Few industries maintain more stringent standards than those involved in the manufacture of aircraft engines. Every part, every component, every design is subject to layer after layer of rigorous inspection. That's an enormous amount of data to collect, collate, sort, and organize; and for a key facility of Pratt & Whitney, there's plenty of call for the data management power of FileMaker Pro, the award–winning database software application from FileMaker, Inc.

Successful Solution

FileMaker Pro is at the heart of many functions at the Asian Distribution Center and is used to run all aspects of the center. Some of the key functions that FileMaker Pro supports include the process of producing airworthiness certificates to jobs like personnel administration.

According to the company, FileMaker is so important to the smooth operation that one of its staff members has become a certified FileMaker developer. Although the Center also uses Pratt & Whitney's worldwide SAP system, FileMaker allows the company to quickly develop solutions for the areas where SAP is lacking and which would take its headquarters computer department years to implement solutions.

Customer Benefits

Because the center serves the Asian market, language issues are always an important consideration. And this is another area in which FileMaker excels.

FileMaker Pro supports Unicode and also includes all the calculation functions and special features necessary for handling data in Japanese and creating Japanese–language user interfaces (as well as Chinese and Korean). The company sees this as a tremendous benefit because it allows staff to develop a database first in English and then deploy in Japanese.

Another benefit realized by Pratt & Whitney database development is found in the easy–to–use implementation of relational features in FileMaker Pro, making it much easier for beginning developers to understand relational design without requiring any formal training in database design.

More recently, the company reports that the built–in charting capabilities of FileMaker Pro 11 have greatly speeded up their monthly reporting process.