SYDNEY AUSTRALIA 2227 (ABN 96 078 508 264) Ph:+61 2 9016 4695
"Helping others to have a future assures our own."
1988-89 All up, the CEO and his loyal, talented staff, Bob Wilcox and Doug Bonner, had saved the British Army well over 3 million Pounds Sterling in equipment, facilities and programmer's wages. This initiative also saved 60,000 Pounds Sterling per annum in manning costs from that point onwards. The system ran for 15 years. In the British Army, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) control Repair Parts. During the 90's they developed a maintenance mgmt system ARROW to assist in the running of their workshops, with a particular emphasis on the management of Repair Parts. The system ran on an ITL mini-computer.
REME also developed another system (CAMIS) to administer and report upon the Calibration of all measuring equipment. This system ran on another ITL mini-computer attached to three semi-intelligent terminals and administered by three clerks. The CAMIS system maintained a schedule for all calibration actions. When an equipment was due for calibration, clerks would manually create a workshop job on the ARROW computer. When the job was completed, the details of the job were manually entered into CAMIS.
The REME Data Centre, the organisation responsible for systems developed, budgeted 15 man-years to develop a replacement for CAMIS. They also intended to have much the same system; a mini-computer with three terminals housed in an air-conditioned room, manned by three clerks. The CEO of NVTech was posted to 27 District Workshop as the Production Manager. With the support of Bob Wilcox, the ARROW computer systems administrator, he developed software in Turbo Pascal to enable an IBM-clone 286 PC to act as an ARROW terminal. The PC also housed a FoxPro database, developed by Doug Bonner, a talented and dedicated computer admin assistant, that imitated CAMIS.
The REME Data Centre would not cooperate with the development so the contents of the CAMIS database were transferred by having it print all of its reports to a virtual printer, a PC programmed by the CEO to imitate a printer. The print-stream being sent to the PC was interpreted and placed into the FoxPro database. Once the data from the old CAMIS was transferred, the FoxPro database was programmed to periodically create text files, listing all of the equipment that was due for calibration. The PC, using software that imitated an ARROW terminal, then created the jobs on ARROW automatically using the details in the text file. The jobs were then processed by the Workshop in the normal fashion. Periodically, the PC would enquire into ARROW to check the status of all jobs it had created and which had not yet been completed. When a job was found to have been completed, the job details relating to labour, tasks performed and parts consumed were stored in the CAMIS database and the status of the job marked as completed. The equipment would then be automatically rescheduled for another calibration action in accordance with rules in the database.
In this manner, all manual scheduling and all manual transcription of data between ARROW and CAMIS was elimintated. The project took 3 months to complete from start to finish, not the 15 manyears budgeted by the REME Data Centre. The PC upon which CAMIS was a 286 with a 40MB hard drive. It cost 1,000 Pounds Sterling. The ITL minicomputer planned for CAMIS was to cost 100,000 Pounds Sterling. The PC operated in a normal room. The ITL computer required a dust-free airconditioned room. There was no longer any need for clerks to run the CAMIS computer. The workload could be coped with by the existing ARROW Staff. There were approximately 20 sites that would have had to be equipped with CAMIS.