The move to Product Data Management (PDM) technology and the ISO9001 registration effort across GTE Government Systems has brought new insight to the development and support of detailed engineering processes. On the automated design network, critical processes that are not used daily, such as new project startup, have left the technical staff mentally saturated, constantly requesting help from the support staff. GTE has turned to workflow technology to improve this situation.

One of these methods, called project enrollment, is the subject of the pilot workflow project at GTE. Enrollment is the method by which a new hardware design project requests service on the design automation network. Because enrollments are not a daily occurrence, users tend to forget the requirement and the process. The present procedure requires a meeting with a specified agenda. The output of this meeting is a completed checklist which characterizes the project.

Using workflow tools, this meeting will be eliminated, the checklist will be automated and new project installation time will be reduced from days to hours. The results will be distributed by email to network administrators, application specialists, parts management specialists, test development engineers and to the project engineering manager to indicate readiness of all support functions. In this way the need for a meeting will be eliminated while process training and institutionalization will be intuitive.

This paper discusses the reasons for turning to workflow technology and the progress of the enrollment method as the pilot project.

Bio:
Mr. Thompson is a systems engineer in the Design Automation Systems group at GTE Government Systems, Communication Systems Division. With 25 years in the electronics industry, he is responsible for hardware engineering process development using CAE/CAD tools. In 1996 he proposed the use of workflow technology for CAE/CAD process management at GTE to solve chronic process-related problems. During the past year he has been developing workflow-enabled solutions for both the electrical and mechanical design processes. Formerly, he was the principal architect of a high-integrity release/archive process, integrating Mentor Graphic's EDA tools with an enterprise level Product Data Management system. His early work on EDA processes produced a library management system in which relational data base technology drives company-specific data into the schematic capture and board layout processes.