The problem
Natural Stone Surfaces was founded in 2001 by a trio of dedicated individuals and has
flourished into the largest independent fabricator of top-tier quality stone worktops in the United Kingdom. The company consist of dedicated staff including skilled artisans using fully automated robotic production, cutting, and processing lines. With increased sales through a partnership with Wickes Home Improvement Centres, Natural Stone Surfaces sought to automate the transfer of order details and plans from Wickes digital systems into their own LOB management application. They wished to increase the accuracy of data transfer to prevent process disruptions occurring later in the manufacturing process and to free up time for their sales office administrators so they could concentrate on ensuring the quality of the order details and order management.
- Natural Stone Surfaces founded 2001 are the largest independent fabricator of top-tier stone surfaces in the United Kingdom.
- Wickes Home Improvement Centre started in America in 1950 and opened their first UK store in 1972. They are one of the most recognised names in DIY and have over 230 stores across the United Kingdom.
- Order details of Natural Stone Surfaces’ products sold by Wickes were delivered by email.
- Order details were also available from Wickes in EDI file format provided via
TrueCommerce. - Natural Stone Surfaces desired to automate input of order details and diagrams into a Moraware Systemize job scheduling and management application.
- The goal was to increase the accuracy of order data added into the LOB application, reduce staff time needed for basic manual processes, and to reduce delays in fulfilling orders.
Our approach
Microsoft Teams meetings and email conversations were held between Natural Stone Surfaces, Wickes, TrueCommerce, and Intelligent Decisioning Ltd to analyse the problem domain and
design a solution that was acceptable to all parties and would meet Natural Stone Surfaces’ desired goals. The team consisted of a manager and developer who worked at a pace that fitted in with Natural Stone Surfaces own workload and schedule. Development was controlled using Azure DevOps. Azure resources were managed using infrastructure as code principles by using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates deployed via DevOps release pipelines. The project followed agile project management principles during development with frequent releases working against a development copy of the LOB application. User acceptance testing was managed by Intelligent Decisioning Ltd and conducted in parallel to the live production process by working with two of Natural Stone Surfaces’ sales office administrators. The final release was a single waterfall style deployment to production.
We were looking for ways to improve our operational efficiency and our suppliers, Wickes, mentioned Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). We contacted our IT organisation, Air-IT, who recommended that we talk to Intelligent Decisioning. Intelligent Decisioning explained to us what EDI is and it’s benefits and then lead us through the process of implementing a solution which allowed us to maintain our operational system with the benefit of a custom EDI integration that Mark Cherry of Intelligent Decisioning developed. Since the implementation of the EDI integration, we have improved operational efficiency and reduced our errors and omissions, resulting in a better service to our customers such as Wickes, an increased bottom line and Intelligent Decisioning were instrumental in all of that.
Pasquale Melchionno
Director
Natural Stone Surfaces
Our solution
The solution was based on Microsoft Azure cloud technologies to utilise Natural Stone Surface’ existing tenant and to take advantage of the highly reliable, flexible, and secure resources
available. One process was developed to extract, analyse, conform, and load data into new or existing jobs in the LOB application from the EDI purchase order files. A second process was developed to pick up diagrams emailed to a shared mailbox, then match them to an existing job in the LOB application and upload them. Both processes utilised similar designs, shared common code and resources, and emphasised security, traceability, and ease of error resolution as the guiding principles.
Our solution offered the following key features:
- Robust and repeatable automated processes that involves the storage of input files, custom process logs, and error alerting via email using Microsoft Graph.
- Easily locate data processing issues and the related input files, and the ability to manually replay processing for files and emails that raise errors.
- Use of Azure resources including Functions, Storage Accounts, Application Insights, and Key Vault.
- Processing performed by Azure Functions written in C# .Net Core using Moraware’s Systemize API
The outcome
We worked with three businesses to deliver a solution that meets our customer’s needs and is robust and low maintenance, requiring very little support. The delivered solution empowers the sales office staff to concentrate on other tasks such as data accuracy while providing them with the information they need to monitor the automated processes. This has resulted in reduced errors in input data, less chance of delayed orders, whilst maintaining the staff’s overall control of the jobs.