WEB BASED FACTORY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR DEENSIDE TEA FACTORY

Abstract

DEENSIDE is a small sized tea factory which was started in 1950s; it is one of the factories in Kandy district, which plays an important role in the Sri Lankan Tea Industry, by providing a rational amount of processed tea for local and international markets. It is a conventional tea factory that handles over 2,500 kilos of tea leaves per day, and has a work force of 50. Although the factory has replaced several manual labours with mechanical systems, and has upgraded some facilities; automation in office and managerial level has not been introduced so far. Until very recent, the factory was managed with the manual file system. As a result, the administration was facing problems of a manual system like data redundancy, data inaccuracy and delay in decision making due to unavailability of timely reports and information. The web based Factory Management System (FMS) is built to overcome some of the problems and inefficiencies of the current manual system. This solution is built in a way to cover the overall administration processes of the factory, such as: purchase and sales detail management, Human Resource Management (HRM), Stock Management, Employee Performance Tracking and Report Generation. Further, the best part is; the web based system makes it possible to monitor the factory processes from any location. The system has adapted Model View Controller (MVC) architecture and Object Oriented techniques. In addition, Unified Modelling Language (UML) was used for analysis and design. Hypertext Pre-processor (PHP) which is a server-side scripting language was used to build the system and Apache has been used as the web server, meanwhile MySQL was used to handle databases. Since this is a web based system, it could be operated either in Windows or Linux environment. The web based Factory Management System has been designed to fulfil the user and system requirements. The system would assist the management of DEENSIDE Tea Factory to monitor and manage the processes. It could also help the factory administration to work efficiently and enable profit maximization through this newly introduced web based system.