Manufacturers are saving time and money with imaging. They always have the latest versions of drawings. Lost documents are a thing of the past.
In manufacturing and engineering having the most recent document is critical. Making changes on an old drawing wastes time and money. In the cases of engineers, it can cost lives. Imagine an engineer authorizing structural work on a building based on an out-of-date drawing.
Here's how imaging helps engineers:
1. Keep Track of Updates. Having all your drawings in an electronic format makes it easy to keep track of the latest version of your information.
2. Easy Distribution. Imaging makes it easy to find the latest version of your drawings. See who has the plans. When they were updated. Where every plan is stored.
3. Save Space. Get rid of all those file cabinets where you store your large drawings. The instruction manuals for a Boeing 747 weigh more than the jet does. Imaging lets you store everything on a single CD-ROM.
4. Link Documents. Keep track of costs, materials and billing. Everything can be linked to a single file. You no longer have to wait for paper to do the rounds of your company to see where everything is.
5. Better Security. Block out sensitive parts of documents. Create different levels of security so only authorized personnel can make changes to documents. Create overlays. Let people see what they need to see. No more, no less.
6. Save Money. Print only the documents you need. Let people view what they need over the network. Keep rarely-used manuals on-line instead of in every office. Everyone has the latest version instantly.
7. Improve Customer Service. Give your customers instant, accurate answers. Eliminate telephone tag. Reduce long distance charges. Paper searches become a thing of the past.
Building Better Bridges
MTA Bridges and Tunnels controls the toll bridges and tunnels that connect the five boroughs of New York City. Millions of commuters rely on them every day. If just one bridge or tunnel is closed for an hour, chaos reigns.
Making sure this doesn't happen is a major concern of the MTA. They had 60,000 engineering drawings on aperture cards and paper. Quality varied considerably. Some were torn, faded or fifth generation copies. All were essential. The MTA staff had problems locating and managing these drawings.
Hundreds of people ranging from internal engineers to external vendors accessed the drawings on a regular basis. This meant there were often several versions of a drawing. Locating the most up-to-date one was critical when work needed to be done. Delays were common.
To bring their drawings under control the MTA sent out an RFP. MTA out-sourced the entire job because it was a large one-off job. Specialized expertise and equipment was needed.
Drawing Management (New York, NY 212-777-5500) won the job with a $750,000 bid. "The MTA realized the equipment would have gathered dust after the job was complete," says Stephen Thomson, Drawing Management's president. "It would have taken much longer to complete because they would have had to hire staff and learn the equipment.
"We scanned the aperture cards on a Photomatrix (Culver City, CA 619-625-4400) 400 dpi aperture card scanner. This scanner is the Rolls Royce of aperture card scanners. It scans difficult drawings quickly with the best possible results. There is a minimum of operator intervention. We got great results with a maximum of three scans instead of the usual five or six. Some scanners have great difficulty handling faded microfilm. Others can't handle it at all.
"The MTA expected 50% of the aperture cards to be rejected. Photomatrix's scanner and our rigorous scanning techniques reduced this to less than 15%. This resulted in a more efficient scanning process and significant time savings. Rejected cards were scanned from the original paper drawings.
"The MTA loved it. They didn't pull as many paper drawings from their archives as expected. This resulted in significant time and labor savings. Their costs were also significantly reduced."
Drawing Management scanned the large engineering drawings on an Anatech (Littleton, CO 303-973-6722) Eagle Scanner. This scanner was chosen because many of the original paper drawings were fragile, torn and in poor condition.
"This scanner was very gentle passing the paper through the scanning mechanism," says Thomson. "Damage to their paper drawings was non-existent."
The electronic documents were stored on an Intergraph (Huntsville, AL 205-730-7552) TD server with 10 GB of memory before being sent to post-processing operators for cleanup, indexing and scaling of the drawings on Intergraph's MicroStation and I/RAS software.
After cleanup the images were QC'd and burned to CD with the index information on a Ricoh (Caldwell, NJ 201-882-2000) CD-reader/writer drive. The MTA took two copies of each CD. Drawing Management kept one CD for backup. It's easy to make extra CDs if they're needed.
"The pay back has been quick," says Thomson. "MTA engineers save about 10 hours a week per person not having to search for documents. They know they're working with the most up-to-date version of a document. "MTA vendors have achieved significant savings. They now get a disc instead of paper blow-backs from a faded aperture card printout. This reduces the cost of their services. The MTA can more accurately cost a job. This leads to fewer cost overruns and saves taxpayers money."
America's Talking with GTE
GTE, a local and long distance provider in many US cities and towns, needed help managing the 120,000 drawings, structural calculations and technical documents they used to maintain and expand their communications facilities in the western region of the United States.
These were accessed everyday by engineers, architects, maintenance and real estate personnel. A single version of a document was stored on microfilm. When someone in the field needed to access one of the drawings, a copy was made. This was cumbersome and costly. It slowed down critical business processes.
