Challenge

BASF, a chemical, technology, and innovation company, was experiencing some problems with its purchasing management. The process of reconciling the purchase and sale of metals by customers over a given period was done manually using complex spreadsheets, which presented several challenges.

The first of these problems was the repetitiveness and complexity resulting from the extensive use of spreadsheets for manual control calculations. It was a repetitive and error-prone process, which could lead to failures and financial losses, as well as negatively impacting BASF's image if any errors occurred during the process.

Another notable problem was the fragmentation of information, since information control was done via email, involving multiple files, which ended up fragmenting the data and hindering centralized management. This clearly demonstrated the need for a system that stored all information in a single location.

The system previously used by BASF had a problem with onboarding new employees. It required a long training period for new employees to learn the system.

Transformation_

Considering all these problems, the Recon project is a system that emerged to automate and simplify the management of metal purchases and sales. This system aims to facilitate product reconciliation, providing BASF customers with an efficient way to manage these transactions over a specific period. At the end of this period, the amounts due or to be received are accurately calculated.

To solve these problems, several functions were created and integrated into the Recon system:

• Importing and Downloading Spreadsheets: Simplifying data manipulation with spreadsheet import and export.
• Graphical Visualization: Implementation of charts to monitor values ​​visually, facilitating analysis and decision-making.
• Automated Calculations: Automating reconciliation calculations for specific periods, eliminating the need for manual processes.
• Metal Inventory Management: Control of the quantity of metal purchased and used, with precise details in grams.
• Automatic Reconciliation Generation: The system automatically generates reconciliations, replacing manual spreadsheets.
• Customer and Product Management: Facilitating the management of customer and product data.
• Automation of Currency Exchange and Metal Exchanges: Automatic integration of exchange rates and relevant metal exchange information.

Recon's interface, besides being intuitive for the user, is aesthetically pleasing, with a good balance of colors. Its design is clean, making it easy to understand the information, despite being a system that uses several tables and graphs.

Strategy

Agile development cell based on the Scrum methodology. An iterative approach for rapid deliveries, with flexible work methods, daily and weekly meetings, and less chance of rework. Business Process Management (BPM) is also used for workflow logic, in addition to Cloud Architecture technology with Azure, which consists of implementation in a robust cloud infrastructure with separate environments for QA and Production, ensuring security and scalability.

Angular technology was used to create an interactive and responsive user interface, SQL Server for data management and storage, and ASP.NET for backend functionality development and integration.

Tools_

• Angular
• SQL Server
• ASP.NET