The secret to our success was planning, planning, and more planning . . .

    • Start small.
       
    • A well thought out plan and Pilot scope should be everyone's first and most important objective.
       
    • List your company's strengths in EDMS and development and utilize the experience of your EDMS vendor and use them to help achieve your Pilot system scope.
       
    • Don't stray from your Pilot scope. You will always have time to make modifications later. Just be sure to include long term goals in your
      Pilot scope.
       
    • Invest in training!

    Steve Hollingsworth
    CAD Systems Manager
    Stupp Bridge Company

For over 140 years, the Stupp Bros. Bridge & Iron Company has been a leader in the steel fabrication industry. In 1998, Stupp Bros. Bridge & Iron Co changed its name to the Stupp Bridge Company and started construction on a new 380,000 square foot fabrication facility that premiered in the summer of 1999.  This new state of the art fabrication facility is located in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and allows the Stupp Bridge Company to remain the most customer-responsive steel bridge fabricator in the country.

In order to meet the new expectations and output of the new facility, the Stupp Bridge Company's Engineering Services had to reevaluate all of its hardware and software and structure itself to produce three times the amount of shop drawings and CNC files that we once produced. In years past, we relied heavily on old DOS-based programs to route our files to the shop and to the different CNC equipment. Due to OS upgrades and the new fabrication facility hundreds of miles away, we had to look at replacing these programs. This enabled us to revisit all of our Shop drawing and CNC file procedures including our revision control procedures.

After months of planning, we started moving from drawing in 2D on a mainframe based CAD system to AutoDesk's Mechanical Desktop running on Windows NT. We then set out to implement a document management system that would allow us to manage and route our drawings. After evaluating AutoEDMS and its workflow functions, we felt it offered everything that we were looking for. We then purchased 20 seats of AutoEDMS and Pervasive SQL client/server database. Then with the help of ACS Software, we piloted AutoEDMS and went live within just a few weeks of the pilot. We literally went from hundreds of filing drawers and a paper driven operation to almost paperless in a matter of weeks.

Before we started, I read a lot of horror stories about implementing a DMS and how many
installations were never successful for one reason or another. Now, after installing a new CAD System, AutoEDMS, and being involved with implementing a new manufacturing system in less than one year, the secret to our success was planning, planning, and more planning. Take the time to learn the product. Develop a highly detailed Pilot scope with goals (a big thanks to ACS for their persistence to make us clearly define our scope), and utilize the experience of your software vendor. We were extremely lucky or should I say fortunate to find a company like ACS Software that knew their product and could adapt it to our business model. With their help, I can rate our success at a solid 10.
 

Currently, we just finished an Intranet application that ties into the AutoEDMS database and we have plans on expanding the system into other disciplines of the company. We have nothing but high hopes for AutoEDMS and we upgraded to Version 6.5 and added 10 more AutoEDMS licenses.

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