Document Management Software Speeds Project

By Adam Wilkins

The $500 million upgrade to the Greater Vancouver Regional District's (GVRD) Annacis Island wastewater treatment plant near Vancouver led to new levels of complexity for the organization in managing its engineering paper trail - specifically, the creation and management of a library to contain the 15,000 new engineering and operations management CAD drawings for the enormous plant.

Completed in October 1998, Annacis Island was at one point the most ambitious engineering project in the country. Today, it daily discharges about 440 million liters of treated wastewater into the Fraser River, one of North America's largest salmon rivers. One key project deliverable was making the engineering drawings more accessible to GVRD plant employees during the workday. This meant planning ahead to make these documents accessible - online - for operations and maintenance staff on the floor at Annacis Island.

Although the GVRD has been using engineering document management software (EDMS) systems for a number of years to manage its in-house CAD drawing library, the launch of one of Canada's largest engineering projects became the catalyst for modernizing the system. Plant managers saw that making the library available online at the plant not only would make the drawings more accessible to staff, it had the added bonus of delivering operational and maintenance efficiencies.

"We had been managing our drawings electronically within the CAD department for about eight years," said Mike Kennett, control system supervisor, operations and maintenance department at the GVRD headquarters, located in Burnaby a few miles from Annacis Island. "But, with the upgraded plant at Annacis Island, it was time to get a system that could improve access in the field and lower management costs."

To start the process off, the GVRD brought in consultants who specialized in software architecture to work with its in-house project manager. The first step was to conduct a detailed technical audit of the current software architecture and in-house staff requirements. The challenge was devising a system that delivered online, secure access to the employees. The FileNET system of EDMS programs was selected for the project.

A major part of the preparation phase was determining the system's index setup and security privileges. Most organizations use five to 15 index subjects (such as author name, document creation date, project name, drawing number, etc.) to mark the document for retrieval. Some implement as many as 20 or 30. However, these longer lists increase the time required to catalogue drawings; most organizations ultimately scale back their index listings after working with the new system for a few months.

Overall, the preparatory stage of the implementation was completed in four weeks.

By planning in advance, the actual installation of the FileNET software took little time. An important architectural issue was the process of "migrating" thousands of CAD documents into the new system from the outside consulting engineers who created them.

To speed this process, the GVRD issued a set of standards for the consultants to follow to ensure the flow of new drawings they produced was easily transferable in the correct format and in Microsoft Access. The drawings were then loaded onto a CD and a custom utility was developed by the software architects to allow the GVRD to import these drawings, up to one thousand at a time - into the new system using a standard CD-ROM port.

Once the system was set up, employee training and residual consulting completed the process. Training sessions were conducted in-house from a module set up by the software architects. Engineers received a full-day session, while support staff with limited access received a half-day seminar.

Today, the GVRD uses its EDMS system to keep track of all its CAD drawings for the electrical, instrumentation, civil, mechanical, architectural, structural, process, plumbing and HVAC systems at Annacis Island. Among the many benefits, GVRD staff can track redlines and latest versions, and keep track of the "one true version" of a document, always a thorny problem for engineering administrators.

"It's a revolution," Kennett said. "People do not understand the cost savings and benefits of these systems and how they can save money by eliminating unnecessary paper-pushing."

As an example, according to Kennett, the new FileNET system streamlines the work involved in handling the thousands of inquiries to the document library that are made over the course of a year. Typically, it would take 30 minutes to send someone out to bring back a printed version from the library. Now, Kennett said, "We can pull up the required document on a computer screen in a minute. The savings are tremendous."

The new GVRD system is a "distributed library" where the drawings are available in multiple online locations within the Annacis plant, away from the main repository at the Burnaby head office. The Annacis Island plant has a number of control stations, each of which are equipped with master controls that enable plant employees to manage plant operations from any of the stations.

A screen to allow immediate access to the CAD drawing library was installed at each of these stations, enabling online shopfloor access to documentation. This allows operations staff to work with the latest documents quickly and efficiently.

Although the project was successful, its implementation was not without problems. Among the many challenges faced by the GVRD were hurdles such as how to implement a system that crosses political boundaries, how to classify documents better, and what legacy information and documents can be streamlined with this technology. For most projects, these questions are best addressed before any outside consulting engineering work is commissioned. This will ensure document management and usage costs are kept to a minimum from the start.

For many public projects, Kennett believes the EDMS should be in place before commissioning, and that the consulting engineer's systems should be compatible.

"Ideally, we'd like the outside consulting engineering firms to be online with our EDMS prior to the commissioning phase. This will allow us to manage documents such as technical procedures, redlining of drawings, servicing requirements and others within our system right from the start. I'm sure this is the way all future projects will go."