Engineering Information Management Software Links Nabisco's Headquarters with Baking Facilities

Nabisco Corporate Engineering is the product and process design center for 10 local bakeries that support Nabisco Biscuit Company, one of the world's largest packaged food providers. The group who is responsible for communicating engineering information to its engineering consultants, equipment suppliers, and local bakeries, needed to find a better way to leverage its collective knowledge. In particular, the company wanted to share engineering information, including MicroStation files, other computer aided design files, and associated documentation, among its constituencies and mobile users.

Currently at Nabisco, vast amounts of product line information are stored in non- electronic form, such as historical drawings in a central archive, and equipment and AE drawings in hard copy. Manual document retrieval is costly, error prone, and delays improvements. Each bakery has an isolated document management system, which fragments data and perpetuates redundancy. In the present system, information is stored only by drawing name or drawing description.

In order to enable easy and rapid access to engineering information from any Nabisco facility, the company announced last week that it would be implementing WorkPlace System Solutions' ActiveAsset software at its corporate headquarters and 11 bakeries. The system will move Nabisco from a file-centric focus to a system where engineering content is managed as an asset throughout its lifecycle.

In the WorkPlace system, ActiveAsset Manager makes information accessible through searches on multiple attributes, so users can find and modify electronic drawings more quickly. Paper documents are scanned and stored electronically, and engineering models are used as the master project source. A centralized database will be established, along with distributed repositories at local bakeries, to encourage optimal file transfer performance. Additionally, ActiveAsset Manager establishes a new level of file security and access control.

ActiveAsset Manager supports over 200 file format types. With familiar drag & drop methods, documents can be grouped in sets, associated with specific files, and organized by project. Documents are stored in their native data format in a central archive or distributed across file servers. ActiveAsset Manager allows users to access information transparently, without needing to know where the document resides.

Project data can be organized in a hierarchical structure, grouping files in sets, and associating drawings with related documents. By browsing this hierarchical tree structure, users can easily retrieve project data, without having to track down all the associated files, documents, and drawings. A single file can be associated with multiple projects, allowing project-specific views of an organization's engineering information.

ActiveAsset Manager also oversees the lifecycle of documents, controlling the creation, editing, review, release, and archival of engineering designs and documents, as well as generating, managing and tracking multiple versions. This workflow management standardizes review and release procedures, increasing the efficiency and reliability of the overall design process. Access rights to a document depend on the document, the user, and the state of the document in the workflow .

At Nabisco, one of the top priorities for the system is to establish a proper project hierarchy, which will set the stage for how users navigate the system to search and locate documents and projects. With WorkPlace ActiveAsset products, Nabisco can migrate to total enterprise-wide asset management. The system is Web-enabled and intuitive, addressing the company's extended enterprise of bakeries in Georgia, Illinois, Virginia, New York, California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

WorkPlace System Solutions, a Bentley Strategic Affiliate, provides engineering information management systems for a variety of applications, including facilities and asset management, engineering and design document management, and project information management using the Internet and extranets.

For more information contact: WorkPlace System Solutions, Inc., 978-952-2559.