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Issue Date: October 2002

Manufacturing, design and documents

1 October 2002

One of the most pressing challenges faced by discrete manufacturers is to connect the engineering side of the business with manufacturing, quality control, and customer service.
For example, in a manufacturing environment, the shop floor might be ignorant of revised designs and manufacture the wrong items; engineers, unaware of customer complaints regarding a specific part, could continue to use it in their designs.
This is just the kind of manufacturing nightmare Chicago's A.J. Antunes - a manufacturer of high-speed toasters and steamers for fast food restaurants, control boards for those items, and a water filtration system - wants to avoid. The company's choice came when it was upgrading to an engineering-centric design system. Donald Springer, IS manager at A.J. Antunes, explained that the manufacturer had to choose between a content management system plus a design system, or just a design system.
The first consideration was price. "The first phase of those document control systems was $150,000 (±R1,5m)," Springer reveals, "plus very significant chunks of consulting money." Despite this, A.J. Antunes prepared to move ahead with an implementation, but that project was shelved when the content management vendor went out of business - a mere month before the go date.
That was when A.J. Antunes went with EDS PLM Solutions and Version 11 of its CAD software, Solid Edge. EDS went a step further, providing a workspace - SharePoint - that offered some of the perks of a document management and collaboration system. Springer explains in more detail: "For manufacturers, there is a constant need to synchronise engineering drawing revisions with manufacturing revisions." SharePoint allows floor supervisors and their managers, for example, to log into the application and check any particular drawing. These used to be archived in a haphazard way, but thanks to SharePoint, no longer.
"The engineers used to create filenames 200 characters long, trying to categorise the documents so they could find the one they were looking for," Springer explains. "Now, SharePoint lets users add in searchable criteria, which can tag files by whether other engineers have checked them out or if it has an effective date. Some documents need to be routed for approval, and SharePoint marks the ones that still need to be routed to managers and the ones that have become official."
However, this is not the only document management functionality SharePoint offers. "If there is a request for a change, there is a detailed document that identifies what the change is intended to accomplish. It could be from technical service, from quality control, (if they have seen a part that should be enhanced or replaced); or sales, (if there is a specific need that a customer has)."
In the final analysis, A.J. Antunes has used its design system to double as a document management and collaboration system. That means not just efficiency but also lower costs. "No consultant has ever entered this building," Springer concludes.
For more information contact Esteq Design Technologies, 012 991 5570.


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