The Paperless Manufacturing Project: Kingsbury, Inc.

Kingsbury Inc., a leader in the design and manufacture of tilt-pad fluid film thrust and journal bearings for all types of rotating machinery, credited a successful Autodesk Vault Collaboration implementation to our Synergis team.  The solution for their paper challenge was to implement a data management system to prevent the waste in resources in coordinating the paper packets on thousands of different projects at a time.  The new paperless system with Autodesk Vault Collaboration, allows teams to work on changes instantaneously without waiting for the paper trail to make it to each team.

“This project wasn’t about saving trees, although it will.  We estimate 20 hours are saved each week with this process because new job packets on the floor are no longer needed when there’s a change – the changes are instantaneous in Vault.  Not only do we save time with changes, we also save when creating a new job folder in Vault which takes a mere 15 minutes to compile.”  – Harry Geiger, IT Manager, Kingsbury, Inc.

Rather than using paper packets, Vault allows the jobs to be stored in the system in what is referred to as a “job folder.”   These folders contain all information necessary to complete the job, and include links to any file associated with the job. “It is becoming apparent that the unique, one-point sourcing of pertinent documents and information, which is from the common computer network, has expedited the manufacturing effort while simultaneously declining the potential for the distribution of materials with untimely revision statuses or other error conditions,” said Jerry Powers, Kingsbury Senior Vice President. “The consequences of the ‘Paperless Manufacturing Project’ continue to become manifest in the increasing efficacy of production-floor information command and control. This represents a somewhat un-quantifiable, but absolutely real savings in both time and direct costs.”
Out of the box, Autodesk Vault Collaboration was able to address the majority of Kingsbury’s requirements; however when a user selected a file in Vault, the latest version of the document was displayed in the Preview tab of the Details Panel, regardless of its life-cycle state (released, in review, work in progress, etc.). Synergis Professional Services team was engaged to develop a custom add-in for Autodesk Vault that displays the latest released version of the selected document in a separate tab in the details panel for users to have access to both the current version and the last released version.
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