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The problem set for us at the North American installation of a multi-national transportation company was to improve their Engineering Change Notice (ECN) process. Their ECN process was paper forms and they wanted to create a computer version of the process. There had been efforts in the company to do this in the past, but these efforts had failed, for a variety of reasons. Our analysis of the situation indicated that simply reproducing the paper forms on the computer would be inadequate. The nature and complexity of their ECN process required a sophisticated decision support system with a notification and workflow component. After a year of working with domain experts and the design engineers who would use the new system we developed a prototype of this ECN decision-making and workflow system. After system and user testing we wrote a 600 page specification which is being used, along with the prototype, to create a production version of the system, which will roll-out in 2002. The new system is expected to:
The design management problem we set out to solve in Sept. 1995 was to help the R&D department introduce IT into the design and development process at the household tools division of a multi-national manufacturing firm. At that time the design engineers did not have PCs (although they were to be introduced during the time of our project). Our goal was to allow teams of designers from around the world to work together by creating a living repository of information from the design and research departments. What we developed was a user-tested prototype and a specification for a community document management system. We also transferred the methods we used for system development and user testing to the R&D personnel we worked with. We provided advice and consulting on selecting an off-the-shelf system to customize to create a production system based on the prototype design. The production version of the system is in use in the original target department and other departments in the company. |
