USER STORY IN THE EDM/PDM WORLD : BOMBARDIER INC.

USER STORIES

IN THE EDM/PDM WORLD :

BOMBARDIER INC.

Canadian based Bombardier Inc. is a relative newcomer to the aerospace industry but the companies that comprise the Bombardier Aerospace group are certainly not. De Havilland, Shorts, Learjet and Canadair can point to a combined 250 year's experience in the aerospace business and design and manufacturing facilities in three countries - Canada, USA and Northern Ireland. An important part of Bombardier's aerospace business is the provision of maintenance and technical services to the military through Defence Services. One of its most important customers is the Royal Canadian Air Force who rely on Bombardier to acquire, register, distribute and preserve the documentation for its VAX and CF-18 aircraft.

By the late 1990s however the Technical Services Department was becoming a victim of its own success. In 1992 just 15 people had been employed to maintain the documentation for 5 different aircraft. By 1998 the numbers employed had risen to 33 and the number of aircraft to 23, which meant that the department had to store and maintain 8 million pages of documentation, 1 million technical drawings and 2 million aperture cards.

The storage for all these documents comprised a 60' x 200' vault which contained approximately 8,000 boxes of documents and 33,000 tubes of drawings plus a warehouse containing a further 3,000 boxes of documentation. Effectively the storage of documents took up more space at the Bombardier site than any other single function or facility. "It didn't stop there", commented Giles Thibodeau, Supervisor of the Technical Documentation Services Department. "Every document that was updated had to be copied 39 times for distribution to the satellite offices all around Canada. This was amounting to over three and half million copies a year, 600,000 every month or 20,000 each day. At a cost of $42 per hour for copying technical drawings and $35 for documentation, it was obvious that we had to do something".

Bombardier did not simply need a document management system, they needed a document management system that could relate documents to the components and sub assemblies that make up an aircraft and that could guarantee rapid access to documents, including large drawings from any of the 39 regional sites, plus the head office in seconds. In addition Bombardier required a system that would be:

easy to use
flexible
able to operate in conjunction with standard computer systems and software
and very important in a defence application, guarantee data integrity, protecting documents from unauthorised access and ensuring that the version control process is watertight.

After an exhaustive selection process, Bombardier concluded that an Altris document management with its integrated document and configuration management plus its unique TIE compression technology was the answer for which they were searching.

The system installed for Bombardier responds to the questions "What are we working on and what data is available for it?" rather than the conventional document management approach of asking for a document or drawing by name, number or keyword. So, for example users at Bombardier might ask the question "What data is available for the engine or the landing gear?" and the system responds with a list of relevant documents and drawings. Bombardier believe that this is a far more natural and intuitive way for people to work in the engineering environment and has already delivered significant benefits including:

personal productivity increases
more effective version and configuration control
more cost efficient distribution and storage with printing on demand in any of the 39 regional sites and head office
better sharing of technical documents
improved customer service.

Key to Bombardier's initial success with the system has been its project by project implementation approach, training those employees who were most enthusiastic about the technology first so that they implemented and trained their colleagues simultaneously. Giles Thibodeau also believes that Altris Software's ability to deliver "out of the box" solutions enabled Bombardier to pursue this implementation policy. He said: "There was no development phase. We, quite simply, installed the software and began to use it. There was no long ramp up period when we did not have all the facilities or when the software was changing. This was a plug and play solution that recognises that Bombardier is in the aircraft business, not software design".

Bombardier's future plans include extending the Altris system to other projects and departments, as well as adding the already integrated Staffware based workflow technology to improve work management and information flows.

Bombardier currently have Altris Pro CM and Altris document management licenses installed. They will shortly implement Staffware based workflow licenses.

HOME | TOP OF PAGE