From its roots as a small industrial gas company some forty years ago, Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. (Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA) has grown to become a multinational corporation, employing more than 17,000 people worldwide, and with operations in more than thirty countries. In 1998, Air Products' annual revenue reached US $5 billion. The company's two major businesses are the Gases and Equipment Group and the Chemicals Group.
In recent years Air Products has made remarkable progress in achieving a competitive advantage regarding the development and use of capital assets to optimize performance as a chemicals manufacturer and supplier. Today, Air Products continues to sustain and improve its position in the industrial, consumer and agricultural markets by achieving superior quality and technological innovations.
The problem
In the mid-ninties, Air Products implemented the PALADIN (Project Application Leveraging and Data Integration) system. Led by Team Leader Jim Sohaney, with members Larry Killingsworth and Ed Anderson, the goal was simple. The major objective of PALADIN was to reduce the time needed to create and maintain plant data over the life cycle of the plant. One important segment of this workflow was the ability to view and maintain assorted files, including drawings, and vendor documents. This need propelled the team to seek an enterprise-wide viewing and markup solution. All of their efforts brought them to Cimmetry Systems' AutoVue Professional.
The solution
PALADIN is a system built on to Documentum’s EDMS system. The tight integration between AutoVue and Documentum allows Air Products users to view and redline documents, while keeping track of version levels of the documents, including mark ups.
Particularly useful among the facilities that AutoVue provides has been the interface linking Air Product's Process & Instrumentation Diagram (P& ID) drawings and documents to Documentum. AutoVue's ability to access entity attributes was leveraged to formulate concise queries to locate related information within Documentum DocBases. Working closely with Air Products, Cimmetry Systems developed the interface to Air Products’ specifications. This allowed Air Products users to intuitively select and access linked information from their tagged data.
The results
As a result of this relationship, Air Products reduced costs and cycle times in excess of 15%. The integration also resulted in substantially reduced project cycle times.
The future
The partnership between Cimmetry Systems and Air Products has grown stronger since their initial collaboration. Air Products believes that STEP will be the next standard, and Cimmetry Systems is working closely with them to develop viewing technology that is STEP compliant. |