Electronic Document Management System at Sizewell B

by Simon Rippon

Reprinted with minor corrections from Volume 37, No.4 of The Nuclear Engineer (the Journal of the Institution of Nuclear Engineers)

Abstract

Sizewell 'B', Britain's first PWR, officially opened on March 25 1996, will now rely for its document management on a sophisticated computer-based system. One of the largest single engineering projects ever to be commissioned on one site in Britain, Sizewell 'B' accommodates more than 300,000 documents, including over 200,000 drawings. The electronic document management system will provide a number of important benefits, including a more direct method of maintaining the station's Configuration Management and hence maintaining high safety standards, improved turnaround in plant modification proposals (PMP), significant time and cost savings in managing vital records, and increased productivity.

Introduction

Suppliers of plant and equipment for nuclear power stations often complain that the weight of paperwork needed to assure the extremely high standards of safety is more than the weight of the components that they are supplying. While this may be a bit of an exaggeration for a thousand-ton reactor pressure vessel, it is certainly true that the paperwork associated with individual items is prodigious and when it is all put together into the huge complex of a nuclear power plant the volume of documentation is almost overwhelming. In a major exercise to introduce an electronic document management system for Britain's newest nuclear power plant, the Sizewell B pressurized water reactor, Nuclear Electric found that the accumulation of essential documentation amounted to about 50 tons and was likely to continue growing at one or two tons per year if something was not done about it.

As the operator of Sizewell B, Nuclear Electric has prime responsibility for establishing and maintaining an exceptionally high standard of safety. To obtain construction and operating permits it has had to make powerful safety cases to licensing authorities—notably to the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII)—and these depend heavily on detailed documentation on every aspect of the design and construction of the plant. Now that the power station is up and running, it is still necessary to satisfy the NII that the plant is maintained in its "safe" condition, or better. This involves continuing programs of inspection and maintenance as well as some backfitting and modifications. Heavy demands are placed on the good management of documents in order to provide ready access to historical information, to check maintenance requirements and procedures for different components and to maintain a complete record of everything that has been done, especially if it involves changes to the plant. Of particular importance is the need to maintain a full audit trail between different documents so that an authorized change to one drawing or document will be duly noted in other related documents. This whole process goes beyond just the management of documents and is referred to as "configuration management"—the process of ensuring that the whole nuclear power station is maintained in a safe and reliable configuration.

Sizewell B has a design life of 40 years. This gives an indication of the time scale over which the full documentation set must be managed. Even after eventual retirement from service there will be a need to maintain a large amount of essential documentation for the plant decommissioning and dismantling which may not be completed for a hundred years or more.

It becomes clear that with the management of documentation for a nuclear power plant it is not so much a case of "can it all be done electronically?" but rather a question of whether there is any feasible alternative.

A good case for EDMS

The project to introduce an electronic document management system (EDMS} at Sizewell B started some three and a half years ago with an extensive case study which looked not only at technical requirements but also undertook organization and management studies and considered the business needs of a company heading towards privatization. The case for EDMS at Sizewell B turns out to be particularly strong.

With a new power station it was possible to plan the EDMS implementation from the top down so that it would eventually embrace the whole body of documentation. This contrasts with the introduction on older operating power stations where document management schemes have tended to grow from limited applications in particular areas which had become troublesome bottlenecks.

Another practical advantage for applying EDMS at Sizewell B was the fact that electronic systems of document production—computer aided design and word processing—had been almost exclusively used from the outset of the project at the beginning of the 1980's. Even the huge volume of words generated during the two-year public inquiry was all recorded on computer systems with extensive indexing and retrieval capabilities.

Introduction of EDMS at Sizewell B has also coincided with a period of acute business awareness. Since privatization of the non-nuclear part of the electricity industry in 1990, the state-owned nuclear generators Nuclear Electric and Scottish Nuclear have made great efforts at least to match the business efficiency of the private sector and this effort is expected to further intensify now that the eight newest nuclear stations, including Sizewell B, are being privatized under British Energy.

