Wafic Idriss Establishment is a Lebanese company that started in the mid-30s in the retail business, and rapidly grew to become a leading company in the Import & Distribution of consumer goods. After visiting the company, the FYP team of industrial engineering students Hassan Mheidly, Rayan Idriss, Hilal Chehab, and Mohamad Younes noticed that the company’s data management system was highly inefficient. Management mainly relied on piles of hard copied documents and barely leveraged their available technology. Mheidly told us “We noticed that the data they have is sorted in Excel files without any sort of data validation or restriction”. Moreover, the team noticed that the company had tracking devices installed on all of its trucks, but had not been monitoring this data to identify and better manage any delays.

As such, the team decided to tackle these two main areas of inefficiency in the company’s operations, and divided their solution into two stages. The first stage involved an enhancement of their data sheets for day-to-day use. A primary concern here was that “[they] needed the operation to be simple since employees were not very familiar with technology”, said Mheidly. The existing files were “inaccurate and inconsistent which led to many data entry errors. They were barely reviewed and thus not utilized properly”. For this reason, the team worked on an enhanced data file that employed macros, lists, data restrictions and validations to make sure that all the records are correctly inputted.

The second stage involved a cutting-edge technology that they developed to further enhance this new data processing system. Essentially, the team developed a robot (algorithm) that imports everything from previously accumulated data sheets. Previously, the manual process went as such: the worker receives orders on separate sheets, then he has to sort through each and group them by location, and finally, he must check the required amount of trucks for each location – this takes about 2-3 hours. The robot, however, is ~ 20-30% faster than an excellent human operator. This solution employed the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software, which is a program that mimics the worker’s typical behavior.

Furthermore, in order to leverage the truck tracking system the company already has, they developed a mobile application for the drivers to better improve their trips. Each delivery request, along with the client’s location, will be easily accessible on the application using Google maps technology. When the order is delivered, the client must sign in order for the delivery to be confirmed. Later, the team linked the mobile application to the data file. As such, all of the delivery transactions can be synced automatically. The team also developed an enhanced routing algorithm; however, they were unfortunately unable to test it given the COVID-19 situation.

All around, the project aimed to utilize automation to improve the efficiency of the company’s data management – a beautiful integration of technology and optimization. Now, the managers can easily inspect the data and identify errors, which will ultimately lead to a reduction in lost sales. Moreover, this solution contributes to the optimized usage of the company’s resources, as it will reduce cost by reassigning their workforce to other tasks.