 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||
|
The MIS Intranet site had been developed to overcome the following issues and allow access to manufacturing details for all employee's with a PC. We had a limited number of user licenses for infor:swan and most of theses had been allocated for manufacturing staff use. The engineering department were also interested in viewing stock data like availability, price and stores location (we operated an open stores policy.) This assisted them in the design process. Over the years we had compiled a large amount of component specification sheet. Each specification contained a covering sheet with item description, stock item number, manufacturer and supplier details. To the back of this was the actual manufacturer's data sheet. As you can image this huge collection of paper took up over 12 lever arch binders. On occasions binders were borrowed and spec sheets would go missing. Access for engineering department was poor. First stage of the design process was to extract the data from infor:swan; doing this directly would be very slow. The answer was to extract data into a SQL Server which would improve performance. An automated extract routine was set-up in SQL to extract every hour. Second stage involved getting the data to appear on a web page. Using a spare Windows 2000 server IIS was installed. As the standard install would supply us with ASP it was decide to use this as our server side component. Server side web pages are much fast than any other option which was available. Setting up an ODBC connection to SQL Server it wasn't long before stock data was being displayed on a web page. Third stage was to access the component specification sheets. Several tables were created in SQL to hold the information which was not available in infor:swan. The web site would allow the entry of data directly into these tables via an admin screen. This meant no additional front end Access database would be required. Final stage of the development involved the most time. All the manufacturer's data sheet would be accessed in PDF format. So each manufacturer's web site was visited and the required data sheets downloaded. Several engineers had downloaded some of the data sheet during their design process so this task was not too painful. Examples
|
||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
