Customer Story: Smith & Loveless

Do you know what sort of pump station would work best for your municipality? Fortunately, the average citizen can leave that decision to an expert manufacturer of water and wastewater pumping and treatment equipment. Often we take water treatment and wastewater disposal for granted, yet the industry behind these processes is a very important infrastructure component.

Smith and Loveless

Behind the smooth-running operation of many municipal pump stations is Smith and Loveless, Incorporated, manufacturer of various sorts of industry equipment. One of the most recognizable industry groups in the world, S & L brings over 50 years experience in innovative pre-engineered solutions to the global water/wastewater treatment and pumping marketplace (Smith and Loveless website). Smith and Loveless, Inc. got its start in 1946 under the auspices of B. Alden Smith and Compere Loveless. Initially a sales engineering firm representing wastewater industry equipment manufacturers, S & L evolved into a manufacturing company itself as its founders realized the need for complete factory-built wastewater systems. Since 1946, S & L has engineered several strategic alliances resulting in expansion into Europe, New Zealand and Australia (Smith and Loveless website). Naturally, such a large company generates volumes of information it must store and retrieve, in this case, thousands of old engineering drawings, job files and Accounts Payable documents.

Problems and limits of previous information system

Up until six years ago, data retrieval of documents in any of these areas was manual and required the user to search the designated repository and dig up the document themselves. This often led to a waste of the searcher’s time and that of anyone trying to help with the search. A second inefficiency, a by-product of hard copy holdings, is that any such document is available to only one user at a time, slowing the processing needs of simultaneous document users. A third inefficiency, also a consequence of a hard copy information system, was a lack of document duplication, and having no backup could be a risky situation. For a company that scans in the neighborhood of 25,000 images a month and that depends on being able to retrieve engineering drawings from up to 20 years ago for retrofit purposes, S & L needed a robust electronic information system, and so managers turned to Delta Systems Incorporated for help.

The DeltaDOCK Solution

In 1991, S & L contracted with Delta Systems to implement its DeltaDOCK software. This is a local area network based, state of the art document management system that combines up to date imaging hardware with customized user-built applications and indexing. Indexed documents are retrieved in seconds through the search function. Furthermore, DeltaDOCK enables data to be imported and exported, e-mailed and faxed. This software also offers several storage methods such as CD, WORM and DVD. S & L uses DeltaDOCK as a standalone application because at the purchase time, the company was running on an old system and management saw no point in integrating. Also, the bulk of the data S & L scans today comes from outside sources, so there is nothing to link. In particular, users scan paper in large quantities for job files or Accounts Payable documents. DeltaDOCK’s versatility shines in this regard given that most of those documents originate outside the company and must be imaged. Next, S & L images any engineering drawings that start life as paper, aperture cards or microfiche. Another big payoff of using DeltaDOCK is that users now have easy access to original job files and drawings for retrofit projects on pumps up to 20 years old; such projects would be impossible without those early specifications and plans, now indexed and imaged only a touch of a button away. The software has crystallized and isolated critical numerical and graphical information about each older client system, eliminating the communication gap between user and vendor and speeding up the retrofit. As soon as the users successfully loaded old job files and engineering drawings, while keeping current with new ones, the new information system generated volumes of historical data with which users could work easily from their desks. Among other benefits, this meant no more trips to the archival room! One feature S & L customized was an application enabling users to create job file indexes from information that existed on the old computer. Users scanned the job files and then tied the scan operation to those indexes. This shortcut meant users then did not have to create the indexes after the images were scanned—another example of the versatility of DeltaDOCK.

Conclusion

Now that the company has stored 1,750,000 images, users benefit from quick, efficient and guaranteed document retrieval. In fact, personnel find DeltaDOCK almost indispensable, a sign that the software has paid off in a big way. Indeed, this company believes DeltaDOCK is so important that not only do 100 non-factory workers have access, but all personal computers have it installed.