Jason Hamer, Account Manager
Computron Software Inc.
5935 Airport Road, Suite 310
Mississauga, Ontario, CANADA L4V 1W5
Telephone: 905-405-2176
Jhamer@yorvik.com

Computron Work Management

Computron Work Management(CWM) is a seamlessly integrated work management tool, consisting of 4 applications: Maintenance, Procurement, Inventory and Project Management. CWM is flexible enough to adapt to meet your business needs regardless of industry. The added value CWM offers is embedded workflow that makes your system easily configurable, functionality that flexibly supports business process reengineering and architecture that creates a fully integrated resource, maintenance and materials management backbone. At the heart of this backbone is a "virtual map" of your organization within the CWM Facility/Equipment database. This automates your planning and management process, gathers all relevant resources, schedules multiple or individual job steps, and generates reports including those related to cost control.

Planning to win

Planned work costs 30% less than an emergency job, reduces downtime, eliminates delays and manages your resources to your best advantage. To successfully manage work you must plan.

CWM consists of four seamlessly integrated applications, each designed to help you plan and manage each specific work requirement:

  1. Maintenance Management
  2. Materials Management
  3. Procurement
  4. Project Management

Maintenance Management helps you plan, schedule, and manage work requirements and maintenance tasks-jobs that are critical to keep your operation going, such as daily, recurring, preventive, and predictive maintenance work.

Materials Management automates your inventory and warehousing functions and integrates them with your planning and purchasing processes, so everything is on hand when you need it.

The Procurement application helps you buy the right material, services, and equipment from the right source at the right price, It also gives you full control over the timing of purchases because it is fully integrated with the other Work Management applications.

Project Management is best for managing more complex long-term jobs-those with several sub-projects, diverse resources, and thousands of tasks, such as plant shutdowns or capital projects. Project Management's powerful and sophisticated algorithms can process all the variables involved, determine the optimal schedule for your work, and help you monitor your progress and costs along the way.

Mapping your operation

The first step in managing your work is knowing what you have, where you have it, and how to use it. The facility/equipment database makes the initial setup job easy.

The facility/equipment database is a powerful tool that helps you manage your company's major physical assets - it's facilities and equipment. A facility is a location, such as a plant, department, or a warehouse. Equipment is a physical asset, such as a desk, crane or a motor.

By entering the facilities and equipment into the facility/equipment database, you can create a virtual map' of your operation. You can then use this map to track the location, service history and condition of your assets. For example, the system can capture the repair record for a specific pump (even if it is moved to another location) as well as a maintenance history for all pumps at a specific location. Both the facility and equipment databases are hierarchical, so you can track and retrieve information in varying amounts of detail.

Planning with Work Management

Planning relies on information. To plan effectively, you need to know what has to be done and the resources you have and need to do it. Work Management collects all information needed to plan and control your work, making work and maintenance practices easy.

Planning with Work Management involves using a subsystem called Activity to define your work, divide it into manageable steps, and specify the order of the steps. You also specify the facilities, equipment and resources you need to complete the job, estimate their cost, and automate approvals your plan.

Work Management lets you define your work your way, even if you use different terms for the same item in different departments. There are no predefined categories. You can even open outside tools and documents such as CAD drawings, flowcharts, or engineering specifications to illustrate a particular piece of equipment, right from Work Management.

Once you enter the steps and your resource requirements-or copy from existing job plans in the library-the system takes care of the rest. As work progresses, it automatically captures data about the job and your resources so you can report and analyze your progress. You can also use information to plan better the next time you do the same job.

Scheduling-the key to success

The more complicated the task, the harder it is to manage and coordinate all variables. CWM offers "drag and drop" computer assisted scheduling (CAS) to make the task easier.

Using the critical path method, the system takes your start date and automatically calculates a finish date, taking all the variables into account. These can include the relationships between activity steps, theory priority, the minimum duration of each step, and the resources planned for the job.

You can see the results immediately on a Gantt chart, or generate one of several reports, including work lists and resource histograms. Analyzing this information helps you balance your resource load and improve efficiency.

Estimating and controlling your costs

Estimates should be based on History and Planned Work. Meaningful budgets are based on meaningful data and give a clear and accurate assessment of where you've spent money before. Work Management gives you cost information you can count on, allowing for meaningful reports that support continuos progress within your operation. Using a combination of prices from the library, Resource Catalog and Procurement application, CWM generates accurate estimates for your work plans, and monitors and reports actual costs once your job starts. It also offers various controls to notify you of cost overruns, thus allowing for better budgeting.

