Document Management Challenge

Client

Established in 1987, our client is a premier provider of first generation aftermarket military aircraft parts and export support services. Headquartered in Southern California, with a 25,000 SF state of the art warehouse, manufacturing, shipping and receiving facility, with additional warehouses centrally located to facilitate easy access, they deliver fast and accurate turnaround to their clients. Their extensive industry experience uniquely positions them to provide highly customized parts support, ensuring compliance, avoiding delays and providing effective shipments throughout the world.

Figure 1 – Aperture Card

Issue

Aware of our experience in electronic document management, our client came to us with a unique document management challenge. They held extensive data sets residing on hundreds of thousands of individual aperture cards. An aperture card (see Figure 1) is a type of punch card with a cut out window into which a chip of microfiche is mounted. The microfiche chip contains an optically reduced image, usually some type of reference document, such as an engineering drawing. The U.S. Department of Defense made extensive use of aperture cards, of which our client’s library contained over 300,000. Aperture cards were punched with machine-readable metadata associated with the microfiche image and printed across the top of the card for visual identification.

Our client’s library was maintained in a physical filing system, which was not electronically searchable. This was inefficient and highly vulnerable to risk, as these cards could be lost, damaged, or destroyed. There were no backups of the information and users needed to be in the same physical location as the cards to obtain their data. Further, data contained within the microfiche needed to be read using a microfiche reader machine.

Goal

Our client’s goal was to digitize their aperture cards, migrate the data and converted microfiche documents to a document management system, and implement a reliable and secure onsite/offsite backup system. At the conclusion, their desire was to have fully archived all aperture card data and provided a secure and electronically searchable data repository available to users both within the office or at remote locations. Additionally, the entire set of data would be backed up, replicated to a secure offsite location, and readily available in the event of a disaster or other unexpected event.

Solution

A company that specializes in aperture card scanning services was located to perform the digital conversion. We partnered with this company to develop a conversion plan for the delivery format of the converted microfiche and associated aperture card data. The aperture cards were then systematically scanned and the resulting data delivered to our location.

A custom web-based interface was developed to automate the upload process into our proprietary document management software (DiVA™). Because of this automation the upload process was completed quickly. We provided access to the document management system (DiVA™) to all local and remote users via secured connections. Remote users were provided secure connectivity via Citrix XenApp. The document management system data was then included in the secure onsite/offsite data backup and replication routines. Point-forward data could be easily input to the system to augment the client’s already exhaustive industry data repository.

Competencies

Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS, C#/.Net, Document Management (DiVA™), Offsite Back Up & Disaster Recovery, Citrix XenApp Application Delivery.

Result

All aperture card data is now digitized and managed from a central location. This valuable, irreplaceable, industry-specific data is now backed up locally and offsite, readily available in the event of a disaster, and no longer at risk of being lost or destroyed. Their data is easily searchable, and the business is now leveraging the benefits of a true document management system, including intuitive and error-free indexing, multiuser access, user/group access and customizable security roles, document revision capabilities, electronic workflows, managed storage, and much more.

Users in the central office and at remote locations have access to the system and are operating much more efficiently. By moving to an electronic document management system, our client is benefiting from cost savings through streamlined processing, it removed the need for physical storage providing more floorspace, and allowed users to optimize their workflow by no longer needing to pore over hundreds of thousands of individual aperture cards.

Testimonial

[us_testimonial style=”3″ author=”Eddie Karon” company=”Executive Vice President/Chief Financial Officer, Camar Aircraft Parts, Co.”]Moving into electronic document management was a significant concern to us, as we had a large mix of paper, existing data files, and hundreds of thousands of microfiche-based media that needed to be converted to electronic files and then imported into the document management system. The DiVA product lived up to its promise of robust document management capabilities, ease of use, and systems integration. The DiVA staff went out of their way to assist us through the entire process, work with our microfiche conversion company, and create a custom module that automatically imported ALL of our converted documents.[/us_testimonial]