Case Study

The Trane Company - Saving Time, Saving Steps

MYRIAD viewing software is helping make employees at the Trane Company more productive than ever, and saving wear and tear on their shoes as well.

The factory floor at the Clarksville, Tenn., commercial air conditioning equipment company comprises one million square feet under one roof. And for workers who often had to trek to a central office to ensure that they were working from the correct drawing, that meant a lot of walking.

"Our old environment was a bunch of paper printbooks scattered all over the plant," said Steve Eckart, Engineering Computer Manager at Trane. Workers would refer to the printbooks to review drawings of the parts they were working on.

But when information in a printbook was missing or out of date - a common problem - employees had to stop working and make the 10- to 15-minute trip to the central office, where the latest revisions were kept on microfilm.

What Trane needed was an easy-to-use system that would allow workers to be more productive while eliminating the errors that resulted from the printbook system. And with a Computervision electronic document management system incorporating MYRIAD viewing software, that's exactly what the company got.

More than 200 monitors distributed across the factory floor will replace the printbooks. Now whenever workers need to find the latest revision of a drawing, they simply launch MYRIAD with a touchpad, and the system takes them directly to the information they seek.

"They can zoom and pan and have access to all of MYRIAD's capabilities," said Eckart. Setting up the system was surprisingly easy, from the initial proposal through final implementation, according to Eckart. "It was such an intuitively logical thing to do, it sold itself to upper management," he said.

For the pilot project, Eckart selected an eight-person team at a site a quarter of a mile away from the central plant and set the standards that would confirm successful implementation. "We wanted people to tell us it was a lot better, not just a little better," he said. "It had to be easy to use and fast. People had to be able to zoom in on whatever they wanted to see. And they had to be able to get in and out quickly."

MYRIAD met the criteria easily - and did even more. "We had to turn people away at first," said Eckart. "Everyone wanted to use MYRIAD." Now just about everyone will use MYRIAD. With 30 concurrent licenses serving 100 people, and more to come, Trane is seeing a significant rise in productivity and in employee morale. The next step for the company is to add work instructions to the database, and Eckart is considering incorporating MYRIAD into the company's engineering change order process.

The new system has proven to be a tremendous labor-saving application, according to Eckart. "People are spending less time walking back and forth to the central office," he said, "and more time putting product out the door."