Document management handles parallel design

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Apr 3, 2003

By enabling a concurrent engineering process to take place, McLaren's kConcurrent application helps simplify complex document management processes.

Engineering and construction plans, as well as many other document types, increasingly need to be accessed by several parties in parallel, which can often lead to delays in project completion and spiralling costs.

By enabling a concurrent engineering process to take place, McLaren's kConcurrent application will help simplify complex document management processes.

kConcurrent was developed from customer demands for multiple parallel authoring of drawings and documents.

This new application accelerates project management and completion, saving time, cost and effort, as well as delivering a faster ROI on complex projects.

As the first customer to purchase and start deploying the software as well as a participant in the Early Adopter Programme, Bayer HealthCare's, Tony Spivey, noted: "Managing documentation across multiple projects is one of our key business issues.

We believe that the opportunity to work with McLaren to develop a configurable application to resolve this problem, as well as easily extend our existing Documentum solution, will enable us to gain a more effective, scalable business application.

We hope that kConcurrent will significantly reduce our operational costs and increase our efficiency".

Spivey also added, "Utilising the configurable business rules should help us to reduce our validation costs for the initial implementation and will further reduce effort required in the future".

Often several parties will be working on different projects but will need access to the same drawings and documents.

Using kConcurrent each project makes a copy of the required drawings and documents, based upon a predefined project policy template, and works on that copy.

The template details relevant project information, such as required attribute information, as well as a full audit history of accessed documentation.

Once complete, the first project merges back into the master documents and a new revision is created that can then be approved and released as the new master document.

As subsequent parties request project copies, email notification is sent to the relevant responsible person(s) to highlight that a new project copy of the document is being accessed elsewhere.

When subsequent drawings are re-submitted, kConcurrent recognises whether the master document that was used by this project copy has subsequently been revised and hence whether or not a manual check is required before the merge process can be completed.

Mark Stephens, VP Industry Applications at McLaren, commented: "Time is money in any industry and finding a solution that could deliver a more consistent approach to managing parallel project work is of critical importance to the companies we are talking to.

kConcurrent delivers all of the mechanisms needed to manage this process in a manner that is compliant with the legal and auditing requirements that also impact business practice today".