‘We knew what our objectives were—we wanted to improve our archive-access turnarounds, further enhance our document safety and security measures, and increase our access to external sites. Océ was very quick to find a solution’

Istvan Szalai. General Manager, Engineering. Garaventa. Goldau, Switzerland

In business for 65 years, Garaventa has accumulated approximately 150,000 technical drawings—and the number is ever-increasing. Everyday, 45-55 people work simultaneously on a project, producing 20-50 new drawing sets. Each drawing must contain additional project-related information inserted by external sources, and all this information needs to come together into Garaventa’s archive. Then, the drawings must go back out—up-to-date and readily available to all relevant departments, outsourcers, and customers upon request.

Whatever document management system that Garaventa uses, it must support their clear policy—‘Safety First ’. Therefore, document flow needs to be optimally controlled and error-prone shadow archives cannot exist.

 

Faster turnarounds and a long-term solution

With Garaventa’s level of document integration, turnarounds were slow. Archiving staff filed drawings manually. Depending upon the number of document requests, they were sometimes unoccupied or overloaded—drawings were usually received in 2-3 days. An urgent repair or customer question required immediate document retrieval, and drawings weren ’t arriving fast enough. Further, Garaventa’s analogue documents—paper and microfilm—had to be digitised. This would give their drawings a longer life and provide added security, as Garaventa is required to provide accurate documents now and well into the future.

 

Garaventa decided upon an Océ solution:

Garaventa chose to implement a customised solution that fully integrated into their existing IT environment. The core of this system is the modular Océ Engineering Exec® software suite, incorporating Océ Doc Exec® Pro for archiving, offering comprehensive document capture and round the clock access. This solution resulted in improved document processes for Garaventa. Documents are created and sent from 50 CAD workplaces and automatically stored in the digital archive. Today the old bottlenecks no longer exist. Expensive, error-prone “shadow” archives have been eliminated, and Garaventa’s digitised documents have a 10-30 year lifespan.

 

With Océ’s solution, all authorised users—Garaventa employees, those in remote locations, and outsourcers—have direct access from their workplace to documents in the archive either via their Intranet or the Internet. The digital archive ensures document availability, offers minimum search times, and makes the process simpler and faster. Archiving staff can more efficiently manage Garaventa’s document flow, and urgent client questions are answered much more quickly.

 

For print management, Garaventa chose Océ’s multi-functional TDS600 system integrated with the Océ Engineering Exec® module, Océ Print Exec® Pro. Together, this productive solution meets Garaventa’s requirements for printing, scanning and digitising documents. Every authorised user can select documents for printing using job tickets. With the Océ TDS600’s scanning capability, digitising Garaventa’s extensive analogue archive can be carried out using temporary staff. Meanwhile, Garaventa chose to outsource microfilm scanning in one go, and these files fit perfectly into their Océ archive. The overall results? “Enormous time savings,” comments Szalai. And money? “We’ve already recovered all the costs we incurred.”