Author: TransLution Software
New Members of the TransLution™ Team
TransLution™ is excited to welcome two new staff members to the team, Mohau Sekese and Monica Molapo, who joined the company earlier this year. We chatted to them about their work, down time and what keeps them up at night.
TransLution™ Version 3.50 Release Notes
TransLution™ Version 3.50 Summary
TransLution™ v3.50 contains some exciting new features as well as enhancements to existing functionality. The main areas of development are to TransLution™ Quality Manager, Multi-Language, and ‘off-line’ scanner use for data capture. Other improvements are to the TransLution™ data buffering functionality and document creation functionality integrated to ERP software.
YIELD MANAGEMENT CASE STUDY: Food & Beverage
This company manufactures food products on behalf of a leading South African retailer. The products range from
packaged snacks such as muffins and sandwiches through to pre-prepared meals for home consumption. Products of this type have a particularly short shelf life measured in terms of a few days rather than weeks or months.
MANUFACTURING CASE STUDY: Steel Construction
This client manufactures Mesh Steel Reinforcing for use in the construction industry. It receives coils of wire as raw material and draws these coils or parts of these coils through various machines to produce the finished products that it sells.
SELECTING A SCANNER
Introduction
There are a bewildering array of options available when it comes to selecting the right scanner, and this white paper is intended to help answer some commonly-asked questions.
Mobile Scanners
Mobile scanners are the most popular. Even though they are more expensive, they offer the greatest flexibility. Mobile scanners can be used either in a batch mode, which means that they can only communicate with a database when physically connected to a PC, or in RF mode—RF (Radio Frequency) scanners effectively act as an additional client on the network and can are constantly connected with the system database. The pros and cons of batch versus RF are outlined separately below.
AN INTRODUCTION TO BARCODES
Introduction
You can use barcodes and bar-coding without being an expert on the technology. But understanding a few key points will help you make better decisions when it comes to selecting and implementing a solution in your business.
How Does A Barcode Work?
When data is displayed as a barcode, each character is represented by a pattern of wide and narrow bars. A barcode reader uses a photosensor to convert the barcode into an electrical signal. The scanner then measures the relative widths of the bars and spaces, translates the different patterns back into regular characters, and sends them to a computer or portable terminal. Every barcode begins with a special start character and ends with a special stop character. These codes help the reader detect the barcode and figure out whether it is being scanned forward or backward.
Manufacturing Case Study: Mining Equipment
This client manufactures and repairs large mining equipment. The repair sector requires that spare parts are kept on-site. As a result, the environment is a combination of a standard warehouse and a complex manufacturing setting. The company’s largest challenge is to manage the conflicting requirements of parts for its manufacturing business with demand from the repair and sales arm, particularly if there is a supply crunch on critical parts.
Manufacturing Case Study: Food & Beverage
This company manufactures food products on behalf of a leading South African retailer. The products range from packaged snacks such as muffins and sandwiches through to pre-prepared meals for home consumption. Products of this type have a particularly short shelf life which can be measured in terms of a few days rather than weeks or months.
Warehousing Case Study: Mining
This project was implemented for a mine in the DRC, specifically in the stores area where spares and other mining equipment are kept. While the store was not large, the client had never had a mechanism to manage stock accuracy on the floor and was experiencing severe losses and stock accuracy problems.
RG Brose uses TransLution
RG Brose, a leading automotive OEM manufacturing components for Mercedes Benz, has chosen Afrisoft and TransLution to assist them with tracking products from receiving all the way through their production process up to the dispatch of finished goods. As products move through the process, live production information will be updated to Syspro.
The process includes labelling raw materials as they are received, scanning products to the production lines, scanning finished goods and doing a back flush into Syspro right through to scanning items for dispatch onto trucks and creating dispatch notes in Syspro.
Supreme Poultry chooses TransLution
Supreme Poultry has chosen Afrisoft and TransLution to assist them with tracking and managing their finished goods storage and dispatch processes at their Tigane Plant.
Each pallet that is produced and labelled is scanned by TransLution to update Syspro in real time with a product receipt and to manage the pallet location in the finished goods warehouse. Pallets are scanned and validated against a sales order before they are dispatched and the final information about all pallets on a truck is sent to the weighbridge to manage the truck departure at the weighbridge.
Afrisoft Releases TransLution 3.22
Afrisoft is pleased to announce the release of version 3.22 of it’s TransLution software product. This version introduces some key new features which include enhanced Batch scanning functionality for remote sites and the initial setup forms of its Quality Manager product.
M-Tec uses TransLution
M-Tec (Malesela Taihan Electrical Cable) has chosen Afrisoft and TransLution to assist them with tracking and managing their cable anti-theft data.
Users are able to capture the start and end anti-theft barcode in each strand of a cable and relate them to a specific client. If any portion of the cable is recovered after theft has occurred, the rightful owner of the cable can be easily traced.
In2food Cape Town extending their TransLution Implementation
After our successful initial implementation, In2food Strand is extending the use of TransLution to include Raw Material Receiving; tracking transfers, issues and supplier returns; and extended manufacturing functionality including backflush of manufactured goods. The system will also perform basic quality control data capture.
The first project focussed on the dispatch process. Each Lug box was labelled with a customer label when it was picked for a sales order. As lug boxes were scanned onto dollies, each scan was validated and a dispatch note was automatically created in Syspro once all lug boxes for a given sales order were scanned.
Rhodes Food using TransLution
The Rhodes Food Group is rolling out TransLution at their finished product and dispatch processes at the Ready to Eat plant in Franschoek and will soon be extending the project to cover receiving of raw materials. TransLution is used to manage and track product movement through production, packaging and dispatch and to post transaction updates to Syspro. The Receiving phase of the project will implement scanning and weighing of pallets as they are received and posting receipt data to Syspro for GRN creation. The volumes of product moved means that it is not ideal to post transactions to Syspro in real time so the system will be implemented using our posting service to log all the transactions as they occur but then to sum the data and post it at a predefined interval in order to reduce ERP transaction volume.
