Ensuring business continuity in times of crisis with ECLIPSE Software Suite

How can one ensure business continuity and resilience in a time of crisis?

The current coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is having a major impact on business operations, with some industries having to slow down or even shut down completely their production line. Not a few start-ups and small companies already are filing for bankruptcy and staff is being reduced to the bare minimum or required to work from home during self-confinement periods.

Both private and government organisations need to remain proactive and innovative in their decision-making to preserve business continuity and build enterprise resilience in this uniquely challenging environment. Companies across industry sectors are forced to rethink how they operate. Businesses must remain secure, intelligent and connected, even (or perhaps, especially) in times of crisis.

While most of their staff is working remotely business and government organisations need to ensure that their highly critical infrastructure is maintained and accessible, their rigorous and reliable engineering processes and activities are continued, and their critical data are managed and shared in a secure way, without any loss or interruption that could have a major financial and operational impact.

Our ECLIPSE Software Suite can provide the digital foundation required for remote working employees, granting secure access to essential business and/or technical information and systems, enabling effective on-line collaboration amongst dispersed internal and external stakeholders and providing synthesized data into timely insights while maintaining supply chain visibility.

The ECLIPSE Software Suite is a SaaS solution that can be configured and scaled to support the following use cases:

1. Support business continuity for high reliability and critical engineering projects

In high-reliability engineering projects, a great deal of documentation is created and exchanged amongst the many actors, stakeholders, and experts involved. Managing this documentation is therefore essential. Documents must be able to be classified, edited, modified, and shared while maintaining their consistency, configuration, and reliability. Our Document Configuration and Change Management (DCCM) solution of the ECLIPSE Software Suite enables geographically dispersed and multidisciplinary teams to continue to collaborate in a highly secure environment. Managing the progress of these projects, being alerted on any arising issues, and keeping track of important process decisions and information can be facilitated in real-time through our integrated Action Item Management (AIM) solution.

2. Support the design, documentation review and validation of highly critical and reliable equipment (e.g. space, defence and medical equipment)

Given that the ECLIPSE Suite is used to support the design and built of satellites, payloads, and launchers for the European space sector, its design is a close fit to support industry with similar rigorous engineering and quality validation process. The medical equipment sector has similar high-reliability standards and must invoke traceability of all documentation, design reviews, non-conformances, and actions performed to design, test, and approve equipment for production, test, and use. The ECLIPSE Suite can provide the necessary tools to achieve an end-to-end process entirely online.

3. Support the supply chain management

In disruptive times it is essential to go back to basics and understand what capabilities and expertise exist within an industry to address critical issues. Having clear visibility of the capabilities, competencies, and resources will help procurement teams to connect to the right suppliers or quickly chose the suppliers on specific search criteria. ECLIPSE ICMDB module can build up a centralised industrial capability mapping database in terms of skills, products and capabilities within any sector, and can certainly be used to support the health sector. It will provide insights into the end-to-end supply chain operations, helping any actors to choose the right partner at various times in a crisis.

As seen in recent times, governments rely on the industry to come up with innovative ideas and solutions to fight against the COVID-19 crisis. Not all ideas within this Call for Ideas will be or can be selected. But how can one make the right decisions in this maze? How can one run collaborative, data-intensive activities while minimizing the risks to reliability, configuration, security, version control, and data integrity?

The ECLIPSE Database Application Builder (DAB) module has been purposely designed to solve these challenges and empower remote and dispersed decisions makers with the perfect tool to address many facets of data management and process tracking requirements.

The Database Application Builder (DAB) module allows users to build one (or a multitude) of rigorously audited database applications on-the-fly, share its content with other authorised colleagues and business partners, manage workflows, and control the release and update of information. Each DAB Application can address different and specific needs in terms of data and/or process management of a financial, contractual, managerial or engineering nature.

In DAB, a user can easily link data to other applications’ records within the ECLIPSE suite or outside via weblinks, enabling fully-integrated management of a project lifecycle. DAB project users are able to retrieve, through powerful searches, the necessary information and data at the right time, without the need to look across multiple platform data silos.

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