A Visionary Approach to Electronic Product Information Management
Product information management in the aerospace industry has always been more comprehensive than other industries. Due to structural integrity requirements of various aircraft designs, aerospace sealant and coating systems are subjected to an array of qualification and quality control testing under specifications of various aircraft manufacturers. Moreover, these systems must also comply with regulatory requirements of various domestic and international regulatory agencies. The resulting product information matrices of these systems can be extremely complex and the scope of document management, depending on the complex nature of the products, frequently may not be handled solely with commercially available solutions. This situation is especially true with PRC-DeSoto's sealant and coating product lines that are, typically, qualified to multiple, international specifications. There are no ready-made document management solutions available in today's market that can accommodate all our documentation needs effectively.
To provide an overall solution to the integrated documentation system, we realized that we should consider developing some of our own applications based on PRC-DeSoto business objectives, instead of relying solely on finding solutions from commercially available technologies. We started our implementation by examining our business needs and visualizing what types of solutions would benefit our documentation flow. Since a large number of new and revised documents were created daily by the centralized Product Information Group and distributed to manufacturing sites and distribution sites all over the world, it was most important for us to implement a true paperless document management system to eliminate hard-copy distributions. It was also important for us to integrate into this system value-added applications that would track documentation flows of process-based documents between various departments of various sites. To keep all users updated on each document's status, the system must also be equipped with real-time or periodic status reports for various product information documents. Based on the above requirements, we contracted with Feasible Management Consulting Inc., the solution provider that has been helping PRC-DeSoto in building its data warehouse since 1998, to develop customized solutions for our documentation system.