Case study · Manufacturing
A design management system for a global manufacturer
A bespoke system for managing design drafts, gathering structured feedback and tracking projects from brief to sign-off.
The challenge
Rectella International (the company behind Bar-Be-Quick) needed a system for their design department to be able to add and distribute designs. After searching, they found that there was no off the shelf package that would do this easily. Users needed to be notified of artwork being added and be able to comment on this. Each project needed to be able to handle multiple drafts of artwork. Also key to the success of the project, was ease and speed of use, with a mixed demographic from in-house designers to sales staff and factory floor supervisors using the system. Most of the users needed something that worked with minimal training, so it had to have a very intuitive interface.
Our approach
Vigeo Systems worked closely with the design team to generate a specification, before developing functionality and letting the design team test and trial the initial release. New functionality has been added to the system, with each piece of work being built in partnership with the stakeholders to ensure the exact requirement was met each time. In its first release, the application was hosted in-house, and so we had to integrate with on-premise Active Directory for user accounts. A major overhaul meant that the application was moved off-site, and as part of this, we needed to change how files were stored in the database. We opted to move the storage to use SQL FILESTREAM to tightly couple the files with the data in the database.
The outcome
A living system that contains over 11,600 artwork files across 5,200+ projects that is accessible from anywhere and is easily expanded to add new functionality. One example of this is the KPI tracking we added to monitor average number of drafts per project, number of new projects opened and closed in a time period, average time spent etc. Managers now have a clear sight of the current state of the design projects and their progress. Designers can quickly add their work to the system and receive feedback from stakeholders in the project, with live email notifications on all artwork updates and comments.
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