Performance Management

Timely and accurate assessment of you company's performance is vital to the success of your operation. With CWM you can monitor progress against any company or industry bench-mark. You can also use any of our pre-defined problem, status, time variance, and cost analysis reports, or quickly create ad hoc reports to meet your needs. In either case, you can view information in various forms to help you decide where to reduce costs and improve work processes.

The Maintenance Management Application

Minimizing downtime is a maintenance issue. In most companies, maintenance accounts for around 12% of production costs. Yet unplanned repairs and downtime are the single largest controllable cost in the operation. By keeping your equipment in top shape, you can significantly reduce your operating costs and maximize production capacity.

The trick is to find a way to fix equipment before it breaks down. Computron Maintenance Management gives you the tools you need to optimize performance by becoming more proactive and less reactive.

Predicting and preventing failure

Whether it is a pump or delivery vehicle that fails, the results are the same: lost time and lost revenue. With Maintenance Management, equipment repair is no longer a fire-fighting exercise. Our system helps you increase reliability through preventive and predictive maintenance plans.

Setting up a preventive program is easy. You simply tell the system when you want to perform a task and it automatically generates a work order to complete it. As the work progresses, the system captures information about the job and the equipment used to perform it. You can store this historic record in the system's library and re-use it later.

Predictive maintenance is also easy. As you gather more historic information, you can plan to intervene before a breakdown occurs. You can also predict when equipment is likely to fail, so your future preventive maintenance programs are more accurate.

Planning your work

Planning work consists of activities. An activity is a basic unit of work, such as fixing a pump or a boiler.

Using a sub-system called Activity, you define your high-level job activities and enter them in the system the way you want. Your can then divide activities into steps and sub-steps and define a logical order for the tasks. You can also specify and control all aspects of the work. From who has access to certain functions, the kind of status classifications you need, and who approves what and when.

The Activity sub-system also helps you define, allocate, and schedule your resources (labor, equipment, materials, tools, and services), either by work order or by individual job step.

Interactive Gantt charts

Through computer assisted scheduling CAS, the system can display your maintenance schedule in Gantt chart format and update it on-the-fly. Enter a change in one place in your plan, and the system will automatically reflect the changes in your chart. Or drag the bar that represents an activity in the chart and the system automatically updates your work schedule for you. You can have it both ways-it's that easy!

Built-in flexibility

Maintenance Management lets you define your work based on your business rules. There are no pre-defined categories that you have to fit. The system adapts to your terminology. You can even open related documents, such as CAD drawings, audio inspection reports, or engineering specifications to illustrate a particular piece of equipment. All from within the Maintenance Management application.

Monitoring your costs

When you set up the system, you create a repository (called the Resource Catalog) of your work resources: labor, equipment, materials, tools, and services, including the cost of each person or item. Every time you create a work order, the system automatically retrieves this information so you can estimate the cost of the work. You can also look at individual activity costs or summarize total costs for a complete project.

Re-using information

Once you have developed your maintenance work plans, you can store them in a special library (called the Activity Library) for re-use at a later time. That way everyone can save time and benefit from your experience the next time around.

Conforming to regulatory requirements

Computron Work Management helps your company meet the standards required for ISO 9000 certification as well as other regulations, such as the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSHA), and the Environmental Protection ACT (EPA). Companies are having to increasingly provide maintenance information to various regulatory bodies. Since a great deal of this information is already collected by the Maintenance Management application, it's easy to extract the necessary details and send them to the relevant agencies.

Producing reports

Information is at your fingertips with Maintenance Management. You can generate a variety of pre-defined documents, such as problem reports, progress reports (percentage complete), time variance reports, and cost analysis reports. Or you can quickly create ad hoc reports to meet special needs. Maintenance Management gives you all the information you need whenever you need it.

The Materials Management Application

Having what you need, when you need it is critical to efficient materials management. Computron Materials Management automates your inventory and warehousing functions and integrates them with the rest of your operation. The result is a system that delivers savings.

Materials on demand

Using the Materials Management application is having materials on demand. It supports just-in-time delivery and consignment stock so you have what you need, when you need it.

Materials Management takes up where other Computron Work Management applications leave off. When you plan a job, you list your work steps and enter a request for the resources you need to do the job (equipment, materials, tools, services).

