Case Study

Client: Culligan International

Overview
Culligan's Document Management Services group provides document control for their entire manufacturing value chain to include documentation for engineering drawings, ISQ quality documents, and supporting manufacturing documentation. Utilizing our document management and distribution solutions, Culligan is able to manage, retrieve, and distribute documents more efficiently. Solutions include: Document Retrieval System, MRP to EDMS Work Order Printing Integration, and Purchase Order Document Distribution to Vendors.

Business Challenges There are many challenges in a project of this size. Some of them include: Providing manufacturing with the correct documentation for a specific part number and order date. Collecting and printing documentation to a related work order. Collecting and delivering documentation to vendors for purchase orders.

Our Solution
Document Retrieval System: Distributing documents to the manufacturing floor can be a very labor-intensive process that never guarantees the right document gets into the right hands. With quality system requirements like ISO, the documentation needs to be properly identified by indicating when it was distributed, to whom, and at what state the documentation is when received. By providing users on the manufacturing floor with a web-based client that allows users the ability to enter a Part Number and Order Date search criteria; they are then able to selectively identify the documents availability and submit them to a production printing system time and date stamps the printed document to their local printers.

MRP to EDMS Work Order Printing Integration: As work orders are submitted to manufacturing they are required to collect all the related documentation to fulfill the order. Part Numbers in the MRP system may not coincide with the actual drawing number and may require cross references or interpretations to retrieve the correct documentation.

The MRP to EDMS (Electronic Document Management System) integration provides Culligan with the ability to submit the work order printing within the MRP system. The system integration retrieves the documentation from the document management system and submits them for printing to a production printing system.

Purchase Order Document Distribution to Vendors : Delivering drawings to vendors as design changes continually happen can become very costly and overwhelmingly difficult to maintain. Collecting the drawings, printing them on expensive large format plotters, and mailing are some of the typical costs involved with this process.

The Vendor Document Distribution solution provided Culligan the ability to release a purchase order and send it to vendors without any user interaction. As purchase orders are released from the MRP system, all documents are retrieved from the document management system, converted to Adobe PDF file format, and published onto Culligan's external web server. Vendors are emailed a notification to retrieve the documents from the web where they are expected to login and view the information pertaining to the purchase order.