The company

Established in 1947 the Milbank Industries Group comprises a number of companies providing quality products to the construction sector. Milbank Floors are one of the leading manufacturers of high quality precast concrete products in the United Kingdom. Milbank Trucks is a number one operator of specialised heavy-lift crane lorries with a fleet of approximate 100 trucks. Other companies include Milbank Danilith, Milbank Roofs, and associations with Swedish Windows and Scandinavian Doors and Stairs. With offices and depots at Earls Colne, Brandon, Gravesend, Stafford and Northampton, Milbank Trucks provide a nationwide service.

The Challenge

Three main applications are used to handle Milbank's mission critical activities: a system dealing with their Swedish Windows business, a Trucks system that co-ordinates their trucks fleet, and a Precast system that handles their concrete beams activities. All three applications were written in NetPlus and use SQL Server 2000 as a data repository.

Milbank's evolving business requires constant maintenance and adjustments to these systems and having had these three applications originally developed by one of Sapphire's NetPlus partners, Milbank commissioned Sapphire to provide them with an on-going maintenance and development solution.

The Solution

The Swedish Windows Application is a fairly small system incorporating Customer information, Production, Sales Orders, Invoicing and Stock Control. Likewise, their Trucks application is relatively small and include Vehicles Information, Customers, Staff Training, Sales Orders, Invoicing and Accident Information.

Milbank Floors' major application is a complex system primarily concerned with the production and delivery of Precast Concrete Units and Hollowcore Units. It maintains all Customer information, Drawing and Estimate Registers. Information is transferred into the database and application from spreadsheets, where all the elements of an order are built up as an estimate. This includes costs of individual parts of a construction, delivery and scheduling of the delivery and vehicles that may be part of the delivery or transfer onto a site. This information is uploaded from the spreadsheets into the database creating the initial Estimate record. This is then linked to the appropriate drawings for the project together with any related word-processed documents or spreadsheets involved within the overall process. Further customer information is attached to the estimate as the project is advanced, and eventually it becomes a full order, with all the appropriate precast units and multiple deliveries being added in to advance a job to the multiple delivery sites. Once an order is finalised, then the information is passed on to the production lines to produce all the elements of an order. The loading and scheduling of vehicles is all part of the final processes that are allocated as an order progresses through the system.

The system allows multiple deliveries to multiple sites and also allows multiple invoices to be applied to an order or to a series of deliveries. It also reports back at any point the actual costs against the original estimated costs, so that the ongoing profitability of the order can be assessed. The links between the application, drawings, spreadsheets and word processed documents are seamless, with the NetPlus application driving all the elements. The application also manages the employee costs as part of a production job, incorporating the Precast and Steel-fixing wages into the overall cost of a project. All Orders, Invoices, Estimates, Deliveries and Production jobs are printed in Crystal Reports via a seamless interface. The application is in a constantly fluid state with new elements being added to reflect Milbank's changing business needs. Milbank take the sensible approach of having a test server environment, to fully test any new elements, before they are implemented on their live systems.

There are currently over 50 users accessing these applications, some of them on remote sites, via a vpn link. More recent development of the system has been to integrate a CAD package with the database, so that all the required information comes from the original drawings, producing estimates, orders, production and vehicle load/ scheduling automatically, hence cutting down on multiple data input.

The outcome

Roger Goodenough, Milbank's IT director is very pleased with the services they have received from Sapphire. He explains: "Due to their highly skilled staff in both SQL Server and their expertise in their own NetPlus product, Sapphire has been able to implement all our requirements quickly and efficiently."