Modernizing the manufacturing line with IoT and custom software

Dago Style is a Ukrainian footwear manufacturer that produces more than a hundred models of footwear both for the domestic market and for export.

Despite the use of modern equipment for production, reporting, and accounting at the manufacturing was carried out with a pen and paper. At the end of the shift, each shop worker brought the manager a piece of paper indicating the number of products he had made per shift. Later, the manager entered this data into an Excel spreadsheet. Tasks for workers were also set orally or on paper.

Thus the management of the enterprise could not see the big picture of which tasks are done and which are still in progress. The manager of each shop had to spend almost a full working day each week to create a report on the work done during the week.

It was also difficult to track the number of defects in the production of a product. The lack of quality monitoring at each stage of production allowed employees to attribute to themselves a larger number of manufactured products and hence higher earnings.

Given a large number of user types, interfaces, and rather complex business processes, our team was asked to conduct a Discovery phase. During this phase, we developed a clickable prototype and described the general requirements for the system.

During the collection of requirements, we realized how different the vision of the future system was for different stakeholders.

Therefore, to reduce risks and additional costs, we proposed to develop a working prototype of the system using a low-code platform. Appsheet made it possible to develop the solution 5-6 times faster and 10 times cheaper. Any changes were also significantly cheaper compared to software development from scratch.

We had a working prototype in 3 weeks. It completely covered all stages of production and had 7 interfaces for different user roles.

This prototype was implemented in test mode on one production line out of five. Over the next month, the client received more than 30 changes to the functionality, among which were those that radically changed the principle of the system.