Malerfirmaet Tipsmark

The purpose of this project was to gain knowledge about integrated delivery systems, including the analysis of a company's processes and structure. This was done in order to identify problem areas in a company, and find out the processes that could possibly be optimised. This project worked with the company, Malerfirmaet Tipsmark. This project mainly focused on the analysis of business processes but also involved the design of an ERP system.

Process

This project has taken a pragmatic problem-solving approach in the way it identified and discovered processes according to Dumas’ BPM life cycle. In order to gain an initial understanding of the business and the main areas it experienced problems or wanted to improve its processes, multiple interviews were conducted. Through the interviews three main problems were identified, which was store management, planning issues, and misplaced equipment. The problem of store management was that the store does not keep track of what products were being sold, and how much money it made from customers. The cause of the planning problem was that the painters often had to leave the job sites to get missing materials and equipment they forgot. The cause of the misplaced equipment problem was that employees would often misplace and lose valuable equipment.

The business structure and their main processes were visualised through diagrams and a process landscape model, which helped gain an overview of the business and how it operated. Revised processes were then mapped out, with the purpose of alleviating the problems that were identified.

The final part of the project related financial calculations for three different proposals for developing the system. The proposals were compared to discuss which approach would be best for the business. Different implementation strategies were also discussed.

Design

In order to implement and design a system that could support the revised processes, physical and system requirements were defined. The physical requirements dealt with the needed equipment for the system to work, and the system requirements dealt with which functions the system had to support. In order to visualise how an ERP system that fulfilled these requirements would affect the business, storyboards were illustrated.

There were no formal designproces and so the prototype was concurrently designed and developed in Adobe XD. This meant that various solutions were not explored, but since this was not a focus of the project there was no time to invest in a more thorough designproces.

The ERP system was designed mainly as a storage system that would track products and equipment across the business’ storage facility as well as the paint store. This allowed the business to quickly get an overview of their inventory as well as to track where each item was located. The system also included a list of customers so that these could be associated with each purchase and the business could generate statistics based on different customer types and their purchases. A history was attached to each item of equipment, so that employees who misplaced equipment could be identified.

The aesthetics of the system were very simple. The colours were kept neutral and consisted of mainly white and grey colours, with only a small amount of blue used to visualise statistics. The structure of the system was similarly kept simple with a table view for the list of customers, and a large list of items where each item was represented by a picture of it.

Gallery

This section provides images related to this project, such as sketches, wireframes, screenshots and similar. Click on an image to view the full size.