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Omnis Success Story – DuPont Performance Coatings About DuPont Performance Coatings DuPont Performance Coatings is recognized as a world-leading manufacturer and supplier of high-performance liquid and powder coatings for automotive OEM, automotive aftermarket, industrial and maintenance applications, as well as high-performance specialty products for digital printing, adhesive bonding, and electrical insulation markets. Our mission is to create exceptional value for our customers through innovative solutions to coatings problems. Omnis at DuPont Although this mission statement was drafted with external customers in mind, it also describes the philosophy of our IT group – delivering systems that provide exceptional value for our organization through innovative solutions to IT problems. We view Omnis as a key part of our toolkit in providing innovative solutions, and have relied on its ability to deliver functional systems on time and on budget since the mid-1990s. Omnis applications are used day-in, day-out to help run various segments within our business. Our R&D and Regulatory groups rely on an Omnis7-based raw material system, which manages physical property, chemical composition and regulatory information. Another Omnis7 application prints batch cards for manufacturing sites in the USA, an integral step in the process of manufacturing product. Our formula management system provides a bridge between the R&D and Manufacturing organizations. This Omnis Studio application is used by chemists and product formulators to develop new products. When formulations are ready for production, the necessary information is transferred to SAP for manufacture. In a company as large as DuPont, several different technologies are used within the IT organization. It's not uncommon to be asked why we don't just standardize on a more mainstream product, such as Visual Basic or a Java-based environment. The answer is simple: we can't argue with the results of our Omnis development. Our Omnis applications are more feature-rich and easier to use than other applications developed in some of those more trendy technologies. Our small team of experienced Omnis developers has consistently completed projects in less time than larger teams working on comparably complex systems using other development tools. Screenshots & more info on our Omnis Studio systems Screenshot #1 from Formula Management system: multiple instances of the Formula Browser, the gateway to the rest of the system:
Screenshot #2: Cost estimation tool to help chemists develop products that are cost-effective as well as high-performance:
Our Formula Management system has gone through several modifications since its inception as a terminal-host application in the 1980s. The current Omnis Studio incarnation was launched in September of 2002, and is accessed via Citrix by users in over 10 countries throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Our users noticed a significant step forward in usability and features when we moved from terminal-host to Omnis7, and were again favorably impressed with the increased feature set with the move to Omnis Studio. As part of our Studio-conversion effort, we re-architected our Omnis7 application architecture to better fit the design intent and features offered by Omnis Studio. The extra up-front design time is now paying dividends, as we are able to add new application modules much quicker than ever before. For example, we added a solvent calculation program which uses Omnis Studio for the GUI, and the oXML component to exchange data with a UNIX-based application server. The solvent module takes advantage of several classes originally developed for the formula system, which helped shorten the development time for the Omnis part of the application.
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