DBT (GB) Ltd
DBT (GB) formally known as Anderson Mining is a company with vast experience within the engineering sector specialising in the manufacture and supply of equipment to companies within the mining industry. In fact with a trading history that spans more than 100 years and global customer base containing some of the biggest companies in the world they are regarded by many as a benchmark within their operational sector.
Clearly servicing and managing such a large and diverse market place results in huge volumes of Paperwork for DBT generated both internally and created directly via correspondence with their customer base. Over time, a large archived paper mountain had grown containing documents, drawings and parts lists from across the companies business departments.
Traditionally, the Company had archived this paperwork and in some cases had it converted to microfilm media, an expensive and laborious process both in terms of creating the microfilm records and in maintaining the outdated microfilm equipment. Additionally, company employees did not typically have direct access to the microfilm records, so servicing a query would take a significant time and resource whilst the microfilm record was retrieved, printed and delivered to the relevant department.
To overcome these problems, the Company decided to deploy a modern electronic document
management system based on the ‘Alchemy’ product suite. The system handles a growing number of critical documents and records that feed into the main operations of the company, such as Research & Development, Product maintenance, Customer Services and Administration. In total, approximately 500,000 documents were scanned into the Alchemy database. Additionally, once the system had been proven, documents dating all the way back to the early 1900 were also scanned and captured into the system, resulting in an environment which now hosts and manages documents electronically for vital area’s within DBT operational systems.
Original paper and film documents which did not need to be retained for legislative reasons were confidentially shredded and disposed of by TWD (UK) after DBT had quality checked the scanned images and approved the paper and film destruction.
DBT staffs are now able to search for and retrieve documents in just a few seconds – a huge improvement over the delays previously suffered when requesting microfilm records. Paper costs have reduced accordingly as well since many documents no longer need to be photocopied or printed.
From a technology perspective, the Alchemy environment sits comfortably within the Company’s existing strategies for IT. The Alchemy repository and all the user interfaces to it reside on standard Windows 2000 PCs, linked by the local network. The scanned images are written to CD media, then stored on dedicated company hard drives with nightly backup. One of the project advantages was that Alchemy was easy to role out and gave no performance issues to the existing network infrastructure as the images are compressed. Additionally, the system requires minimum housekeeping and has been found to be totally reliable.
