Objective: Capture actual production parameters and monitor productions processes. Based on production goals provide production equipment at all workplaces with production orders and appropriate documentation. Our assignment was to provide recommendations for database response time and data accuracy improvements.
Features: This customer is one of the largest US manufacturers of plastic film. Our task was to improve their manufacturing process by monitoring production equipment and processes in every work place. The customer had designed, developed and implemented a company wide database application using their own resources; however, after one year in production and several improvements made by the RDBMS supplier, they still had problems with response time and data integrity. Our mission was to improve & optimize performance, data integrity & data accuracy, using client’s internal resources for developing and coding.
This project entailed:
- formulate a detailed description of the current data model, at physical, conceptual and implementation levels.
- completely qualify the slow response time
- completely qualify data integrity problems
- review users priorities and delivery schedules
- redesign the data model to address the qualified items
- develop objective metrics allowing us to measure response times
- before and after improvements
- develop all the “fixes” required – accomplished using the client’s
- internal resources
- report the improvements made to management.
For several functions, the response time was divided by a factor of 20 and overall improvement was made by a factor of 7. Regarding data integrity, we did not only resolve discrepancies, but we also introduced new concepts that allowed management to monitor manufacturing yields and losses more closely.
Our results were praised by both users, management and application developers, in terms of addressing technology transfer, especially as related to database design issues.
SophiTEC, Inc. 