Facility Engineering Work Products System (FEWPS)

In the FEWPS initiative, KBSI leveraged the eTEAM solution for life cycle product management to create a system for tracking and managing requests in the development of facility engineering work products.

The process of developing complex systems or products typically requires participation from multiple specialties and organizations:  domain stakeholders, technology engineers, modeling and simulation analysts, system engineers, and managers.  Managing this development, because of the inherently complex, long-term, and multi-organizational nature of the work, is a challenging proposition that involves a number of facets and tasks:  request instantiation, disposition, and monitoring; generating and submitting a requirements package; tracking the outcomes of submissions; monitoring the status of outcomes; and generating reports, budgeting, and prioritization.  These operations currently tend to be performed manually and, as a consequence, are labor intensive and prone to errors.  There is no collaborative working environment and no centralized access to data.

To address these issues, KBSI developed the Facility Engineering Work Products System (FEWPS).  FEWPS provides a secure, role-based, and collaborative work environment that supports the facility work product management process.  The technology provides request tracking and management, allowing users to instantiate, disposition, monitor and track requests, and to support budgeting, prioritization, and report generation with role-based access control (RBAC).

webbanner_productionmanagementThe FEWPS initiative was a task within the original eTEAM™ technology development initiative and leveraged and applied the eTEAM™ framework concepts, technology, and experience in establishing automated support for the management of facility work products across their life cycle.  The eTEAM™ technology framework is grounded in the U.S. Air Force’s Systems Engineering Methodology (SEM).  eTEAM™ provides both the methodological foundation and automated support for the administrative and technical management of systems and their life-cycle system artifacts using the SEM.

FEWPS is based on the .NET framework and XML Web Services and supports both a Web application and a Windows desktop application version of the system.  The Windows application is designed for use by engineers and managers; the Web application is designed for shop floor requestors and provides limited functionality.  The FEWPS Web application allows shop floor requestors to submit requests, view the list of active requests, browse through previous requests, check the status of requests, and edit or cancel active requests.  The Web application is always in the online mode, allowing users within an Intranet to access FEWPS and request components via a Web browser.  Each new request submitted through the Web application is available to FEWPS users in the FEWPS Smart client.

Desktop users (engineers and managers) can view requests, workspaces, projects, DSWs, service orders, word orders, procurements, CSRDs, and facilities for specific development projects.  Managers can assign requests to engineers who can then manage the information associated with the assigned request, track and review the request history, and document and save prioritization plans for projects.  Engineers can also create, edit, delete, version, and track the history of contract, budget, and expense information related to projects and requests.  FEWPS also allows managers to automatically generate reports depicting the time-phased layout of projects, their relationships, and their estimated impact to production using graphical representations.

FEWPS was designed with the goal of building a system that is scalable, reliable, and extensible and that provides comprehensive and secure request tracking and management for facility engineering work products.