In the semiconductor industry, automated machines are a high-value asset. Machines operate 24 hours 365 a year. Any downtime means a drop in production yield and money. To make sure the machine operates smoothly, the maintenance department needs to store expensive spare parts for faulty parts replacement. 

To track the purchase, storage and use of spare parts, the maintenance Engineer uses Excel spreadsheet to record the transactions.

However, as time goes on, the simplicity of the Excel spreadsheets has given problems to the maintenance department:

1. The employees are spending too much time doing unproductive works of maintaining the Excel spreadsheet.
2. No scanning feature of check-in/out of items.
3. Little checking of data duplication in the spreadsheet.
4. It takes too long to search for a specific item.

Once the management recognizes the operational inefficiency, they decided to invest in a software solution.

We are invited to propose a software solution to the issue:

1. To customize to the Corporate ERP system to offer such features, or, 
2. To create a customized Windows-based solution.

Option (1) will be too expensive to implement. Furthermore, no one is interested in the movement of the spare parts except for the maintenance department. Thus, the most cost-effective solution is an option (2). After analysis - and effort to match business requirements to IT solution, the following software solution is implemented:

1. A Windows-based desktop solution based on Windows Form technology.
2. As there are not many concurrent users for this application, and, the data is considerably small, a simple Microsoft Access Database is used as the back-end database engine.

In summary, the following features are delivered:

1. Spare parts maintenance.
2. Hierarchical locations settings.
3. Check-in/out transaction for trace-ability.
4. Auto-generation of PR (Purchase Request) in Excel format.

With the newly installed software solution, the maintenance department reaps many benefits with minimum investment:

1. The maintenance Engineer frees up more time to perform other useful jobs.
2. Faster check-in/out of spare parts.
3. Better spare parts tracking - minimize loss of items due to misplaced or check-out of items without recording to the Excel spreadsheet.