Abstract:
Citrix and web based Production visibility system was the title of the final project chosen to
develop for North Sails Sri Lanka for the complete the project requirement of the MSc in
Information Technology ofthe University of Moratuwa.
North Sails has become the world leader in sail making through an ongoing commitment to
making sails that are faster, lighter and longer lasting than any other sails in the world. More than
fifty years ago, a sail loft opened at the B-Street Pier in downtown San Diego, California. The
space was living-room size at 15 feet by 40. “It was a little dusty and dirty but big enough to
build a Star-boat mainsail,” commented Lowell North, the owner.
North Sails is using the Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains ERP system for the business. Users are
accessing the ERP system through a remote server environment called Citrix from worldwide.
There are 23 different brother companies worldwide. This project is on the company which is
operating in Sri Lanka.
The major weakness ofthe current system is there is no way to track the productions status of a
manufacturing item, once it is in the production and the current system is a manual work. It is
almost impossible to do the scheduling of the production correctly at time due to this reason.
Customers are losing their comfort with the company because ofthese reasons.
For overcome the above issues, the production visibility system was proposed. That system will
work to solve the company problems mentioned in above sections.
Once the sales orders received to the customer service ofthe company customer service reps are
enters those in to the ERP system. After that they will enter the respective manufacturing orders
for those. Once those are entered in to the system production scheduler schedule the production
according to their priorities. They can arrange their schedules with the aid of the proposed
visibility system. Once those are scheduled and in the production any of the end users can
monitor the status ofthe WIP production.
iii
Production supervisors can update the production status via handheld barcode devices when the
production is going on. The facility is providing in the proposed system for this which is not in
the ERP system. Also the production supervisors should provide the information about their
labor capacity at earliest they can to the production schedulers.
By implementing the proposed system most of the issue will solve. Same time the company can
gain hidden benefits like Customer satisfaction, internal user satisfaction, arrange the production
schedules correctly, more labor time saving, etc.. So based on those factors company can earn
more profit by implementing the proposed system.
