PlotManager – the ideal tool to complement your digital drawing management.
SAP as the foundation for a digital drawing archive.
Fundamentals:
Under the umbrella of the term mySAP PLM (product lifecycle management), SAP has introduced a series of powerful tools over the last few years to manage documents digitally.
This document management system (DMS), which is part of the core SAP system, offers the ideal platform to build an integrated digital drawing archive. This allows associated drawing documents to be to displayed or printed immediately from within many SAP transactions.
The recommended storage medium for DMS documents is the SAP Knowledge Provider (KPRO).
Starting situation:
- Option to save user-specific default settings such as preferred output device and type, scaling settings etc.
- Maximal ease of user by providing a powerful search function next to each input field.
- All types of plot outputs take place within one transaction i.e. one program for every use case.
This approach is time-consuming and error-prone for several reasons:
- When dealing with large assembles, a lot of clicks are required to get a printout.
- The page orientation has to be set manually for every single document.
- No aggregated print job i.e. printouts from other users are getting mixed up at the printer requiring time-consuming sort-and-separation.
- Drawings are not stamped – oftentimes many drawings are in the printer without someone being able figure out who printed these drawings and to which print job they belong.
The Solution – PlotManager for SAP R/3 as an add-on
Achieve your result quicker:
- The time-consuming manual printing process from within the drawing viewer is eliminated by using powerful functions for single- and mass-plotting.
- Integrated record processing with cover and end page eliminates time-consuming sorting after plotting.
- Stamping functions mark plotted drawing documents with freely configurable information such as plot creator/recipient, date, document status etc.
- The best possible performance and scalability by processing the individual plot jobs in parallel while respecting the correct order of the output.
- It is possible to directly output drawings which have not yet been imported into the SAP archive, e.g. directly from a CAD designer’s working directory or from a scan folder.
- Download a set of drawings instead of printing it.
Ease of use:
- Option to save user-specific default settings such as preferred output device and type, scaling settings etc.
- Maximal ease of user by providing a powerful search function next to each input field.
- All types of plot outputs take place within one transaction i.e. one program for every use case.
Simple installation:
- Every printer for which there is a Windows driver available can be integrated within minutes into the plot management system.
- Minimal training and introduction effort if an SAP drawing archive is already in use.
- Since the PlotManager is completely developed in ABAP (client-server architecture) there is no need to install anything on the plot clients apart from an SAP GUI.
- Easy and quick setup with no SAP customizing knowledge required from within the configuration section of the PlotManager.
Cost aspect:
- Possible to output on cost-effective laser printers which do not support the input formats natively.
- Cost-optimized output using the redirection feature. This allows e.g. for DIN A0 and A1 originals of a drawing set to be printed on a large format plotter while all other formats are printed on more cost-effective A3/A4 devices.
Security:
- Sophisticated authorization checks ensure secure operation also for less tech-savvy users and limit output to authorized output devices only.
- All output formats, the redirection feature, and downloading sets of drawings are also protected by own authorization objects.