Because all Computron Work Management applications are integrated, the system automatically checks to see whether the materials you need are held in inventory or whether they must be ordered. Either way, you have what you need when you are ready to go to work.

System settings are also configurable to your specific needs, with flexibility to alter that configuration if needed.

One stop shopping

With Computron Work Management, you only have to enter your requirement once-when you define your work steps in the Maintenance Management application. As soon as the work is approved, the system takes over.

If the item you want is held in inventory and you need it right away, the system automatically creates a pick ticket and the item becomes available for pickup. Otherwise the system reserves the required materials and makes them available when your project begins. If the item is not in inventory, the Procurement application handles the request.

Two-step receiving

One of Materials Management's biggest time-savers is two-step receiving. You can mark a shipment as "arrived" even though you haven't formally received it, counted it, and put it on the receiving dock. Two-step receiving is useful if you are busy or if you have off-site storage areas where you assemble those goods for re-distribution. Materials Management can also create a pick ticket right from the receiving dock so you can save on storage and picking costs.

Smart warehousing

With Materials Management, you can set up as many warehouses and hierarchies as you want. A main warehouse to store most of your materials, and a secondary one in your Maintenance Department for small quantities of selected items such as cribs, or any other arrangement that suits your needs. You can also designate certain locations as picking locations and other, less accessible places, as longer-term storage places. And the system easily adapts if you use different units of measure in different warehouses.

Automatic replenishment

Materials Management assigns a stock replenishment rule to every item in your warehouse. When the system detects that an item has reached its critical level, it automatically issues a PO release or alerts the Purchasing department. The system supports all major replenishment schemes, including ROP/EOQ, Min/Max, and OP/PQ, further enhancing a systematic supply chain.

Planning ahead

ASN (advance Shipping Notice) allows you to plan ahead since vendors send you a packing slip before they ship the goods. If an item is missing, there is enough lead time to borrow it from another job or find it elsewhere. Materials Management is ASN-ready, helping you cover shortages ahead of time so you can complete your job on time.

Integrating your costs

Because it is integrated with other Work Management applications, Materials Management helps you track the cost of goods for your projects. When the system creates a pick ticket, it retrieves the cost of items on the ticket, either from inventory or from the PO, and transmits it directly to your work plan. The system then uses the information to calculate the material costs for individual tasks or for the whole job, enhancing activity based costing by defining specific resource costs within each activity.

Tracing DSL, hazardous, and other materials

Materials Management makes it easy to trace hazardous and DSL (drug and substance legislation) materials. Once you assign these characteristics to an item, the label follows it everywhere so you can always find it. The system also documents compliance with regulations that govern these substances, by producing shipping lists or special handling requirements.

Tracking other information

You can also use the Maintenance Management application to track other kinds of information, such as warranties, thus limiting the cost of rapairable items. Or monitor who borrowed tools for various jobs and instruct the system to assess or waive charges, depending on whether or not the tools are returned. The possibilities are endless!

The Procurement Application

Saving Purchasing dollars goes right to your bottom line. The Procurement application helps you save money by giving you the information you need to make the right purchases from the right source at the right price. Because it is fully integrated with the other Work Management applications, it also gives you full control over the timing of purchases so you have everything you need to do the job on time, within budget.

Buying on demand

The Procurement application offers everything you would expect from a traditional system: on-line requisitions, POs, acknowledgments, RFQ and vendor analysis, and three-way invoice matching. But, like Materials Management, Procurement's power comes from the fact that it is fully integrated into your maintenance and other work processes.

Procurement takes up where other Computron Work Management applications leave off. When you plan a job, you list your work steps and enter a request for the resources you need to complete the project.

Because all Computron Work Management applications share information, the system automatically checks the Materials Management application to see whether the materials you requested are held in inventory or whether they must be ordered through the Procurement application.

One stop shopping

While you may have to re-key information with other systems, you only have to enter your requirements once with Computron Work Management. When you define your work steps in the Maintenance Management application. When the work is approved, the system takes over.

If the item you need is held in inventory, the Materials Management application handles it. If the item is not in inventory, the system checks the Procurement application to see if there is a blanket PO for the item. If so, the system automatically creates a PO release. If not, a notice goes to the Purchasing department so they can create a PO.

Setting up your vendors

The Procurement application can save your buyers countless hours of sorting through vendor information. When you set up your system, you can tender plenty of information, including vendor terms, their minimum order amount, and how you will communicate with them-by EDI, fax, even the Internet.

