OREANDA-NEWS. January 10, 2013. The Engineering Portal has discussed the introduction at Salut of NSI Semantic Information Management System and TP Timeline CAD System (both developed by SDI Solution) with Dmitriy Yeliseyev, IT Director, Dmitriy Zabelyan, Head of Process Engineering Department and Yana Sokolova, Head of Technical Information Bureau.

Dmitriy Yeliseyev pointed out that “Salut has to date garnered wide experience in implementing IT projects. A geographically distributed infrastructure was put in place using dozens of dedicated programs and advanced equipment”. Nevertheless, the reference information centralized management has been remaining an open issue for the last ten years. The dedicated systems to address this problem, known as MDM (Master Data Management), are a relatively recent solution that was quick to arise the interest of specialists from Salut.

Two years ago, Salut made his definitive choice by opting for an offer from SDI Solution, a Russian solution provider, reputed for his excellence in adapting MDM technologies to the engineering purposes and whose ability to team up high professionals had been proven in previous joint projects with our company.

According to Dmitriy Zabelyan, “the advantage of the system consists in that a specialist from a separate department is totally responsible for the data he enters and for their updating. All the other departments and divisions are there to use this information or to complement it.”

From the very beginning, it was not an easy task for the Contractor (SDI Solution) to make an exhaustive analysis of our company's data arrangement principles and flows so as to have a holistic approach to the multitude of specific responsibilities to be brought under one common denominator. So, the lead-time for the project launch had to last around two months. Another 3-4 months were spent on coordinating various approaches, conceptions and the development of a master model.

For Dmitriy Yeliseyev, once fully implemented, “the project will allow the company to significantly optimize its costs by introducing commonality in the data management processes and avoiding duplication of reference data when planning the manufacturing resources and inventories.”

Yana Sokolova is responsible for the NSI reference data updated status during the technological process information transfer into the NSI Semantic system from the inheritable sources. She finds it challenging and highly interesting to have to do with various types of data from the company's numerous information systems, each one of them requiring individual approach and treatment. “All the more gratifying it is when you find a quick and efficient way to achieve a comprehensive data transfer”, says she. Interacting and communicating with people from the many departments and divisions of the factory, both engineering and administrative, is also part of her duties. Sokolova adds: “During personal exchanges, I always try to put across the idea of how important this new system is for the company as a whole, not only for individual departments and employees.”

On the company's staff, there are 600 process engineers with 300-350 of them already redeployed to work within the new system. In the perspective of 2013, it is planned to implement a full-fledged traffic of electronic data on the product composition and manufacturing processes inside the planning loop of manufacturing and material resources.

The finality of the project is to relinquish the old on-paper description of a manufacturing process in favor of the electronic documents.