The Power Of Small Document Imaging

Dan Callaghan prefers not to be the center of attention. As plant manager at the Kenetech Fort Orange Cogeneration Facility, his plant is responsible for producing electricity for 60,000 residents in the Albany, NY, area. When the electricity stops flowing, Callaghan is in the spotlight. He is responsible for solving problems at the plant and keeping downtime to a minimum.

Overwhelmed With Manuals
Most consumers are blissfully ignorant of the massive equipment used to produce energy. The 65-megawatt power plant houses a gas turbine, heat-recovery steam generator, steam turbine, condenser, cooling tower, and various pumps and motors. The operation and maintenance guidelines for each piece of equipment are located in one or more technical manuals. For example, the gas turbine requires six large manuals. In addition to the six manuals, there are manuals for each of the major components inside the turbine. Callaghan explains, "I have a bookshelf in my office that is six-feet high and at least six-feet wide, which is filled with manuals. And that is only half of them."

When a problem occurred at the plant, it would take employees several hours to search through manuals and still find minimal information. There was also no way to insure that employees were gathering information on how to solve the problem at hand. "Sometimes you have an idea what the problem is and that is the only path you explore," says Callaghan. "I have been in situations where we spent days narrowing down a problem and it turned out to be something else." The plant sells about $70,000 worth of power each day and is scheduled to be in operation 98% of the time. Every failed search was costing the plant money.

A Turnkey Solution
Callaghan needed a method for searching through the manuals more effectively. Because the manuals were only viewed periodically and by certain employees, the plant did not need an enterprise-wide imaging system, according to Callaghan. Instead, the facility installed an electronic filing system called DocSTAR. The system allows employees to scan and store documents on disk, but the real benefit is improved document retrieval time. Once a document is scanned, it is indexed by a word, a number or the full text of the document. Using a keyword search, users can access every document which contains the keyword.

The DocSTAR system, produced by Bitwise Designs, Inc., was installed at the Kenetech facility in early 1997. DocSTAR is powered by a Pentium-based host computer and documents are stored on magneto-optic disks. The standard version of the system includes a single drive, while users can upgrade to a jukebox or multi-drive tower. Users can also choose between a 10 page-per-minute scanner or a high-end model which scans 40 pages-per-minute.

The system uses the Caere OCR (optical character recognition) engine for full-text searches. DocSTAR also uses Diamond Head Software's ImageBASIC, an imaging application toolkit. DocSTAR incorporates two components of ImageBASIC and will be adding a third component, explains Ira Whitman, senior vice president at Bitwise Designs. "DocSTAR uses ImageBASIC's image window component, which includes scanning, display, file saving and loading, and printing of images. This component of ImageBASIC is built on the Pixel Translation engine," says Whitman. "We also use the annotation component of ImageBASIC for editing and marking up scanned images without altering the original. All annotations are saved as a separate image and the original remains unaltered." Future versions of DocSTAR will use the ImageBASIC color component for scanning, importing, and viewing color or gray-scale documents.

Eliminating The Backlog
Immediately after purchasing DocSTAR, employees at the Kenetech plant scanned every manual into the system. Scanning all of the manuals and diagrams took three months with employees working 12-hour days. Manuals with three-ring bound pages could be scanned directly into the system. Others, which were bound with glue, were copied and the copies were scanned. Once the manuals were scanned, employees then scanned equipment diagrams and schematics. The larger diagrams were copied and reduced to letter-size paper.

Save Time Searching For Information
It was not long before the plant employees had an opportunity to test the capabilities of DocSTAR. The plant produces about 30,000 pounds of steam per hour as a by-product of producing electricity. Instead of letting all of the steam evaporate into the atmosphere, 12,000 pounds per hour are funneled to a paper factory located next to the power plant. The steam is 900 degrees, but a cool mist is used to reduce the steam's temperature to 550 degrees - what the paper factory requires.

A problem arose in the system where twice the normal amount of steam was being funnelled to the paper factory. The plant had to use more of the cooling mist to keep the steam at 550 degrees. While the situation was not critical, Callaghan wanted to solve the problem before it got worse. "We did a search of all the manuals stored in DocSTAR using key words to describe the problem and the equipment involved. Within a couple of minutes, we had all of the information that could be possibly related to the problem," states Callaghan. "We were able to determine several possible explanations for the problem. Without all of the information at our disposal, we have a tendency to concentrate all of our energy on one possible area." Callaghan reviewed each scenario with consultants and determined the actual problem within two hours. He says that gathering the same amount of information manually would have taken about two weeks. The plant had to be shut down for five days while the problem was corrected. "We plan for about five days of plant maintenance each year, so we performed it at this time," states Callaghan. "If we had misdiagnosed the problem, the plant might have been shut down for several weeks while we continued to troubleshoot."

The Need For An Electronic Filing System
The size and scope of the DocSTAR installation at the Kenetech facility is typical. DocSTAR is not an enterprise document imaging solution. The product is designed for small companies or divisions within a large company. DocSTAR reduces the need to store documents in file cabinets which is critical for companies that have small work areas. "I have seen customers that have file cabinets in the bathroom because office space is so tight," states Ira Whitman of Bitwise Designs. "When documents become too difficult to manage, the result is lost documents, poor customer service, and an overall decrease in business. The DocSTAR system allows a user to reduce paper storage and quickly access critical documents."