You can specify different ways of communicating for different documents-for example fax for Advance shipping Notices (ASNs) and EDI for Vendor A, and the reverse for Vendor B. Or you can set up different locations for the same vendor and different terms and conditions for each location.

After you enter the information you can perform vendor analysis to compare prices and evaluate performance, ensuring that you get the maximum benefit of your purchases.

Automating approvals

Setting up buyer queues lets you efficiently filter purchasing information to the buyer responsible for each item. With our embedded workflow, you can assign approval limits to each buyer and define the entire approval process to meet your exact business requirements so a PO automatically moves along the approval chain until it is released.

Blanket agreements

Entering your blanket POs or agreements to the system will save even more time and money. When an order comes in for materials or supplies that are part of a blanket agreement, the Procurement application automatically generates a PO release for the vendor in question. The system is automated to do it all for you.

Quotations

Analyzing requests for quotations (RFQs) often involves comparing vendors across several criteria. The Procurement application makes this easy. When you send out an RFQ, and enter the return information into the system, it generates a summary screen for each criterion, making your decision easy. Buyers can also check to see when a quote expires or when a quote is outstanding past its due date.

Vendor Performance

The Procurement application gives you quick access to existing vendor analysis data based on the criteria that are important to you, from on-time delivery to mean time between failure. Enter the characteristics that matter to you and the system generates ad hoc reports that document performance against those standards. Knowing how you have done in the past helps you source strategically, negotiate better terms, minimize returns in the future and, ultimately, reduce production downtime and maintenance costs.

The Project Management Application

Designed for complex projects like engineering shutdowns or capital projects, Computron Project Management is a comprehensive planning, scheduling, costing, and management tool to help you gain and keep control of your project.

Planning, a key ingredient

Planning is the first step. With Project Management you can create a new platform scratch, use an existing plan from a previous project, or copy a plan from the library of standard procedures.

Like Computron Maintenance Management, Project Management is an activity-based system that stores descriptions of your work. You can define high-level activities, sub-divide activities into steps, and define a logical order for the tasks. You can also specify and control all aspects of the work-from who has access to certain functions, to the kind of status classifications you need, who approves what and when.

In addition to generating requests for information or quotes, you can define resources (labor, equipment materials, tools, and services) and assign them to each task. You can also estimate the cost of each resource within each activity, roll them up to a work order cost, or roll them up to a total project cost to see if you can meet your time, budget, and resource limits. Finally, you can use Project Management's Scenarios feature to develop several work plan options, analyze them, and choose the one that fits best.

Finding the critical path

For mega-projects, you need mega-help! With thousands of tasks and inter-dependent sub-projects to coordinate, shifts to schedule, and scarce resources to assign, you need a powerful scheduling tool.

Project Management's forte is scheduling. Using sophisticated algorithms and critical path calculations, it synthesizes information from all parts of Computron's integrated system and determines the best way for you to do the job at hand.

All you have to do is enter a start date and time. The system takes over from there and calculates a finish date, taking into account all the variables-work steps, their relationship to each other, their priority, the minimum duration of each step, and the resources planned for the job. Everything is included.

Scheduling your work

Project Management's scheduler helps you "work smart." For example, it makes sure that discrete tasks don't extend beyond a shift, it schedules concurrent jobs if resources permit, and it prevents two jobs from taking place in the same place at the same time.

Flexibility is also a key component of the system. You can build your schedule based on individuals or crew. And you can decide whether to keep your key crafts in one area or move them around. You get the most efficient schedule possible based on your priorities.

Special Control Features

With Project Management, you can update your schedules within an hour of one shift to prepare for the next one. Any unfinished work can be added to the next shift so work stays current and you always know the status of your jobs.

You can perform mass updates on activities simply by entering your revised dates and pressing a button. Calculating percentage complete, using scheduling flags and other codes make tracking information and managing your large projects easier.

Interactive Gantt charts use computer assisted scheduling to dynamically update your schedule whenever you make adjustments. Enter a change in one place in your plan, and the system automatically makes all the related changes for you. Resource histograms also help you balance your resources.

Reports at all stages and levels

Project Management offers a series of planning, scheduling, cost and status reports to help you monitor your progress. The planning reports include work lists, specialized resource reports, and cost analysis down to a single resource cost within an activity.

If you want scheduling information, you can get regular shift schedules, schedules for inspection or other special jobs, resource lists, schedule analyses, and Gantt charts.

