Intellectual property - crown jewels belong in the safe

The first blueprint of a steam boiler owned by General Electric is over a hundred years old - one of over ten million PDF documents on boilers of different eras, series and designs.

These technical documents not only have historical value, but also represent extremely valuable intellectual property that must be protected against loss and theft at all costs. This realization provided the impetus for a central information management project including decommissioning of legacy systems.

In a large-scale initiative, therefore, archives around the world containing boilerplate documents - mostly on paper - were inventoried and digitized as PDF scans, and at the same time they were stored centrally and securely.

Crown jewels, after all, belong in the safe - which at GE Power, the fossil fuel-based energy division of the company, is called JiVS and comes from Swiss-based Data Migration Services.

General Electric has made industrial history - and not just because of its countless inventions and their impact on economic structures and entire societies. It is true that modern life would be almost inconceivable without GE aircraft engines, its medical-technical devices and plants for classic, renewable and nuclear power generation.

But beyond the inventions, the company's history and its success have been shaped by the countless acquisitions, mergers, sales and spin-offs of companies and business units.

"This was also the case in 2014 when GE acquired Alstom."

recalls Peter Thomas, Technical Product Manager at GE Power and responsible in this business unit for securing and managing development data and documents as well as introducing innovations based on IT.

"For reasons of competition law, part of Alstom had to be spun off and went to an Italian company. But this also meant that the business documents with technical information from the Alstom legacy, accumulated over decades, had to be neatly separated to avoid knowledge outflows and losses - a Herculean task."

Heterogeneous, complex, expensive

In contrast to business data in ERP systems, technical data and documents from development, as well as from service including maintenance and repair, are usually only partially digitized - according to estimates for similar large companies with a long history such as GE Power, this figure is around 20 percent - and is increasing sharply as IT and digitization progress.

Historically, the remaining information created before the IT revolution of the 1980s continues to exist in paper form, image cards or microfilms and is distributed among local archives in different countries.

But digitized information is also scattered across different locations and countries, and can be found on shared drives, in application-managed databases and document management systems.

This heterogeneity of data carriers, databases and applications is typical for large companies and their historically grown IT environments. GE is no exception.

As a result, the approximately 270,000 employees worldwide work with more than 10,000 different applications.

"In development, these are fewer systems, but the basic issue of information being distributed and in different formats remains"

Peter Thomas explains and emphasizes:

"From a business perspective, this arguably has more serious consequences, because we're talking about the intellectual value chain, where the most valuable assets are created and mapped by engineering systems."

Centralization and standardization is the magic formula for mastering this heterogeneity. This affects both the system landscape and the processes. In many cases, not only do the various GE business units and acquired companies work differently, but also the locations and units of one and the same business area.

To change this situation, chief engineers at GE Power, who are responsible for standardizing the development process worldwide, launched an initiative to homogenize the system environment as part of the Alstom acquisition.

What happens to legacy applications?

But with every harmonization and conversion to a uniform central system, the question immediately arises as to what is to be done with the legacy applications and the underlying databases and inventories.

"The idea of shutting down many different legacy systems and replacing them with a central application immediately suggests itself in this context; it is simple and precisely for this reason so captivating. But anyone who also imagines the path to this goal to be just as simple is doing the math without the host."

warns Peter Thomas.

"Because it's not just applications that have a lifecycle, but also the data and documents created and processed within them. So if you want to decommission systems, you have to ensure that the information is managed independently of the applications."

Solved, maintained, compliant

By separating the application and information levels, such management differs fundamentally from the related approach of archiving.

On the one hand, the extracted data and documents must continue to be usable in the new application landscape. On the other hand, not only the information itself but also its business context must be preserved. The latter is particularly important for regulatory reasons.

Plants for energy generation and supply are subject to strict regulations in all countries, some of which differ from one another. And because of the longevity of these plants, all relevant information, from construction plans, parts and materials used, to permits and maintenance and repair documents, must be stored in an audit-proof manner for several decades.

As a rule, the retention period is at least thirty years, and fifty years or longer in the case of nuclear power plants. In addition, many components in the energy sector are subject to export controls.

Therefore, related documents such as construction plans may not be accessible in all countries. Some are not allowed to leave the site, and for others, regulatory approvals must be applied for in order to access them.

"We have to be able to prove in a short time why which component was installed when and by whom. At the same time, we have to ensure that the correct export control classification is assigned to all relevant documents.

We are talking about much more information than the blueprint of the part in question itself, with which they are associated"

knows Peter Thomas.

"This total package of data and documents is usually only available in the originating application, and access is regulated by clear permissions.

So, in order to decommission the application, we need to make sure that the additional data is transferred to the central information platform completely and in the right context with the documents."

Consequently, the maintenance of this metadata, but also of the master data on documents, is an essential part of the project to shut down legacy systems at GE Power. Only if this data is properly maintained will queries be possible not only for legal reasons, but even more so for business reasons.

This is the only way that maintenance crews or quality managers can, for example, display all documents relating to damage to a gas turbine in a power plant in a particular Asian country at the push of a button.

If quality managers determine that this damage is not unique to the facility in question, but more common, even older blueprints should be available to designers to make improvements to the defective parts.

Of course, this must be possible in the new central system. Data and documents originating from decommissioned systems must therefore be transferred into formats that can be used in the successor systems. Conversely, documents from new applications become obsolete at some point and must therefore be able to be stored on the central information management platform.

Legally compliant platform

"This is the only way to close the loop in information management".

emphasizes Peter Thomas.

"The catalog of requirements for a legally compliant platform for information management was correspondingly high. Fortunately, there was already a similar project to standardize the system landscape in the ERP environment."

