Case Studies

Moldtek Technologies Limited is today India's leading plastic moulded containers company. The company commenced operations in 1987. Today Moldtek is India's leading pail packing company and has expanded its total production capacity of 10/20 litres pails from 24 lakh pieces per annum to 36 lakh pieces per annum. Moldtek which holds 75 per cent of the marketshare in pail packing is the leading supplier of plastic containers to top paint, lubricant and edible oil companies including Asian Paints, Nerolac, Berger, Castrol, Tata BP, Shell, Gulf Oil, HPCL, IOCL, Veedol and Esso amongst others. The company, which is listed on the Hyderabad and Mumbai Stock Exchanges has the most advanced plant in India with facilities including 30 injection moulding machines ranging up to 650 tonnes, world class printing equipment and a highly sophisticated tool room having Swiss machines. Apart from pioneering the concept of injection moulded rigid plastic packaging containers with air tight and pilfer proof features, the company has introduced triple lock fails in 10/15/20 litre capacities and double lock pails in 7.5/10/20 litre capacities. Moldtek has a very high degree of testing procedure and complex process, which enables it to provide tailor made and advance designs to blue chip companies like Castrol and Asian Paints.

Moldtek Plastics has an Oracle based system for managing the day-to-day operations of its Sales departments. The typical lifecycle of any sale constitutes the following phases.

1. A customer request comes in the form of an email or postal mail or telephone call or FAX. Information is captured through an enquiry form in the existing system.



2. After the initial offline correspondence the quotation is sent to the customer.



3. The client would send in the purchase order for purchasing certain products from the company.



4. Invoice is sent across to the customer with various terms and conditions.



5. Payment comes in form of cheques, Demand Drafts etc.,



6. Goods are delivered to the customer through a courier service company. All along the data is kept feeding into the system at various levels. Like the delivery challans, goods dispatch forms etc.,



7. Post the delivery there could be whole set of correspondence like returned goods, returned bank payments etc.,



8. Follow up correspondence through various media.

In the above mentioned steps lots of documents are interchanged and which are very critical to be stored. But of the various documents only certain is captured through the form based Oracle system. The users who use the system can only retrieve the information based on the field information that is fed into the system.

The Oracle based system is good enough as long as the information that needs to be retrieved is based only on the information that has been fed in. But it comes to queries, enquiries, auditing etc., the original source documents need to be retrieved to view the extra information present in those documents. During those situations, the hard copies of the documents have to be pulled out from the racks. This is not only a time consuming problem but also results in certain manual errors in terms of wrong filing etc., There has to be a better way of managing these hard copies of the documents to meet the following purposes.

1. Ease of storage and retrieval.



2. To be able to retrieve the documents based on the content present in the documents.



3. Minimal dependency on the scanning operator in terms of the organizational knowledge to effect the storage of documents in their respective folders etc.,



4. Most importantly integration with the existing Oracle based system so that the new Document Management System could be integrated without replacing the existing system.

ViciDocs is the Document Management System that had been integrated into the existing system so that all the hard copies could be scanned in and stored in the Repository while entering the form based information in the Oracle System. The following are some of the key points, which made the integration easier.

• ViciDocs is based on distributed Component architecture enabling it for easier integration into any existing system.



• The server and the client components are COM based which enable the integration all the more easier just by using the interfaces published by the server and the client components.



• The software is extremely scalable where in existing network infrastructure can be used without any additional investment into hardware or server class machines.



• With the usage of barcode technology the knowledge workers can create the folder hierarchy, take barcode printouts of the folders and hand them over the stack of documents to the scanner operator. The scanner operator can straight away scan the documents without bothering which documents need to be stored into which folder.



• Web based search enables the retrieval of the documents without the installation of any client software making the documents available at fingertips.



• Fuzzy logic based indexing and search engine enable the retrieval of documents through full text content search.



• Multi format viewer allows the viewing of various types of file formats without the presence of the native application on the local machine.



• ODMA compliance enables the integration into any ODMA compliant client application.

For every sales transaction which constitute various forms like the Purchase Order, Invoice, Cheques etc., a unique Sale transaction ID is assigned by the system which is used across various forms belonging to that transaction.

Whenever a document related to a particular transaction ID comes in an interface of ViciDocs component is invoked by passing in the unique ID and another ID, which indicates the type of document. ViciDocs automatically scans in the document and performs an OCR on the document, creates an Index and stores the unique ID against the document. The user can perform the following functionality once the Index is created.

1. Retrieve the relevant documents, scanned copies, given a unique ID.



2. Perform a search on the content of the documents stored in the Repository and retrieve the documents along with the unique ID stored against the documents.



3. Invoke a viewer, provided by ViciDocs to view the documents retrieved from the ViciDocs Repository.

Most importantly all the above functionality was achieved without modifying anything in the existing system.

Once it has been successfully implemented, this method of integration has been adopted in various other departments where there were some systems existing like Marketing, HR, Finance, Accounting etc., This way they are able to store all the vouchers etc., also in the Repository thus avoiding the retrieval of hard copies from the racks.