Engineering

Highlights

Cost, quality, speed, and innovation are the driving forces in engineering design and development. Businesses realize that the challenge to compete lies at the front end of the development cycle, where the ability to reuse designs and rapidly implement changes can reduce development times and overall cost. Document and information management systems are needed to organize, access, and control data about engineering designs throughout their life cycle. Cimage NovaSoft GMP from Cimage is an integrated document management and workflow system that helps companies gain rapid document and data access, and improve quality and flow of information, with security, revision control and audit trails assured every step of the way.

Design Reuse

Engineers rely on accessible and up-to-date documentation to efficiently introduce engineering changes or design new products, CAD drawings, bills of materials, specifications – Cimage NovaSoft GMP's extensive search capabilities provide rapid, consistent access to your most important documents. Since all documents are under full distribution and revision control, the correct version is always available upon request. Relationships can be easily established between documents so that you can maintain parent, child, and peer relationships. And Cimage NovaSoft GMP's open architecture and compliance to standards lets you integrate it with other applications in your business such as your Manufacturing Requirements Planning (MRP) system

Drawing Management

All documents, whether stored in electronic format or in hardcopy, can be managed using Cimage NovaSoft GMP. Cimage NovaSoft GMP makes it easy to access, store, and track any type of document, including CAD drawings, business and technical documents, spreadsheets, electronic forms, raster images, audio, and video. Electronic folders can be organized to match your environment. Access privileges are controlled through a multi-level security schema that extends to the document level. Cimage NovaSoft GMP's logical document feature lets you manage a group of files as a single document and still view, edit, revise, and control each file independently.

Engineering Change Request (ECR) Forms

ECR Forms, as the primary means of documenting change requests, typically contains fields for both mandatory and optional data. Cimage NovaSoft GMP's integrated electronic forms capability lets you create forms, input data, and retrieve information by sorting on any field in the form, such as originator or status. Fields can be restricted to drop-down menu options, open to variable input, etc. In this way, not only documents and drawings, but even data can be managed by Cimage NovaSoft GMP. And forms are under full revision control.

The ECR Process - Workflow

Moving an ECR, or any document, through review and approval processes in a timely manner can significantly improve the overall cycle time. With Cimage NovaSoft GMP, change request workflows, whether structured or ad-hoc, may be easily created using drag-and-drop icons. Cimage NovaSoft GMP notifies you via e-mail when a workflow document is in your in-basket and launches the appropriate application, be it review, approve, edit or redline. With time-trigger notifications, bottlenecks can be readily identified. Response and approval threshold voting, sharable tasks, and serial and parallel tasks help shorten cycle times while maintaining full control of the change process.

ISO 9000 and Regulatory Compliance

Information pertaining to a specific change must be documented, stored, and made readily available when needed – sometimes many years later. And, Cimage NovaSoft GMP workflows include an electronic signature component as well as a full audit trail capability that tracks time and date stamps, action performed, work files, redlines, and other historical data needed for legal and regulatory reasons, as well as for ISO 9000 compliance.

The Extended Enterprise

In today's competitive environment, many companies contract out for component manufacture, packaging or even full product manufacture. These contractors must adhere to the same regulations and ensure that the information is recorded, tracked and passed to the company distributing the product. By allowing access to Cimage NovaSoft GMP from the multiple sites you can treat these contractors as extensions of your company, with totally integrated document management.

Some of the documents that Cimage NovaSoft GMP manages:

• Engineering drawings and specifications
• Plant and equipment drawings
• Product and process plans
• Corporate policies and procedures
• Compliance audit records
• Contractor records
• Piping and instrumentation diagrams
• Bills of material
• Engineering change request forms
• Quality assurance procedures
• Vendor specification sheets
• Testing procedures and results
• Training records

Some of the functions that are performed with Cimage NovaSoft GMP:

• Document control
• Change management
• Workflow management
• Action plan tracking
• Contractor tracking
• Security by user, folder, document, group
• CAD integration
• Electronic review and approval
• Records archival
• Drawing and document redlining
• Compliance audit tracking