Working with drawings is an important part of the daily activities of all manufacturing, engineering, design and construction companies. The suppliers of water, electricity, gas and communications also work with technical drawings and maps. Technical drawings, maps and diagrams are the main source of knowledge for the execution of tasks in planning, production, repair and maintenance. In many cases, they are the only source of inherited knowledge, and for manufacturing companies they are the only way to develop new solutions borrowed from past periods.
The searched drawing very often is "in the archive", on paper somewhere in a metal cabinet, and finding it can be a serious challenge. Technical paper drawings fade, become dirty and tear up over time, a process that can lead to the loss of valuable knowledge.
With the implementation of modern CAD design systems, the two worlds – of the paper past and the digital present are looking for their point of coalescence. Building a corporate electronic technical repository is the natural step towards multiplying of valuable technical knowledge by electronic means for their structuring, management and use throughout the organization.
Archimed e-Docs offers complete solutions for scanning paper technical drawings, maps and documents and managing their electronic copies throughout the organization.
Solutions based on e-Docs dramatically reduce the time for searching, retrieving and processing scanned drawings, maps and documents, allowing users to receive all the information necessary for their work in the context of the tasks they perform - on time, with the latest version and according to the access rights of each individual user role.
- Scanning. The paper technical documents of the existing archive shall be scanned by a scanner. The images of the scanned drawings shall be stored in raster format on the hard disk of the scanning computer.
- Indexing. Raster files are put into a central server database. Each file is indexed so that it can be searched and retrieved later electronically. Indexing is done by entering descriptive information about the scanned drawing – for example product, assembly, the drawing number, version, revision, year and etc. In addition, each scanned drawing can be stored in a hierarchy of folders reflecting a specific product structure or other user-selected relation.
- Centralized storage. All scanned drawings/documents are stored as computer files in a single location - in a secured storage of a specialized computer called a database server. All newly scanned drawings/documents are stored there, and the software ensures that they are protected and with guaranteed integrity.
- Controlled access. Whenever any employee needs a specific scanned drawing or document it can be searched and retrieved from the database, with a corresponding username and an individual access password, provided that the drawing/document is registered. Depending on their profile - username and password, each user has a unique set of rights to work with electronic drawings/documents, including access to certain folders, rights or prohibition of operations on electronic drawings.
- Quick search and retrieval. Users have direct access to all drawings/documents in the database according to their individual access rights. With the powerful tools for quick search, the user can find each individual drawing or group of drawings by searching by keyword, group of keywords and/or logical conditions. Retrieval and visualization of the required drawings on the screen is done in seconds!
- Raster editing. Very often a minimal editing of an existing drawing is required in order to make a change to an already existing project. In such cases, the user has the option to make a direct change to the raster drawing by deleting a region and drawing new elements directly onto the drawing image – including line, arcs, circles, arrows, dimension lines, numbers or text – just like with AutoCAD!
- Optical recognition of text. If there are large text fields in the drawings, such as specification tables, operating instructions, annotations, etc., they can be quickly and easily recognized and converted as text, using an intelligent OCR engine (Abbyy OCR Engine, Tesseract OCR Engine). The recognized text can be edited directly or in Microsoft Word, and then pasted back into the raster image, into the vector CAD file, or as a separate txt document.
- Change management. With Archimed e-Docs, the user gets not just archiving software, but a powerful change management system, supporting lock/unlock for editing, version control and revision management of technical drawings, workflow for review and approvement of drawings and document, and the possibility to work remotely via WEB.
