Tetra Pak began in the early 1950s as one of the first packaging companies for liquid milk. Since then, it has become one of the world's largest suppliers of packaging systems for milk, fruit juices and drinks, and many other products.

Working for Parametric Technology Corporation, we worked on a new project to help them configure a central Oracle 8.1 database on a Sun E4500. The database is used by over 70 SGI Workstations that PTC sold to Tetra Pak to expand its use of Pro/ENGINEER® Solutions to streamline its product development process as well as its use of MEDUSA® drawing production software for electrical design and layout. 

All CAD/CAM drawings are stored as BLOBS within the Oracle database, along with a complete storage of component parts that can be automatically traced back to supplier warehouses when drawings are finalised for production. Job price estimates are also automatically generated, as all component costs are stored and updated when required, along with estimated costs of man time to complete jobs, with country variations also calculated.

We also created automated reports via PL/SQL and Oracle's Job Processing queue, that would report on jobs that were running late, or components that were running low, or for jobs that were starting to run beyond costs and delivery times.

We finally completed our part of the project by creating shell scripts to be used via cron that automatically checked the integrity and status of the database. Any problems were alerted to the system manager via pager and e-mail.