Acknowledging that quality control is vital to the success of any organisation, the local office of APV, has implemented its Quality Management and Sales System, named CAANDI, that will ensure manufacturing standards are adhered to on a global basis.
CAANDI, which is based on the Lotus Notes and Domino platform to run the company`s electronic ISO 9000 manual and Corrective Action Requests, was developed and implemented locally by Lotus Business Partner, Sambane Business Solutions.
Sambane`s Paul Young, says that document Change Requests can be created for the manual directly through the Notes interface. "If they (APV) had to use any other application they would have to implement a third-party tool to obtain the same kind of functionality." According to Peter Purdon, IT Systems Administrator at APV, the company has four corporate databases in use, all developed by Sambane, in conjunction with APV, South Africa These take the form of product and client lists, major project registration and tracking as well as the products installed at clients.
"APV is a supplier of process engineering solutions and automation to the food, beverage, pharmaceutical and healthcare industries and therefore it is important that we are able to identify the solutions that have been installed as well as being able to track the progress of any given installation," he says.
"The replication abilities of Notes allow us to maintain uniform control of data while it is being updated," he adds.
Purdon says that Notes and Domino were chosen primarily for their inherent stability and flexibility. "At the end of the day Domino has more features than the Microsoft option," he says.
Purdon says the company is also moving to set up an intranet using Domino as a secure server platform. "We have found that with Domino all the data on our network is kept in the same place. This ensures that the database file is kept compact and that data is never lost, unlike other applications that store data across the network," he adds. The Intranet will be extended to provide Engineers based on-site access to their e-mail, procedures, Corrective Actions and drawings directly via the Internet.
The security features found in Domino have also proven to be of benefit to the company which managed to stave off a number of the `worm` virus attacks that use Microsoft`s Outlook application to gain access to server and client hard drives. "We`ve had very few problems in this area," he says.
Lesego Tlhabanelo, marketing communications manager at Lotus Development SA, says that using Lotus Notes and Domino R5, comprehensive and fully integrated security, messaging and administration features can easily support and build a secure infrastructure.
"The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) of Lotus Notes and Domino offers features that extend security to the Notes workstation. The Execution Control List (ECL) is an integrated security feature provided by the Lotus Notes and Domino PKI since R4.5.
"Although no software is immune to threats, the key to ensuring a secure environment is proper implementation of features and a solid administration model," he concludes.
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