| DISC > Success Stories |
| Amada Engineering |
| Efficiency Through Consolidation |
| 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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