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Follett Corporation (www.follettice.com) is a family-owned company that started out making bins for storing ice and is now a global organization that designs and manufactures innovative ice equipment for the healthcare, foodservice, hospitality and supermarket industries. Follett's cost-effective products make, store, dispense and transport ice with labor-saving, sanitation and safety benefits to operators worldwide. Follett ice dispensers are popular in hospitals because their nugget ice is easy for patients to chew, and the cylindrical shape is good for packing transplanted organs. Their products are also popular in convenient stores, restaurants, sports venues, stadiums, and amusement parks. According to John Weiss, CAD Administrator, their primary product line is a family of nugget ice makers that use an auger to shave ice from a refrigerated cylinder that is then compressed into cylindrical shaped ice nuggets that the company has named Chewblets. "We're the only one who feeds our ice to dispensers or bins through a tube. It's unique because you can make the ice in a separate room from where you dispense it," said Weiss.

Design Inefficiencies Drive the Need for Document Control

Follett is in a competitive, price sensitive market, so they must be conscientious to keep costs low, and deliver high-quality, value-added products. "We're always comparing methods of manufacturing. We look at what different processes we can improve to keep manufacturing as inexpensive as possible," said Weiss.

Prior to Adept, Follett designers stored Inventor projects on their private hard drives or personal network folders, which resulted in the same nut, bolt, screw, and/or sheet metal part being modeled over and over again. After realizing the cost and time involved in modeling redundancies and the difficulty of collaborating, Follett looked into document management to help them streamline their document control processes.

A Team Approach to Document Management

To select the best document management system, Follett brought together a cross-functional team. While the team's primary representatives were from engineering, Follett envisioned a time when everyone in the company would benefit from document management, so they also included employees from marketing, sales, tech service, purchasing, fabrication, and the shop floor into the decision-making process.

"We had a list of requirements. We wanted a system which would manage legacy AutoCAD files as well as Autodesk Inventor files. We wanted to find an enterprise solution, not something that would just manage engineering documents. We wanted to share all our engineering data with our materials and purchasing departments," said Weiss. "One of our core strengths is that we make all our own sheet metal parts here. So, we also need to share design information with the fabrication department."

After a preliminary search, Follett focused on three top software contenders: Synergis Software's Adept, Autodesk Vault, and Cyco Meridian. The cross-functional team selected Adept as the clear winner based on the following criteria:

• It uses a centralized database.
• It doesn't encrypt file names.
• The viewer that is included with Adept can display multiple document types.
• It lets users update metadata directly, without being forced to update the properties in the documents.
• It lets users manage documents and data throughout the enterprise, not just the engineering documents.
• The price is excellent.
• The Synergis Software team is very responsive.
• The software is easy to implement.

After a five-day training course on Adept Administration, Weiss was practically able to set up the system on his own. "When I got back to the office from class, it was all so fresh in my mind, I started to experiment and see how much I could do on my own," recalls Weiss. "I started setting up users, groups and libraries, data fields and Library Cards. Then I took all the folders from the network drives, synchronized them, and brought them into Adept. When the Synergis Software Application Specialist came on site to install the software, we only needed a day to get Adept up and roll it out throughout the company."

Multiple Benefits for Many Departments

With Adept being used to manage Follett's Autodesk Inventor models, designers are able to "model once and reuse the files many times." All Follett's Inventor models are stored in a central Adept database that maintains the inter-relationships of complex parts and assemblies throughout the product lifecycle. Designers no longer remodel the same part over and over again, so productivity reaches new highs.

Within months of implementing Adept in engineering, the software was deployed in other areas of the company. Adds Weiss, "We started out in the engineering department, and materials, and then put Adept to use in the fabrication department, shop floor, and tech services. We used to be very paper heavy here, and now people have found that instead of going to a paper cabinet and looking for a drawing, it's quicker to fire up Adept, find a part and view it. It also saves us from the expense of buying seats of AutoCAD or Autodesk Inventor for everyone to view their models."

Adept in the Technical Services department has made it easier for Follett to help its customers. "Adept's searching capability far outweighs anything our ERP system provides. While the technician is talking to a customer, they fire up the Adept viewer, look at a drawing, and describe the part to the customer, all while they are still on the phone. When people in the materials department have discussions with vendors, they pull up the drawing from Adept and look at it, too. They are also able to print drawings without even having to bother the engineers anymore."

In the fabrication department, people can print files from Adept without depending on an engineer to hand them a hard copy. Fabrication also uses Adept to validate a part for laser cutting shapes out of sheet stock. With computers on the shop floor, the press brake operators use Adept to validate parts by viewing the drawing, thereby eliminating errors. They can work on drawings that are waiting for ECO approval.

Better Testing and Compliance Processes

Follett is currently working on a project to organize their manufacturing process documentation. With Adept, information that was housed on unsecured drives can now be consolidated to make it accessible to people on the shop floor. In addition, the testing and qualification data that is associated with the equipment drawings is being entered into Adept. "All the tests and qualification testing we do during product development or to trouble shoot problems is being cataloged and stored in Adept at the time of the test," said Weiss.

"We regularly take advantage of Adept's ability to create relationships among any type of documents. We use this to manually link design documents to the test and qualification documents. Typically we'll make the test report the parent and make everything else the child. With document management, all the necessary information stays together," said Weiss. "That way, if there is a problem in another six months, we can easily review the test results."

Follett must also adhere to two important industry standards: the Underwriters Laboratory (UL) and National Sanitation Foundation (NSF). With Adept, Follett manages all the required documentation, including the actual certification reports and site inspections, which in the past was stored in binders on an engineer's bookshelf.

Document Management Expands Throughout the Enterprise

Follett continues to create innovative ways to leverage their document management system. What started as an engineering workgroup solution has become an enterprise wide system that increases company productivity, boosts collaboration among groups, and helps them stay competitive.

"We're doing a lot with Adept and there's a reason for that. My boss wants to find even more uses for Adept beyond managing CAD files. Now we're planning to track and manage SPI sheet metal unfolding files that we generate in Inventor for fabrication. These files are intelligent flat patterns that the fabricators can quickly open for bend simulation and press brake programming. Getting those files into Adept is the next thing on my list of things to do."

 

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