Design News for Mechanical and Design Engineers

The company (www.coopercameron.com), headquartered in Houston, TX, manufactures oil and gas pressure control equipment, including valves, wellheads, chokes, blowout preventers and assembled systems for oil and gas drilling, production and transmission used in onshore, offshore and subsea applications. It also manufactures gas turbines, centrifugal gas and air compressors, integral and separable reciprocating engines, compressors and turbochargers.

The company uses the SAP R/3 business system integrated with eQuorum's ImageSite (www.eQuorum.com) document and image manager to share engineering documents worldwide.

"From SAP transactions, we launch into engineering documents and can view them or print them within our network printers around the world," explains Dave Whiting, manager of engineering systems, Cooper Cameron Corp. "Now we have one document file and people around the world can print or view it."

This integration of SAP R/3 with ImageSite provides users with a seamless solution to handle online viewing of complex engineering and technical documents as well as online collaboration and distributed printing.  Users search for documents stored in the SAP R/3 repository using the SAP interface. Once the documents are retrieved, eQuorum's SAP Connector lets users view, distribute or print using ImageSite. ImageSite is used in PDM environments for the storage, management and distribution of "released documents" that are generated by the CAD modeling software after the design is complete.

Whiting adds that all engineers have access to the "latest revisions of all documents from one source, in a bill of materials. They can point and double-click and view it on screen, and elect to print or move on. This gives us the confidence that we are looking at the latest and greatest."

ImageSite lets users manage, share, distribute, and print engineering drawings and technical documents. Engineers can send an e-mail message to link users to documents in the ImageSite document repository. With the use of a Web browser, users can do  collaborative viewing and mark up hundreds or thousands documents.

Cooper Cameron found that document management saved the company considerable time in design of its wellheads, such as this one.

"They aren't doing anything overly innovative," Orr says of eQuorum. They are doing a job that everybody needs, and apparently doing it very well," he says. "ImageSite seems to say what it is, and does what it says. It's a simple solution to a common problem."

Whiting says that the biggest payoff comes from his customers.

"What we're able to do, through ImageSite, is point and click and put together a whole package of bill of materials and print it all at once. Our customers can then send it to an Extranet, and their suppliers can access it through a URL," he explains.