Consolidate Distributed Documents by
Simplifying Information Sharing
DaiNippon Screen MFG. Co. Ltd. is the leading company with strong R&D capabilities; 60% of its employees are technical staffs. With the extensive scope of businesses, Screen has an emerging need for information sharing and retrieval within various researches internally. To make the information easier to accessible and greater collaboration across the departments, the company decided to set up a portal to streamline information sharing and communication effort.
Background
Speed up R&D through information sharing
Founded in 1943, DaiNippon Screen MFG. Co. Ltd. has focused on the research and development as the core competence of the company. Specifically, for each stage of product development and production of electronic manufacture machinery, semiconductor and display panels, has been built upon the basis of abundant knowledge database. Screen regards all technical information and knowledge as indispensable assets and generated by their staff. Therefore, how to bring the information stored in a personal computer or derived from numerous researches within the company’s database into life and become useful as well as useable to all employees in the company has been a critical mission for Screen. Aiming to encourage cross department sharing and communication, the company has decided to introduce the comprehensive information search system and created one single portal for centralized management, the company expects to achieve four goals.
¾ Facilitates the processes of development, design, and manufacture significantly.
¾ Provides highly relevant search results to ensure effective access to all valuable information.
¾ Improves the efficiency of development, design, and manufacture processes.
¾ Raises the reusability and information sharing cross departments.
Through experience sharing and consolidating distributed data between “personal” and “company”, Screen expects to setup a fast and accurate search system that enables seamless integration with current system.
Challenges
Decentralized Information Architecture
To find a competent system for achieving information management, the company has tried numerous methods; however, it was unable to bridge over all researches and data timely without an effective solution. Screen has looked for greater accuracy and reliability search system that is quick and easy to use for sharing up-to-date data. Therefore, the company began to consider adopting an online database system with an access control mechanism to provide instant access.
One of Screen’s departments spent one year to implement the Lotus Notes/Domino System and loaded all technical specifications and documents into the system for management. Yet, it was not a productive system since the Lotus Notes/Domino System only supports limited search power and query syntax. After a period of time, the company found that the efficiency goes down since the search capability is difficult for people to find or locate the specific content. To solve that problem, Screen did a survey on the company’s technical staffs associated with the user experiences and search scenarios. Following are the top listed challenges:
¾ Time-consuming and costly for retrieval scattered data
¾ Unable to support real-time search within internal groupware or database
¾ Lack of one single point to access or locate the data
¾ Hardly to search for unstructured data, such as email or scanned researches and within disparate networks.
¾ Barely to provide extensive capabilities
Through the survey, Screen realized that the company must build a portal to provide secured and unified search across all documents and type of files within different departments.
Solutions
Ultimate Search Solution Delivers Unparalleled Performance
To shed light on these issues, Screen wishes to streamline access through a flexible and reliable search engine; thus, the company can openly share information within the internal network and increase the value of information assets. How to consolidate existing database and integrate system has became a challenge issue for the company.
Some search engines in the market nowadays come with extra functions, such as the natural language search; however, the response is often impeded by the process of language analysis, resulting in waste of even more time. Therefore, Screen agrees that a general full-text search system would be sufficient enough for retrieval of required documents from the huge database since the existing database has been clearly defined at the time of initial entry.
System Structure
InfoGates consolidates distributed information in the Lotus Notes/Domino Server and File Server. It is capable of performing instant query and retrieving relevant documents across a lineup of databases.
By selecting InfoGates as the information search system, Screen has achieves its goal to provide powerful search function that meets the needs of the company. It is capable of consolidating not only the existing databases but also all the appendixes and attachments. Even the data scattered along the line of the internal network, the search engine likewise is capable of retrieving the data through cross-database search. In the past, we very often had to make compromises in order to go around the limitations of the search tools, so some files must be converted into other formats for the system to function and a huge amount of time and resources were put in to reformat the original files. InfoGates supports multiple formats, including all Microsoft Office files formats, Lotus Notes Folders, Visio, PDF, and CAD files. With this system, the engineers no longer need to worry about whether the formats of the documents conform to the search system and what left for them is full attention on making those valuable documents. There is no need to alter a person’s behavior; neither does a person need to learn new things. This system ensures the accessibility of relevant content and easily retrieves information based on user’s requirements.
Working with InfoGates, the administrator can implement the easy-to-operate and user-oriented framework quickly. With the Google-like interface, all staff can obtain accurate search results and file locations while enabling trouble-free browsing within seconds.
In addition, InfoGates supports view cache function and flexible query that allows the users to get on the system directly without having to change user habits or alter file formats. InfoGates provides Screen the tailor-made search solution for internal communication as well as resource sharing.
The Effects
Improved Efficiency and Accuracy of Internal Communication
After InfoGates is set up, Screen conducted another survey and the results indicated a workforce with a high degree of overall satisfaction with the InfoGates system. They think this system enables them to retrieve the data easier and makes their work more efficient. In addition, the cross-database search function of InfoGates supports the full-text search capability of appendixes or attachments that query.
With the intuitive navigation and integrate with existing system, the company can monitor and analyze the information access tightly. This statistics can be used to ensure the security of the system, query histories, and serves as a reference for future expansion. To provide comprehensive and unified search system, Screen specially set up a Company Portal Management Committee; members of the committee are elected from each of the departments. They can track the operation log, including the information collection, content consolidation, interface improvement, setup of multiple server, and search function modulation to improvement on the access environment. Through the complete organization, they can minimize IT overhead and maximize the end-user productivity while ensuring the long-term retention and instant retrieval of the valuable information assets.
User Feedback
¾ Searchable file data, even the hidden appendixes and attachments – nothing is left out.
¾ Unparalleled search technology enables to speed up the query and simultaneously search cross-database.
¾ Large-scale index capabilities to improve query performance.
¾ Instant retrieval improves efficiency and productivity dramatically.
With the rapid deployment and customization through accounts authentication, InfoGates enables users easy to login and retrieve data while minimizing the maintenance effort via a comprehensive log analysis.
User Profile
Dainippon Screen Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (TSE: 7735) was established in 1943. The company's principal activity is the design, manufacture and distribution of desktop publishing (DTP), press equipment and systems for the graphic arts industry. More information, please visit :http://www.screen.co.jp/