Leading management consultants claim that the cost of administering paper based management systems in large organizations can be anything from 6 to 15 per cent of gross revenue and in an industry as heavily regulated as nuclear power the figure is likely to be towards the top end of the range. For Sizewell B, that could mean a few hundred million pounds per year being spent on activities which, although vital, provide little or no added value. Documentation management is clearly a key target for cost cutting and EDMS is claimed to offer savings of up to 50 per cent.

Reduction of staffing levels is another familiar accompaniment to privatization and increased business efficiency. In the case of the nuclear industry it has been the target of criticism from those who maintain that safety levels could be compromised by staff cuts. EDMS should go some way to countering these concerns because it eliminates many hours of largely unproductive manual effort in searching out required documents, obtaining copies and administering their refiling or disposal after use.

An efficient documentation management system, and in particular a system that maintains the links between inter-related documents, is also vital to preserve the knowledge of highly qualified staff when they leave a power station. This is true whether it be due to a current round of down-sizing or the more normal course of job changing and retirements that take place over the operating life of a plant.

EDMS requirements

The case study for EDMS at Sizewell B identified the key requirements as the efficient management of lifecycle information; the provision of easy, but controlled, access to, and reproduction of documents to get people away from keeping their own filing systems: and, most ambitiously, the automation of workflow processing—the process of maintaining interrelated packages of documents and electronically routing them to the appropriate people for review and audit. The system is required to hold all the legacy data—some 200,000 design drawings and 100,000 text documents—and to have spare capacity for at least five-years worth of newly generated documents. It needs to support at least 350 user terminals of which 50 might typically be in use at any one time.

How the Cimage Document Management System interacts with the Nuclear Electric mainframe computer.

A particularly important requirement was the need for the EDMS to link into the existing local area network (LAN) at Sizewell B without overloading the system. There is also a dedicated link between the Sizewell B LAN and Nuclear Electric's engineering design offices in Barnwood, Gloucestershire.

Planned maintenance has assumed supreme importance at nuclear power stations because it not only helps to assure the safety and reliability of the plants, but also represents an area of activity where the battle to improve efficiency can be won or lost. Sizewell B uses a work management system known as Passport on the company's mainframe computer to plan, schedule and control all maintenance activities. It relies heavily on the ready availability of up-to-date documentation and is a major source of authorized amendments to the documents when maintenance tasks are completed. A vital requirement, therefore, was for the EDMS system to closely integrate with Passport.

Selection of Cimage

Based on the above requirements, Sizewell B invited bids for the EDMS and received no less than 95 proposals. These were fairly quickly reduced to a short list of 12 and then three mainly by elimination of systems which had been developed for commercial and legal documentation management where there is rarely any requirement for anything larger than standard A4 pages. Cimage Enterprise Systems was eventually selected for its completeness of solution and specifically its experience with many large format drawings. The company claims, for example, the capability to scan into its systems the full length of core samples for oil well logging applications. A well developed work flow software package was another attractive feature of the Cimage EDMS which was particularly well suited to the requirements of engineers at Sizewell B, and the ability to operate EDMS efficiently across a wide area network (WAN).

Cimage has American origins with experience of documentation management systems for nuclear plants in the U.S. The Cimage headquarters office at Bracknell in the UK now supports the development and marketing of documentation management systems around the world.

After initial selection, Cimage was contracted in 1994 to undertake a prototype exercise at a cost of around £425,000. This involved the input of about 12,000 documents—a cross section of all the types of documents that might need to be handled— and testing the system against the challenging technical requirements needed to comply with information technology at Sizewell B. After successful completion of this exercise and an intensive vendor evaluation program, Cimage received a further £650,000 contract for the software and services for the full EDMS. Installation at Sizewell B commenced in December 1995 and was completed in March 1996.

