Tr Cutler Interviews Ricardo Talbot Regarding Wasteful Searches

Among North American manufacturers more than half of the company information is not centrally indexed and searchable; organizations employing a thousand knowledge workers wastes nearly $3 million per year due to an inability to locate and retrieve information. Knowledge workers spend a third of their time searching for information. All this time searching for documents is negatively impacting the productivity, bottom-line, and lean operations of most North American manufacturers.

According to Ricardo Talbot, Chief Science Officer for Elmo Solutions, “The biggest distinction in effective search tools that create and manage engineering documents is the capability to index, retrieve and display a wide range of CAD and imaging documents from AutoCAD, other Autodesk "flavored" applications, Autodesk Inventor, and SolidWorks.

Calculating return-on-investment for effective PLM/CAD search products are usually based on the safe assumption that the average information worker spends only one hour per week searching for electronic documents. It is economically viable to deploy CAD and PLM document retrieval tools because according to Talbot, “Our original intent was to develop and market a full-fledged TDM (Technical Document Management) system with sophisticated document retrieval and viewing features, revision control, approval control, workflow, really the whole enchilada. However, when we surveyed our potential customers, we discovered that 90% of them would be perfectly happy with a "barebones" TDM solution that would really focus on retrieval and viewing of engineering documents, as long as it was easy to use.”

Talbot suggested, “What those people were actually describing to us was the good old search engine, Intranet-style, with advanced engineering-specific viewing capabilities were already in place in many cases. So it was decided that our approach to TDM would take the form of a solution that would satisfy the needs of 90% of the market, at an average initial cost that would be typically about 50 times less than full-featured TDM system.”

Automation.com contributing editor and manufacturing journalist Thomas R. Cutler profiled Elmo Solutions search product. The article may be read in its entirety at http://www.automation.com/sitepages/pid2831.php.

Elmo Solutions provides comprehensive professional services related to the creation, maintenance, transformation and processing of CAD/PLM metadata. Elmo Solutions is headquartered in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada and has users in 42 countries. Elmo Solutions is an offshoot of IRISCO du Québec Inc., a professional services company specializing in Products / Property / Project Lifecycle Management. Established in 1976, its customers include manufacturing companies, public utilities, engineering and government organizations.

Elmo Solutions, (www.elmosolutions.com) the leader in extraction and processing of PDM metadata, announces the immediate availability of its Elmo Search software. Elmo Search is the world's only affordable, enterprise search product designed to meet the distinct needs of CAD Managers, R&D Managers, IT managers, end-users and senior managers. Elmo Search enables searching within AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, Word, Excel, PDF files, emails, and many more document types. It is designed to increases employee efficiency and productivity by delivering highly accurate search results, in just a fraction of the time required by other technical document management (TDM) solutions. It also allows the creation of separate groups of documents, or "collections", each targeted at specific groups of interests within the enterprise, while complying with existing file security permissions. Elmo Search also constantly monitors document changes in a document collection, automatically indexing new and updated documents on-the-fly within seconds.