Organizing and Managing your Finished Goods
One of the hidden challenges faced by software companies is organizing and securing the finished product and its digital assets. Typically a product’s digital assets (electronic finished goods) come from various groups like development, technical writing and product management. These digital assets are collected and placed on a gold master. Collecting and protecting these assets is usually secondary to the release process and many times you must move on to the next release without tying up the loose strings on the latest release. RESCUE helps to organize and secure the finished goods while building the final release be it for physical or electronic release.
RESCUE provides a collaborative secure workspace which can be used by many different groups involved in the creation, approval and distribution of your products. RESCUE is browser-based allowing all team members to access it easily including third parties such as outside manufacturing/fulfillment houses, OEM partners, test labs and integration and development partners.
 As a manufacturing control application RESCUE is a central repository linking content, structure, metadata including product chaining information.
So what is manufacturing control and how does it fit into the software management world? Manufacturing control encompasses two standard and overlapping processes:
Release Management and Supply Chain Management
In both processes, the goal is move a digital product through its production cycle through a controlled and standard methodology, namely through workflow management. RESCUE provides a standard 5 stage production cycle which starts out with product definition, moves through sourcing, then onto test, first article and finally to be released.
Alerts can be generated as product is created, loaded, tested and released, ensuring that contributors, producers, consumers and interested parties are all notified as they require. Schedules can be built and alerts can be triggered when scheduled workflow is missed.
Manufacturing control also means linking the content to the structure and tracking check-ins (submits) and check-outs (retrieves). It means locking content and structure when in the test and production phases. All activities are tracked. It also means linking metadata like product descriptions or ECCN numbers and even custom information to the product structure.
All levels of the BOM (products or kits, objects or components) can have structure, content, metadata and workflow states. This means components like CDs which may be separate kits are tracked it as the CD is referenced as the same part number in those kits. Adding content or changing states of the CD affects all the kits ensuring complete synchronization.
Having content in a controlled and central repository means one place to go and get it and only if you have permission. Content submissions and retrievals are check-summed to ensure the entire content has been successful uploaded or downloaded. Linking the state shows you not only the content is safe but you know at what level within the work process the content represents.
Release Management
RESCUE’s built-in workflow management can be used to move streamline the release management process. Teams can use the collaborative environment to ensure they are synchronized and notified as individual components like CDs are ready. Schedules can be input and are automatically monitored and will trigger events that may cause alerts (notifications) to be generated when missed.
Part numbering and revision control ensures order and discipline is maintained. Parts that have been released can not be modified except by revision control. Who changed what and when are all logged so change tracking and forensic study is made easy.
Tired of not knowing the state of a release or its components? Before a product can more from one state to another all the child components (like CDs) must be at the same or higher level. This means when promoting a product confirmation is requested for those components identified at a lower level. This helps prevent the situation where a CD is still being tested and somebody declares the product GA. View flash presentation on release management.
Supply Chain Management
Tired of getting or sending gold masters, what outside groups to be able to participate or contribute directly to the release process; RESCUE can help. To receive gold masters or any content from a vendor, you create the appropriate part number or better yet have your vendor to that and then allow them to submit the content. The content could be an ISO file and bitmaps for the hub art. It could be zip files or individual files that go on the CD/DVD. The granularity is up to you.
Whether you production team is in-house or a third party, RESCUE can be used to alert them when products become ready for them to manufacture, via workflow management and alerts. Downloads are check-summed so you are sure they are getting the whole and correct content each and every time.
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