Automated Drawing Management and Delivery a Vital Part of Deregulation Preparation at Florida Power & Light

With deregulation at hand, utilities across the country are busy increasing operations efficiency and eliminating every unnecessary cost. One of the largest publicly owned utilities in the United States, Florida Power & Light company (FPL), is using an integrated system for engineering document management and delivery to reduce reproduction costs by 80% and deliver all engineering paperwork and documentation to any location in the company within minutes.

Florida Power and Light provides electric service to 7 million people in an area covering almost the entire eastern seaboard of Florida and the lower third of the state. The company operates 34 major generating units located across the state. Maintaining accurate and up-to-date drawings is crucial to safe, reliable, efficient operation.

Until early 1995 the company maintained an electronic database of 200,000 fossil fuel plant drawings on a mainframe and in hardcopy form at company headquarters in Juno Beach, Florida. This database, maintained by the Civil Engineering and Technical Services Department of the Power Generation Business Unit, included daily plant operational drawings, vendor drawings, and design modification drawings. Each year the department updated thousands of drawings, sending as many as 20 copies to each of the appropriate locations, and responded to requests for more copies of drawings when needed. While the database provided safe archiving of the drawings, it did not have the capability to show users the drawing before they ordered a paper copy. And information associated with the drawings was not available within the same system.

As a result of a corporate initiative to move applications from the mainframe to a client/server architecture, the department completely reengineered its approach to document management. The document management system, designed to contain every aspect of engineering documentation for operation of the FPL fossil fuel plants, is built on a combination of two software products, Cimage Document Manager and Lotus Notes. The new system saves the company days of turnaround time for paper copies and helps assure maintenance and upgrade work is done with correct information. And reproduction costs were reduced by 80%. In addition, the need for drawing handling has been significantly reduced, access during critical non-standard working hours is provided, as is complete information for outage and shift work.

Before the department installed the new system, obtaining a drawing required several days. An employee would request a drawing by finding the drawing number in the power plant drawing index and submitting a request for a copy of the drawing. Someone else would pull a hardcopy original out of the files and send it to an outside blueprint facility. When the copy came back, it was sent through office mail to the person who requested it. If, as was often the case, the drawing was not exactly what was needed, the process started all over again.

Without the ability to see a drawing, users often had to guess at its contents, based on the drawing title. "The process was unwieldy," explained Keith Olaisen, Systems Analyst for the Power Generation Business Unit. "With no way to see exactly what was on a drawing, people may have gotten what they asked for but it wasn't always what they wanted."

The Electronic Document Management System is a standards-based, networked document management, distribution, and retrieval system with security and access control, revision handling, check-in and check-out, storage management, information structuring, and audit trail. It provides full indexing and search/retrieval capabilities using industry-standard relational database technology. It manages a wide range of document formats, including scanned paper drawings, CAD files, illustration, textual documentation, spreadsheets, and technical manuals.

The new FPL system uses Cimage to provide engineering information, particularly large format documents. Lotus Notes is used for the management of many additional specifications, manuals and support information. Users have instant access to 110,000 drawings and thousands of manuals, memos, procedures and engineering records, all accessible from a personal computer. Development is nearing completion of the integration of Cimage and Notes. With this system, when drawing-based information is referenced by Lotus Notes users, they need only select the Cimage icon within the Notes window to generate a query to Cimage for that drawing. Because this triggers a new search every time, the user is assured of getting the latest version of any information within Cimage.

According to Olaisen, "Because Cimage has simple tools to connect into other applications, integrating it into Lotus Notes today (and perhaps other applications such as plant maintenance applications in the future) was pretty simple. The fact that other utilities and petrochemical plants also use it was a big plus." The system runs on the existing FPL fiber-optic network backbone wide area network which connects all the FPL plants. System performance is excellent and no major changes to their computing infrastructure were required, another bonus.

Florida Power & Light runs their system on a Hewlett-Packard Model 9000 server with an optical disk juke box storage that provides 50 GB of drawing storage. Over 300 employees are trained to use the system and can access the database from any location using a Windows-based PCs equipped to run Cimage. Primary users have their own desktop system, and central terminals are also available at all plants. In addition, each plant has an 11 X 17 Hewlett-Packard plotter and an E-size (42"x36") Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer for plotting capability.

FPL has a corporate license for Lotus Notes, enabling everyone in the company to use it. A pool of 60 Cimage licenses, shared across the business unit, means that up to 60 users can view drawings at any one time, which meets current demand.

Now when a drawing is needed, plant and staff personnel use a PC to view the detailed drawing information in the database to find the correct drawing. Information can be obtained off the screen or the drawing can be printed or plotted out in minutes. This has lowered production costs, made the process more efficient, provided faster drawing turnaround, and has reduced the chance of working from outdated drawings. Anyone comfortable with using Windows can learn how to use it in about an hour and an on-line help system is available at all times.

The company is so pleased with the new system that it is investigating Internet access to allow architecture and engineering firms to have controlled access to drawings to simplify the process of working with outside firms.

"With this new system we can now track our drawings and revisions and be more confident that drawings are up to date and accurate. It is impossible to misplace a drawing since it is always in the system," commented Olaisen. "Also, because of today's scanning technology, the quality of our scanned documents is as good as, if not slightly better than, the original drawing. When it comes to information retrieval, we feel we have a competitive advantage."