Managing the design records of the UK's largest nuclear plant

By Mel Gould, manager, Sellafield Design Services, BNFL plc

Controlling nearly 2 million drawings was becoming a major issue for BNFL's Sellafield Design Services. Now document management technology has cut the time it takes to locate, retrieve and modify, and approve plant drawings from an average five days to around 20 minutes. It's not just the nuclear industry that could benefit from the Sellafield approach.

The Sellafield site covers an area of 4 and a half square miles and contains some 400 buildings which range from small monitoring stations to massive plants.

British Nuclear Fuels plc (BNFL) is acknowledged as a world leader in providing an efficient nuclear fuel cycle service to customers both in the United Kingdom and overseas. Its expertise covers fuel manufacture and enrichment through to used fuel reprocessing and recycling, transport, waste management and ultimately decommissioning.

Sellafield, located on the North West coast of England, is the largest of the company's five sites in the UK.  It covers an area of 4 1/2 square miles and it contains some 400 buildings which range from small monitoring stations to massive plants.  Strict records of each of them, including all design and physical changes, have to be kept both as original drawings and microfilms.

BNFL's central design resource is based at Risley, its Cheshire headquarters. In addition, all the company's sites have a local office which handle design work for maintenance or smaller scale projects. The Sellafield Design Services (SDS) team numbers about 60 people including small civil, mechanical and electrical engineering groups. Staff tend to focus on specialized work, using local contract design resources to handle the more routine detailing and the creation of manufacturing drawings.

Drawing mountain

The SDS team also contains a records department which keeps drawings up to date for the entire site. Sellafield's nuclear site license requires that certain key records must be absolutely accurate, reflecting even the smallest modification to plant. Maintaining records was demanding, compounded by storage problems. Since drawings might be needed at any time during the plant's day and night operation, they had to be stored in accessible but space consuming units.  By 1994, the drawing mountain contained more than 2 million original CAD and manual drawings and modifications. They were occupying the equivalent of 1,250 cabinets, some of which were kept at Risley or on a site 15 miles away from Sellafield at Lillyhall.

Besides occupying space, another problem was that prints needed to be supplied to a whole range of people across the two sites. They were indexed on separate computer systems - one at Sellafield and one at Risley - and SDS had to search both for the records related to the drawings. A full set of microfilms was also held in both places. Keeping these duplications up to date was a major task.

Modeling workflow

In 1994, SDS decided to investigate electronic document management and tendered for a small pilot system, selecting a two-workstation configuration from Cimage. With a view to subsequent enterprise-wide use, the capabilities of the system were tested by loading on drawings of an entire reprocessing building which comprised a wide mixture of old, new and very old drawings. The results proved that the system would meet requirements without heavy customization.

SDS involved potential users in the new system as early as possible to ensure commitment and understanding. It needed to be acceptable to a whole range of people across both sites, not necessarily experienced in IT.  A lot of time was also spent in examining and improving the department's existing procedures and how the system would relate to these methods of working. If widespread and easy access to the drawings could be provided, then plant, maintenance and project staff alike could share in the benefits. This approach also made good use of BNFL's existing investment in its site-wide, client/server PC network.

In 1995 work began on a full implementation with permanent software licenses for design office and registry staff, plus ten casual user licenses for ad hoc access across the site. The Cimage solution, utilizing an Oracle 7 database, duplicated the functionality of the old Sellafield Computerized Drawing Registry System (CDR). The new system holds drawings either as scanned images or CAD files on optical discs in a large 'jukebox'. A single jukebox, not much bigger than an average filing cabinet, can hold up to 400,000 drawings.

SDS worked closely with Cimage to model the workflow stages involved in creating drawings. An important feature of document management is its ability to act as an 'electronic policeman.' It is simply not possible, with a properly implemented workflow, to 'buck the system'. Only users with the correct authority and access rights can implement each stage, and the system ensures that those who check and approve drawings are different people. As a result, an accurate, full life history of each drawing can be maintained.

	Typical view of the complex array of services pipework in one of Sellafield's active buildings.  It is essential to keep clear records of such facilities.

Cutting approval cycles

Drawings are produced in AutoCAD. The Cimage system holds the AutoCAD file, together with a raster copy. The latter is used for viewing and printing locally. This approach avoids the use of special viewing software on all PCs.