Project Management's work order system helps you retrieve cost information at any level. For example, managers can see total project costs, while supervisors can look at detailed figures for individual work orders.

The system also produces status reports, including percent complete, performance measures, remaining hours, equipment status and more.

Technology and Architecture

Computron Work Management is an open systems client/server suite of applications that is portable across all major hardware and software platforms. It is easily configured to suit your exact business requirements.

Client/Server Architecture

Computron Work Management client/server architecture features: Computron Work Management uses Open System's Entera, a set of software tools for building and managing three-tire distributed applications.

Our three-tier architecture follows the OSF DCE (Open Software Foundation Distributed Computing Environment) model endorsed by major companies like IBM, DEC, HP, Sun, Oracle, Sybase, and Microsoft as well as industry standards bodies such as IEEE and POSIX.

Design Philosophy

Computron Work Management architecture is designed to provide maximum flexibility. It supports:

Application architecture

CWM layered architecture consists of:

Recommended client requirements include MS Windows based PC's with a Pentium Processor. Computron Work Management supports the following servers:

Client user interface

Computron Work Management client software runs on Windows NT4.0, NT and Windows 95, all in 32-bit native mode.

Application logic

The application logic runs on the client PC, the database server computer, or on separate, third-tier application processors via OSF DCE. The application code runs independently of the graphical user interface (GUI) and the database and never changes from one environment to another.

Database

Computron Work Management supports Oracle and Sybase Relational Database Management Systems.

Future releases will support other Database Systems.

Portability

Computron Work Management offers complete portability because 90% of our application code is totally independent of both client and server environments. Only the GUI and database interfaces (no more than 10% of the code) require any changes.

RDBMS

Like other systems, out Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) provides data storage and retrieval. But our system adds more. In traditional applications, the client application generates SQL statements from client application screens and sends them to a database server. Computron Work Management has significant advantage because SQL statement are pre-translated and stored in the RDBMS database. We can therefore send short commands across the network to the RDBMS to invoke previously interpreted SQL.

Third-party reporting

Because Computron Work Management is based on ANSI-standard SQL-compliant relational databases, you can use third-party SQL-based ad hoc reporting tools, such as Microsoft Access and Crystal Reports to read from the Computron Work Management database. The complexity of the reports is limited only by the third-party tools you choose.

CWM offers three kinds of reporting:

You can output reports to network printers or display the results on your screen.

The advantage of our internal ad hoc and standard report features is that you can generate queries without having to configure or understand database tables, fields, joins, and so on, as required by their-party tools.

About Computron Software

Computron Software Inc. is a leader in Work and Maintenance Management, Financial, Imaging COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk) and Workflow solutions. The company's new breed of action management software is specifically designed to help you access information anywhere in your organization-quickly, easily, and from the desktop. Computron's products deliver unmatched flexibility, productivity, information access, and price performance to major Fortune 1000 companies.

Computron Financials

Computron Financial applications are an integrated suite of 2nd generation, client/server financial and accounting applications designed for open, enterprise-wide environments. Customers can select their own optimal platform and operating environment with the confidence that they have the flexibility to migrate to other platforms in the future. Computron Software also allows companies with diverse environments in multiple locations to standardize on a single work and financial management solution, regardless of hardware platform.

COOL for Windows

Computron COOL is the first system to elevate imaging to an enterprise-wide tool. COOL provides an industrial strength server that can support the most demanding report recording, indexing, and accessing requirements coupled with a graphical desktop metaphor that supports access via a cabinet/folder/document paradigm by report date or by report name.

Computron Workflow

All of Computron's products are built around the firm belief that software should support business processes--not computer processing. The way in which work flows through an organization is paramount. Yet, all too often, workflow is dictated by the software rather than the processes the software was meant to automate and enhance.

Computron Work Management(CWM)

Computron Work Management(CWM) is a seamlessly integrated work management tool, consisting of 4 applications: Maintenance, Procurement, Inventory and Project Management. CWM is flexible enough to adapt to meet your business needs regardless of industry. The added value CWM offers is embedded workflow that makes your system easily configurable, functionality that flexibly supports business process reengineering and architecture that creates a fully integrated resource, maintenance and materials management backbone. At the heart of this backbone is a "virtual map" of your organization within the CWM Facility/Equipment database. This automates your planning and management process, gathers all relevant resources, schedules multiple or individual job steps, and generates reports including those related to cost control.

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