Document Searches Should NOT Defy Lean Operations
by Thomas R. Cutler | Febuary, 2007
Manufacturing Insights
Automation, Control & Plant Intelligence - Articles, Analysis, Reviews, Interviews & Views
by Thomas R. Cutler | Febuary, 2007
Manufacturing Insights
The average information worker spends more than
thirteen hours per week creating documents and nearly seven hours per week
organizing documents; an additional four hours per week are spent managing
document routing and another ten hours per week searching for information. All this time searching for documents is
negatively impacting the productivity, bottom-line, and lean operations of most
North American manufacturers.
According to Ricardo Talbot, Chief Science Officer
for Elmo Solutions, “The biggest distinction in effective search tools that
create and manage engineering documents is the capability to index, retrieve and
display a wide range of CAD and imaging documents from AutoCAD, other Autodesk
"flavored" applications, Autodesk Inventor, and
SolidWorks.
Calculating return-on-investment for effective PLM/CAD search products are usually based on the safe assumption that the average information worker spends only one hour per week searching for electronic documents. The labor cost is illustrated below and includes the fully burdened rate, yet is quite conservative.
It is economically viable to deploy CAD and PLM
document retrieval tools because according to Talbot, “Our original intent was
to develop and market a full-fledged TDM (Technical Document Management) system
with sophisticated document retrieval and viewing features, revision control,
approval control, workflow, really the whole enchilada. However, when we
surveyed our potential customers, we discovered that 90% of them would be
perfectly happy with a "barebones" TDM solution that would really focus on
retrieval and viewing of engineering documents, as long as it was easy to
use.”
Talbot suggested, “What those people were actually
describing to us was the good old search engine, Intranet-style, with advanced
engineering-specific viewing capabilities were already in place in many
cases. So it was decided that our approach to TDM would take the form of a
solution that would satisfy the needs of 90% of the market, at an average
initial cost that would be typically about 50 times less than full-featured TDM
system.”
A typical high-end TDM system implementation can cost
as much as $6,000 per user; the new “barebones” technology implementation is
closer to $120 per user.
The Challenge of Metadata Capture
Although CAD documents (especially AutoCAD drawings)
are usually metadata-rich, the way metadata is structured in those
documents may vary considerably from one environment to the other
(actually, it may even vary form one user to the other in any given
environment). A typical run-of-the-mill Parts List or schedule in an
Autodesk AutoCAD-based application: Architectural Desktop, AutoCAD/Mechanical
and Autodesk Mechanical Desktop will represent them as dedicated objects of
their own, while in "vanilla" AutoCAD, they may be represented as AutoCAD
tables, blocks with attributes (a given part is actually often spanned over more
than one AutoCAD block), or even as bits and bites of AutoCAD Text or MText
entities. It gets even more challenging when looking at the Bills of
Materials issue, since there is no such thing, per se, as a BoM structure in
AutoCAD.
Talbot elected to develop a collection of
applications, based on a common foundation API (Applications Programming
Interface) to find, extract, and properly structure metadata to make it
more usable, and help people leverage their past, present, and future investment
in the creation of technical and engineering documents.
Based in San Jose, California, SignaSys, Inc. is
a broadcast and news media systems integration and consulting firm. It
has sixty employees, of which about twenty work on pre-project design and
feasibility studies. On a daily basis, those knowledge workers
produce and maintain engineering documents in of a variety of formats,
namely AutoCAD, Microsoft Word and Excel, as well as eMail documents stored
in Microsoft Exchange public stores. The ability to efficiently retrieve
documents using both keyword-based and structured searches is crucial to sales
personnel, since it would allow them to quickly identify previously created
documents that can serve as basis for new projects, thus dramatically reducing
pre-project design costs. The SignaSys IT department used the new low cost
search solution and discovered an efficient and reliable technology that
yielded a quick return on investment with a minimal cost of ownership.
Jeff Mohler, SignaSys' IT Engineer noted that the new search product, “Helped us reduce dramatically the costs associated with document redundancy, as well as document searching. We were also very impressed with the high quality of the technical support we received from the Elmo Solutions people. For us, that sells the product."
Lack of Search Tools = Anti-Lean
Companies that do not have effective search tools
waste money on:
With humility, Talbot, who is often called Mr. T,
humbly suggested, “I'm just a software engineer with big ears who heard people
complaining about how they could not get the most out of their past and present
investment in the creation and maintenance of CAD data, and who put together
simple, yet powerful ways to serve them.”
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