At Sellafield, designers retrieve drawings straight from the optical storage disc to their AutoCAD workstations, modify them and electronically dispatch them around the approval circuit. They are then automatically restored to the optical disc. There is no longer any need to modify the original drawing negatives or create printed copies, although the system automatically prints to microfilm at each modification for mandatory record purposes. Designers can find an electronic drawing quickly, even though they may not know where it is located, by using Cimage's Document Manager facility.

Most importantly, the latest version is available to other users; if it is being modified when they ask for it, they are not only warned but told who is handling the work. This has proved an efficient and accurate way of significantly improving a process that previously varied in pace from one day when work was needed urgently to a more representative five days for routine tasks. The entire modification and approval cycle may now be completed in under 20 minutes although, obviously, more complex work takes a little longer.

Scanning plant records

With regard to dealing with existing documents, SDS had hoped to use external bureau services to capture the images direct from microfilm, but were not happy with the clarity of the resulting images, particularly on the older records. In using external services it was found that interpretation varied of the standards required. Additionally, the quality of the scanning equipment used by these resources was delivering a poorer quality than expected, confirmed by internal audit.

SDS decided that to ensure quality standards were met, the department would carry out the scanning and quality checks in-house, augmented by external agency staff. The agency staff are local people who are recruited specifically for the work from nearby employment agencies and trained by SDS. This arrangement is cost-effective and efficient.

Regarding the use of electronic document management facilities, even though some users may only want to access the system once a month, user numbers are steadily climbing. Some 40 PCs are regularly connected. Interestingly, although SDS used to provide prints in the order of 20,000 a month, the volume has now dropped significantly because people don't need to print it if they can look at a drawing on-screen. This is an unexpected but welcome additional cost saving.

	Remote handling of active material using master/slave manipulators (MSMs).  The operator can see into the operating cell through specially engineered windows using video and camera surveillance.

Improved monitoring

The system has enabled SDS to solve many problems including the management of its AutoCAD files. Previously, an AutoCAD manager had been responsible for filing and retrieving files. The new system not only keeps a log of drawing modifications, but also of view-only access and printing. It has improved the monitoring of where the drawings are and what they are being used for. As a result, the wider access of drawings is safe and manageable.

SDS now takes advantage of the system's ability to cope with scanned data and existing raster formats to integrate the handling of both types of files. Designs drawn on AutoCAD are also routed electronically around the approval circuit using Cimage's workflow capability, and on to the main database where the drawing is automatically updated and the image is stored as a raster file, as well as the AutoCAD original.  Before, the location and retrieval of the CAD original could take two to three days, even if it only needed a two-minute modification, and it could take another five to six days to return to storage after the approval circuit was completed. Today it happens immediately and the change has allowed the CAD manager to move on to other work within the company.

SDS expects to recoup its entire £700k ($1.1m) investment in the system in under two and a half years. Return on investment is measured by evaluating only genuine savings. This includes employment wages, maintenance costs of the previous system, equipment that would have had to be bought or replaced, consumables, and drawing storage costs including space, heating and lighting.

The cost of managing drawings is charged out to the operating plants for whom services are provided. This rate is based on an allocation depending on the number of drawings stored for a particular plant, and the number of prints produced on their behalf. The savings achieved through the system means that the cost of managing drawings is reduced and the costs to be recovered or the rate charged to users falls correspondingly.

Looking ahead

The prospects for the future look even brighter. In January 1997, Risley decided to follow Sellafield's lead. Now both sites interchange drawings electronically. Instantaneous exchange of drawing files has replaced the well-worn postal route between Cheshire and Cumbria. An image can be retrieved on site anywhere in 30 seconds. Furthermore, someone at the Risley site can call up a drawing from Sellafield in less than two minutes and produce a local print.  With the link between the two systems, physical location has become unimportant. Control is still carefully managed: only one site can own the drawing and permission has to be given to remove it. Cimage's Remote Database Manager software ensures that something done on one system is automatically replicated across to the other sister system.

The way is now open for other departments to collaborate: the electronic document management system could be used for managing many other applications such as handover records, borehole data and as-built project files. Meanwhile, all new work goes onto the system as a matter of routine and progress is underway to transfer the rest of the site drawings into electronic format. Well advanced future plans include making drawings and standards available via BNFL's own intranet.

More information from:

Mel Gould
Manager, Sellafield Design Services
British Nuclear Fuels plc
Sellafield
Seascale
Cumbria
United Kingdom
CA20 1PG

Telephone: +44 (0)19467 71112
Facsimile: +44 (0)19467 76800