| With the adoption of on-line
media such as CD-ROM and CD-R, and DVD RAM corporate IS departments
are now providing on-line and nearline access to hundreds of files
across the network within seconds. Amada Engineering has developed
an extended CD network to support its service representatives across
the United States and in several countries around the world. This
industrial engineering and design company scanned 10 years worth of
paper service reports on to CD in just eight months. Each document
was linked to the central database running on a Windows NT server,
allowing access to every service record for a given customer in a
matter of minutes, rather than days. Plus, the system provides simultaneous
access to information across the network and has enabled Amada to
reduce its physical storage requirements significantly.
Amada Engineering’s Software Engineering
Manager, Jeff Duveneck, spearheaded the company’s transition
to on-line media. The company, which produces and supports computer-controlled
automation systems for industrial applications, receives average
over 20,000 completed service reports per year, in addition to supporting
documentation for each report. Because of the requirement of compatibility
with the existing database, Duveneck opted for storage on CD\DVD
as the most logical way to replace the paper filing system.
Amada selected the NSM6000 CD\DVD library because
of its speed, reliability and quality engineering. "As an engineering
firm, we know quality when we see it," Duveneck explained.
"Plus, nothing can touch the NSM's speed." Duveneck’s
department then wrote a program that required the manual entry of
just one small piece of information from each service report to
link everything together. It took just eight months for Duveneck’s
team to scan 10 years worth of service reports to CDs and link each
document to the appropriate customer in the database
Amada’s NSM system has been up and running
reliably ever since. Now when a new document arrives, it is scanned
into the computer and resides in a cache on the hard drive until
enough data is accumulated for a batch transmittal to CD. "The
software knows to check the CDs if it can’t find something
on the hard disk,” Duveneck explained, "so the archiving
is totally transparent to users.”
Other design engineering facilities utilizing
the document and image management solutions include: Eastman Chemical
Corp, Mustang Engineering and Smiths Industries.
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