Documatics Limited – Business Process Management software

Scope of the Project

The installation of Process Evolve™ was for the Boston and Shannon sites, with access also required for users with specific roles in India, France and Italy. The initial implementation was to cover the document management process to ensure a simple transition period, where productivity levels were maintained with minimal disruption.

The Shannon site was the first to be deployed. After a trial period, initial user requirements were supplied to the Documatics development team, to introduce the core GE document processing requirements. An example of such requirements was the ability to stack drawings to coversheets, and the ongoing tracking of the submittal process for these stacked documents.

Once the Shannon site was up and running, with all users trained and comfortable with the solution, the Boston deployment soon followed. Again a similar approach was taken whereby the document management process was focused upon.

The next step in the project was the implementation of the workflow feature to incorporate the business processes defined by GE Sensing. This introduced greater efficiencies for GE Sensing, ensuring that specific users carried out the necessary task when required within the process, and flagged any area that needed attention within the flow of an order.

How the solution was implemented

Process Evolve was implemented by way of initially installing a trial system with standard Process Evolve functionality. Users such as the Application Engineers and Document Controllers provided feedback on how they wished to use the product. Through communicating and coordinating with the Six Sigma process engineers within GE, the Documatics R&D team set about implementing the additional features required to ensure a smooth transition over to a more stable system.

Once deployed, training was provided for each user of the system within GE. Further advanced training was provided for those identified as ‘Super Users’ within the GE team. These Super Users act as the first line of support for any queries, with the Documatics Professional Services team on hand if any query is to be escalated.

Challenges to deliver

One of the goals of GE Sensing in taking on a new system was to ensure all of their global offices had visibility to order detail and the associated repository documentation.

While the main document repository was to be stored on a virtual server, global access via Process Evolve to this repository would have to rely on existing bandwidth capacity to communicate the virtual server. This threatened to introduce inefficiencies in downloading and uploading documents to and from local sites.

Rather than introduce further cost to GE Sensing whereby the communications infrastructure would need to be significantly upgraded, Documatics undertook to overcome this limitation by providing a novel solution to provide a transparent distributed document storage system. As opposed to documents being downloaded from the virtual server, the concept of local site caching for site specific documents was introduced. This ensures that the latest versions of all documents are available on the local sites.

The distributed system ensured users had the speed of access to documents they work on ensuring virtual server is the master containing the most complete and up-to-date versions of all documents.

Benefits to GE Sensing

GE Sensing now have a tailored environment within which all documentation for each and every order is stored. Audit trails can be tracked to identify who made what changes and when to each document associated with an order. The tracking feature allows traceability on each document submitted to the customer.

Each generated document is now governed by the processes defined by the Six Sigma team within GE Sensing through the use of the Workflow feature.

The Databook feature allows users to amalgamate all necessary order information in one book that is to be delivered to the customer with the manufactured product. As opposed to the historical manual approach to this task, during pilot this feature improved the efficiency of creating data books by up to 70%. When fully implemented it will reduce order delivery time, allowing invoices to be issued with a much faster turnaround.

As already mentioned, GE Sensing’s global offices now have clear visibility of necessary document repositories and all orders through the Process Evolve platform.

Why Documatics

After assessing many solutions, GE Sensing choose Documatics for a variety of reasons.

• While the product has many sophisticated features such as Workflow and Databook generation, it was the ability to configure the platform to the specific requirements set out by GE users that made Process Evolve stand out over other products.  No need for coding changes and compatibility with future updates was assured.
• Allied to this was Documatics proven track record of delivering quality solutions in a professional manner to a large customer base in a time critical manner.
• The on-going ability of Documatics to support and update Process Evolve to meet GE Sensing’s changing requirements is a vital element in the on going successful relationship.