Objective SAET has three domains of activity: design and production of energy production, transmission and distribution systems; design and production of weighing, dosing and mixing systems; design and production of industrial automation systems. As regards safety, the strict quality standard EN89/392/September 93 is applied.This traditional business, rooted in electrical engineering, has become more and more software intensive in the last three years. Today 10 employees of the company out of 40 are involved in software production. While customers demand greater reliability and cost effectiveness, the company was able to obtain productivity and quality improvements in the traditional part of its business, but not in software production. On the contrary, this still minor part of the business is causing an increasing part of faults and delays.To gain control of software production, SAET decided in 1995 to set up for its software department a ISO9001 compliant quality system. The quality system is , up to date, paper oriented and has a number of drawbacks: waste of time, both from the staff and the quality manager, for clerical tasks, negative influence on the attitude of staff towards the quality system. The risk is high that, on the long run, the quality system be abandoned or have a negative effect on productivity.The objective of this PIE is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the quality system. In measurable terms this means reduction in effort by staff using the quality system of 30%, productivity of quality manager improved 30%; 75 % of staff globally satisfied and having a positive attitude towards the quality system; reduction in number fault reports from installed software and rework effort.THE EXPERIMENTThis project aims at automating the clerical tasks of the quality system (document search and retrieval, communication of documents, access to the quality manual, access to quality sheets and logs, measures collection and processing), by exploiting as much as possible the context of the organisation: a PC for each staff member, PCs connected by a LAN, MS Office tools on each PC.The experiment, after an initial assessment dedicated to detailed analysis of the current situation of the quality system, will redesign the quality system, both to automate it and to adapt it to automation. Then the staff will be trained on the new QS and the new QS experimented on a baseline project (a monitoring and control system for an hydroelectric plant ). Feedback from the experiment will be used to modify and improve further the QS.EXPECTED IMPACT AND EXPERIENCETECHNICAL IMPACT We expect that the productivity of work dedicated to the quality system will substantially improve. This means less time dedicated by the staff to the QS, more time for relevant work on the QS available for the quality manager.HUMAN FACTOR IMPACT Much more important, on the human factor side we expect that, reducing (possibly to zero) clerical quality tasks, the staff will change positively its attitude towards the QS, will consider the time dedicated to it a kind of value added, instead of time lost. This can produce a positive feedback effect: people more motivated to work with the QS, better products produced, more motivated people.COMMERCIAL/ORGANISATIONAL IMPACT We expect that the automation of the QS will make immediately available indicators (measures) of the state of projects, products, and the company in general. These are strategic data not available today because of the difficulty in processing data in paper form. Fields of science natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwareengineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringcontrol systemssocial sciencessociologyindustrial relationsautomationengineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectrical engineeringsocial sciencespsychologyergonomics Programme(s) FP4-ESSI 2 - Software Best Practice initiative within the framework of the specific research and technological development programme in the field of Information Technologies, 1994-1998 Topic(s) 1.28 - Process Improvement Experiments Call for proposal Data not available Funding Scheme ACM - Preparatory, accompanying and support measures Coordinator Societa Anonima Elettrotecnica "S.A.E.T." EU contribution No data Address Viale Dell'industria 14 35030 Rubano (Pd) Italy See on map Total cost No data
