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Adept Helps the Company Achieve Better Processes, Cost Reductions, Time Savings, Higher Productivity and Greater Ease in Meeting Goals

In the midst of managing a very large project for the military, as well as trying to achieve the stringent process requirements for multiple industry certifications, Foster-Miller (www.foster-miller.com), an engineering and technology development firm, turned to Adept document management & workflow software for help. Thanks to an effective implementation of that software, Foster-Miller now uses Adept software to manage their documents, as well as for their review and release processes; peer, management, and customer collaboration; design history maintenance; industry standards compliance; and as a central repository for standard operation procedures (SOP).

Located principally in suburban Boston, with additional offices in Washington, DC and Albany, New York, Foster-Miller was founded in 1956 by three graduates of MIT who believed there was a need for a company that could solve clients' difficult technical problems through first-class analysis and design. Before implementing Adept, the company had rudimentary and very labor intensive processes in place for document managementóthey used Microsoft Windows to assign rights to personnel and directories. Their systems would not satisfy the industry quality certifications they sought. But Foster-Miller was wary of anengineering document management (EDM) system that would get in the way of user productivity. They wanted a flexible EDM system that would be part of an individual's daily activities, rather than being an additional task.

"A good process is as invisible as possible, but still delivers significant benefits," said Andrew Courier, Program Manager, Foster-Miller. "Our goal was to automate as much as possible and not to hire additional personnel to support new processes. We don't need a group controlling the baselines or viewing rights, or handing out numbers. Adopting document management was a very good move for us."

Currently, Foster-Miller uses 25 copies of Adept with its SolidWorks and AutoCAD software. In addition to the out-of-the-box capability, they added two custom extensions from Synergis Software: the Adept Library Signature (ALS) for complex approval routing; and the Automatic Number Generator, which automatically names the models, detail drawings, and presentation files, as well as other design files created with software including Microsoft Word, Excel, Project and other tools like Visio and SolidWorks.

Overcoming Resistance to Document Management and Speeding Learning

When Foster-Miller began implementing Adept, one of the first obstacles was the push back they got from the staff, who believed document management would be an extra step in their process and had a negative perception of document management.

"We had to work at changing the culture and find a way around the resistance to use an institutionalized document management system," said Courier. "Even after we set policy that Adept must be used on the project, we found people were creating much of their work outside of Adept and saving copies on their hard drives or somewhere on the network. Or, they were just using Adept as a final publishing tool."

Unfortunately, these practices promoted wasted effort and mistakes. Too often, someone would end up reviewing an older version of the document or the document would be lost all together. Foster-Miller's approach to changing their culture was to make it look like they were embracing old methods while actually adopting new ones. "We customized the Adept interface to look like the Microsoft Explorer View that our personnel were currently using. The resistance to using an automated system was greatly reduced because the operators were using an interface that looked like something that they were used to," said Courier.

Foster-Miller Meets Stringent Industry Certification Requirements with Adept

It is common for the team at Foster-Miller to work on complex and challenging projects that have strict development requirements. "We make anything from food manufacturing equipment to medical devices to air craft launchers, so it's important we have a system that is flexible enough to provide process control for all types of projects," said Courier. Among their projects are various medical projects and an Electro Magnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) for the Navy. This advanced level of work required Foster-Miller to fully commit to improving their design processes. They embarked on an initiative for process improvement in order to become certified by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) for a Capability Maturity Model level 3 (CMM 3) process rating and certified by National Quality Assurance USA for an International Standards Organization (ISO) 9001 and the aerospace version of ISO, AS9100, quality rating.

Once up and running on Adept, Foster-Miller continued to optimize Adept's library card/database fields to meet the needs of their certification initiatives for CMM3 and AS9100. The improvements they made included adding additional intelligence to the way they archived documents. "It was pivotal in our efforts to prove we had good control and easy accessibility of our design products," said Courier.

"We've just completed and passed the SEI CMM 3 assessment on our processes," said Courier. "We relied heavily on Adept to achieve our goals of becoming a CMM level 3 and AS9100 company. If anyone has lived through an SEI CMM assessment, they know the assessors do not enjoy struggling to find artifacts. Adept is a very useful tool. When an auditor wanted to find any one of our project forms, locations of an SOP, or document approval status or flow, it was just a search away."

