1. Introduction:
United Chinese Plastic International Limited (UCP) is a leading manufacturing and trading company in artificial flowers and Christmas decorations industry. UCP serves overseas customers from worldwide and target mainly USA and European markets.
UCP has adapted many information technology (IT) systems on product design, packaging design. However, the protection on intellectual property is not safety enough that makes UCP loss much on product design being stolen.
Moreover, due to UCP aged system infrastructure, UCP was suffered from high cost on power consumption, slow system response on reporting and low reliability support.
This term paper would describe the current business problems related to IT and provide suggestions in order to operate in effectively and efficiency.

2. Background of United Chinese Plastics International Limited

3. Basic Operation Work Flow:
I. Customer requests quotation 3D plastic drawings
II. Designers prepare their design work out based on requests via CAD software
III. After confirmed by customer, UCP would produce prototype as confirmation.
IV. Customer confirms prototype as mass production
V. Production process planning and material planning
VI. Computer-aided manufacturing (CAM)

4. IT systems in UCP
There are mainly four major systems for plastic manufacturing plus five people design team works system
a.) SCM (Supply Chain Management System)
b.) MRP (Material Resource Planning System)
c.) ECNs (AutoCAD)
d.) OMS (Order Management System)

5. Current IT Problems on UCP
a.) The designed projects file without being well protected
There are five designers who are responsible to product and packaging design. They would use workstation to design and save such project file in local hard disk of workstation. Moreover, those hard disks are SATA hard drive and rotating speed of hard drive is very low. Except problem on performance, SATA hard disk would get crash problem and two of designers’ all works within local disk was gone. Although UCP provided designers usb hard disk for backup data, such usb hard disk were always reported to be missed or damaged. Some designers even forgot to make a copy as backup device occasionally.
Moreover, as high competition between plastic manufacturers, many manufacturers companies including UCP also suffered from designed file was stolen by internal staff. One previous staff has copied all designed works from his usb disk and then resigned. There is no security system and design in UCP for protecting such intellectual properties.

b.) Too many IT Systems on aged infrastructure.
There are many aged systems which are not protected by hardware high availability (HA). Some IT systems are installed with Personal computer (PC) and nearly 60% hardware servers are out of hardware warranty . Those personal computers just run with one hard disk without RAID protection and one power supply. Those PC have suffered from hardware failure before and always need a whole week to repair and rebuild System again. Moreover, some systems are run with old operating system such as Microsoft Windows 2000 or 2003 which is out of vendor support too.
Those IT Systems are installed under PC. Those systems are run under free based operating system software. That means such IT system would be lack of such operating system vendor support. UCP system supports would only base on browsing internet forum to find solution. Hence, the longer time is needed for system up again.
Moreover, according to existing IT System inventory (reference), there are total 27 severs. Those servers need placed in three pieces of full size racks (42U) which consumed many rack spaces. Moreover, such aged systems power consumption is comparatively much higher than nowadays server hardware.
Except hardware are aged, IT systems like ERP, OSM were designed in ten years ago which is found complicated and overlapped duties.
For example, the SCM would not have any linkage on ERP system. The database under SCM could not be used with ERP for easy mapping. That means it required more time to input data on both system and there is time delayed on updating same data on these two systems.
Moreover, those aged systems are out of support. Such software is only run on Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 server operating system(OS). However, such OS is out of support but UCP still not willing to upgrade as newer OS like Windows 2012. This is because those IT systems like ERP, SCM …are all outdated and such IT system of software house is also closed down too. Hence, there is no upgrade path for UCP to migrate to newer OS and those IT systems are also luck of support. Moreover, the lack of IT system maintenance and fine tune make system run very slow.

c.) High purchase and maintenance cost on work design workstation
The time period phase out of workstation would be short. Normally, workstations need to be replaced within 1-1.5 years due to slower speed of graphical card, large memory needs of design object and time for rendering for 3D drawing objects. The unit cost is 30,000HK Dollars (around US$ 4,000) and also power consumption is high with 220W. If customers’ quotation is come with large amount of projects, high volume of projects or large file size of the projects, designers still need a large amount of time to save the works or to make much more time on compiling the projects. This is because it cannot be easily to enhance the workstations computation performance. This is low feasibility to make that workstation as scalable by adding those five workstation’s performance to run large projects.
For example, if compiling or saving design works consume much of time, it is simple to add memory and processors. However, the workstation’s resources slots are small and easy to fill up, then the only one solution is waiting until the saving or compiling job is completed. Thus, the time compiling is always consumed with 3-4 hours.
Moreover, since those workstations are similar designed as personal computer, there is no extra high availability design on hard disk or movable parts like fans. Hence, if there is hardware failure happen, onsite engineer needs much time to trouble and replace its failure parts like motherboard. UCP lose much time for workstation downtime because, it need wait for hardware parts for replacement.

d.) Large time on generating ERP report
Since ERP system is aged, administrative staff needs much time to generate ERP report. UCP only hire 6 staff to maintain administrative works to maintain administrative requests. Some ad-hoc, one time-based report would be seldom made since it required ERP system supplier to tailor-make via programming. Hence, it is resulted in wrong estimated product and material planning by incorrect data.
Moreover, those database

6. Suggested Solutions
a.) Migrate existing graphical design workstation into virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) System infrastructure for designed group would be worked as below.
i.) Front end (Client side) would be thin client worked as computer terminal for graphical designer usage ii.) Back end (Server side) would be servers and storage which run virtual machines. For sake of highly utilized with servers’ resource, software application, virtualization technology would be adopted. iii.) Virtual machines are run with virtualization software like VMWare, Redhat KVM or Microsoft Hyper-V
There are some reasons would be beneficial to UCP existing environment
I) Less power consumption since twenty seven old physical servers would be migrated into virtualized environment; it just worked as five physical new servers after consolidated and virtualized by virtualization software. That means such 27 servers system would be migrated as virtual machine.
For workstation side, those five workstations would be migrated as five virtual machines and used thin client as computer terminal. This would be result in lower power consumption than pure workstation by 50% or above.
II) High redundancy protection Virtualized infrastructure would be composed of servers hardware instead of PC installed with free servers’ operating system. Servers would have its high availability designed functions and features like redundant power supplies, fans and RAID hard disk. This would have highly protection in case hardware failure on those moving parts happen. Those mentioned components could be hot swapped without shutdown servers in order to decrease downtime of servers.
III) More security Since thin client could be connected
IV) Easy backup
V) Easy failure management
VI) Highly and easily scalable

Nowadays, some ERP systems’ functions and features have already included MRP, OSM as well. Thus, it can eliminate compatibility problems between each IT system and also save time on one-stop-shop like system.

7. Conclusions