Insynthesis Integration

With more than 3 decades of experience in systems engineering processes in the rail, road and radioactive waste industries, we have the skills to support design integration processes in:

• Requirements Elicitation
• Systems Architecture
• Interface Management
• Systems Assurance
• MS Office automation
• Training delivery

LinkedIn Profile

Insynthesis Inspiration

With more than 3 decades of experience in building and renovating houses, we have the skills to help you:

Self-builders – build an energy efficient home.

Home owners – understand how you can retrofit your home to make it more energy efficient.

We can also help you source energy efficient materials at the best prices.

The Self Build Store

Energy Efficient Houses

We also build energy efficient houses and renovate/retrofit houses to make them more energy efficient.

With a solid grounding in passivhaus techniques and products, which are usually the domain of the rich, we strive to build energy efficient housing for low income families.

Ecological Homes Limited

Office automation example 1

A client organisation had a complex set of requirements provided in wordy .pdf documents to be adapted to the UK market. An Operational Concept for the UK had been developed and broken into 31 separate topic documents.

Each topic document required analysis to determine what the impact would be on UK infrastructure and operations and converted into requirements to, ultimately, be captured in standards.

As the team elicited and captured the requirements we fed them into a client/server DOORS database. A toolset was developed in MS Excel allowing the requirements to be downloaded from DOORS, either by topic area, or a cross section of topic areas to ensure consistency, ready for review by subject matter experts (SMEs).

To put it in context there were 5 DOORS modules containing 2,500 draft requirements. Workshops were held with SMEs requiring the display of 17 pieces of information* per requirement. Changes were made to some information whilst checks were made against other information relating to that requirement, and also related requirements.

If you have been in a workshop such as this with an operator scrolling up and down, and side to side, in an Excel spreadsheet then you will know how disorienting and inefficient this approach is. To resolve that the Insynthesis team developed a user interface designed specifically to make it easier for the SMEs to understand the implications of changes, and for the operator to navigate to related requirements as necessary**.

*Insynthesis would not recommend an attempt to make changes to so much information in this format, but the processes and procedures had already been developed by the client organisation requiring this approach.

Once changes were made they were uploaded back into the DOORS database. A benefit of this approach is that, unlike MS Excel, DOORS maintains a history of changes and so an audit trail was created.

User Interface enabling delegates to see changes in one place whilst enabling the operator to navigate an Excel Spreadsheet painlessly

**The Insynthesis team has subsequently adapted the interface for use in other areas where spreadsheets with large amounts of information are created and reviewed such as hazard analysis and procurement. Each adaptation has taken approximately two weeks effort.

Office automation example 2

See example 1

Once the 31 topic based requirements sets described in example 1 had been agreed and approved by SMEs, against the operational concept, it was then necessary to convert them into requirements documents for wider peer review.

The client organisation wanted the documented output to be in a format that allowed requirements from the 5 different system modules in DOORS to be captured in the 31 topic requirements sets. This, however, presented a problem as the DOORS tool was set up based on the assumption that one module would result in one document.

Conversion of 5 modules to 31 Topic workbooks

The Insynthesis team developed a suite of tools to:

1. Take the requirements exported from the 5 system modules and consolidate them into a single workbook.
2. Extract each set of topic requirements into its own dedicated workbook (31 no. workbooks).

3. Export the content of each topic workbook into a consolidated set of requirements in MS Word format with descriptors that would allow VBA macros in MS Word to format the document in accordance with the template layout prescribed by the client organisations procedures (31 no. documents).

From DOORS to Word documents via Excel