Alchem Notes

Some general information about Alchem (Or RFI)'s most important needs:

INVENTORY

Each of Alchem's flavors has a lot of ingredients,so the catalog of ingredients will be very large, there are also different options for each ingredient, for example a certain chemical could be bought as "Natural, Natural Identical or Artificial" the chemical composition is the same, but each of these "options" would come at a different price, and be under different regulations (so essentially it would be a different "ingredient")

When Alchem produces an order for a client, it is important to use the FIFO rule, the oldest ingredient is the first to be used. This means that Alchem absolutely needs a method of separating their inventory by batch/lot numbers. It has to be this way because upon agreement between both parties, a supplier may send an older batch of a certain ingredient which may expire soon, and just using received date would be inaccurate.

Many of Alchem's ingredients have their own recipes. For example a solution will be composed of a solute and a solvent, there are some other examples where ingredients may have their own recipes, the reason this is important though, is that the cost of this ingredient with a recipe needs to be updated with the cost of the ingredients recursively. This concept is also very important for forecasting, as the forecast system would have to "explode" the recipe into the lowest level possible (RM, or "Raw Material") while calculating the required amounts of each ingredient for the upcoming months.

Every ingredient has a lot of very specific and important information, such as CAS numbers (universal unique id system for each chemical), boiling points, melting points, specific gravity, & other regulatory statuses (such as Kosher or Vegan certified)

Keep in mind, Flavors are Alchems' "product"

Each Flavor must have an option of having a listing of each of the customers which purchase it, & optionally, a unique code for each customer(previously known as external code)

Flavors should have pricing options depending on the QTY purchased (since Alchem is primarily a B2B company, it would probably mostly receive bulk orders.)

A good inspiration site to look at for many of the points mentioned above would be VIGON

SALES

This portion is somewhat done on nextERP, but it's better to go in depth with Roberto about

CUSTOMER SERVICES

In charge of placing orders & sending invoices, customer services in general.

R&D

This department is pretty unique to alchem & flavor companies in general, Most of the R&D module is done, there are mainly minor fixes to be made, but this is alchems main workspace within the ERP, so it has to be well made.

Flavorists have multiple responsibilities: Develop New flavors, Make samples of existing flavors, clone flavors develop new ingredients (such as solutions or keys) which may be useful for more than one flavor

all of these responsibilities circulate around recipes, which must follow any regulatory status required for the flavor of relevance (for example, a natural flavor cannot contain an artificial ingredient, or a solution which contains an artificial ingredients.

PRODUCTION

this one is self explanatory.. but what's important here is to follow the FIFO rule.

QA

QA is important for both R&D and Production, since R&D produces samples, QA needs to make sure the samples are up to par & there's enough information about the flavor for the customer (such as possible allergens, is the flavor flammable, etc) but also to test the quality & accuracy of the flavor in the first place. (was the color of the flavor supposed to be red? yes. Is it red? it's blue. Failed QA.)

This also applies for incoming ingredients from suppliers. If a supplier was supposed to send a certain chemical, but upon inspection, it's clear they mislabeled what they sent, this needs to be known, also if a chemical is not of the advertised quality.