PECO Energy/Exelon

Problem

PECO Energy's Accounts Payable department had a mainframe-based imaging system for archiving their vendor invoices. Their annual maintenance costs were causing concern after management discovered the amount that PECO's Nuclear Division was paying to operate their system compared to another department's DocuVantage® system that supported more than 10 times the number of users.

Old Method: PECO Energy's Accounts Payable department had a mainframe-based imaging system for archiving their vendor invoices. Their annual maintenance costs were causing concern after management discovered the amount that PECO's Nuclear Division was paying to operate their system compared to another department's DocuVantage® system that supported more than 10 times the number of users.

New Method: DocuVantage recreated the application for the Nuclear Division, added storage to the existing server and trained the scan operators to use the application. The scan operators began entering documents into the system and discontinued the previous IBM mainframe-based imaging system.

A conversion firm was hired to extract the images and database records from the previous system and put them into the appropriate conversion input format. Approximately 900,000 database records and 2 million images were imported into the system and verified by Accounts Payable personnel. The return on investment for this project was achieved less than one year from startup.

Instrumentation and Calibration Records

Old Method: The Instrument and Calibration (I&C) group had 70,000 instrument calibration records stored in file cabinets (500,000 pages), which were accessed by plant personnel on a regular basis. They also had a Microsoft Access database which held the index values for all of the files. To improve the accessibility of the documents, they decided to make them available in the DocuVantage Document Management solution since it was widely used throughout the plant already.

New Method: DocuVantage created a customized database screen for the I&C records and imported the existing database into the DocuVantage system. The plant then trained two operators to scan and attach all of the files to the database records. Now all personnel in the plant can access the files without leaving their desks.

Nuclear Records Dept.

Old Method: The Records Management departments at the two nuclear power plants needed a way to provide users access to documents while still keeping the original documents in permanent storage facilities. They were photocopying documents and distributing them around the plants at many locations. This method of providing access required a team of people dedicated to copying and distributing the paper and then keeping them updated to the current versions.

New Method: By DocuVantage installing a Document Management solution, they were able to provide easy access to the documents, eliminate personnel, and meet NRC requirements for managing the documents. In just a few months, the application was available to almost every person in the plants and the central office. This saves many hours of time spent accessing the physical records by simply allowing personnel to find and retrieve documents right from their desktops.

Engineering Production Drawings

The Nuclear plant maintains over 200,000 completed production plant drawings. These drawings are stored in the Document Management solution for easy access by engineers, designers, maintenance personnel, and many others. As drawings are updated, they are replaced in the system in order to provide users with access to the latest version.

The Nuclear plant maintains over 40,000 CAD drawings of their nuclear power plants. These files must be available for use by designers and engineers within the plants. The solution's check-out/check-in features allow for the designers to modify these drawings and still allow users to access the current version. Files are checked out for modification and downloaded to the user's workstation. Once the designer has finished making changes, the file is checked back in, replacing the older version. This feature allows them to maintain control over the files by not allowing multiple users to modify the same file at the same time.