Midhani | Adtechcorp

Project Brief

MIDHANI, a public sector organization, is the largest supplier of specialized alloys for space research organizations in India. Midhani’s quality management process was extremely complex, required a good amount of manual intervention, and lacked end-to-end visibility of test results. Adtech was onboarded as a technology partner to build a tightly integrated solution that could streamline their quality management process

Problem Area

Complex quality process management process
No central database for documentation
No end-to-end visibility of test results
Huge manual intervention

Facilities

Cycle time of QC process was reduced drastically from weeks to days
Creation of Centralized database for documentation
Gained real-time visibility of the status of the testing in the QC lab.
Paperless processes helped our client save 10,000 sheets of paper per year

The situation

Challenges faced

Midhani’s QC lab is responsible for conducting tests on all the finished goods before shipping them to the customers. Orders worth more than USD 100 million undergo QC in this department and a test certificate is issued on completion. The specification of the customer order has to be validated against this test certificate before shipment is accepted. The problem here is that Midhani has very stringent & complex processes in place for testing their high-grade steel. This complexity has forced them to operate outside of their ERP system and therefore Midhani’s leadership team wanted Adtech to digitize & streamline the QC management process across the board.

We aimed to replicate the Midhani’s entire QC system into a custom application which granted role-based access control to the lab managers to see and certify only the tests related to their labs for any sample. The biggest challenges however were understanding the complex alloy testing process at Midhani, designing the system to meet the global standards of testing, capturing and aggregating the test results which then could be used to generate a digital test certificate. For this explicit purpose we needed to tightly integrate the QC bolt on system to the Process Manufacturing application in Oracle ERP system at Midhani. This too was another arduous task and another perilous mountain that Adtech had to climb while creating Midhani’s new QC management software

The situation

Our approach

Our team estimated that the project would take 16 weeks for completion after conducting a system study. To kickstart the project we began by talking to the lab managers and the test managers of the QC lab to gain insight into their existing processes. We leveraged their insights and used the next two weeks to create mock-up screens for the new system. Once the workflow of the QC lab was mapped and the UI validated with the users, the stakeholders were made aware about what is coming their way once the system is digitized. The sign off from the end users goes a long way in ensuring that major surprise during the UAT phase is eliminated.

We would constantly seek user feedback on what was being built and this ensured that feedback was addressed quickly during the development cycle. Finally at the end of 16 weeks we had an application with 100+ screens spread across multiple QC labs. We spent the last of our 2 weeks ironing out any kinks left in the system after extensively discussing it with key users and the lab managers. By the end of the 16-week period the application was good to go and our stakeholders were pleased with the results.

Results

Midhani’s new QC system was able to cut the cycle time of the QC process from weeks to days and eliminated all audit issues caused by the old manual processes. It also gave management real time visibility into the status of the testing done in the QC lab. We also helped Midhani save considerable user licensing costs since many of the lab users were not required to be part of the ERP system since only the aggregate test results were to be recorded within the same.