As a result of its association with the Sizewell B project, Cimage has now been named as the preferred vendor for EDMS for the rest of Nuclear Electric and is also exploring the possibility of joint projects with Nuclear Electric for potential customers in other countries.

The Sizewell B EDMS

At the center of the EDMS at Sizewell B is a powerful server-computer a Sun Spare workstation—using the Unix operating system and Ethernet protocols to communicate with the personal computers and workstations of 350 users on the LAN and also to interface with the station's mainframe computer. An Oracle relational database with 44 inter-related database tables is used to keep track of all the documentation and related information.

Drawings are stored as computer-aided design files (CAD) using AutoCAD software and other documents are stored as word processor files using Word Perfect. The main store uses optical discs of the WORM (write once read many) type. A Hewlett-Packard "jukebox" storage system with a capacity of 200 Gigabytes provides the necessary capacity.

Network monitoring, showing the optical jukebox on the right next to Unix computer running the EDMS. The LAN-server is on the far side of the room on the left of the picture.

A feature of these proprietary components of the system is that they use 'open system' industry standards which facilitate the reading of files by different systems and easy translation into different software formats. Nonetheless, it is recognised that the "flavor of the month" in computer software packages can change with great rapidity and it is proposed to review the systems every five years to ensure that retrievability is maintained into the foreseeable future.

As well as the normal personal computers used by most members of staff at Sizewell B there are also 100 engineering work stations which have been equipped with large 21 -inch monitors. These are particularly useful for viewing drawings and can also display two full A4 pages side-by-side with sufficiently good resolution to permit reading at a relaxed distance from the screen. Users who are fortunate enough to have been provided with these larger monitors guard them jealously.

Likewise, there are a number of special printers and scanning units on the system which are able to accept large format documents up to AO size (1268 x 844 mm). Scanning equipment was also provided for the initial task of inputting some 120 000 aperture cards—microfilm records of drawings with printed bar codes for indexing information.

EDMS in use

Different levels of authorization allow users of the EDMS to view documents on screen, to view and print out copies and to view, print out and save back amended documents. Authorized access can also be restricted to certain categories of documents. All access to the systems is automatically logged.

A user calling up the system will have the option of searching various levels of indexing on different tables of the database and can undertake a search for all related documents before retrieving those required for viewing. Associated with each document listed in the database is an audit record which will give the full history of who originally generated the document and when, any amendments and changes and related documents. It would also include warnings of any mark ups on the documents which might be in the form of highlighted amendments in a Word Perfect document or notes on an AutoCAD overlay on a drawing. Included on the audit log would be notification of any document currently checked out for amendments.

In addition to searching records of documents on the database it is also possible to make a full text search of the documents themselves with key word or combinations of key words. In the case of hard copy textual documents, optical character recognition software is used when they are scanned into the system to extract any text matter from the document and this is held in an associated file for full text searching purposes. It is not difficult to envisage the potential importance of this powerful search tool when, for example, a problem may be encountered with one small component and one needs to know quickly if, and where, any similar components have been used in the power station.

When an authorized user of EDMS makes a print of a document or drawing it will include a print banner stating that it is an uncontrolled copy and also showing by whom and when it was printed. Users are discouraged from keeping these uncontrolled copies after completing the task in hand. It should be quicker and more reliable to go back to EDMS rather than keeping paper copies in a filing cabinet. There is also considerable flexibility in the print out format. A user might, for example, choose to zoom in on a particular area of interest on a large drawing and print it out on a convenient sized sheet of paper rather than carrying around a full sized copy of the drawing.

Any new or amended document that is entered into the EDMS by suitably authorized users will automatically be flagged for auditing and will not be accepted into the system permanently until it has been approved by the appropriate people. In the case of amendments, the documents will have changes highlighted until accepted by a designated responsible person and others with a particular interest in the document. A detailed audit log associated with each document is built up in another table held by the database. This will show the date and time of the original entry of the document, the name of the person who created it, if and when it was checked out for changes, and when and by whom the changes were vetted. It can also show when a document has been flagged as "required reading" by particular people and just when they got around to reading it.

