Cars are the fundamental element to the auto racing business. The cars must perform. With corporate and network sponsors, prize money and reputations at stake, errors can be costly. To ensure that cars are kept in prime condition, each car part must be monitored and precisely tracked.
Tracking the "lifespan" of a car part is essential in car racing. During a season, a team can use more than $500,000 of disposable car parts. Some cars use as many as 28 tires in a weekend. Typically, each mechanic is responsible for specific car parts. In the past, these mechanics would track the parts` histories on paper. However, the paper trails became too large to maintain and a new system was required.
This scenario prompted Advanced Racing Systems in 1995 to create a "flat file database" as a record keeping system. The limiting factors were the report creation to view the data and excessive time spent in data entry. To combat these shortcomings, Advanced Racing Systems developed a new database product, PartLife, one year later.
PartLife makes the task of tracking miles on car parts easy, while providing great flexibility to accommodate the unique approaches seen among the different race teams. Car parts and chassis are defined to the PartLife program. The parts that are in use are linked to the chassis, and then miles are accumulated to the chassis, which then transfers those miles to the parts that were on the car at the time. In addition to tracking the parts` miles, PartLife assists in the selection of parts to be put on the car.
Reporting is the mission critical aspect of PartLife. Advanced Racing Systems recognized that it was going to need a tool that could create reports to meet the needs of each racing team, each with distinctive needs. "Typically, the need for the report arises because of some situation that just popped up. The report is needed now, not two days from now," said Carey Parkes, principal, Advanced Racing Systems, Ltd. "In racing, two days from now the car has been built, tested, qualified and raced."
Seagate Crystal Reports, the award-winning query and reporting tool from Seagate Software, met Advanced Racing Systems` business needs and brought substantial benefits to the PartLife program. Not only does Seagate Crystal Reports allow for instant, up to date information, it can report from multiple data sources and produce presentation quality reports.
Crystal Reports` sub-reporting feature is especially helpful to Advanced Racing Systems` clients that have sub-assemblies, such as Patrick Racing. "The Seagate reporting function in PartLife makes answering unique questions easy", says Jim Rodgers of Patrick Racing. "The database manager can tell a mechanic which gears were run on a given automobile racing on any specific track on a given day. Our teams rely on reports like this to build our cars."
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