More than 13 hours per week creating documents and nearly seven hours per week organizing documents are common among small and midsize engineer-to-order (ETO) manufacturers; four hours per week are spent managing document routing and another 10 hours per week searching for information. All this time searching for documents is waste and counter to lean initiatives and established efficiency metrics. According to Ricardo Talbot, chief science officer for Elmo Solutions, “The biggest distinction in effective search tools that create and manage engineering documents is the capability to index, retrieve and display a wide range of CAD [computer-aided design] and imaging documents from AutoCAD, other Autodesk-flavored applications, Autodesk Inventor and SolidWorks.”

It’s economically viable to deploy CAD and product lifecycle management (PLM) document retrieval tools because, according to Talbot, “Our original intent was to develop and market a full-fledged technical document management [TDM] system with sophisticated document retrieval and viewing features, revision control, approval control, workflow, really the whole enchilada. However, when we surveyed our potential customers, we discovered that 90 percent of them would be perfectly happy with a lightweight TDM solution that would really focus on retrieval and viewing of engineering documents, as long as it was easy to use.”

 …