The complexity of the turbine hall shows a justifiable case for strong configuration management so the plant and documentation are kept in step.

Supporting configuration management

Clearly the above access possibilities to EDMS provide the basis for the regular and timely review of documents which is an essential element of the configuration management of Sizewell B. Workflow software is used to facilitate the electronic routing of documents and review comments in a way which mirrors the paper flow in a classical review process. Workflow software provides automation of this process:

• all information relating to a document review is collected together in an "electronic folder" to ensure that complete and correct information is available to reviewers.
• the reviews can be conducted electronically with the main responsible person and other reviewers able to monitor the progress of the review and to see each others comments if so desired.
• the system is pro-active, informing people when they are required to perform a task and reminding them at intervals until they do it.
• management reporting systems can use the electronic audit trail created in the review process to check which documents have been reviewed, who reviewed them and whether anybody was slow with their comments, etc.

In a similar way, EDMS can provide essential support for any plant modifications. When making a request for a change it will be necessary to collect together copies of all related documents and drawings and while the engineering of the modifications is being carried out the documents will be tagged within EDMS to indicate to others that changes are in progress. These tags will only be removed when the modifications have been completed and new issues of documents and drawings have been approved and placed back into the system. This process fulfils the configuration management requirement of ensuring that documents and drawings are always consistent with the state of the plant.

Planned maintenance

The above review and revision capabilities of EDMS are particularly important in the support of planned maintenance. In developing and maintaining maintenance schedules it is necessary to check the documentation for the commitments that have been made in the safety case that was submitted to licensing authorities and the record of maintenance for different items of plant and equipment. The interface between the EDMS and the Sizewell B mainframe computer will allow the Passport work management system to submit requests for copies of all the documents and drawings that are needed to support a particular job. When the job is actually scheduled, the system will print out copies of the documents along with the work order form. Completion of maintenance work will be duly recorded in the appropriate documents in EDMS and would contribute to the life history of different components and systems.

The potential value of an electronic system for parceling together documents for maintenance jobs and keeping the records up to date can be gained from the number of jobs being handled by the Passport work management system. During normal plant operation around 150 maintenance jobs are scheduled each day and during scheduled outages this figure can rise to 1000 jobs per day.

The loading of the Cimage EDMS system is now nearing completion and it is undergoing a proving stage. Training is being given to all end users, ready for its planned roll-out later in the year.

Another innovation that is being examined is the possibility of providing robust portable computers for use by maintenance workers. Instead of taking paper copies of documents into controlled areas they would be able to view documents on EDMS at their place of work. While any paper taken into a controlled area has to be brought out as potentially radioactive waste, the portable computers could be kept in the controlled areas along with sets of tools.

Maintaining the safety case

Almost as important as maintaining the hardware of a nuclear power plant is the need to manage the safety case to the licensing authority. Within the EDMS at Sizewell B there are already some four to five thousand documents related to the safety case that has been made to the NII. These include some 3,500 "commitments" that have been made on a whole variety of procedures and practices. The links between related documents provided in the EDMS are invaluable in checking whether proposed revisions to documents would in any way compromise some of these commitments.

One of several future developments could involve the entry of a large number of technical specifications into the EDMS. Tech specs are an almost sacred set of rules and test procedures which have to be completed during the commissioning of nuclear power stations and before start up of the plant after major outages.

Unofficially the NII has shown general approval of the greater efficiency offered by the Cimage EDMS in maintaining the safety case at Sizewell B and would probably look favorably on a wider application of such systems. There appears to be no problem with the permanent recording of documents on optical disk, subject to the use of systems which comply with British and international standards. Ed Brown, the Manager of Information Systems at Sizewell B, is looking forward to the day, not far distant, when he can have a 50-ton bonfire of paper and microfilm documents.