PROTOTYPE VERSION OF CHEMLAB INVENTORY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Chemical Engineering Department of Universiti Teknologi Petronas conducts lab
sessions as part of the chemical engineering syllabus and for the final year students and
postgraduate students to conduct their research. In order to conduct the lab session
successfully, the department are required to purchase all the equipments, fixed assets and
consumables to be used in conducting the research or experiment. Currently, the
documents related to the equipments and consumables are stored in file cabinet and
technicians and lecturers need to refer to the person-in-charge manually to get the
required information. The problems that arises from this paper-based system are scattered
documents, time consuming, difficult to spot the re-order level of consumables,
technician unaware of the maintenance and testing of the equipment, and risk of loss of
documents. A computerized system is required to overcome this problem. Theaim of the
project is to develop a prototype version of ChemLab Inventory Management System to
overcome the problem faced by the current system by centralizing the database,
triggering an email to remind the respective person when the consumable reach the
critical level and reducing the risk of loss of documents. A combination of Rational
Unified Process (RUP) model and Prototyping model will be used as a software
development methodology to carry out the project. The RUP model consists of Inception,
Elaboration, Construction, and Transition phase. The ChemLab IMS consists of 7
modules. The modules are Staff Detail, Vendor Detail, Principle Detail, Fixed Asset
Details, Consumable Details, Asset and Operation Details, Search Module and Query
Module. All the findings havebeen recordedfor future enhancement and references. As a
conclusion, the ChemLab IMS overcomes the problems faced by the current user by
introducing computerized system which provide easy and quick access to the information
anytime, anywhere.