Nynex (Bell Atlantic)

Nynex, the fourth largest telecommunications company in the US, has recently purchased AutoCAD stations and entered into a training contract with Open Archive Systems to enable their paper archives into a raster based distribution and modification environment. With several hundred thousand plant records serving the New York and New England area, an easy and efficient document management and editing system provided substantial cost savings over their current manual method. Autodesk was already a known solution for outside plant records. Open Archive Systems entered in late 1994 to address the hybrid editing and distribution needs of the central office NEWS (Network Engineering Workstation System) project. Autodesk was well in the minds of Nynex, but the hybrid raster drafting issue was the final driver for Nynex to place its' initial order with Autodesk. The resulting document management system makes these central office records available to planners, engineers, installers, draftsmen and forecasters who are connected by a wide area network and optical storage subsystems.

The Teamwork

Open Archive Systems, Inc. has been contracted to provide a wide range of services for the transition of several hundred thousand drawings to a digital archive format within Nynex's (NEWS). These services include coordination of initial scanning services, integration of plant records and existing databases into image enabled archives including a model for maintaining work in process during the transition, in-depth training and tools for the user community, and enabling new raster modification and conversion processes into the AutoCAD System.

The Solution

A multi product solution was chosen to be administered on an incremental basis. Open Archive Systems provided support for enabling several hundred thousand drawings. The initial visit resulted in a 30 day consulting contract in addition to the purchase of GTXRaster CAD Plus. Training services were also be provided for the user community. Viewing and plotting capabilities are utilized via Informative Graphics' Myriad multi-format viewing software. Myriad offers superior performance, TIF compatibility, customization, incremental corporate agreements, and fast and easy plotting capabilities. 30 AutoCAD stations were purchased to start this project along with the GTXRaster CAD Series as the raster and conversion solution.