His colleagues had already examined the market and corresponding offers. JiVS turned out to be the only solution that could meet all the requirements for legally compliant, context-dependent management of the entire lifecycle of information, both structured and unstructured.

The first project in the area of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) from 2014 to 2016 was the extraction of over ten million PDF documents on steam boilers that were stored in different systems at six different locations, including a PLM application in Ashby in the UK and a document management solution in Stuttgart.

All documents were to be migrated to the central JiVS platform, which is implemented at the GE Power site in Baden.

Available, reliable, reusable

"This was an opportunity to design and implement an ideal type of information migration process"

reports Peter Thomas.

"The starting point here was to distinguish between active and inactive information."

Only the active data that is needed in daily work should be transferred to the new central system GE Power PLM. Inactive data and documents, on the other hand, which are only occasionally relevant for business or need to be stored exclusively for verification purposes, should be transferred to JiVS.

Once the data and documents had been extracted, the task was to maintain, cleanse and, if necessary, transform master data and metadata.

At the same time, the documents were indexed in multiple languages using OCR recognition for subsequent full-text search. Neutral file formats were defined for reuse, PDF and TIFF for documents and STEP and 3D PDF for drawings or plans.

Finally, a kind of stamping system was implemented in JiVS, which made it possible to trace every call of a document from JiVS, especially in order to meet export control requirements.

The stamps are used in the same way when documents are transferred from the live system to JiVS. Basically, the whole thing is similar to a classic library system, where every new arrival and every loan are recorded without gaps.

Since September 2017, both the system from Stuttgart and the solution from Ashby have been completely replaced after the documents were fully migrated to JiVS.

Since this included management documents and even personnel files, access to them had to be very severely restricted.

Finally, in the case of personal data, for example, the requirements of the new European General Data Protection Regulation must be met.

"The project was a complete success"

Peter Thomas is pleased.

"All documents continue to be available, worldwide, and can be searched in English, French, Spanish and Italian.

Users can be confident that the content is correct and consistent. What's more, they can use it in the new environment as needed. Available, reliable, reusable, that's what makes information valuable to an organization."

Even during the project, Peter Thomas received further requests for migrations and system shutdowns. These included two initiatives to replace Product Data Management (PDM) systems in Switzerland and Sweden.

In the course of the accompanying migrations, the process model for data transfer was further refined. On the one hand, the CAD drawings stored in JiVS were to be reused in the latest CAD environment CATIA 5, i.e. outside the central PLM solution.

On the other hand, a new category of migrated data was created for information that could not yet be transformed and normalized due to time constraints. Nevertheless, auditability is guaranteed during migration in JiVS, because the unchanged transfer from the legacy systems is fully documented.

Both legacy PDM solutions are to be switched off by the end of 2018 at the latest. Only the last two released versions of the documents will be transferred to the central PLM system for daily work.

Efficient, effective, valuable

The benefits of a centralized, enterprise-wide information management platform are clear: with the right backup strategy, data and documents are protected against loss.

Authorizations and controls prevent unauthorized access, whether accidental or with deliberate intent. In the event of reorganizations due to acquisitions and disposals, information assets can be separated or merged with much less effort than in heterogeneous IT landscapes or in the paper world because they are fully inventoried.

Legal requirements and other duties to provide information and evidence can be fulfilled at the push of a button, as it were. In addition, information can be retrieved, searched, and used in current business cases anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. This is both efficient and effective.

Necessary persuasion

"And yet we still have to keep convincing the business users and the previous application managers.

Because my team and I are constantly confronted with the question of why these benefits would not come much more easily and, above all, much more quickly if all legacy assets were transferred to the new central environment"

complains Peter Thomas. His answer is always the same:

"Because it's way too expensive."

Of course, it takes longer to clean and normalize the information, enrich it, and transform it if necessary before it can be reused.

But this is the only way to retain the contextual information required for business and legal purposes independently of the legacy systems, so that they can be switched off.

Business advantages

With JiVS, GE Power saves an average of 80 percent of the operating costs compared to the legacy systems. In addition, the reduced search times and the resulting contribution to value creation - if you can find construction plans faster, you can also write more maintenance orders - add up to several million euros a year for 50,000 employees in this business unit worldwide.

"Our information management based on JiVS is much cheaper than an archive, but as valuable as a treasure"

was the positive conclusion drawn by Peter Thomas.

But his plans go much further:

"When you consider that the lion's share of information in development still exists on paper, it quickly becomes clear that the potential of our centralized information management is far from exhausted."

He estimates that around 90 percent of the documents in the paper archives can be completely digitized. The rest are documents that have historical value and should therefore continue to be preserved in the original, as well as those whose legal validity depends on signatures that have been provided and cannot subsequently be digitally imaged.

Here, too, the financial argument is decisive. The cost of the paper archive in Baden alone, which contains around 16 kilometers of circulation - 50 million documents - adds up to considerable maintenance costs for archivists and room rent every year.

In addition to file maintenance, it is above all the physical security requirements imposed by law on archive rooms and buildings that have an impact here. After all, the files must be effectively protected not only against burglary, but also against fire and flooding.

"I did the math on the return on investment of digitizing paper assets in engineering for three archives and came up with a nearly six-figure savings per year in U.S. dollars"

calculates Peter Thomas.

Spiritual and physical world merge

In the long term, however, he sees an even greater advantage than cost reductions. With the conversion of paper archives to JiVS, development would reach a similarly high level of digitization as the transaction-oriented world of ERP.

"If development and ERP could access the same information repository, the intellectual and physical value chains could be merged.

As a Group, we would then be as agile and flexible as the SME sector, which is rightly praised for this. The right people could then access our crown jewels at the right time and in the right context and further increase the treasure."