Manufacturing Plant Produces Time Savings with Raster Editing Software

Crown Cork & Seal Company, Inc. (CC&S), founded in 1882, is one of the premier packaging manufacturing companies in the world with facilities and subsidiaries in the United States, North America, South America, Central America, Europe, and Asia. The Facilities Engineering Department at CC&S' corporate headquarters in Philadelphia is responsible for modifying and archiving old facility drawings for their plant as well as some of the drawings for 21 other CC&S facilities. Most of the drawings CC&S Philadelphia modifies reflect changes in plant layouts and production areas, such as a "Can Line" where beverage cans or aerosol cans are assembled.

The Solution

About a year ago, CC&S Philadelphia purchased four versions of GTXRaster CAD for the Facilities Engineering Department. Joe Garrity, CC&S project engineer, explained that the previous methods of editing drawings either manually in AutoCAD or by using a CAD overlay system were time consuming and were not always the best methods for producing accurate representations. "Because we can now scan the drawings and edit them in raster format using GTXRaster CAD, we've eliminated possible sources of error," he said. "Editing in raster is more cost efficient than converting to vector because many times we'll only make a few changes to a drawing and not have to use that drawing again for years." Converting a drawing to vector format by redrawing it would take much more time than making a few simple edits in raster format.

Combined with networked 386 PC's and a Houston Instruments LDS 4000 Scanner, GTXRaster CAD is a powerful editing tool. Because the command structure of GTXRaster CAD is almost identical to AutoCAD, there is almost no learning curve. This is very important to CC&S Philadelphia because several months a year they have an engineering student from a local university participate in a co-op program that provides on-the-job experience editing drawings using GTXRaster CAD. It would not be productive for CC&S if they had to spend time training students to use a software program they were not familiar with.

One of GTXRaster CAD's most powerful features is Intelligent Object Picking (IOP) which allows users to select objects and manipulate them as if they were vector images without interfering with intersecting objects. Garrity pointed out that IOP is an important function when used for expanding an office. For example, the line of the walls can be expanded or the arc of the swing of the door can be changed without converting the image to vector or redrawing the image in AutoCAD.

Two other GTXRaster CAD features that Garrity uses are the "gCopy" and "gMirror" commands. Both these features eliminate the need for redrawing images in AutoCAD. gCopy is a simple command that lets the user window an area to be copied and then move the duplicated image to another part of the drawing. An example of the gMirror command is duplicating an image directly opposite its twin which could be used to represent such things as a double door. No additional measuring or drawing is needed.

Using four copies of GTXRaster CAD, the Facilities Engineering Department currently modifies approximately 10 to 15 drawings a week. Each drawing takes about an hour to revise using GTXRaster CAD. To recreate the drawing in AutoCAD, it would take a full day or more.

As a result of the dramatic time savings, the Facilities Engineering Department can respond efficiently to multi-job requests in the same day, and save dozens of hours in labor each week.