MANUFACTURING SOLUTIONS

Sophisticated document management, electronic publishing and intranet document sharing are making a difference for manufacturers such as GE, Pratt & Whitney and Nissan.

Before evaluating and choosing any technology, however, you have to identify the business processes and functions that need to be addressed. The most common include customer service support, information support (i.e., document access) throughout an organization or larger supply chain, and product configuration for products that are customized or made available with multiple options.

No one automates anymore for the sake of automating. Companies still improve business processes for the sake of better organization, but the manufacturers that step back to view their overall business objectives invariably end up with better, more effective solutions.

Here are just a few of the common objectives that drive today’s manufacturing solutions:

• Improve product quality.

• Speed development and product introduction.

• Keep operational costs down.

• Retain and increase sales in a competitive market.

• Improve customer service.

• Ensure compliance and commitments.

Pratt & Whitney has implemented electronic publishing to improve customer service. Nissan is harnessing the Web to distribute technical drawings worldwide, cutting cost and speeding engineering changes. At GE Turbine Engine, intelligent capture and imaging helps users understand the interrelationships between parts, subassemblies and completed products. Read on to find out how these and other companies are taking advantage of the latest technologies.

Electronic Publishing Soars At Pratt & Whitney

For commercial airlines, maintenance and safety top the list of critical business issues. Companies that manufacture major aircraft components, like jet engines, share this responsibility. Up-to-date product documentation is not only a matter of good customer support, it is a matter of safety for millions of passengers each year.

Pratt & Whitney Large Commercial Engines (East Hartford, CT) sells and services a huge share of the jet engines used in today’s leading commercial aircraft. The quality and accessibility of engine service manuals is an integral part of the delivered product.

Once each quarter, Pratt & Whitney updates and publishes a CD-ROM-based manual called the Eagle Disc. It began publishing to CD-ROM in 1995 with assistance from Enigma (Waltham, MA), maker of Insight electronic publishing software. Working with Enigma and an outside service bureau, Pratt & Whitney has evolved the Eagle Disc to improve functionality and add more and more of the documents that airlines need to keep their aircraft flying.

The use of CD-ROMs provides numerous benefits to Pratt & Whitney, to aircraft manufacturers and to the end-customer commercial airlines. At Pratt & Whitney, the Technical Publications Department has witnessed increased productivity because it can more easily cut, paste and adapt existing material to create new versions.

For example, different engine models will often have similar parts and features, yet they’ll be unique enough in configuration or thrust to warrant separate manuals. For the sake of efficiency and consistency, the publications staff reuses approved material everywhere applicable instead of writing new copy each time. This could be done more crudely in a word processing program, but electronic publishing allows a company to build in automated update functionality.

A hyperlinking feature built into Insight allows Pratt & Whitney to automatically locate and correct copy in various manuals. “When you click on the hyperlink, a selection box comes up with different choices you can make,” explains Nick Iaccarino, Pratt & Whitney project leader. “Often, the staff works from service bulletins that apply to different parts catalogs. The user has the opportunity to select, say, Model A, Model B and Model C.” By entering a part number and clicking the mouse a few times, the editor can locate all of the sections that need updating.

Some CD-ROMs provide read-only access; however, Pratt & Whitney wanted find, use, re-use and export capabilities extended to internal and external (customer) users. Airline personnel save time and money by using this cut-and-paste capability to create job cards or abbreviated maintenance lists that the mechanics must sign off on.

Enigma has also developed a “Reintegrate” function, which allows users to extract, modify and blend the altered copy with the original document. In paper format, airlines regularly create pages of special instructions, known as “green pages,” that are inserted into the manual after being approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The Eagle Disc CD ROM must remain intact to meet FAA requirements for documentation that is traceable to the original manual. However, software available from Enigma stores the modifications on hard disk and allows the viewer to pull up a blended version of original information together with these special instructions.

To meet the needs of all customers, Pratt & Whitney continues to release information in a wide variety of formats, such as paper manuals, microfilm and Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) source data. But electronic publishing technology, along with the FAA’s August 1997 Advisory Circular permitting CD usage for production data, has set the stage for reduced reliance on paper and microfilm publications in the airline industry.

Nissan Improves Document Access

Nissan Research and Development (Farmington Hills, MI) manages tens of thousands of engineering drawings for parts used throughout the automobile company’s manufacturing operations. In two related projects undertaken with Xerox Engineering Systems (Stamford, CT), the unit streamlined distribution of release documents and provided affordable access to documents worldwide.

Before early 1998, when the projects began, Nissan R&D printed out its paper, microform and electronic engineering documents and physically distributed them to 10 or more people in the Michigan facility and (by regular or express mail) to up to seven departments in other facilities. This included an R&D office in Great Britain, the manufacturing plant in Smyrna, TN, and a plant with R&D staff in Mexico. Delays were commonplace, according to Jim Tgiros, supervisor of application/CAD, and it often took up to a week for documents to reach the plant in Mexico.

