Bespoke project control database for Alpine Electronics

Alpine Electronics are producers of quality in car audio and telematic systems. They produce hi-end systems for aftermarket (vehicle owner fit) and prestige vehicle manufacturers, for example Jaguar, Aston Martin, Bentley, Land Rover and Volvo.

As any supplier to the automotive industry knows, this industry sector places high demands on their suppliers. These demands include: consistent and reliable communication to multiple divisions spanning many continents; delivery on time and to budget (not just to support vehicle manufacture but during the arduous vehicle development cycle which typically takes 3/4 years); compliance with strict quality and environmental standards such as QS9000, ISO/TS 16949 and ISO 14000.

At the time Support for Organisations began working with Alpine Electronics UK, they were going through a period of growth in both their customer base and the number of employees.

When Alpine were small, it was relatively easy for the management team to understand what was going on in the organisation. As the number of customers grew with staff numbers to match, this became more difficult.

Alpine turned to Support for Organisations to develop a bespoke database system that controlled every aspect of their OEM business. The objective to develop a system which tracked all communications, key performance measures (metrics) and provide the management team objective reporting based on real time information. The system had to be designed to support Alpine’s move towards ISO/TS 16949 (QS 9000) and ensure that during staff absence any employee could know exactly what was going on their projects.

Support for Organisations worked with Alpine Electronics to develop a bespoke database system, which complied with the exacting control requirements of ISO/TS 16949. In addition we developed many of Alpines operational procedures and helped to guide Alpine to ISO/TS 16949 which they achieved first time.

A system diagram is shown below which illustrates some of the information which was captured for reporting.

Summary of data captured.

Contact information:

All contact for key suppliers and customers stored in a relational database
Bi-directional correspondence with customers recorded with hyperlinks to master documents
All issues and todo’s associated with contacts recorded for reporting

Project Engineers:

All project timing information and milestones recorded and links to Microsoft Project for gannt chart production
All issues/problems and todo’s the project engineer is working on recorded
Correspondence and associated documents between project engineer and customer
All requests for quotations and resultant quotations produced

Product Information:

All drawings and specifications including revision tracking
Bill of materials, assembly and sub assembly details
Product development schedules (sample delivery and test schedules)
Issues and resolution with modification level tracking
Details of development testing and results
Hardware and software revision issue log for traceability

Timing and project control:

Key performance measures and milestone performance

Commercial:

Pricing and price breakdown for products and product tooling

Features:

The database system was networked with appropriate user level security. In addition to support project engineers that were frequently out of the office, the database was replicated so they were able to work on a local machine copy, then synchronise upon their return to the office.