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Boss Engineering is a Civil Engineering and Land Surveying firm that has been in business since 1969. Computers weren’t used when the company started and for many years afterwards. With employees constantly having to look through old documents, Boss Engineering needed to have a more efficient means of storing their enormous amount of paperwork and drawings. They also needed the means to quickly retrieve the information.
The company already had in place a company database that consisted of all their jobs including all pertinent client information, and other miscellaneous company reference information. It was a logical choice to incorporate the document retrieval as part of that database.
CST looked at ways of coming up with a practical and economical way of scanning, storing and retrieving the information. The company already had a large format scanner that was used for copying large drawings and a few 8 ½” x 14” scanners with document feeders.
Batch routines were written to automate the creation of folders that stored documents and drawings. After creating the folder this same batch routine started the built-in scanning routine. Images were stored as multiple page tiff images for drawings and multiple page pdf's for the documents which consisted of letters, calculations and other miscellaneous paperwork.
The company hired a part-time employee to scan the large format drawings. There was a large amount of drawings the company had accumulated over the 35 years they had been in business. It took approximately 3 years to get the drawings scanned into the system.
To retrieve the documents, more batch routines were used. A simple routine was written where employees could type the job number in and all documents and drawings would be displayed in a dialog box. The employee could then select the appropriate file they needed and it would open in an imaging program. They could look at and print the document as needed.
About two years ago the company began working on building a GIS system for their use. It was logical that all the images scanned should be tied into this system too. These images were hyperlinked from the GIS system to the job images and were available again using the same imaging software.
This whole process has saved the company thousands of dollars every year in research costs.
CST Intech is a technology consultant company specializiing in delivering solutions to small business.
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