In 1995, two major aerospace companies formed a joint venture to oversee ground operations and flight support for U.S. Space Shuttle. While the organization has requested anonymity, the solution being used to track quality control documents for the shuttle's inventory of parts and supplies is an example of a world class quality program. Featuring Datacap Taskmaster for scanning and automated indexing, and an EMC/Documentum image management system for storage and retrieval, the integrated solution keeps track of more than 2.5 million different parts, each one indexed by a unique part number.
There is a deeply ingrained tradition of rigorous attention to quality and safety throughout the U.S. space program. An essential component of quality management is the ability to track every part supplied by every subcontractor for each of the three space shuttles in the fleet. If a part fails to perform as expected, it must be traceable from installation in the vehicle all the way back to the original manufacturer.
To facilitate traceability, every part is shipped with detailed paperwork in triplicate, which is continually updated as the part is shipped to Florida's Cape Canaveral, tested, and installed. When work is completed, all paperwork is forwarded to the Quality Documentation Control (QDC) department, housed in a facility not far from the launch pad. Each week, 20,000 to 25,000 part documents are scanned on a Kodak 3520 or Bowe Bell + Howell 8080 scanner and indexed for storage in the Documentum system. In 2000, the organization decided to automate indexing and selected Datacap Taskmaster to streamline their process.
Taskmaster provides this organization with a way to eliminate the manual keying required for indexing thousands of documents every day. The concept is simple, yet highly effective. At scanning, document separator sheets are inserted between each new document, which notify Taskmaster that a new document follows. Each new document has a barcode on it that must be located and compared against barcodes in four different Oracle databases. When a match is found, Taskmaster populates the associated metadata into the index fields, automatically indexing the document image for storage in Documentum.
Since accuracy and traceability are absolutely essential to the overall document management strategy, the Taskmaster automated indexing solution eliminates the errors typically associated with manual indexing, accelerates the process, and provides significant cost savings for the organization.