Commander Trends

The DiscTag Enabled Workflow is designed around complete information automation. Products from many vendors, including DCA, allow for the DiscTag XML metadata to populate the user interfaces of the applications, and, of course, each application adds its’ specific report to the metadata.

DCA’s Commander Trends provides the only solution for mining DiscTag or XBOX metadata to show trends of tester parameters sorted by LBRs, replication lines or format types within a plant.

Commander Trends automatically assimilates DiscTag metadata to provide daily reports on the health of your plant. These reports can be sorted by LBR, replication line or format type and are customizable using parameters from any DiscTag Enabled tester, mastering system or replication line available in the metadata.

Since all of the data is automatically collected using the DiscTag workflow process, the IT investment necessary (in dollars and time) to get Trends up and running is minimal.

Trends utilizes the Commander Index server as its’ backbone. The Server receives which parameters the Client would like to receive reports on and then delivers those reports at the same time each evening.

Setup
Upon installation, Trends automatically scans your DiscTag or XBOX metadata store for available equipment that can be tracked. DiscTag Enabled equipment includes:

• DCA Viper
• DCA Titan & MIS 8.5 formatters
• Singulus CrystalLine
• AudioDev SA-300, C400 & XBOX testers
• DaTARIUS DaTABANK
• Singulus Spaceline II & Blu-line replication with Dr. Schenk inspection.

Available equipment is sorted on the left-hand side of the user interface into categories for LBRs, replication lines and formats.

After your equipment is identified, Trends will make all available tester parameters available to the Client, so that you can choose which parameters to track over time. Chosen parameters are tracked for each piece of equipment, with the exception of FIFO underflows and LBR errors, which are only tracked for LBRs.

Upon choosing parameters to track, you can specify the minimum and maximum values, which will be displayed along with the parameter over time on the charts. The administrator can also set how many days to display trends for each parameter.

By default, Trends will start tracking PO Fails, Asymmetry and Jitter for all equipment using a 90 day time period and pre-determined minimum and maximum criteria.

Daily Use
The server will automatically render reports based upon your chosen parameters each night at your specified time. This gives everyone in the plant the same reports to view each day.

Reports can be printed, saved as HTML or saved as PDF.

Administrative Use
Of course, there are times when plant managers may want to view reports intra-day, and Trends allows this functionality, rendering reports dynamically upon request with an administrator login.

Trends also allows administrators to drill down into the details for the cause behind a specific parameter going bad, allowing you to open all of the metadata in Commander Supervisor related to any data point on the trend graph. Additional information available in the metadata can include operator names, LBR prompt values entered, the complete bandfile for a mastering job and the replication parameters entered for a specific run.