Design of automated Ethernet Cards tracking system

Executive Summary

Our customer develops 10Gb accelerated Ethernet adapters and 10Gb adapters for blade configurations. Every giga bit card is verified after passing through various workflow stages before shipment. Manually tracking the flow of each card and its status through all the stages was leading to a number of quality control errors in the end-product.

ennovate proposed to automate the workflow of the gigabit ethernet cards and eliminate manual intervention completely. Consequently, ennovate developed various modules to track the workflow of the cards, following an agile development methodology. Overall, ennovate’s offshore development team helped reduce our customer’s operational costs by over 21% and card validation time by over 33%.

The Customer

• Our customer develops connectivity solutions through high-performance, low-power multi-gigabit Ethernet products
• Every cards received from the manufacturer may go from different stages like card receiving process, inventory, reject & return to vendor, shipping of the cards etc. This system was developed to track the flow of the cards from its inception to shipping to the end customers by capturing status at each stage

The Challenge

• Lack of accuracy through manual card tracking - It is quite a cumbersome task to track the flow of each card without an automated system. It is also difficult to find out the number of cards- received from the manufacturer, passed/failed at different stages of the test floor, scrapped/returned back to vendor due to defects and those shipped to the customer

The Solution

• ennovate provided an effective solution to track the networking cards at all the workflow stages through a completely offshore agile development methodology
• We have developed the following modules:
  • Receive Cards: This module helps operator to scan cards received from manufacturer using bar code reader
  • Reject & Return cards to Vendor: This will help operator to mark defected cards as rejected and return them to the vendor
  • Scrap Cards: Unusable cards are marked as scrap to prevent further usage, through this module
  • Move Cards to Test floor: This will help operator to move the cards to different test floors
  • Move Cards to Test floor: This will help operator to move the cards to different test floors
  • Move Cards to Inventory: This will help operator to move cards to inventory and add on to the inventory stock after the cards pass all the tests on the Test Floor
  • Log Cards to Engineering: This will help operator to move cards to different departments like architecture, marketing, hardware engineering etc.
  • Check out Cards: This module helps user to move cards from Inventory stock to the test floor for Final Ship Test (FST) before shipping the cards to customer
  • Ship Cards: Performs quality control checks on the cards, such as MAC address validation, firmware and EEPROM checks etc, before shipping to customer

• Here is the overall system flow diagram:

  

The Benefits

• With the automated card tracking system, our customer can now track the flow of every card at different stages of the supply chain and can also identify any anomalies without manual intervention
• The automated system was able to bring down operational costs by over 21% and validation time by over 33%