Case study
Khalifa Packages
Khalifa Packages makes corrugated cartons — the kind that carry FMCG, pharmaceutical and food products. The plant is a make-to-order converter: paper comes in by grade, board is combined on a corrugator, cut, printed, glued or stitched, and dispatched against customer purchase orders. That production model has almost nothing in common with the inventory-and-invoice software most small manufacturers end up using. Margin is decided by paper consumption, waste percentage and machine yield.
- Client
- Mr. Yousaf
- Service
- ERP & CRM Solutions
The challenge
Paper is the product, and it is consumed in layers. A carton is a construction, not an item. The job cards in this system define five paper layers — outer KLB 115, flute RF100 B, mid CMP 105, flute RF100 C, inner KLB 115 — with GSM, flute type and take-up factor determining planned weight in kilograms. Any system that cannot represent that structure cannot cost a job, and cannot explain why one job is profitable and another is not.
Every stage has three outputs, not one. A converter does not simply “produce”. Each stage returns A-grade board, B-grade board and waste. Yield is cumulative across stages, so a small loss at the corrugator becomes a large loss by the time the job reaches the folder gluer. Without per-stage accounting, waste is only discovered at the end of the month.
Numbers must not drift. In manufacturing, the temptation to “fix” a stock record or edit a posted journal is how audits fail. Two rules were treated as non-negotiable product behaviour: stock movements are appended, never edited; posted journal entries are reversed, never edited.
The shop floor is not an office. Machine operators work at a terminal in a noisy plant. The interface has to work at a glance, on a screen that may be mounted on a wall, with a queue that tells the operator what to run next and a QC form that cannot be submitted with inconsistent numbers.
Finance and production were speaking different languages. Overdue receivables sat in one system, production status in another, and the owner reconciled them by hand.
The solution
A single web application covering the full order-to-cash cycle of a converting plant.
Sales and order ingestion. Customer orders and local purchase orders enter the system, become sales orders with status tracking, and feed the production pipeline.
Production planning. Plans are scheduled with board sheet counts and preparer details, and require approval before release — an explicit control point that keeps the plant manager in the loop.
Job cards. Each job carries the customer, product, quantity, routing, stage-by-stage quantities with cumulative yield, the full paper layer specification, planned weight, material issues and tooling. Nothing about the job is implicit.
Shop floor. A per-machine queue with a QC gate form, showing shift, operator, timestamp and connection status.
Inventory. An append-only ledger across paper grades and store locations (paper store, finished-goods store, ink store), with receipts, issues, returns, dispatches and adjustments as distinct movement types.
Finance. Journal entries with a posted state, reversal rather than editing, and receivables ageing surfaced on the operational dashboard.
Reporting. Waste analysis by production stage, production summaries over selectable date ranges, and export from the major tables.
Administration. Eight operational roles, an audit log with field-level changes, an in-app user guide, and a theme console with contrast validation.
The results
Role-aware dashboard. Units produced today in pieces and square metres, waste percentage against tolerance, open orders, finished-goods stock, overdue receivables, a 30-day production trend by stage, waste by stage, order pipeline by status, top customers by order value, paper stock against reorder level, jobs awaiting QC and plans awaiting approval — with Owner, Production, Sales and Floor display variants.
Job card with construction detail. The five-layer paper table, flute types, take-up factor and planned kilograms sit alongside the routing and the per-stage yield, so the job is self-documenting.
QC gate with balance enforcement. Inspected quantity must equal A-grade plus B-grade plus waste. The screen shows the reconciliation before submission and blocks the operator if it fails.
Append-only stock ledger. Every movement is a new record, tagged by type and location. Reconstructing paper usage for any period is a query, not an investigation.
Carton product master. Carton type, trim and slit size, ply, deckle, layer combinations, routing, PMS colours, packing and tooling, with a scaled die-cut diagram for verification.
Waste analytics. Waste percentage by stage across a date range, with papers consumed and jobs run — the report that turns “we seem to waste a lot” into a specific stage and a specific grade.
Audit log with field-level diffs. Every change records what changed, from what, to what, by whom and when.
In-app role-based documentation. A user guide inside the product, with an end-to-end flow diagram and per-role walkthroughs, so onboarding does not depend on the person who built the system being available.
Theme console with WCAG validation. Tokens for colour, radius and density with live preview and a contrast checker that flags AA failures — useful when the same product runs on a designer’s monitor and a factory wall display.
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