In early 1998, Nissan implemented EDMICS 2000, a document management and Oracle-based repository for large-scale engineering documents. Developed by Fuji/Xerox, a joint venture company in Japan, EDMICS is sold in North America by Xerox Engineering Systems (XES). This system was integrated with Nissan’s internal systems to create D-Net, an electronic system for distributing and sharing official release documents. Files are transferred securely across Nissan’s WAN using FTP protocols.

While D-Net solved Nissan’s need to speed distribution of critical release documents, it was not broadly deployed due to the high cost of each client/server Unix-based workstation. To let engineers view and share documents on a more ad-hoc basis, XES came up with a lower-cost solution based on its Intranet Docs software. The system provides authorized access to documents through ordinary Web browsers.

“We basically put in an IP address and it is there for everyone,” says Tgiros.

XES prices Intranet Docs per server and by document capacity. The entry price for Intranet Docs 2.0 is about $19,000 for one server delivering up to 3,000 sophisticated, large-format documents. Per-document costs decline as you scale up to two million documents accessible online.

Nissan brought Xerox Intranet Docs live in December 1998 and, currently, hundreds of users in several locations access documents through Version 1.26 of the software. Tgiros says Nissan initially planned the system for engineers and those in manufacturing, but they discovered several other groups that requested online access. This includes shipping and receiving staff, who use engineering drawings to verify the orders, as well as service area employees, who inspect parts. Now they key in the part number to view a whole drawing or an enlarged section.

Automation Prevents Shipping Delays

In a make-to-order business, customers place as much weight on service as they do on product quality, particularly when many competing vendors make the same type of products. If you hope to attract repeat business, you have to meet your promised product delivery dates.

Fey Industries (Edgerton, MN) recognized this business reality. “We want to exceed the customers’ expectations,” says Vernon Buus, IS programming supervisor. The company manufactures vinyl and thermal-formed promotional products with customized logos and other imprints. Products include ring binders, self-stick calendars, daily planners, credit card holders and media packaging for VHS tapes, DVDs and CD-ROMs.

Fey had sufficient measurement data about how work moved within its discrete manufacturing facility. Still, delays elsewhere in the company — somewhere between ordering and manufacturing — remained poorly understood and unpredictable. An order could pass within minutes to the manufacturing area, unless someone placed a hold on it so that the credit, art or engineering department could handle an aspect of the job.

Employees had no easy method of finding out background information on a hold, such as when it was placed or what activities had occurred to remove the hold and expedite the job. A one-year-old product configuration system from Friedman Associates (Deerfield, IL) did its job well on the manufacturing side, but it didn’t automate front office processing. While different hold queues did exist, users had to actively monitor them on a regular basis.

To prevent oversights and unnecessary delays, Buus says Fey decided it needed to automate routing and notification with workflow and electronic document management. Fey also wanted to be able to speed up information retrieval and prioritize routing based on promised ship dates. This would give engineers, people in accounting and other users easier and more timely access to information. They needed a clear audit trail so that management could identify and correct bottlenecks within its offices. Lastly, Fey needed the solution to run on the IBM AS/400 midrange computer.

The company selected MultiManager from SolCom (Sioux Falls, SD), which helped Fey redesign and implement the sales order process this summer, just in time for its busy September through December calendar product season. The new system functions as the starting point for all product orders, which are received primarily by fax and mail. Orders are scanned using a Bell & Howell high-speed scanner and SolCom scanning software. They’re then indexed within MultiManager and started on a work process. Order-entry clerks process these images and further define and break them up into separate work orders if necessary.

The order then proceeds to the next step — as defined using MultiManager’s MultiFlow icon-based workflow design tool — so that the right employee works on tasks at the right time. Upon completion of each step, the order and job processing continues in an automated fashion, outlined by the workflow.

Buus says Fey Industries plans to use MultiManager to design additional workflow applications, such as job bidding. It will also be tightly integrated with the manufacturing system so information can flow between the two systems and employees can avoid double-entering data.

Imaging Gains Intelligence At GE Turbine

At General Electric Gas Turbine Manufacturing Operations, located in Greenville, SC, quality is a top priority. The heavy-duty gas turbines it builds are used by approximately 50 percent of electric utilities worldwide. Each turbine contains thousands of critical parts and requires an overwhelming amount of documentation.

The company already had an imaging system from Eastman Software, but they created a customized solution called GEDMS (GE Document Management System) to improve navigation and linking between images. At the heart of the system is the Radian Advanced Integrated Lifecycle Support (RAILS) system from Radian Systems (Alexandria, VA).

All part and quality assurance documentation is now scanned into GEDMS at a central location, along with various ID numbers. A Windows Explorer-like logical tree structure allows users to visualize the logical links of parts to subassemblies and then to major assemblies. They can look at a larger overall view or drill down to view detailed parts information.

“What makes this project unique is not the imaging,” says Jim Winsness, the company’s manager of quality records. “What helped here is using the RAILS technology to structure [interrelationships] — showing that these pieces went into these pieces and then into these subassemblies to build this turbine.”

