When an order for a new electric motor hits the MRP system at Siemens' Cincinnati Motor Plant, a Web-based document-management system automatically finds and sorts the needed drawings from an archive of more than 200,000.
The Intranet Docs system from Xerox Engineering Systems (XES) sends the drawings to a printer for hard-copy production and folding. The system also sends drawings to the manufacturing line while other team members in areas such as quality assurance, purchasing, and engineering get instant online access from terminals at their stations along with print-on-demand capability.
The Xerox 8830 printer and folder does much of the tedious work previously done by four document handlers. The document vault holds more than 200,000 drawings, some dating back to the turn of the century.
The previous production method used four document assemblers to locate aperture cards. They would also print and collate labor packets for products being assembled. This tedious process could involve hundreds of large-format documents. And because some days see 300 labor packs in distribution, this manual operation proved slow and costly.
The more streamlined method from XES, a subsidiary of Xerox focusing on the technical documents market, includes a document-management system that seamlessly tracks paper and digital documents. Converting the most-used paper documents to digital formats eliminates repetitive manual processes such as searching, sorting, and building job sets.
