
Introduction
Medha Servo Drives Pvt. Ltd., founded in 1984, is focused on rail transportation. Since inception, Medha has used Research and Development as a tool for success and today they are proud to be known for their product range, domain knowledge, design expertise, quality and manufacturing capabilities. Medha have designed and manufactured various world-class high-tech electronics products for application on locomotives, coaches, railway stations and yards. They specialize in designing and engineering their products to withstand shock and vibration, wide temperature variations, and electrical disturbances that are typical of harsh locomotive environment. Their strength lies in designing, customizing and integrating systems that involve multiple functional domains such as control electronics, power electronics, fail safety and mechanical construction.
Challenges
Medha’s product specialization covers Control Electronics, Power Electronics and Signaling. The requirements of these domains are very complex and safety critical. There are verification and validation processes at each stage of designing and manufacturing activities. Medha’s core strength and competency is in,
- Embedded control for real-time applications
- Mission critical and safety critical applications
- Power conversion Electronics
- Packaging and Ruggedisation for Railway Environment
- Unmatched Diesel Locomotive knowledge in India
- End–to–end Solutions: Product conception, Design & Development, Engineering, Manufacturing and After sale service
For achieving above strength and competencies Medha have faced challenges in following process areas.
Kovair Application Lifecycle Management Solution
Kovair Application Lifecycle Management Solution provides a rich and configurable, global platform for implementing Software Development Lifecycle process, collaborating on the entire development cycle and tracing implementations back to original requirements. Kovair Application Lifecycle Management Solution ensures that all stake-holders and team-members are working from the same playbook, no matter where they are located, and that there are no costly last minute surprises. The result is a top-quality application that matches what Medha has asked for and complies with their internal and external-Requirement-Management. The main features of Kovair Application Lifecycle Management Solution are:
- 100% Web based for global access without any client side software.
- Multiple ALM Solutions (Requirements, System Architecture, Design Elements, Tests, Defects and Change Requests) in a single data repository.
- Achieve Change management with multi-level traceability
- Built in Workflow Process and Policy Engines for reviews and escalations.
- Document attachment capabilities for a global review and approval of documents.
- Microsoft Word Import Add-on helped in importing requirements from Microsoft Word document
- Microsoft Word Report Add-on helped in creating comprehensive real-time word reports such as SRS, SAD etc.
- Excellent Reporting capabilities with Dashboards, Word, Excel and Crystal reports.
- SOA based Enterprise Service Bus “Omnibus” integrations with any best-of-breed third party tools for Integrated ALM Solutions.
Solution implemented at Medha
Entities Defined for Medha’s Application Lifecycle Management Solution Kovair Application Lifecycle Management Solution was fully custom configured (codeless mouse click configurations) to meet Medha requirements, which included domain and safety specific challenges. The final Application Lifecycle Management Solution implemented at Medha consisted of the following entities or objects:
- Products
- Projects
- System Requirements
- System Architecture Requirements
- Requirements
- Design Elements
- Test Cases
- Defects
- Change Requests
Conclusion
Medha has achieved all their goals of Requirements and Change Management control mechanisms for very high reliability Railway Systems for electronic hardware, embedded software and mechanical systems by implementing the Kovair Application Lifecycle Management Solution in their organization and are very happy with the outcome. They have made a presentation of their positive experience at a recent customer seminar organized by Kovair at Hyderabad, India that led to the creation of this case study!