United States Navy / GE Jet Engines Workflow
The U.S. Navy manages vast quantities of complex equipment and works with its contractors to incorporate engineering changes to its equipment to improve safety, efficiency and cost-effectiveness. All these changes must be closely tracked and documented because the effects of even a single change have far-reaching consequences.
Just the jet engine alone, of a Navy plane contains thousands of meticulously engineered parts. Multiply this by the broad array of equipment and parts under its purview and one understands why the Navy recognized a need to better manage the tasks of coordinating, documenting and tracking engineering changes.
"I have been working with Internet technology and it's challenges since 1989 and our most difficult task is to quickly convert legacy applications and data into a web based application. The best example of this legacy application was the Navy's Engineering Change Proposal Application. An automated tool that was supposed to streamline a very common business task. Many contractors and application developers have attempted to automate this process and have failed," said Jim Glenn, Internet Branch Head Code J561, Space and Electronic Warfare Command, System Support Center Charleston.
The Answer Is Zope
A Zope-based solution now enables the Navy and its contractors to collaborate securely and efficiently from widely distributed sites, greatly reducing the time required to implement engineering changes.
Complex Collaboration Presents Challenges
Working with geographically distributed contractors to produce large complex documents according to strict processes proved a tremendous challenge to security and quality control efforts. The existing unstructured processes provided little visibility of tasks in the workflow process, and pushing changes to completion was slow, burdensome and inefficient.
The Navy turned to Zope Corp. to help quickly develop and deliver a system to address these unique, complex challenges. "We turned to the development product ZOPE and have completely rewritten the meaning of legacy conversions", said Jim Glenn.
A Zope Solution Enables Secure, Distributed Collaboration
The Zope-based solution developed for the Navy and its contractors offers a number of attractive features for complex content management challenges. The platform provides a completely Web-based collaboration environment for all of the participants in the change-proposal process and provides role-based security to ensure that participants only have access to appropriate information at appropriate points in the workflow.
At all points in the Content Management Process, participants can view the state of a proposal and the actions they are authorized to take. Management has access to a full audit-trail of individual proposals or groups of proposals via a reporting capability. The solution allows manager approvals to be performed electronically, enabling incrementally faster progress through the change lifecycle.
The solution additionally, makes use of relational database integration to allow easy sharing of change data with existing budgeting and planning systems and to leverage existing onsite infrastructure and expertise.
Zope Corporation Key To Successful Deployment
Zope Corporation was instrumental in identifying the goals, objectives, and requirements of the new system. A detailed set of documents were produced by analyzing the existing processes through staff interviews and information gleaned from the existing ECP form, which described the anticipated results of the engagement. The Requirements Collection Process, combined with an iterative approach to software lifecycle management, honed in on the solution, which met both the United States Navy and General Electric's needs.
Zope Solution Highlights
- Real-time collaboration. Representatives from the Navy and from geographically distributed contractors work together using the Web, greatly reducing the time required to implement changes.
- Role-based collaboration. The role-based security underpinnings of Zope ensure that users see only what they are allowed to see, guaranteeing both protection and a reduction in complexity for workflow participants. For this Navy implementation, many people from different organizations and with differing levels of authority and responsibility must work together according to complex workflow rules.
Zope is the perfect solution.
- Deployment time. The benefits of the Zope platform provided the rapid development capabilities required to focus on the domain requirements and quickly deliver a custom solution.
- Total cost of ownership. The Open Source Zope platform greatly reduced the up-front costs to the Navy to implement the system.
- Data connectivity. Data related to engineering changes that once were trapped in paper documents are now available to feed existing budgetary and planning systems.
Challenges
- Enable secure collaboration between Navy and contractor representatives acting in many different roles
- Enable enforcement of complex workflow rules
- Provide an easy-to-use content-entry system for non-technical document authors
- Easily integrate with existing budgetary and planning systems
- Enable extensible document / process auditing and status reporting
Approach
- A Zope Content Server based solution, using a relational back-end to expose data to external Navy systems.
Benefits
- Effective, secure management of documents between the Navy and its contractors
- Faster completion of the change-proposal process
- Better visibility of status and tasks for all participants
- Integration with current budgetary and planning systems
- Fast time-to-implementation
- Low total cost of ownership
We're betting our company on Python and Zope, that's how good we
feel about the technology.
- Ian Prince, Developer, inextenso (Internet and environment system integrators, Switzerland)