Application Software

Development of Shop Floor Management system

Customer

A leading PC manufacturing plant in India

Business Challenge

The customer was getting end-user complaints to an extent of 2% because of over /under shipping against the customer orders. There use to be revenue losses as support personnel were unable to judge the warranty claims due to lack of item tracking procedures.

The current production process was totally human /resource dependent – such as identification of right set of drivers for a given configuration, validation of the installed drivers / components etc. The company wanted to automate most of their critical operations of the manufacturing process

Solution

Caravel did the complete business process re-engineering by visiting multiple plants and devised a new shop floor management process [adhering to standard engineering practices] to bring down the end-user [customer] complaints to literally 0%.

Caravel had devised new techniques of automating most of the critical tasks so as to bring in fool-proof mechanisms in Item tracking, Component based signature collection, Configuration validation, Automated OS loading with right set of drivers, packing and dispatch.

Development of Customer Support System

Customer

A leading PC manufacturing plant in India

Business Challenge

The customer would like to have the data that was collected in their shop floor management system to be on-line in order to validate the customer complaints, especially when the part /item replacement is taking place during the on-site repair process by their service personnel.

Solution

The qualitative data that was captured during the PC manufacturing process is made available on-line through this system.

The customer support personnel, can check / validate the component serial numbers directly from the site[ end-user location] before taking action against the warranty claims / repair calls / replacements.

Job order based data replication procedures were established to replicated the data from the factory based SMS server to on-line customer support system.

Development of Item tracking System for manufacturing industry

Customer

A leading PC manufacturing plant in Singapore

Business Challenge

The customer is a large OEM for multiple PC brands.
As the PCs are getting shipped to various countries of the world, the local service centers were finding difficulty in warranty replacements, as the data pertaining to part number / manufacturer batch numbers of component OEM is not enough to substantiate warranty claims.

Solution

The system was designed in such a way that it acts as an extension to the ERP system [its manufacturing module] to collect qualitative information, as quantities and customer order processing is getting managed within the ERP itself.

The qualitative data collection starts from Stores where the raw materials received gets scanned to collect the bar-coded serial numbers.

At the time of issuing the material to shop floor for manufacturing against the launched jobs, the system facilitates to collect the serial numbers of all the items that are used in each every machine in the given job order.

The system guides the assembly operator with an engineering approach by display the assembly drawings / instructions that are specific to current assembly process.

The systems takes care of packing and dispatch functions in a controlled manner, so as to have details on other external components such as keyboard, mouse, speakers etc that are part of each CPU box and by which transport /courier the items of the job got shipped.

Using the serial number data that was captured in the kitting phase, the service personnel located at [country specific] service centers can check the warranty details directly from the component OEM web sites.

Development of Automated OS loading System for PC OEM manufacturer

Customer

A leading PC manufacturing plant in Singapore

Business Challenge

The customer is a large OEM for multiple PC brands. Most of the PCs gets shipped with an OS. While preparing a reference system with the required OS, there is a tedious and time consuming task of identifying and installing the appropriate drivers for various components of the PC, by referring to the respective versions, tracing the right driver CDs etc.

Solution

This system creates job specific Windows OS images based on Microsoft’s OPK technologies and linux OS images using the variant specific automation procedures, by choosing the right set of drivers from the driver repository.

The Engg personnel keep the driver repository up-to-date, as and when they receive the latest drivers from various component OEMs, time to time.
It also verifies the assembled system configuration against the customer order, on getting the compliance report, job specific OS images gets installed over Ethernet, after preparing the machine using WinPE.

Development of Web Based Ordering System

Customer

A leading PC manufacturing plant in Singapore

Business Challenge

The customer is a large OEM for multiple PC brands. The system integrators / resellers across the world wanted to build a custom PC based on the requirements laid down by their end-users. They wanted to make sure whether the chosen custom configuration is ‘feasible’ to manufacture, because of compatibility /performance related issues.

Solution

The system is intended to avoid the gap /constraints in manufacturing the custom configured machines [PCs] by the registered Independent Hardware Vendors [IHVs] and resellers and the marketing personnel.

This system allows the registered users to ‘build’ the machine over web by validating the compatibility of components against the motherboard, memory, and all other sub-systems in terms speed, connectivity, compatibility etc. with the help of the product configuration engine.

The system also provides a tentative base figure of the cost for volume sales based on the pricing / discount information uploaded at the given point of time.

Development of On-line verification system

Customer

A leading PC manufacturing plant in Singapore

Business Challenge

With the availability of high-speed internet connectivity, the customer wanted to save the time of their resellers / IHVs by avoiding the air-travel to Singapore, just to validate /inspect the production process of their large orders, on shop-floor.

Solution

This system is intended to provide on-line access to the machines of the designated job order that belongs to the registered customer over web.

Besides look at the Job order status as report, the customer can get hands-on control of a selected PC [ target machine] to personally examine the configuration, installed custom software etc.

To conduct special test, provision is made to upload the test suite to designated folder on the server such that the uploaded stuff is made available to the customer as a shared folder over factory LAN. The customer can run the specific test out the uploaded the test suite, the resultant log files can be downloaded back for further analysis and reporting.

Development of defect tracking system

Customer

An ATM [Automatic teller machine] manufacturer

Business Challenge

The customer is an ATM manufacturer with their HO in Europe.
The customer had engaged multiple OEMs to manufacturer various parts / sub-systems for the ATM. The OEMs are expected to deliver 100% error free items, and checked for their quality directly during assembly process. If any part is found faulty while assembling over the conveyer, the entire high-speed production gets slowdown as the respective operator need to document the defect details against the respective OEM

The customer wanted to automate the defect logging procedures to save the precious time.

Solution

A defect tracking system was designed and implemented to cater the defect logging needs of their multiple assembly lines.

Each assembly line may manufacture different kind of sub-system that belongs to various types of ATM models.

This system displays the engineering documents pertaining to part /item that is being assembled on the conveyer based on the stage of assembly and the type of sub-system that is being manufactured.

If any part is found faulty, the operator scans the part of items / its bin from which the part was fetched. The system displays the respective defect codes to quickly select and close the defect logging procedure in a shortest possible time.