Some aspects regarding the information and the quality management in a cad services company.

Cioban, Horia ; Pop, Nicolae

1. INTRODUCTION

Automotive industry is one of the major factors of CAD activity development. Dynamics of the automotive fields guide also the trend of the design activity, who becomes more and more a significant part in a PLM process. The increased volume of the outsourcing gives a chance to a services oriented company. As part of the product lifecycle, design can get up to 40% of the manufacturing costs. On the other side, taking into consideration only computer simulation, it reduces the time and efforts for producing the prototypes. To survive on the market, a CAD company must be able to react very quickly to the changing needs, offering at the same time a good quality products and services. It has to prepare a strong organization and infrastructure, an accurate information management, that means:

* flexible and well trained personnel;

* up to date hardware, network and communications;

* software platforms related to the client.

Avoiding terms like "knowledge management" this paper will use managing information instead, as a more appropriate meaning for the role of databases, projects, files and archives manipulated inside the organization or delivered outside as products (Miller, 2002). A quality management system is one of the first references asked by a company looking for a supplier.

2. NETWORK STRUCTURE IN A BIG COMPANY

The IT model given by the informational structure of a big company can be scaled and applied into an appropriate shape in small enterprises. It can takes as an example the network containing more than 50.000 computers of a corporation from automotive industry.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

This huge amount of equipment can be administrated only by organizing it into a hierarchical framework of objects. The new servers OS offer services like Active Directory--AD (Richards et al., 2006).

The framework that holds the objects is viewed as a number of levels, having at the top of the structure the Forest. Below, the hierarchy contains trees, domains and OUs (organizational units), as in figure 1.

These OUs are containers with groups of clients (PC's and laptops), servers, printers and users. The properties and the behavior of the groups from containers and guided through policies, using a console GPMC (Group Policy Management Console). The most important thing is that all applications running on server, including AD and GPMC can be accessed remotely by administrators from any client in the network.

Like Active Directory, there are several categories of applications used for managing information and activities in a company, like: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Supplier Relationship management (SRM), most of them having similar consoles as interfaces. All these solutions are integrated and change information through importing/exporting data procedures. As examples, antivirus and security solutions get all necessary inputs from Active Directory (Microsoft, 2008).

3. SOLUTIONS FOR INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

A CAD company can be a small to medium enterprise offering services in a niche of businesses. As a results of globalization, many automotive industry producers and suppliers have found outsourcing as a possibility to reduce costs. Design activity is one of externalized functions of a manufacturing company. Having several big clients, a supplier can have a comfortable life on the market.

Regarding the infrastructure, it is very important for the supplier to have the same hardware and software, including the working environment as the customer. For example, they have the same version of CAD solution, including service pack and going to the same hotfix. Figure 2 explains how a corporate network can be scaled, using only the necessary components and functions from the mother structure, starting from Organizational Units branch to the right of figure 1.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Any change in the customer's software must to be replicated to the supplier and this is one of the most important condition for a good cooperation. Of course, not all components have to be replicated to the supplier. For example, if the customer uses a CAD application, the supplier have to install the same software, the same service pack and hotfix. Supplier have to setup also a compatible environment with the client.

The design activity in a CAD company is divided into projects. Each order obtained from the customer is one project administrated by a project manager. In figure 2, on the level 3 there are groups of clients/PCs and each team save the current projects data on servers from level 2. One of the properties of data servers is that they have the storage disks organized in mirrored or RAID schema. On each data server there are two folders: when a project is finished, the project manager moves it from the current folder to the finished projects folder.

On the top level, the server acts as file and application server and has also the storage disks in RAID. The backup utility of the OS server has a daily task to make backups from "Current projects" folder of every data servers (level 2). To reduce the space reserved on disks, the incremental backup method is used. It makes monthly backups from the "Finished projects" folder of every data servers. A second safety mechanism for data is "shadow copy", which is a feature that allows taking manual or automatic backup copies of a specific volume, folder or file at a specific point in time (Microsoft, 2008). These two layers of security offer the possibility to restore information from few months back.

Applications like licenses management servers and antivirus management solutions run also on the application and management server. To reduce costs, less then 50 users and clients can be managed without Active Directory service.

4. SOLUTIONS FOR QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Many processes of a CAD company can be integrated in a quality management system and this is one of the most important requirements for an automotive industry supplier. Because the price of an ERP solution is quite high, a small to medium enterprise can found an in-house solution, even though not all features will be covered (Godfrey, 1999).

Using a Database Management System (DBMS) it can develop a client/server application that can store information about: employees, customers, projects, works, parts, operations and estimated hours, like in figure 3.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

A client can order one or more projects, a project can contains one or more works and a work can have one or more parts or models.

For each part, the application administrator can define specific operations and 3 fields belong to each operation: designer's code (who works on this operation), estimation time (how long it takes) and delivery time. Input data are filled using forms, like in figure 4.

Sample models for customer's form, project fiche or work fiche are according to the quality manual requirements.

A work fiche contains all necessary information to keep the traceability of a project and can make arithmetic operations on lines and columns. It is also a useful tool to estimate the workload or offers.

Outputs are lists and reports like: monthly report of estimated hours/customer (figure 5), monthly report of estimated hour/employee, workload/customer. Application offers also information regarding quality indicators for design activity like deadline factor--days after deadline/no.of projects / month--or individual performance factor--estimated hours approved by the customer in a month / working hours in a month. The software is running on the file/application server and can be accessed by any user in the company.

5. CONCLUSIONS

Having as model the IT structure of big companies, a CAD organization can manage projects and activities using a quality management system as a tool to orient business to the client requirements. Using applications applied on QMS, managers can supervise the processes with respect to the system and its performance. These solutions reduce the cycle and the volume of papers and improves the decision process. Company becomes more flexible, reacting to the market inputs.

These managing systems for information and quality were designed, tested and implemented by authors in a medium size CAD company, during 3 months with satisfied results. Now they are in a dynamic and a continuous process of development.

Reacting to the positive impact, the company management intends to add more new functions to the QMS application and to integrate it with other software.

6. REFERENCES

Godfrey, A. B. (1999). Juran's Quality Handbook, McGraw-Hill, ISBN 978-0-07-034003-9, New York.

Miller, F.J. (2002). I=0 (Information has no intrinsic meaning), Information reasearch, vol.8 No.1, (October 2002), ISSN 1368-1613. Available from: http://informationr.net/ir. Accessed: 2008-06-28.

Microsoft (2008). Windows Server 2003: Active Directory Infrastructure. Microsoft Press, 1-8--1-9. ISBN 0-73561438-5.

Microsoft (2008). Volume Shadow Copy Service. MSDN. Microsoft. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Shadow_Copy, Accessed: 2008-06-28.

Richards J.; Allen R.; Lowe-Norris, A (2006): Active Directory: design and deployment of Microsoft's Active Directory, O'Reilly, ISBN:0596101732, Sebastopol, USA.