Texas Municipal Power

Texas Municipal Power, a steam powered generating station that serves 4 municipalities in Texas, is slashing the time needed to convert manually produced engineering drawings into electronic format with the use of GTXRaster CAD. As the primary source of the municipalities' energy requirements, the Texas Municipal Power Station utilizes a Power Engineering Department that is responsible for managing and making design changes for the entire plant as it relates to piping, structural, and electrical system drawings. "Updating and modifying the drawings is an integral part of the day to day operations and maintenance of the department," explained Buck Buchanan, engineering technician at Texas Municipal Power. "If a mechanical or electrical device fails, it needs to be replaced quickly as depicted in the engineering drawings (and therefore, we must have updated, working drawings at our fingertips)," he said.

Texas Municipal Power has 26,000 original, manually produced engineering drawings that are deteriorating each year. Unfortunately, this problem is not uncommon with many companies today. How to best modernize the process of modifying or updating current paper documents is a major dilemma, especially when you consider that a few billion engineering drawings have already been produced to date at a clip of 26 million new ones each year according to Pinnacle Peak of Scottsdale, Arizona.

With this problem facing Texas Municipal Power, it was decided that the plant would need to convert the drawings into an electronic format so that restoration and modification would be easier and timelier to perform.

The first product that Texas Municipal Power brought in to accomplish their objective was an overlay software program that worked in conjunction with AutoCAD (the organization's CAD program). According to Buchanan, the overlay program was inefficient and difficult to use. "To make an edit with this program, we had to trace over the scanned raster image with AutoCAD and then erase the raster image itself," explained Buchanan. "This conversion process was not very efficient and was extremely costly given the man-hours required to perform the task," he said. The other problem was that the overlay program used a completely different command structure than AutoCAD, which meant that the department had to learn all new commands to manage the drawings.

The Solution

Texas Municipal Power made the switch to a true raster editing program called GTXRaster CAD 2.0. One of the product's strengths was that it operated inside of AutoCAD Release 11 or 12 and used the exact same command structure as AutoCAD. As it turned out, it was a better solution for the modification and updating of the plant's paper documents from a user productivity standpoint. "For each command in the pop down menu using the previous overlay program, we had to execute another command to cancel the first one out," said Buchanan. "With GTXRaster CAD, commands are a simple one step process and you can execute your next command using AutoCAD or GTXRaster CAD." As a result, Texas Municipal Power estimates that they have saved twice as much time using GTXRaster CAD just from the structuring of the command set alone.

The Power Engineering Department projected that scanning and editing the first set of 3,000 drawings after implementing GTXRaster CAD 2.0, would take about 24 months. They completed all 3,000 drawings in 15 months, approximately 9 months less than originally projected. "If we were still using the overlay program, the project would not have been finished," said Buchanan. Texas Municipal Power expects to double the amount of drawings that were scanned and edited last year with a goal of completing 6,000 drawings by the end of 1993.

Buchanon says that Texas Municipal Power's return on investment since purchasing 4 copies of GTXRaster CAD 2.0, a scanner, and a file server, was three months.

Three of the restoration functions in GTXRaster CAD 2.0 that Buchanon finds most useful are gSPECKLE, gDESKEW, and Intelligent Object Picking (IOP). When the deteriorated drawings are scanned, there are often small pixels of clutter that are not part of the engineering drawing. The gSPECKLE feature can be adjusted to remove up to an inch of unwanted data.

"With GTXRaster CAD, commands are a simple one step process and you can execute your next command using AutoCAD or GTXRaster CAD."

The gDESKEW feature is also helpful to Texas Municipal Power for drawings that do not track perfectly when scanned. Crooked images on the screen can be realigned to true scale with the gDESKEW command. If a drawing was skewed improperly using the previous overlay program, it would have to be rescanned, and in many case, correction may be improbable due to the age and deterioration of the media itself.

From an editing and modification perspective, the Intelligent Object Picking feature is beneficial to Texas Municipal Power because the user only has to edit selected geometry instead of converting the entire drawing to AutoCAD as the overlay program dictates. IOP has decreased editing time by recognizing raster elements as if they were AutoCAD entities, eliminating the need for redrawing the image or erasing the raster elements on minor edits. For example, a user can pick 3 singular points on a circle and IOP will note that as one entity even if it intersects other entities. The radius of the circle, for example, can then be modified without effecting the other entities.

GTXRaster CAD 2.0 operates on 486 PC's and used eight hours a day by Texas Municipal Power. "Since implementing GTXRaster CAD one year ago, we have been able to modify, update and manage 4 times as many drawings than we were able to do any previous year," according to Buchanan.

"Since implementing GTXRaster CAD one year ago, we have been able to modify, update and manage 4 times as many drawings than we were able to do any previous year"