Technetix Case Study

TV Decoder Management System

Company Profile

Technetix PLC is the largest UK-based manufacturer of CATV & SMATV equipment. The company uses state-of-the-art automated surface mount manufacturing equipment for volume production and has made extensive investment in product development through the use of computer-aided design and RF and video test equipment.

Business Requirements

Technetix were in the process of preparing for the large-scale manufacture of television decoders which would enable or disable pay-per-view channels provided by companies such as Sky and other cable television service providers. Each unit would have a unique serial number determined at the time of manufacture. When a user subscribed to a channel, the TV station would transmit this serial number and key, and, upon receiving this number, the decoder would enable the chosen channel.

Technetix identified a requirement for a management system to control these serial numbers and a production system to control manufacture. Although there was an existing system in place, it was limited to handling small amounts of numbers. Technetix needed the legacy data from this system to be imported into the new database. Since the system would be very sensitive to fraud, Technetix also had a requirement for strong encryption methods to be used.

Due to a significant increase in orders, Technetix went on to establish requirements for multi-site manufacturing and database synchronisation between the UK and an additional production line in China.

Our Solution

As this project was mission-critical for Technetix, Beacon concentrated on setting up fail-safe systems and procedures, and developing a secure database providing authenticated access, password security with encryption, ageing and account lock-out.

For the computers on the decoder production line, we implemented a client/server design with Visual Basic clients and SQL Server back-end. These computers carried out 4 tasks: a ‘programmer’ to automatically issue serial numbers, print barcodes and burn the serial number into the device; a ‘testing’ computer to test units; a ‘despatcher’ to group the units into batches of 10; and an ‘exporter’ to take the batches of units and create customer orders.

Due to the success of the project, Technetix gained orders from around the world. Faced with increased demand and aggressive delivery dates, the production line capacity in the UK expanded 8-fold and a parallel production line was set-up in China. Beacon were asked to review the overall system design and response times to ensure it would cope with such expansion and to synchronise the serial number database between the UK and China. The essential requirement was to ensure that no duplicate serial numbers were issued. Beacon recommended the hardware required and integrated the entire system enabling the two databases to communicate and synchronise vital data.