Airplane components maker moves to digital archiving system for complex document management relief

Making components used for aircraft engines is a complex process with an equally complex behind-the-scenes menagerie of records to manage for FAA compliance.

Electro-Methods, South Windsor, Conn., designs close-tolerance flight safety components for aircraft engine manufacturers, and the U.S. and foreign governments. To meet FAA guidelines, Electro-Methods must retain some records for as long as 25 years, and some for the time that an airplane is in service.

The company reached the point where it had 33 four-drawer cabinets filled with quality and inspection records, blueprints, certifications, and other paper documents. And while it maintains four buildings totaling more than 109,000 square feet, Electro-Methods needed to repurpose storage space for new machines and manufacturing use.

Says Michael Salwa, data processing manager, “We didn't have a lot of space to add more filing cabinets, but we needed to keep the files.”

This dilemma led Electro-Methods to search for digital storage solution. Eventually, Salwa met with reps from CD Dimensions, a technical services provider that recommended the Alchemy system for document management from Captaris.

Nearly all Electro-Methods employes rely on product records for various job responsibilities, which is why the paper filing system had to be replaced. For instance, engineers view blueprints, accountants access invoices and payroll, and everyone from the sales department to people on the shop floor refer to various job folders and manuals.

Locating and retrieving a paper file could take up to an hour. So engineers typically sent file requests to a clerical worker who pulled job folders and blueprints from file cabinets.

“She probably spent half of her day just pulling documents,” Salwa says. “Because it took so much effort to get a new set of blueprints, engineers would sometimes just keep the outdated set they had.” The consequence, he adds, was that version control became compromised, and engineers found themselves spending valuable time walking from desk to desk looking for files and job folders.

Soon after adopting the Alchemy system, Electro-Methods' staff was loading documents into the Alchemy digital archive using a KIP wide-format scanner/printer and Ricoh scanners. The process started with stored job folders, but since scanning was so fast and intuitive, the team progressed to blueprints, certifications, inspection records, payroll, and other accounting documents. So far, says Salwa, Electro-Methods personnel have scanned more than one million pages into Alchemy.

Salwa estimates Electro-Methods achieved ROI for the Alchemy system within six months. Old filing cabinets were removed from the administrative and inspection areas, and replaced with office or manufacturing equipment. Instead of waiting up to an hour for paper copies, searching for missing files, roughly 60 employees now use Alchemy on a daily basis to search and retrieve documents from their own desktops.

“There are no more lost papers or multiple copies. Managers love it,” Salwa said. “We're able to do higher volumes of business with the same amount of people.”

Alchemy also supports disaster-recovery efforts. Previously, Electro-Methods didn't have a convenient backup for paper files. Now files are stored on a hard drive on-site and backed up on tape off-site, Salwa says.

“Even if our server crashed, we could still get our records,” Salwa says.