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Manufacturing Automation
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| History |
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DSI has brought to bear its expertise in
Client/Server computing for many clients over the past ten years and
more, including one of the world's leading Scientific and Educational
Publishers. The Publisher was seeking a way to automate its
manufacturing process following a series of mergers and acquisitions.
After a prestigious consulting firm failed in a one-year project to
produce a manufacturing system suitable for its needs, the Publisher
engaged DSI to design a new system that would improve efficiency and
minimize processing costs.
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| Results |
The result was the "School Inventory
Manufacturing System", a true Client/Server application utilizing a
large scale Relational Data Base Management System (RDBMS) supplied by
Oracle. The business processing logic is distributed between the
front-end Windows application and stored procedures that reside in the
database.
The front-end GUI application is developed in
PowerBuilder with a PowerBuilder Foundation Library (PFC). The PFC
supports an object-oriented architecture that provides our development
team with a powerful set of reusable, pre-built objects and services.
Reliance on objects accelerates the development of full-featured
object-oriented applications when the objects a reproperly employed.
Back-end processing is built on an Oracle 7.3 platform running on
Microsoft NT for Servers in a design utilizing stored procedures and
triggers.
The School Inventory Manufacturing System provides:
- Real-time calculations for Book Cost Estimation and Paper Forecasts
- Communication with vendors by E-mail
- Optimization of workload distribution to staff based on product type
- A repository for Vendor Scale Information
- Maintenance and tracking of both Firm and Tentative Orders
- Ad-hoc Reporting
- Interfaces with other systems from desktops (Paradox), to mainframes (CICS/VSAM)
- A streamlined integration with other business processes.
- The speed and ease-of-use of the
cost-estimating subsystem helps the Publisher's staff to generate
accurate cost information instantly.
- The School Inventory Manufacturing
System supports increased productivity through an ease of use that is
achieved by the encapsulating all the business rules in an
object-oriented structure.
- By automating and simplifying the manufacturing processing, the application reduces labor, human error, and the paper load.
- Inclusion of a state-of-the-art
ad-hoc reporting tool provides users with the ability to create reports
based on their immediate needs.
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Technology 