Team: Operations Engineering and Production

The Operations Engineering and Production team is mainly concerned with the following:

Production management for the TerraSAR and TanDEM missions
Execution of all DFD media-delivery activities
Systems management of the department’s servers
Hardware procurement for the work stations of the department’s staff

The first two tasks can be further detailed as follows:

Production Management

The production management staff has the central task of controlling the TerraSAR-X request workflow. This covers the monitoring of all orders within the system, with the ultimate goal of assured delivery of all orders on time and complete. The task is performed in close cooperation with:

DIMS System Operations
Processor operations
Mission planning at the Mission Operations Segment of the German Space Operations Center (MOS/GSOC)
The instrument team at the Microwaves and Radar Institute.

These functions involve:

Provision of an order desk to support external and internal customers, especially the PPP-partner Infoterra. The main tool of the order desk is an Outlook post box for email communications
Administration of the users within the DIMS Order Control component
Monitoring orders, especially those in an error status; triggering corrective measures
Follow-up of sensitive orders in line with satellite data security legislation (SatDSiG)
Detailed status analysis based on user requests
Generation of statistics concerning order throughput and production
Generation of accounting reports for billing
Information for users concerning system downtimes and planned unavailability of service
Generation and handling of Non-Conformance Reports (NCR) and System Change Requests (SCR)
Contributions to the quarterly report of the mission manager.

Delivery

The delivery activities cover all steps from media generation to dispatch to postal or courier services. In details this is split into:

Management and monitoring of the CD/DVD burning devices
Media storage and provision
Keep-ready of the inlay, delivery paper and label printers
Dispatch of media to the shipment staff
Sorting according to addressees and delivery units
Keeping statistics
Delivery confirmations within databases
Customs declarations
Filing of delivery papers
Transportation to the postal services.