Development of production and inventory database for plastic injection molding manufacture

Abstract

For a plastic injection molding industry, the usage of an improper designed information system always causes the lateness in production, which subsequently results in the delay of the products delivery to the customer. The delivery on time is one of the most important factor in this industry. So, a production and inventory database of one company was revised and developed in order to reduce the production development time and the product delivery problems of the company. Thus, this is the main purpose of this thesis. The development of database consisted of four stages. The first stage was the preliminary investigation which was the fundamental study the current paper based database system. The study was done by many data gathering techniques which included the interviews, the documents analysis, and the work observation. The data collected in the preliminary investigation stage was useful in the system analysis stage which was the second stage. The Data flow Diagram and Data Dictionary were used in the system analysis in order to clearly showed the existing processes in the system. The second stage also outcame the users' and the system's requirements. The third stage was the design and development of the database system which relied on the system's and users' requirement. The database was developed on Microsoft Access and Microsoft Visual Basic 6 application on the personal computer platform. The final stage was the test, implementation, and evaluation of the developed database system. The implementation was done on the pilot machines group in the parallel consersion style to prevent from suffering damage if the system did not perform. The evaluation results indicated the shortening of the production development time in a proportion of 20.61 percent due to the more effective communication of the production and inventory information. The reduction of the production development time enhanced the delivery on time ability of the company. In addition, the developed database also facilitated the users in processing the production and inventory data, thus increased manpower utilization.