The company designed an EDC server that was configured to pace the flow of incoming drawings and documents and easy to use by operations personnel. The REDC client PCs operate under UNIX and MS Windows equipped with view, search and print capabilities. In addition to electronically captured CAD inputs and scanner inputs, the system is capable of responding to the customers' data requests. For that purpose, AMP has a search tool called PDX, which is basically a search tool under a Netscape browser. This tool combines particular product information with an archive that contains drawings related to that product.
Customers can also input feedback and other data into the system.
The number of unique documents stored on the EDC has gone up from 350,000 in 1996 to over 600,000. The number of on-line information requests has gone up from 20,000 to over 130,000 within the same period. More importantly, the average time it takes to retrieve information from the system is currently near two seconds, whereas in 1996 it was around 20 seconds. This is in part due to the utilization of a very small TIFF type file for scanned data.