Authoring tools and management information systems: study of a generalizable architecture

The need to effectively manage the documentation covering the entire production process, from the concept phase right through to market realise, constitutes a key issue in the creation of a successful and highly competitive product. For almost forty years the most commonly used strategies to achieve this have followed Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) guidelines. Translated into information management systems at the end of the '90s, this methodology is now widely used by companies operating all over the world in many different sectors. PLM systems and editor programs are the two principal types of software applications used by companies for their process aotomation. Editor programs allow to store in documents the information related to the production chain, while the PLM system stores and shares this information so that it can be used within the company and made it available to partners. Different software tools, which capture and store documents and information automatically in the PLM system, have been developed in recent years. One of them is the ''DirectPLM'' application, which has been developed by the Italian company ''Focus PLM''. It is designed to ensure interoperability between many editors and the Aras Innovator PLM system. In this dissertation we present ''DirectPLM2'', a new version of the previous software application DirectPLM. It has been designed and developed as prototype during the internship by Focus PLM. Its new implementation separates the abstract logic of business from the real commands implementation, previously strongly dependent on Aras Innovator. Thanks to its new design, Focus PLM can easily develop different versions of DirectPLM2, each one devised for a specific PLM system. In fact, the company can focus the development effort only on a specific set of software components which provides specialized functions interacting with that particular PLM system. This allows shorter Time-To-Market and gives the company a significant competitive advantage.

La comunicazione aziendale tra redazione e traduzione: Il caso di ipack srl.

This dissertation is the result of my participation in the Language Toolkit project, a recent collaboration between the Chamber of Commerce of Forlì and the School of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Interpreting and Translation at the University of Bologna, which aims to make students meet with the companies of our territory, in this case Ipack, based in Mercato Saraceno (FC). My dissertation is a specialized translation work from Italian into English of two documents that were entrusted to me: the declaration of compliance of Ipack’s products and a summary of the quality manual. They are two high technical texts and, therefore, the translation task required a preliminary phase of research on the topics and on the terminology of this specific domain. The dissertation consists of five chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces the company with which I collaborated for my dissertation project and provides an overview of business communication and a brief classification of Ipack’s communication tools. The second chapter covers the background topics, namely food packaging and quality management systems within companies. The third chapter concerns the analysis of the two texts, describing the intra-textual and extra-textual aspects, as well as the morphosyntaxical and lexical features. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the revision work on one of the two texts, the one about quality procedures. In the commentary following my review, I explain the methodology and the strategies that I used and I also provide some extended examples of the main changes applied to the original text, with respect to both content and linguistic features. Finally, the fifth chapter focuses on the translation of the texts followed by a commentary that explains the work methodology, resources and my translation choices, accompanied by practical examples.