Christchurch-based Meggitt (www.meggitt.com) — a global engineering group specialising in extreme-environment products and sub-systems for the defence, aerospace and energy markets — has introduced the ENOVIA software platform and document control system across all its divisions.

To ensure that the right software was chosen for the job, the UK and Swiss divisions of Meggitt turned to Nottingham-based product lifecycle management (PLM) specialist Design Rule (www.design-rule.co.uk) for advice.

Andy Lodge, design engineering manager at Meggitt UK, said: “Our two main objectives were to improve document control and to get our teams based in different locations to collaborate more effectively, using a shared platform. The move to ENOVIA was also an opportunity to review — and improve — our existing document archive.”

Alongside its French and Swiss partner Visiativ, Design Rule co-ordinated the project in the UK and made recommendations on how PLM software could help Meggitt achieve its objectives.

Mr Lodge added: “ENOVIA went live in September, and one of the benefits we saw straight away was an improvement in efficiency when it came to locating files and performing admin tasks.

Just to get an idea of how complex our document archive was, we used to have over a million documents, spread across 15,000 folders. Some of them were duplicates or had become obsolete.

“Last year, we identified about 100,000 working files that needed to be managed and installed on the new system. We have already added 80,000 of them to ENOVIA, which now allows us to find relevant files in just seconds. Needless to say, this has saved our team a significant amount of time already.”