Electronic Document Management

A process or manufacturing facility creates and uses anywhere from hundreds of thousands to several million pages of documentation in order to conduct its business each year. Much of this is comprised of controlled documents, business records and technical documents, used in engineering, testing, maintenance and production. There is a negative impact on the productivity of a manufacturing facility when:

  • An overall corporate strategy does not exist for the creation, use and management of technical documents, controlled documents and business records.
  • Authoring tools create files that cannot be shared outside the organization or department which created them.
  • Access to corporate information is only available to those individuals who know where the documents reside.

An Electronic Document Management (EDM) system can remedy these impediments to productivity. The initial deployment of an EDM System should target applications with high payback opportunities. These applications are document-centric and typically include:

  • Engineering:
    By reducing the generation and handling of paper documents during design, review and production, the cycle times for these processes will be reduced and so will the costs associated with drawing distribution.
  • Quality:
    By consolidating the authoring, review and publication of procedures, standards and work instructions, and related documents, quality can eliminate all duplicate and overlapping operations in deploying these documents.
  • Maintenance:
    By providing electronic access to all equipment documentation, maintenance can reduce the time currently expended in the search for maintenance information and work instructions.
  • Document Control:
    The control of the documents generated by Engineering, Quality, Environmental and Safety.
  • Office Technology:
    By capturing electronic images of business records (e.g. purchase orders, invoices, etc.)

Common Attributes of an EDM System

Management of Controlled Documents
The motivation for the deployment of an EDM System is based in part on the management of controlled documents. These are documents that possess one or more of the following attributes during their life cycle:

  • Some form of authorization is required for publication, distribution and/or use.
  • Regulatory requirements define the creation, management, distribution and/or retention.
  • The document provides design, maintenance, operation, safety and/or environmental information that impacts the productivity or safety of the process.
  • The document contains information which is considered the intellectual property of the business.
  • The document is distributed outside the facility in a manner consistent with the above attributes.

Processes and Relationships in an EDM System
A properly designed EDM system provides an integrated set of services to meet the document management needs of both end user and system administrator. Its client/server or web-based architecture provides a scaleable set of hardware and software resources capable of adapting to the future needs of the business. The typical functions of an EDM system are described in the figure below.

Document Capture
Documents stored in an EDM system may originate from several sources: CAD drawings, word processor generated documents and hand generated paper documents. All these formats are checked-in through a common document capture application. This software application provides a consistent point of entry for both electronic and paper documents.

Paper documents are scanned to create an electronic image file which can be stored in the EDM System. Verification of the scanned images and their preliminary indexing is typically performed through a scanning workstation application. The Check-In of new documents and revisions to existing documents is accomplished with a Management of Change application.

Electronic documents are captured in their original electronic format and automatically rendered into a distribution format such as TIFF or PDF, that can be viewed by all with file access privileges. The connection between the original electronic format and the distribution format are maintained by the EDM system data model and Management of Change application.

Document Indexing
Once a document has been captured it must be indexed to the appropriate portion of the data model. The document indexing process is customized to meet the requirements of the business processes where the documents are used. The definition of the data model entities and their attributes are maintained in the EDM system database.

Document Security
Access to the document types maintained within an EDM system is controlled at login by the User or Group ID and password or electronic signature combination. The rights to view, markup, edit, print or distribute a document are attributes that are indexed and maintained in the EDM system database.

Document Retrieval, Viewing and Markup
Once documents have been placed in an EDM System, they may be retrieved for viewing and subsequent printing. The user may retrieve or Check-Out a document through a Document Query application. The best ways to search for information are determined during the EDM system design process. Some common options for searching are:

  • A visual model in which the user moves through the document database by pointing at graphics.
  • A traditional tree structured approach in which the user moves through a hierarchy of documents and folders.
  • A direct query approach in which the user poses a query for a document or set of documents and is presented with the match list of documents that correspond to the requested query.

In all cases the retrieval of documents is performed through the appropriate data model. Once a document has been checked-out to a user's workstation, markups can be applied to the document and returned to the originator or entered into a workflow. These markups can be as simple as a sticky note or as complex as raster drafting suggestions to the drawings. In all cases the markups do not alter the original documents which are controlled through the Management of Change application residing in the EDM system.

Document Printing
Documents placed in the EDM System can be printed using any of the printing devices attached to the network. In addition production printing can take place using high volume printing devices. Documents can be selected for printing in several ways:

  • Once a document has been delivered to the user workstation, all or portions of the document can be sent to a printer.
  • A list of documents can be selected for printing, without retrieving them to the workstation and printed with a variety of overlays to indicate additional information, including: Date and time of printing or usage and security information.

Management of Change
There are both regulatory as well as good business practice requirements for managing the change to the documents captured by the EDM system. The following diagram describes the steps typically performed on documentation when it has to be revised.

The Management of Change application will:

Technology Overview
Product Lifecycle Management
Enterprise Content Management
Electronic Document Management
System Architecture