Hindustan Dorr-Oliver’s (HDO) core business activities comprise providing engineered solutions and technologies. As HDO operates in the engineering vertical, its in-house teams have to create drawings and material lists and distribute them to the concerned team members based either in the company’s Mumbai office or at the factory site in Ahmedabad.

The company has recently implemented SAP ECC 6.0. HDO uses a separate Document Management System (DMS) for this. There is one more DMS that will be rolled out after the necessary customisation. Both the systems will then be integrated to facilitate seamless collaboration within the Mumbai, Chennai and Ahmedabad locations.

The DVTDM migration and the need for advanced DMS

Initially, the drawings were physically distributed for proposed changes to the concerned team members after their creation. They were stored in a hard copy format having a dedicated storage room, which held about 2.5 lakh drawings of different sizes at one point of time. In case of similar orders, the task of searching the right drawings was quite tedious. "This was a time consuming process that made us adopt a third party Document Viewer Total Document Management (DVTDM) application," said Ajay Khanvilkar, senior assistant GM – IT, Hindustan Dorr-Oliver.

The DVTDM deployment was coupled with digitising the archived drawings and thus, ease in searching and modification of drawings came as a natural advantage. There is no restriction now in getting as many photocopies as required too. As and when there is an order for similar equipment, the drawing for the relevant equipment is retrieved, printed and worked upon eliminating the need to recreate it. "We are also going to integrate SAP with the DMS server," said Khanvilkar.

On the DVTDM application currently in use, the drawing number has to be selected manually. "We felt that the drawing number should be generated automatically," said Khanvilkar.

The upcoming Data Management System will be equipped with this automation. The implementation of the new Document Management System (DMS) will allow the user to create a new drawing code and then the drawing number will be generated automatically to get itself attached to the drawing, which can be saved and later distributed to the concerned team members to allow them to put up their comments and proposed changes in the form of a note. The material list (having an automatically generated number) can also be attached to the drawing. This information will automatically get stored in the DMS.

The Roadmap For The DMS

"We have put forward our requirements before the vendor. They will customise the DMS software on the lines of our demands like automatic generation of drawing numbers and material list numbers and the type of drawing sizes," informed Khanvilkar. The vendor has recently started working on the project. The work on the DMS, to be rolled out initially at the Mumbai office, will be completed in about three months and subject to approval, it will be subsequently rolled out at Chennai and Ahmedabad too.

"We are also planning to add a feature on the DMS that will show the time taken to create a drawing," said Khanvilkar.

After the implementation, the company will buy three 1TB servers for the DMS for the Mumbai, Chennai and Ahmedabad locations respectively.