systems built for: Delta/Surprenant Cable Corporation
Surprenant Cable's newly-hired turn-around CEO asked me to automate their sales quoting & engineering design functions, provide a parts numbering system ... and to specify and install the required PCs and network - for responsive transmission of graphic cable designs.
Projects development time was roughly as follows …
| Project | Cumulative Development Time |
| Scoping, specification and board of directors proposals | 4 weeks |
| Sales Quote System | 10 weeks |
| PC hardware installation, operating system and office suite software configuration was done in parallel with the Sales Quote system development. Thus, actual Sales Quote System development time was something less than 10 weeks. | |
| Part Number Cross Referencing System | 1 week |
| Engineering Design System | 7 weeks |
| 22 weeks |
Infrastructure Projects
- 16 Client (end-user) and 2 server (storage) PC' were installed to dual boot between Windows95 and Windows NT3.51.
- The Microsoft Office Professional suite has been installed on the non-server PC's.
Networking
- A state-of-the-art high speed (100 Megabytes per second) network was installed with a switch to bridge to the slower DECnet/Axis 10 Megabytes per second network.
- A FAX server and client software was installed.
- Two 600 dpi printers with Intel Netports were installed.
- Terminal emulation software (SmartTerm) was installed to provide connection to their DECnet/Axis production scheduling and MRP system from the PCs.
Sales Quote System
- The Sales Quote system is complete, feature rich and quite refined in its present version.
- Partial part number searches return a candidate list of part numbers for quote item choice.
- Price can either be specified or computed from a gross margin percentage.
- Standard cost is adjusted by current raw materials prices and setup cost over the customer requested cable length.
- Quotes can be FAXed or printed on formal letterhead.
- A User Guide, including system maintenance and configuration, is on the network server.
- 14 MIS reports have been built to be run at the click of a button. Each report is sorted by three levels, such as Sales Organization, Customer and Sales Reps. 12 of the reports have user specifiable start and end dates; thus, any of these reports can be run from beginning of the year, quarter, month, week or even day. All of the reports are based on "quote dates"; the remaining 2 reports identify any quotes or quote items, containing no "quote date"; thus, no quotes should slip through the system i.e. without visibility to follow up on them.
Part Number Cross Referencing System
- Provision has been made to cross reference numbers from 4 different part number systems:
- SCC Product numbers
- Axis system numbers
- Customer numbers (Mil-spec or otherwise)
- Sperry system numbers
- Button activated queries have been provided to perform either exact or partial number searches 16 different ways.
- The Part Number Cross Referencing System tables have been populated with SCC Product numbers, Axis system numbers and Sperry system numbers from their Axis MRP system.
Engineering Design System
- A 40 page engineering design formulae specification, including how the system operates, is on the network server.
- The engineering system designs:
- Insulation
- Fillers
- Cabling
- Taping
- Jacketing
- Shielding/Braiding
- Electrical formulae
- Reels
- Braiding and shielding can be computed 8 different ways e.g. for braid, spiral, round or flat when number of strand ends and carriers per machine are unspecified by the customer; "unspecified" computations are done in 3 query levels … (and presented in tabular format for designer selection in approximately 2 seconds) …
- Data is gathered for over 2,000 possibilities.
- Fields are calculated per engineering formulae.
- Filtering is done by engineer-specified range criteria per defaults or designer overrides.
- Design LayUp Report selection is narrowed down by combo box customer choice, then by LayUps for that customer.
Do you need a developer, capable of delivering 3 systems plus the supporting infrustructure ... in 22 weeks? Call Data-based-Systems.com