The customer
The challenge
The company's tracking processes reflected industry-standard practices that couldn't scale with its growth ambitions. Weight recording was manual and non-digital, documentation submitted once daily, and data transferred to Excel by hand—creating a 24-hour reporting delay at every step. Incoming material tracking and billing cycles depended on batch processing, and there was no systematic outbound tracking, leaving inventory visibility incomplete.
Multi-facility coordination made things worse. Excel file-locking prevented simultaneous access across plants, creating a bottleneck whenever multiple locations needed to work with the same data at the same time.
The solution
Brimit approached the project using a phased implementation philosophy: start with one pain point, prove the value, then expand. No AI, no complex analytics in the first phase—just eliminating manual handoffs and getting data flowing reliably.
Phase 1 — Processed materials tracking
An interface converter bridged legacy scales to modern protocols. A Unified Namespace (UNS) layer standardized data flow to the cloud. Custom operator panels with material type buttons replaced paper-based recording. Operators place a bale on the scale, press a material type button, and weight plus type are captured automatically and written to cloud storage instantly.
Phase 2 — Incoming materials tracking
The same architecture was extended to truck weighbridge scales. Drivers press "Arrived Full," the truck is weighed, unloads, then presses "Departed Empty"—the system calculates net weight and links it to the supplier for billing automatically.
Phase 3 — Outbound shipment tracking
Bale counting was added to operator panels for loaded trucks, completing the inventory loop: materials in, processing, materials out—a capability that didn't exist before.
Business intelligence layer
Near-real-time executive dashboards with KPIs covering OEE, planned vs. actual productivity, and throughput trends. The multi-facility view eliminated the Excel file-locking bottleneck entirely.
The results
- 24-hour reporting delay → near-real-time data availability across all facilities
- Multiple manual handoff points → fully automated data capture at the source
- Excel file-locking across plants → simultaneous multi-facility access
- No inventory tracking → complete visibility across incoming, processing, and outbound materials
- Batch-processed billing → immediate supplier billing data