Rohr tackles time and space with new document management system

Rohr tackles time and space with new document management system

Sheila Julien, Freelance Writer on Technical Issues, based in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, USA

Keywords Aerospace, Document management, Rohr

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Seconds count if you have the aircraft industry dependent on you for the design,manufacturing, and maintenance of airframe components and everything must go like clockwork. So Rohr, Inc. was looking for both speed and accuracy in a document management system that could handle over half a million documents and yet be accessible to locations around the world.

Rohr, Inc., based in Chula Vista, California, is a designer and manufacturer of nacelles, the structures surrounding aircraft jet engines, and pylons, the structures and systems connecting engine and wing. The company supplies virtually all the commercial airframe manufacturers around the world. Because of its broad customer base,Rohr must maintain design documentation processes that can operate in accordance with each customer's engineering change control procedures as well as with the regulatory requirements of different countries, including the FAA.

For each design, the company maintains a master drawing and a set of associated support documents numbering up to 100 in a single bundle. These master drawings and their supporting documents are used by designers at design sites, by manufacturing sites in the USA or Europe and by service sites around the globe to ensure a high level of accuracy in the building and servicing of these critical airframe components. Without the documents to verify that the manufacture or service is performed exactly according to the most current specifications, the work cannot be completed.

While the master documents are maintained in Chula Vista, they must be accessible throughout the world. "In the past we had people here in Chula Vista, our seven other US plants and the two in Europe maintaining aperture cards and paper documents in their print cribs", says Martin Meehan, senior technical staff analyst at Rohr. To accomplish the distribution, a data management group would duplicate the master documents and then transport them by commercial courier services to the various sites requiring the specific documentation. The receiving site would then log the receipt, file the documents, and pull the old documents.

Under the paper system, it could take three to five days from the time the documents were available from the data management group to when they were accessible to the individuals needing them at the remote sites. This may not seem like such a long time in some cases, "but if an aircraft is on the ground pending a document required for maintenance, three to five days is a very long time", according to Meehan.

In addition to time pressure, the paper process demanded a high degree of process discipline and careful adherence to policy to ensure accurate maintenance of the files at the individual sites. This discipline is absolutely critical in a business such as Rohr's, with zero tolerance for error. Once the documents reached the remote location, they would be maintained in a file room at the site. Individuals requiring the documents would enter the file room, pull the file, copy the document and then place it in a "to be filed" bin. A document filing specialist would regularly refile the documents to reduce the risk of a misfile.

In dealing with hundreds of thousands of cards, it was no small chore to ensure that every file room had all the appropriate documents, that each bundle had all the supporting documents correctly bundled together, that every single document was the correct version,and that each document was appropriately archived according to the specific rules for that situation. That was then ...

Rohr recently implemented a document management system that not only reduced the risk of human error, but also increased the speed of distribution to less than a day ­ in some cases moments.

Using the imaging technology and unique distribution architecture of a Cimage-based document management system, Rohr's documents can in essence be in two places at once­ or ten places for that matter. While the original documents are maintained in a central vault, perfect images are made available throughout the world via a network of servers that can provide instant, up-to-date, local access. "With this system, we have minimized the potential for delays and errors. We are now able to provide more timely and accurate data and so reduce the potential for scrap and rework resulting", Meehan explains.

Under the new system, the chances of errors in filing and refiling, risk of damage to the physical document, and potential for accessing out-of-date versions are dramatically reduced. Even site access time is reduced. Users no longer have to march off to the file rooms to get a document ­ it is available to them at their desks.

While increasing accessibility, the new Cimage-based system also enhanced controls. "In our business, we are continuously audited to ensure control and compliance", Meehan describes. Rohr's new document management system codifies the required rules and procedures to improve controls and reduce risk of variation from procedures.

The system is flexible enough to handle the complex archiving rules Rohr must adhere to. With different customers each inevitably having different internal procedures for engineering changes, and each requiring Rohr to work to their procedures, engineering update control was a major issue. The rules and procedure can differ depending on the type of documents, the customers involved, and even different countries'regulatory environments. "Cimage has an open architecture that allows us to customize the system to meet our needs best", according to Meehan. "If we need to add new rules, we can do that."

The first part of the production system started in April 1996. The system currently manages about 250,000 engineering and 70,000 support images. The plan is for the system to manage 600,000 images when fully implemented. Users are located across six buildings in the Chula Vista location, other US plants, and a plant in Germany and one in France.

There are seven servers in the system, with all queries going to the Chula Vista server to assure access to the latest information. The remote servers contain typically 20,000-30,000 images, which are accessed so often that it is more economical to maintain local electronic copies to reduce network traffic. The system is installed on Hewlett-Packard (HP) servers. Client software operates on HP, Sun and IBM UNIX systems as well as IBM-compatible personal computers.

Next stop ...

The initial scope was limited to replacing the current physical distribution system for design drawings with a far faster, surer system. While this conservative scope ensured a speedy and effective implementation, its initial successes and wide user acceptance prompted user requests for the system to be expanded to meet other needs as well ­ such as managing customer correspondence documents,equipment engineering information and purchasing data. Rohr's new system could eventually be used as a flexible search engine, providing capabilities inconceivable under the old paper system.

Future plans for the system include expansion into customer service and purchasing and to field support locations in Singapore and Scotland. Also planned is a system for direct transfer of CAD design information directly into Cimage Document Manager.

Note: In December 1997, Rohr Inc. merged with The BF Goodrich Company. Rohr Inc. now does business as The BF Goodrich Aerospace/Aerostructures Group.

This article was originally published in Document Management magazine, Spring 1997.