiously
tracked and audited to maintain their FDA certification, so our customers
have to do their due diligence and complete very detailed audits of Value
Plastics. To maintain certified supplier status with them we must demonstrate
strict control of our processes and the resultant data.”
Gibson said that IFS/Shop Order serves as the centralized source of information
about individual lots of parts, providing visibility of information on the
resins, colorants, machines and other variables involved with each manufacturing
run of each product.
“We can demonstrate that the shop orders we create reliably capture information
on each product,” Gibson said. “We can prove that we are giving our
customers correct information with product and material certification. They

I F S C u s t o m e r s t o r y
En11030-1 Production: IFS Corporate Marketing, December 2009.
then conduct a physical audit of our building and processes. We have made a
commitment as a company that IFS Applications is the sole vessel to capture all
of the information on that process, with the shop order as the repository for
information on each part manufactured, and that pays off not only to provide
visibility to our processes and performance internally, but in the way it provides
visibility for our customers. If a customer has a unique question for an audit, we
can generally walk through one or two IFS Applications screens to find the
information they need.”
SOA Success Story
One way to ensure that an enterprise application remains a central repository
for information and avoid data silos is to extend the enterprise application using
Web services and a service-oriented architecture (SOA). While companies many
times Value Plastics’ size reportedly struggle with this process, Gibson and his
small department have been able to use IFS Applications’ SOA-based framework
to open the applications to new internal and external users.
“Six to seven years ago, when we first went through our application selection
process, we heard the first rumblings of SOA,” Gibson said. “IFS has done
a good job in releasing new versions that are true to that initial commitment to
support the SOA way of doing things. We do get value out of SOA and will get
more value in the future.”
Gibson has been able to leverage the fact that IFS Applications is built on
SOA to open up the company’s business systems.
“For our web shopping cart, we created an application in-house that has a
real-time dynamic tie-in to IFS Applications including customer-centric pricing
and real-time product availability,” Gibson said. “It is a good example of how we
maintain everything in IFS in one system while opening our business systems
directly to customers. For our inventory room, we use IFS Applications’ .NET
framework and created Web services for picking. We deliver these services to a
handheld windows-based scanner to do real-time bar-code-based validations
against pick list, inventory moves, and inventory receipts. We also have leveraged
web services for internal use on our intranet, where we deliver a narrow slice of
the application for repetitive processes so that end users are not burdened with the
full application or the full form. If a user just needs to give an input or receive an
output or a validation, this can be a great way for them to access the applications.”
To make sure that a trading partner in Mexico could report directly into
IFS Applications shop orders, Gibson and his staff of three were again able to
open up a Web service.
“We were having trouble taking outputs from our partner’s systems and
wedging them into an IFS shop order,” Gibson said. “But we knew we needed
to maintain information within that central IFS shop order repository and its
underlying database. So we exposed a small slice of the IFS shop order and IFS
transport task and extended those out through a secure SSL through an extranet
site. When we ship work to that company, we now generate an IFS transfer task,
they see that part coming down immediately on their extranet, and we get
immediate notification that they received it. This extranet also lets us capture
scrap, scrap reasons, counts of completed components and backflushes.
“Additionally, our Mexican partner maintains some finished goods inventory
at their site, so we have extended out a small slice of the customer order component.
That way they can print and execute a pick list generated within the IFS
customer order component, and we can ensure accuracy and lot traceability to
meet customer needs. We anticipate doing more things like that.”
Gibson feels he can configure the flexible IFS Applications to meet changing
business needs, and where necessary to drive efficiencies and accuracy, create a
Web service for
virtually any situation.
“If there is an IFS application program interface for it, we can write a Web
service for it,” Gibson said.
Benefits
• Single data repository to facilitate
decision making.
• Greater visibility of processes and
performance.
• Easier data capture to facilitate
internal and external audits.
• SOA opens applications to external
and internal users with ensured
security.
• 100 percent traceability of lots,
items, etc.
“ … Our Mexican partner maintains
some finished goods inventory at their
site, so we have extended out a small
slice of the customer order component.
That way they can print and
execute a pick list generated within
the IFS customer order component,
and we can ensure accuracy and lot
traceability to meet customer needs.”
John Gibson
Vice President of Information Technology
If you need further information, e-mail to info@ifsworld.com, contact your local IFS office or visit our web site, www.ifsworld.com