GE’s turbine customers can select various options such as alternative fuel systems, so each turbine ends up as a partially customized product. Organizing document images in this way makes it easier to compare a new order of a specific type or frame size against a list of similar jobs on file. Users can also search by part number and locate all of the turbines that incorporate a particular part. GE can then proactively notify all customers about information they need to know about part maintenance or available upgrades.

GEDMS has made document management less unwieldy. GE must provide Comprehensive Product Quality Reports within 30 days of shipping a turbine, and these reports are often as large as 20 bound volumes. Compiling each report previously required extensive coordination of paper and the eventual creation of an archival microfilm copy.

With the new system, customers receive all of their relevant information and drawings on a CD-ROM that incorporates the RAILS front-end software they need to access the contents. GE can even offer customers the option of adding their own maintenance information right onto the CD.

GEDMS gives everyone on the company’s network — engineers, manufacturing, product service staff — access to all documentation from a user-friendly front-end client on the desktop. Over the last three months, access has been made available over the company’s intranet so that casual users can view records without having the full client software loaded on their desktop. Eventually, users outside the company will be granted secured access to records over the Internet.

Small Manufacturer Taps A Simple Solution

The machine shop, sheet metal shop and plastics division at Burgess Brothers (Canton, MA) can produce “anything that anyone wants” according to IS manager Tom Gurski. Sometimes the company makes customized prototypes for potential new products and it never hears of the project again. It also has repeat customers with production manufacturing needs. In the latter category, Burgess makes the plastic chassis for the TruScan family of wide-format scanners from Vidar Systems (Herndon, VA).

When Burgess learned more about the products it helps to manufacture, it decided use the scanner and TruInfo software to scan, index, store and retrieve documents, bringing its extensive paper files under control.

Today, all paper and electronic engineering drawings, whether created in-house on the CAD system or received from a customer, are indexed and stored in the TruInfo System. The archiving function eliminates the time-consuming problems associated with large paper-based file systems, such as locating documents and regenerating deteriorated prints. In addition, the software improves document quality. Users can manipulate drawings and blueprints to make them more readable and they can zoom in on details as needed.

Printouts of the latest version of a drawing are still sent to the manufacturing floor in each job packet, but inspectors can access the TruInfo database directly to check details and verify design information.

While Burgess has improved efficiency with TruInfo, it is contemplating an upgrade to the Info.trak document control solution as part of a larger upgrade to an NT client/server environment and a new MRP system. Developed by Vidar’s Bamboo Solutions division, Info.trak is a broader document control solution for ISO process management. It adds security, revision control, check in/check out and workflow functionality to the basic scan, store and retrieve functions delivered by TruInfo. An optional Info.push module lets you send update notifications via the Internet to let users know that new versions of documents, designs and/or manufacturing processes are available through Info.trak.U

ADVICE ON SELECTING MANUFACTURING SOLUTIONS

Kalthoff, producer of the twice-yearly engineering and manufacturing trade shows that bear his name, has the following advice for would-be buyers of document solutions: “Look at the most complex part of the system first and find a vendor and the solution that will fit. Generally, the system will handle the rest of your needs.”

Engineering document management is very complex because you’re dealing with large, vector-based drawings. Some are on microfilm, some are in CAD systems and some are just hard copies. If you can find a DM solution to handle conversion and file management for the engineer documents, Kalthoff says, these products can probably handle the small-format text documents and forms in purchasing, receiving and order entry.

“We believe the more user input, the better the system will be,” Kalthoff says.“It’s much easier to teach a user about technology than it is to teach an MIS person how the users do their jobs.”

You still need the technical expertise to understand what kind of horsepower’s going to be needed to run the system, what kind of network is required, the costs involved, the types of platforms it runs on and the detailed functionality. The most practical solution is to assemble a multi-discipline project team to select new systems.

Kalthoff International will split its upcoming show in Los Angeles (October 11-13) into two sections — one for business and MIS people trying to understand how to meet the needs of manufacturing and engineering, and one for engineers trying to understand the technology.

Mergers and acquisitions, and the proliferation of product lines have led to today’s more complicated work environments. Project teams collaborate across multiple locations using multiple business systems and several different types of CAD or PDM. Naturally, this makes the tasks of creating or revamping document management much more complex.

Integration between business systems and document management system continues to gain importance.

“This trend is being led by the ERP companies, who are hungry for new sources of revenue,” Kalthoff says. Through business partnerships and/or acquisitions of companies with document management technologies, these vendors are trying to add more functionality they can sell to new and existing customers.

Many companies who are facing this need to integrate within their companies will hear about it through their existing vendors.

“The cost of integration is coming down for users,” according to Don Post, a principal at Imerge Consulting (Cary, IL). “[This is due to] pre-certifications and open APIs, and industry standards should further enable this trend.”

Another trend, says Post, is the emergence of more niche document management software products geared to specific applications or vertical industries.

“At first look, many of these products sound alike,” Post warns, “but when you get under the covers and figure out what they really focus on, that’s when the limitations and strengths are clearly visible.”

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