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Touch-Screen Document Viewing Application

Easy Access to Documents — and No Printing Necessary

Integration of existing software, hardware and business processes paved the way for leaps in efficiency through process automation.

Business Situation

B&B Manufacturing is a large manufacturing facility with four buildings on its campus and a diverse production environment. Mechanical drawings of the products being manufactured need to be available to technicians. Previously, when an engineer or technician needed to see a drawing they had to put in a request to administrative staff to have the drawing printed. B&B wanted to improve this process and make the drawings more easily accessible.

Technical Situation

The mechanical drawings for all products being manufactured or manufactured in the past are stored digitally in the Laserfiche document management system. This document management system stores document information in a MSSQL database and all documents in TIFF format on a network drive. The software provides a nice user interface for document archiving and retrieval but requires a standard windows computer with keyboard and mouse for operation. The manufacturing facilities operating environment is not suitable for work stations like this. B&B had existing touch-screen thin terminals with web browsers.

Solution

The engineers and technicians at B&B Manufacturing use the touch-screen terminals that are positioned throughout the manufacturing facilities on a regular basis. This interface is familiar to them and easy to access. Sierra Bravo leveraged this existing technology to develop a web based touch-screen application to lookup and view mechanical drawings.

The Laserfiche document management system stores drawings with unique identifiers that the end user normally is aware of. The data associated with these drawings and the network location of the TIFF files is stored in a MSSQL database that is also available on the network. A PHP application was developed to interact with the Laserfiche database and the network file system to make the drawings available to the end user from the web browser on the touch-screen thin terminals.

Web-Based Touch-Screen Application

The web application was developed so that the end user can enter any portion of the document ID and pull up a list of documents that contain that string. The PHP application pulls the document detail and grabs the TIFF document in order to present it to the user. Web browsers do not have a native support for TIFF files so the document is converted to GIF before presenting the document in a document view page.

A rich user interface is available to the end user so that they can rotate, zoom, and drag and drop the drawing directly from the touch screen computer.

Benefits

By making the drawings readily available to the engineers and technicians B&B was able to save production and administrative time. They also where not required to print a drawing every time an engineer wanted to take a quick look.

Products and Services Used:

  • Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)
  • PHP 5
  • JavaScript and custom AJAX libraries
  • MSSQL database server
  • Laserfiche document management software
  • ImageMagick image manipulation software
  • GD graphics libraries

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