The problem: inventory that the ERP couldn't see
A world-leading oil and gas MNC operates one of the most material-intensive facility types in industrial operations. Maintenance, repair, and overhaul activities require constant movement of parts, consumables, equipment, and specialised tooling across multiple warehouses on a large site. Unlike a manufacturing plant where material flow follows a predictable production sequence, an oil and gas facility has highly variable demand — the materials needed for a planned shutdown differ completely from those needed for an emergency repair at 3 AM.
Across eight warehouses, the organisation held thousands of unique stock-keeping units ranging from standard pipe fittings to high-value instrumentation. The ERP — a heterogeneous landscape spanning SAP, BaaN, and Infor depending on which part of the business was acquired when — was the system of record for procurement and finance. It was not, in any meaningful sense, a live view of what was actually in the stores.
Material movements were documented on paper gate passes, signed by the receiving supervisor, and posted to the ERP at the end of the shift or, in busy periods, the end of the week. The lag between physical movement and system update meant that an operator requesting a part from stores might be told it was available — because the ERP said so — only to find that it had already been issued to a different work order two days ago and not yet posted.
The consequences rippled through operations. Expedited procurement was initiated for materials that were physically present but not visible in the ERP. Physical verification — warehouse staff walking the aisles to confirm stock on hand — became a routine activity rather than an exception. For assembly tasks requiring multiple parts, the hunt-and-verify process of assembling a complete kit could take an entire shift, with the risk of discovering a missing item only when the operator had already travelled to the work site.
The solution: FlowTrack as the real-time inventory layer
The design requirement was clear but technically demanding: a stores management system that works in real time, integrates with multiple existing ERPs without displacing them, operates reliably in an industrial environment where network connectivity can be intermittent, and is simple enough for stores operators to use without extensive training.
FlowTrack SCM was deployed as a dedicated warehouse management layer, with bidirectional integration to the existing ERP landscape. The integration approach was deliberately non-prescriptive: rather than requiring the organisation to standardise on a single ERP, FlowTrack maintains its own item master and synchronises with whichever ERP owns a given material category. A standard hardware part might sync to SAP; specialised process equipment might sync to Infor. The integration middleware abstracts these differences from the warehouse operators.
Every item in the stores is identified by a barcode — either an existing manufacturer barcode or a FlowTrack-generated label applied at goods receipt. All material movements, from goods receipt through internal transfers to issue against work orders, are executed by scanning the barcode on a handheld terminal. The scan creates a transaction record in FlowTrack and simultaneously posts the corresponding movement to the ERP. There is no batch posting, no shift-end data entry, and no reconciliation step. The ERP is always current because FlowTrack posts to it in real time on every scan.
The Internal Movement Order: traceability by design
The most significant workflow innovation in this deployment was the Internal Movement Order (IMO). An IMO is created for any material movement that crosses a warehouse boundary or changes the status of a material — receipt from vendor, transfer between stores, issue to a work order, return from the field, write-off, or quarantine.
The IMO carries the full context of a movement: which items, in what quantities, from which location, to which destination, authorised by whom, for which cost centre or work order, and at what time. Every scan that updates the IMO appends a timestamped record. The result is a complete, auditable chain of custody for every item from receipt to final consumption.
This traceability is operationally valuable in an oil and gas context, where regulatory compliance requires documentation of material movements for certain categories of equipment — pressure vessels, safety-critical instruments, hazardous materials. Previously, assembling this documentation for an audit required reconstructing movements from paper records. With IMO-based tracking, the complete movement history is a report query.
The IMO also enables performance measurement that was not previously possible. Because every movement carries a timestamp and a cost centre reference, the system can calculate the time from movement request to fulfilment, the cost of materials moved against each work order, and the frequency of inter-warehouse transfers — a proxy for how well distributed the inventory is across the site.
Before FlowTrack, our ERP showed inventory as it was last week. Now it shows inventory as it is right now. That sounds simple, but it changed almost every decision the stores team makes.
The full-kit module: assembling complete material sets
Planned maintenance activities in oil and gas operations — turnarounds, scheduled equipment overhauls, planned shutdowns — require the assembly of complete material kits before work begins. A turnaround job might require dozens of different parts, each stored in a different warehouse location. The maintenance planner produces a Bill of Quantities (BOQ) — the complete list of what is needed — and the stores team must assemble that kit and confirm that every item is available before the maintenance team arrives.
The full-kit module addresses this directly. When a maintenance job is planned, the planner creates a work order with a BOQ in the ERP. FlowTrack receives the BOQ and creates a full-kit picking task. The stores operator scans the work order, and the handheld terminal displays the complete pick list: each item required, the quantity needed, and the warehouse location where it is currently held.
The operator works through the pick list systematically. Each scan confirms the item and updates the fulfilment status. If an item is not in its expected location — because it was moved to a different warehouse, or because the quantity is insufficient — the system flags the shortfall immediately. The planner is notified in real time, not when the maintenance crew arrives on-site and finds the kit incomplete.
Items picked against a full-kit task are reserved — they cannot be issued against any other work order until the reservation is confirmed or cancelled. This reservation mechanism eliminates the scenario where two planners request the same material and only one gets it, with the second discovering the shortage at the worst possible moment.
Handheld terminals and the offline question
An industrial site of this scale presents connectivity challenges. Certain warehouse areas, particularly underground stores and high-bay metal shelving structures, have poor wireless coverage. The handheld terminals used in this deployment are designed to queue transactions when connectivity is lost and sync them automatically when coverage is restored. For routine movements — scanning a receipt, issuing a part — the operator experience is identical whether connected or not. Transactions are timestamped at the moment of scan, not at the moment of sync, so the audit trail is accurate even when synchronisation is delayed.
The web portal provides supervisors and planners with a real-time dashboard view of warehouse activity. Outstanding IMOs, low-stock alerts, items overdue for return from the field, and kit fulfilment progress for upcoming maintenance jobs are all visible without requiring access to the ERP directly. For managers who are not ERP-trained users, this portal became the primary interface for stores management decisions.
Results: from lagging data to live operations
The operational improvements from the deployment were measurable and immediate:
- Inventory accuracy: Physical counts conducted after deployment found ERP inventory records were accurate to within 1.5% of physical stock, compared to discrepancies that had previously required weeks of reconciliation to resolve at financial year-end.
- Material picking time: The full-kit module reduced assembly time for planned maintenance kits by 40% by eliminating the hunt-and-verify process and replacing it with a guided picking sequence.
- ERP posting lag: Eliminated. Every movement posts to the ERP in real time. The shift-end data entry process — and the staff time associated with it — was removed from the operation entirely.
- Assembly line stoppages from missing parts: Incidents where maintenance work was delayed because a kit was incomplete dropped significantly in the first six months. The full-kit reservation system ensures shortfalls are identified during planning, not at execution.
- Cost allocation accuracy: Because every IMO carries a work order or cost centre reference, material costs are allocated to the correct job automatically. The manual cost allocation exercise that previously happened at month-end was eliminated.
The broader lesson from this deployment is that ERP accuracy is not primarily a data quality problem — it is a workflow timing problem. When the system that records what happened is disconnected from the moment when it happened, inaccuracy is structural. The solution is not better data entry discipline but a workflow design where the recording and the movement are the same act.