GTE wanted everyone to have immediate access to information, wherever they were. The obvious solution was placing their documents on a dedicated intranet. Before this could be done, three issues needed to be resolved.
1. The system had to be a true document management solution. Putting a drawing on the screen was not enough. It had to be the correct version of the drawing. There had to be some kind of version control.
2. The system had to be easy to use without training or support. The people accessing documents changed daily. If the interface was not intuitive, the system would fail.
3. The system had to deliver large, complex drawings over networks and dial-up connections. GTE did not want to add significant traffic to their internal network. Some outside vendors needed to access documents through GTE's dedicated intranet. Just the thought of downloading a large number of 300 KB TIFF files at dial-up modem speeds was nearly enough to send users clamoring for their microfilm.
To solve their problems, GTE chose In.vision (Irvine, CA 714-477-2200), a document management, imaging and collaborative workflow tool designed on an Internet architecture. It was tailor-made for a project such as the one GTE was facing.
In.vision lets GTE maintain individual document components like CAD reference files. It's easy to generate TIFF renditions for users outside the CAD department.
The rapid development environment lets users develop customized Web-based applications even if they don't know programming or HTML. GTE used these tools to duplicate the microfilm search metaphor that everyone was comfortable using.
Browse, the Web-imaging component, makes sure everyone can view the images in their browser without plug-ins. Browse eliminates the delays most users expect with large TIFF files. TIFF images are dynamically converted to screen resolution GIF when the user requests a view. Users can select documents from thumbnails, viewing and zooming.
More than 60,000 documents are now available over the Web. Another 60,000 drawings are being scanned in-house. The large format scanning is performed in the browser using In.vision's browser-based Image Capture module.
They're running the system on a Hewlett-Packard (Cupertino, CA 408-725-8900) NT Server with 36 GB of storage. The system supports PC, Mac and Unix workstations. Users access the system with standard browsers.
Major Tool & Machine Produces Parts Faster
Major Tool & Machine (Indianapolis, IN 317-636-6433) produces large customized parts. Forty percent of the parts they produce are unique.
"Each job requires 100-300 customer-supplied drawings for the metal piece being constructed," says CAD/CAM services manager, Steve Denkers. "Before we installed the product data management solution it was difficult to keep track of the drawings."
In early 1996 Major Tool & Machine started looking for a solution to improve document tracking and work center distribution. They also replaced their old mainframe with a Visual Manufacturing computer system. They were now able to use Windows 95 and Windows NT. Personal computers could be used on the shop floor. Denkers wrote a document management software program called "The Librarian." He needed an imaging component. Various programs were tested. Imagenation from Spicer Corp (Kitchener, ON 519-748-2462) was chosen.
"It was the price/performance ratio that sold us," he says. "Imagenation integrated easily with our document management software. Their software cost $10,000 for everything. The whole system, including hardware and software, cost more than $300,000."
"We bought two multi-processor servers with 40 GB of storage from Compaq (Houston, TX 281-370-0670), a Xerox (Peabody, MA 508-977-2000) plotter and scanner to scan in customer drawings and 30 terminals from Dlog in Germany.
In August 1996 the document control system was up and running. In January 1997 the installation of a new Oracle database completed the first phase of the project. Document security gives shop-floor level employees access to the drawings. This is managed at the network level.
"We no longer have to worry about out-of-date drawings, coffee being spilled on a drawing, welders burning up the drawing or machinists forgetting them in a tool box," says Denkers.
When Major Tool & Machine receives a new job, they scan the client drawings into the system and clean them up using Imagenation. The engineering assistant enters each drawing's title block information into the Oracle database with "The Librarian." As the tool is transformed from raw material to a finished product, the large-scale drawings are routed from work center to work center and viewed on the shop floor using Imagenation.
After being rolled, the customized part order then proceeds to the welding and fabrication area, advances to an array of CNC precision machines for milling, drilling and turning, and finally moves to the assembly and finishing station where the rough edges are smoothed and paint is applied to the parts. The program management department monitors the entire job from conception to the quality assurance department's final testing, inspecting and signing off.
Drawings are tracked according to the part identification number. "Anyone can pull up the drawing they need from anywhere in the shop," say Denkers. "When we get new revisions, they are scanned immediately. Each work center has the latest revision."
Besides a more efficient routing and viewing system for client part drawings, Major Tool & Machine uses this application in-house for their machine blueprints. They scan old drawings and clean them up using Imagenation's despeckle and deskew utilities.
"After 15 years of being shoved and used in the maintenance department, many of the drawings were covered in oil and grease. Some of them were a real mess," said Denkers. "Scanned drawings are far more durable than the paper drawings we've been using for 50 years.
"The system has since been expanded. The order drawing is linked automatically to a job sequence. An employee can pull up just the documents they need for the operation being performed. Employees no longer have to search through all the drawings, just the ones needed.
"We're saving a lot of time searching for information. We have accurate information. There is less room for human error. We always have the latest version of the drawing. If we had to do it all again, I wouldn't do anything differently. Spicer's software works great." U
