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Ingenco : GTX Ingenco - the name is derived from the word Ingenuity. Ingenco - the company is a recent spin-off of Scottish Power's Technology Division. It is rapidly emerging as one of Scotland's and the UK's most innovative companies, as it becomes a centre for engineering and scientific excellence for the management of heat, power and telecommunications systems. With their Headquarters in East Kilbride Scotland, Ingenco has operational bases and offices throughout the UK including London, Prenton, Newtown and Bonnybridge. Today less than 40% of work carried out by Ingenco's engineers is on behalf of the Scottish Utility. The 420 highly skilled engineers and scientists offer specialist engineering services throughout the UK into the Utility, Power Production and Distribution, Mobile Telecommunication, Healthcare and other Industrial Market Sectors. Inevitably many of the Engineering Sectors that Ingenco services struggle with 'the paper problem' - and non-more so than their traditional Power Production and Distribution Sector. Ingenco have inherited a sophisticated and powerful computer based system to help them manage the paper drawings and CAD and other electronic drawing files as well as keeping them up to date. Ingenco's drawing management system is based upon the Spescom/Altris CAD-Connect product and this system is linked to AutoCAD and the GTXRaster CAD Series of products. By using the Altris system, there is the potential for the Ingenco transmission engineers and other users to be able to make redline comments on the latest 'revision' of a power drawing or a schematic. These marked up documents, from any location within the organisation, are then passed electronically to the Drawing Office engineers, where they are running the GTXRaster CAD and AutoCAD software concurrently in the Altris environment. Update to the scanned drawing files is then done using the GTXRaster CAD editing tools before checking the new revision of the electronic drawing back into the Altris database. The scale of the operation is impressive. With an overall database of more than 274,000 drawing files residing on the central server in Cathcart, 32 of the Altris seats have been enabled with the GTXRaster CAD product. Connected by a wide area network, the GTX seats have been made available in all the important regional centres including 8 seats in East Kilbride, 4 in Motherwell, 3 in Glasgow, 2 in Edinburgh and 1 each in Dumfries and Kilmarnock. Further South, the clusters of GTX seats reflect the acquisition of the Merseyside and North Wales Electricity Board (MANWEB). To help fulfil the responsibilities of the MANWEB engineering services, 12 GTXRaster CAD's are located in Prenton, near Chester and 2 in Liverpool. The hardware infrastructure in support of the software facilities includes 2 OCE 9400 scanners and 2 x HP1055 plotter systems, one located at East Kilbride and one at Prenton. Following this significant investment in the software and hardware technology required to manage and update their drawings electronically, what facilities of the GTXRaster CAD product are most important to Ingenco? Mr Bobby Laird, Ingenco's EDMS Application Administration Manager, commented that, "We use GTXRaster CAD to help us keep our drawing files up to date and to help make them available for everyone to view. When we are editing or updating our drawings, we often use the comprehensive Hybrid (Raster and Vector) editing capabilities of GTXRaster CAD. Having the choice of working and editing in either raster or vector while making these changes is important to us." Mr Laird went on to add that, "At the end of the update process, the drawing files are rasterized using GTXRaster CAD. This enables the corrected, latest revision of the drawing file to be available for viewing by everybody, not just those with AutoCAD on their PC's. Overall we have found that updating our drawing files using the hybrid techniques of GTXRaster CAD has proved to be more cost effective and easier than anything else we have used". GTX look forward to helping Ingenco maintain their record for Ingenuity and high quality service, as their skills and experience are brought to bear in the new markets that they are addressing. Find out more about Ingenco at www.ingenco.co.uk . Find out more about GTX at www.gtx.com |