Scientific Document Management System for the Nuclear Field

Customer

The Customer is the world’s intergovernmental organization for scientific and technical co-operation in the nuclear field with worldwide representations.

Challenge

Due to the complexity of nuclear material tracking processes, a dozen of small systems were developed to cover data management. Out of this challenge, several problems aroused. One of them was that business processes changed very quickly and information systems did not manage to cover various aspects of tracking the data. Another challenge was that those systems were not connected and the data was stored in different formats in several places. The complexity of nuclear business domain and constraints from the science of physics also introduced a challenge in creating a unified system that could track all aspects of organization processes. In addition, the stakeholders were using outdated mainframes to record data before, during and after the inspection of the nuclear facilities. The Customer decided to introduce migration to more updated systems in order to improve service quality and provide verification of all the documentation.

Solution

To reach the goals all existing business processes, rules and artifacts were refined and documented in order to provide the decision source for further information. The following actions were carried out to collect information:

• Interviewing stakeholders and studying their documentation, processes and policy;
• Reverse-engineering mainframe code to perform some data calculations and recording all the calculation algorithms and business rules in the specifications.

Due to the huge amount of information, the document creation process was automated using a specially developed tool, which processes UML diagrams and creates documentation using organization templates.

After the business processes had been documented, the next steps were to elaborate the requirements for the new system, to develop data structures and user interface layouts and to verify them with the end users in order to achieve project goals.

The new system is designed to be built with applying Service Oriented Architecture principles and using the latest Microsoft technologies.

Results

Thanks to clear understanding of the Customer’s requirements, ScienceSoft team successfully performed business analysis as well as developed and verified all the specifications.

ScienceSoft’s experts managed to create all-in-one solution that integrated functionality of all the separated systems that were previously used as well as stored data in unified format. Migration to an automated system rendered the stakeholders’ work faster and more efficient.

Technologies and Tools

ADABAS and PL1 mainframe codes; .NET. Framework 3.5; Sparx Enterprise Architect; MS SQL Server 2008; MS Team Foundation Server; MS SharePoint 2007; Universal Modeling Language.