P and H Mining Equipment use DominoPDF to generate professional looking PDF reports for easy distribution and printing.
RJ Lindsay of P and H Mining writes about the project challenges and implementation.
Company Overview
Joy Global Inc. is a worldwide mining machinery and services company. Through its market leading divisions — P and H Mining Equipment and Joy Mining Machinery — the Company manufactures underground and surface mining equipment and offers aftermarket-related services. P and H Mining Equipment and Joy Mining Machinery are both recognized leaders in the design, manufacture, distribution, service and enhancement of mining machinery and equipment. Joy Global’s products and related services are used extensively for the mining of coal, copper, iron, gold and other mineral resources.
Joy Global and its divisions pride themselves on providing a full range of value-additive aftermarket services, and are committed to assisting their customers mine ores and minerals at the lowest possible cost. To achieve these objectives, they use a Life Cycle Management Strategies (LCMS) approach, which places the highest value on continuous and exceptional customer support. To assist our customers, facilities and equipment service centers span six continents and over twenty distinct countries.
The mining industry is vital to the overall health of the world economy. Today, more than 50% of the electricity generated in the US comes from coal-fired power plants. Joy Global expects to continue its role as a leader in assuring that mineral and energy resources are efficiently and carefully extracted, and delivered reliably to meet the requirements of the world economy.
Project Overview
This project was aimed at eliminating the use of a local database by each repair center around the world for collecting inspection data for various underground mining components re-builds and repairs. The plan was to create a global Domino database(s) to be accessible to everyone involved in the inspection process, which included the inspector(s), shop floor supervisor, engineers, contractors and possibly even customers.
Creating such a database would allow global quality to standardize the data captured by the inspectors, which at the time was in a different format depending on the location that the data came from. This would allow for easier analysis of the data by the engineers that would lead to more accurate trend prediction. The global database would also allow for on the fly customer reports for inspections that included visual evidence on why a repair may/may not be in warranty.
This improved customer service and also improved turn around times on repairs for our customers.
DominoPDF
We selected dominoPDF because our customer requested a professional looking report that a sales person could easily distribute via email or print to their customers upon request.
The repair center supervisors also wanted a better way to communicate to customers what exactly was looked at when their component was inspected.
Looking at other comparable products DominoPDF was the most cost effective, yet mature product that was easy to use. We pretty much installed the software on our server and were off and running in less then a day.
Technical Notes
We created a Domino form based on requests from various customers on what they wanted to see on their service report.
We created a link that runs an agent that composes a form onscreen with the data the customer wants to see and then invoke the dominoPDF software.
The PDF report opens on the requestor’s screen allowing them to save the file to their local machine, email it or print it out to send to the customer.
This is now the standard customer report tool used for all of our inspection databases.
About the Author
RJ Lindsay has worked at P and H Mining as an analyst for over 5 years. He has been working primarily with Lotus Notes/Domino for about 8 years. His expertise is in creating web based applications in Domino.