Drawing Comparison Tool

CLIENT: TOYOTA MOTOR EUROPE

DESCRIPTION

Triggered by a business need within Toyota R&D, engineers at Toyota Motor Europe (TME) or their suppliers create drawings, often based on revisions of existing designs. Before these drawings are officially released, they must undergo a thorough review, validation, and approval process involving the Toyota Engineer, Manager, Senior Manager, and General Manager.
The review process ensures that all changes outlined in the Engineering Change Instructions (ECI) are correctly reflected in the drawing, and that no unintended modifications have been made.

Engineers face several challenges due to the size of the drawings, with each instruction (line, shape, dimension, text) needing to be individually verified.

This results in the following issues:

• Drawing reviews are time-consuming
• Engineers can easily overlook changes during the comparison, increasing the risk of quality issues
• Management cannot confirm the accuracy of the work without performing the review themselves
• If a mistake is identified and the drawing is modified, the entire validation process must be restarted

The purpose of the drawing comparison system is to:

• Assist engineers in comparing two revisions of a drawing
• Automatically highlight differences between revisions
• Enable the engineer to assess these differences and validate the system’s assumptions
• Allow the engineer to communicate the results of the comparison with management for approval
• Enable the engineer to share the comparison results with suppliers for feedback in case of rejection

AKKA was selected to implement the full project based on the Feasibility Study document and the proof-of-concept tool provided to TME.

ROLE

As Technical Leader, I was responsible for analyzing the requirements and selecting the appropriate technologies and implementation approaches, which I then validated with the business and management teams (following the technical offer and Feasibility Study provided to the client).

I also managed a development team of four developers, ensuring that requirements were met, timelines were respected, and communication flowed effectively between the technical team, management, and the client.

In addition to overseeing the development, I contributed to some of the front-end UI work, particularly focusing on the viewport-related code written in JavaScript (using the React and PixiJS frameworks).

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