Welcome to the personal page for John Cosmas

JOHN COSMAS
Program Manager

Project Highlights:

		Term: Course of 5 weeks
		Total Hours: 200+ hours
		CMM: Level III
		CMMi: Level II
		Resources: 1
		Compliance: SOXS
		Methods: ATDD, Agile

Core Applications

		Labor Management
		Time Studies & Ergon
		Time Management
		BI Reporting
		Microsoft Access 2010/2013
		Visual Basic Applications

Features Technologies:

		Windows 2012 Server 64-bit
		Windows Multipoint Server
		Microsoft Access 2013
		Microsoft Office Developer Tools
		VM Ware Workstation 10
		XenServer 6
		Citrix Client
		CISCO VPN
		YouTrack
		Alfresco
		Team Foundation Server

View solution screenshots:
click on any link to view screenshot...

The My OWS screen allows users to access their collection of OWS records quickly, and provide the means to reach individual OWS using a search tool. This feature enables users to navigate OWS with less clicks and orders them accordingly in a easily accessible manner that makes traditional designs less user-centric.

The tabbed design of operational consoles organizes the underlying OWS records into manageable containers, allowing users to find them according to specific operational entities such as Facilities and Skill Centers, less the traditional method of scouring cumbersome reports.

Wizards regulate user interactivity and alleviates errors from user input. It also confines the way a user to established technical standards which helps to manage input into measurable factors that accurately calculates work performance using pre-defined formulas that represent real-world data. Color-coding entry fields enables users to distinguish between locked and mandatory entry fields.

The custom PFD option provides an engineer direct access to defining PFD factors that breaks down standards into time-centric activities that accommodates an entire series of ergon activities attributed with a worker OWS. Underlying formulas update the Total PFD values whenever a single factor is changed, and checks inputs to ensure the that the user does not omit mandatory fields. A warning is also generated whenever a user selects factors that may exceed a maximum number of allowable minutes which is maintained through a configuration table which alleviates hard-coding.

Intelligent reports allows engineers to assess OWS status and data with easy and

An administration console is used to change, add and remove configurable lookup factors that allows the application to operate with a high degree of adaptability as real-world standard evolve with working conditions improving and changing over time. This alleviates additional programming and provides engineers direct access to calculation factors without developer involvement.

A configuration screen with a set of options alleviates the need to hard-code default settings and values which makes the entire user experience highly configurable as standards evolve to meet changing work conditions. Underlying wizards, queries and reports can react accordingly with no need for additional programming since the existing design is reliant on a data-driven model.

User logging serves the requirements for revision control and SOX compliance so that an administrator can just as easily recreate a previous version of an OWS, and also determine the users who has was responsible for creating, updating and deleting an established OWS. This does not only create accountability, but provides a clear and concise apparatus for detailed audits.

An advanced find screen was designed to help users perform searches on a wide range of filters such as date ranges and retrieve OWS records quickly and with relative ease.

Enhanced DASHBOARD

Operational views

Wizard-based inputs

Custom PFD option

Intelligent Reporting

Configurable Admin Console

Customized defaults

User logging

Advanced search

Hanesbrands

Hanesbrands is the manufacturer of the most popular brand of intimates, apparel and underwear in the US. Their distribution centers are located throughout the west and east coast of the US, where they receive, package, rebrand and ship orders of packaged, ready-to-ship materials to customers throughout the country. Their work centers operate at high efficiency, which is monitored using Operational Work Standard to measure the work performance of each task. A new MS Access based application which features a highly functional set of dashboards, filtered screens, input wizards and customizable lookup tables regulated by administrator defined operational parameters makes this a dynamically-driven application.

Operational Work Standard

Reaching that degree of operational excellence is the purpose of having OWS (ISO 9001 based) business quality improvement that is able to target, tolerate and test work quality to improve work quality control. This enables engineers to implement continuous process improvement practices to build work standards with a high level of reliabilty, repeatiblity that is equally self-sustaining, self-maintaing and self-correcting when faced with diverse changes or operational demands. It alleviates human errors and assures that each business or work process is done right the first time. This enables the engineers to achieve minimum operating costs and maximize operating profits.

The solution set that was put into place was a joint-venture effort in part of the chief engineer and myself to build a working model with minimal effort but with a high degree of customization that is achieved by data-driven interfaces. The resulting application adopts a very simple heuristic design that provides many workflow and task driven forms that regulates the way the engineering staff input and navigate the system. This well rounded system features include:

		Work Standard Management
		Workflow based processes
		User specific security
		Dashboard technology
		Standardized reports
		Rule-based validation of inputs
		Advanced search tool
		Light-weight client design
		Revision control & history
		SOX compliance for auditing
		Exception handling and error detection
		Cloning of existing OWS records
		Detailed user activity logging

This topic is under construction. This information will be available shortly.

Intelligent Work Consoles

This topic is under construction. This information will be available shortly.

Workflow/Wizard based Inputs

This topic is under construction. This information will be available shortly.

BI Reporting

This topic is under construction. This information will be available shortly.

Value Driven Design

A typical MS Access application tends to adopt a switchboard type design which forces the user to navigate multiple screen before getting to the key information that they need to function. The OWS Manager was designed to allow the user to engage workspaces, and allow them to transparency to underlying OWS records by organizing them into functional components such as Facilities, Skill Centers and Sub-Groups. This reduces the number of clicks required to administer OWS records, and improve the way they service the stored standards.

The nature of the design offers a constructive way that engineers can assess day-to-day behavioral operations and exercise the proper coaching necessary to improve the work process at the workplace. This application keeps track of changes by virtue of the underlying revision control mechanism that allows the engineer to track changes, differentials and provide the means to clone existing standards to create new ones with ease and reduced input operations. It allows engineers to work seamlessly instead of creating a portal that simply serves as nothing other than a common data entry tool.

Agile & ATDD

Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) is a development methodology based on communication between the business customers, the developers, and testing. Many of the principles of Behavior Driven Development (BDD), and Story Test-Driven Development (SDD) were adopted to aid in the development and testing by having a clear understanding of the needs prior to implementation and allow the manager to be able to converse in their own domain language. ATDD encompasses acceptance testing, but highlights writing acceptance tests before developers begin coding. YouTrack was installed and configured to support this effort to help meet deliverables, document various behaviors into test cases, capture necessary features into user stories and provide the user community direct access into the backlog for reporting, defect submission and check progress.

Highly Configurable

This topic is under construction. This information will be available shortly.

Windows 8 Design

This topic is under construction. This information will be available shortly.

Audit Control for SOXS Compliance

This topic is under construction. This information will be available shortly.

Citrix Support

This topic is under construction. This information will be available shortly.