Intelligent Manufacturing € November € 1996 € Vol. 2 € No. 11

Hamilton Standard Implements Document Management System

Hamilton Standard (Windsor Locks, Conn.), a manufacturer of aircraft engine controls and accessories, has implemented a document management system (DMS) that has helped it reduce change management cycle times. The company was facing changes in two different markets in the aviation industry -- as a supplier to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and as an aftermarket manufacturing supplier. Winning new and repeat business from these customers requires Hamilton Standard to drive down product costs and cost-of-ownership while assuring high levels of customer service and responsiveness.

One of the company's primary customer needs is service and repair documentation. Aviation regulations affect service and repair operations and specific maintenance manuals page-by-page. The documentation has to be up-to-date and revisions must be well-managed, which imposes a heavy workload.

Hamilton Standard's service and repair operation is required to have the most current version of work instructions on the manufacturing floor. "The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has very strong limits on what we can do as a repair station," explained Richard Narowski, manager of information systems (IS). "The OEM has to bless recommended changes, and then they need to be worked into FAA-approved documentation." To keep their books current, service and repair departments will employ staff just to manage unwieldy paper documentation -- sometimes hundreds of thousands of pages -- removing and replacing pages.

This was the perfect environment for the more effective process of on-line documentation, but the wide variety of computer systems that pre-existed at Hamilton Standard prevented the selection and use of a standard document system. The engineering department, for example, generated maintenance manuals on their own systems, which were not compatible with the systems utilized by the repair stations.

This diversity of systems was expensive to support. Also, departments couldn't communicate easily with each other or with customers. Many users had to have more than one computer to complete tasks. In response, Hamilton Standard's IS group began breaking down barriers between operating systems to eliminate islands of information. First, they took apart the multitudes of networks and provided employees with interoperable mail systems and gave them the ability to share files. Then, the IS group integrated the remaining platforms to link into the company's document management system (DMS). The DMS is supported by a newly created and unified LAN on Hamilton Standard's shop floor, which showed not only text, but graphic displays of the parts and instructions.

The integration of systems is key to the success and overall reliability of the DMS. Hamilton Standard uses Linkage Concurrent Engineering software from CIMLINC (Itasca, Ill.) as the kernel of its integrated DMS. Linkage CE enables a variety of engineers to concurrently work on a document in real time. The Linkage technology provides engineers across departments direct access to all design documentation in Hamilton Standard's systems, along with a way to review documents and make changes on-line.

An integrated DMS encourages and processes input from shop floor operators through a bank of manufacturing engineers, runs the recommendations by the quality engineers, and gets feedback, all within a matter of minutes. "We wanted revision control to make and record changes more quickly," said Tony Falco, a DMS at Hamilton Standard. "The key is that now shop floor operators are involved in changes -- they can get the current information in a matter of minutes, instead of sitting around for two weeks."

The DMS must handle both complex and non-complex changes. A complex change usually involves additional engineering or analysis. A specification might need to be changed, or a new repair process documented. Hamilton Standard's DMS has reduced the complex change cycle from months to weeks.

The DMS, with its integrated Linkage technology, equips Hamilton Standard to distribute documentation electronically across departments. Users have the right documentation in the right place at the right time. Through the new processes, systems and monitoring, Hamilton Standard can provide guaranteed cost-of-ownership contracts that span five to 10 years, on a fixed price per flight hour.

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