Handling Water & Sewer Documents for Manufacturing

by Betty Liang

CASE STUDY: Walker Process Equipment
840 N. Russell Avenue
Aurora, Illinois
Fax: (630) 844-9590
Telephone: (630) 892-7921
Internet Home Page: http://www.walker-process.com
Internet e-mail: walker-process@walker.com

DOCUMENT SOURCE: SEWAGE & WATER SYSTEMS AND COMPONENTS DOCUMENTS

. Detailed Fabrication Drawings
. Assembly Drawings
. Layout Drawings
. Job Notes
. Equipment Specifications
. Vendor Information

SUMMARY OF BENEFITS: . Long-term Disaster Recover Medium

. Inexpensive Storage Medium

. Tremendous Storage Space Savings

. Instantaneous Access to Files

Walker Process Equipment (WPE) is a manufacturer of large sewage, wastewater and portable water treatment equipment located in Aurora, Illinois. The company engineers and produces proprietary systems as well as custom parts for municipal and industrial systems. WPE is contracted by the cities and organizations to repair, replace, maintain or construct systems that are vital to the citizens involved. Due to the high degree of customization and subsistence, WPE stores a large archive of these contracts that need to be readily accessible at anytime. Each contract contains the following piece of information: Detailed Fabrication Drawings, Assembly Drawings, Layout Drawings, Job Notes, Equipment Specifications and Vendor Information. All documents are stored according to a unique contract number.

WPE stored all its original hardcopies on site so it was not only difficult to sort and retrieve, but filing also became a cumbersome task. WPE began investigating different types of storage media, first beginning with Microfiche. However, this presented several problems. First WPE would lose document control by outsourcing to a Microfiche Conversion service. Second, it was extremely expensive considering the amount and size of the documents stored. Third, microfiche is not a permanent storage device and can only be access by special microfiche reader machines.  Lastly, the time savings by using microfiche were not enough to warrant the cost of the service and medium.

Hence, WPE sought other alternatives and fortunately discovered Ricoh's turnkey document  imaging solution. The reps responsible for document control took the first step by sending sample documents to Ricoh's San Jose based facility. Immediately upon receiving the documents, a CD was created and indexed and shipped back to WPE. Impressed with 1) the high quality of the scanned images, 2) flexibility to print and read off and PC and 3) speed and accuracy of the search, WPE inquired about evaluating an ImageHunter demo unit for a trial period.

Only two weeks passed before WPE purchased Ricoh's ImageHunter document imaging system.  The ability to burn their documents onto CD overruled all the previous concerns raised with microfiche. WPE could maintain full control of its documents in-house while storing them onto a low cost storage media. Another advantage was the lifetime of a CD which lasts 100 years. Today, WPE is pro-actively using ImageHunter and has dedicated student temps to scan and index the contracts and drawings. Documents are scanned on a daily basis at 200 dpi. Once scanned, each document type is indexed using a single Template containing two fields: 'Contract Number' and 'Document Type'. Since no security features or OCR are performed, Walker has been able to store 20,00 pages per CD - twice as many documents that would normally fit on a CD with OCR. Thus far, Walker has been able to store 8 CDs worth of data, each backed by another set of CDs. The first set is recorded with ImageHunter's special search and view browser, and the backup set is burned without software. For disaster recovery purposes, WPE stores one set of CDs offsite while the hardcopies are shredded. The only documents that are still kept in their original hardcopy are large-scale drawings and 'standards documents' which contain WPE's proprietary systems. With all other documents destroyed, WPE has been able to streamline its papertrail and save a substantial amount of office space.

Author Biography:

Betty Liang
Sales & Marketing Analyst
Ricoh Corporation
San Jose, CA 95134-2088
Direct Line: 408-954-5419
Fax: 408-954-5490

Website: www.ricoh-usa.com

Betty Liang is a Sales & Marketing Analyst for Ricoh Corporation, San Jose. She is involved with the product marketing for Ricoh ImageHunter Document Imaging system. She can be reached at (408) 954-5419, or e-mail to betty@u83.ussj.ricoh.com.