During their AS9100 audit, Foster-Miller opened Adept on a screen and performed the audit live using Adept. Once again, they were quickly able to retrieve and show the auditors any document they requested. "We highlighted that we store our Engineering Change Orders (ECO), which are Microsoft Word documents, in Adept and our ability to use Adept's relationship tool to link them to the file(s) that were effected by the ECO provides a complete change history for each part. The auditors were impressed to the point where in less than 20 minutes they said, 'Forget about it. You guys are all set.' Adept definitely helped us achieve certification."

Adept Libraries Offer Greater Control Over Data for Approvals and SOPs

An ongoing focus for Foster-Miller, the next generation EMALS project, also has significant requirements for documentation. Internally, they have created three levels of formality for their process. "It's very extensive," said Courier. "Adept allows us to set it up for simple or complex processes."

On a recent medical project, Foster-Miller used Adept to link ECOs to the part baseline. "It was important for us to trace what version was going out, because we were delivering drawings and documentation quite frequently and we had to make sure our customers had the right version," said Courier.

For all of its projects, Foster-Miller required a reliable way to route material for review and validate who reviewed and approved documents. The company uses an Adept custom extension, Adept Library Signature (ALS) to function as the final approval routing. Foster-Miller's approach to the ALS is for documents to be sent to all reviewers at once and be reviewed in parallel rather than in series. This is because they did not want the review cycle to get delayed or stopped in someone's mailbox. The process uses secret passwords to ensure verification in the workflow. If someone rejects a document, Adept requires them to type in the reason for the rejections, so every step along the way is documented. The ALS is set up so once a document is approved, Adept moves it from a work-in-progress (WIP) library into a secured release library. "We worked with our Synergis Software account team and created exactly what we wanted. We got a lot of good suggestions and the ALS has been a big hit," said Courier.

Beyond using Adept for projects and safeguarding design history, Foster-Miller also uses Adept as a library for Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) documentation. Hundreds of SOPs, manuals, training documents and templates are stored on Adept and available to Foster-Miller personnel. "We created a separate tab on the database for our SOPs and entirely different looking database view for our SOP library which made it much easier to find these types of documents."

It's More than a Vault; Adept Enhances Collaboration

For every project, Foster-Miller has multiple library tiers: a work-in-progress library, a release library, a management library, and an obsolete library. Each library has different rights depending on who needs to collaborate on the given project. There are special folders for formal program reviews and process improvement (which includes SOPs).

"We use Adept as much more than a drawing vault," said Courier. Currently, Foster-Miller is in the requirements definition phase of the design for a large military project. They are generating over a hundred performance specifications that require peer reviews. The company is using Adept to manage the review and release process. "Our process involves several Adept libraries with different levels of securities and access. For example, we have a work-in-progress library for our projects, so we can maximize our team collaboration while maintaining a design history," said Courier.

"At Foster-Miller, we are committed to continuous feedback to and from our management in order to constantly improve ourselves. Adept provides a secure medium in which sensitive documents can be shared between program managers and upper management," said Courier.

Adept's Auto-Number Generator Eliminates Costly Human Error

Foster-Miller engineers previously maintained their document numbers on a spreadsheet. It was an awkward process that required many steps to obtain and number a document. It worked most of the time, but once in a while numbers would be overwritten and cause problems.

To prevent such problems, the company turned to Synergis Software. The result was to modify an Adept add-on application for auto-number generation that would work within their process. "We are extremely happy with the auto-number extension," said Courier. "Now we simply go into Adept and fill in the required library card fields and walk away with a number. As a result, we have been much more successful in getting people to fill in the library cards. It's really good right now. People are doing a great job."

The Telling Result: New Processes Increased Foster-Miller's Accuracy

"We train all of our people to manage the whole lifecycle of the document. They make a document, create approvals on their own, make a number on their own, say where it goes, check it in and out," said Courier. "We each take responsibility for our company's success. Adept makes it easier and we're efficient on it."

Adept has become seamless in Foster-Miller's process. It doesn't add any more time for them to do what they need to do. And now, they have less people who have to manage documents and files and therefore focus their resources on creating world class design solutions for their customers. With Adept, Foster-Miller has fewer errors going out of house and less waste in house. "We've just about eliminated the errors we had before," said Courier. "In today's ultra competitive world, companies can't afford to be inefficient and once it's set up, Adept ensures we are efficient."

 

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