Mizzou deploys product lifecycle management solution for engineering data archive system, generating savings on facilities projects
Bellevue, WA — January 8, 2004 — The Space Planning Department at the University of Missouri Columbia has completed the first production deployment of the a new product lifecycle management (PLM) solution from provider Product Sight, allowing the department to generate significant savings on its facilities projects.
Product Sight's Lifecycle Environment is an integration of the company's PLM technologies, FindView and SyncroSpec. This system is designed to deliver unified Web access to existing product lifecycle content from wherever it is located, combined with management for related engineering and manufacturing activities.
The solution's SyncroSpec component synchronizes data and activities needed to control engineering documents and data, while the FindView component offers a search engine that gives universal overview of relevant information content with access to existing product data from multiple sources.
"Mizzou," as the university is known, is expanding its facilities and programs in order to keep pace with the university's growth and change. Space Planning & Management was established to gather and manage space information for the campus. The department collects, updates and reports on facilities information for internal and external clients. Data is collected in the form of floor plans, campus maps and surveys, space inventory database and building and infrastructure archive information.
The university has already deployed Lifecycle Environment within its Space Planning Department and has already seen return on investment with its management of engineering and design data in the organization.
"FindView has played a core part of our facilities archive management for some time," Scott Shader, director of space planning and management at the university said. "We saw the opportunity to improve our archive document management right away when Product Sight showed us how its SyncroSpec Pipeline created greater synergies for our operation."
Architects and engineers, both internal and external to the university use Product Sight's system for facilities maintenance and new design. The system maintains a repository for the official archive of the final set of sealed documents for each facility project. The SyncroSpec Pipeline module has added document control and business process automation to FindView's engineering content search capabilities.
The deployment of the new system was completed in less than three weeks.
"Product Sight Lifecycle Environment is already allowing us to streamline procedures for capturing and maintaining up to date technical data on campus facilities and infrastructure," Shader said. "This helps us improve Space Planning's contribution as a profit center for the university. Overall design costs are reduced by reusing and reworking existing drawings versus redrawing everything. We can help projects save as much as $500,000 on a $20,000,000 project."
The university also recently put a library Web site for the archive online. Shader's Space Planning group was able to apply for and win research grants for making archive data more broadly available to university researchers and the public. Product Sight said that FindView made searching and viewing the information powerful enough for researchers and user friendly enough for use by the general public.
