Project Type: Database, CD-ROM, Web, PDF Documents & PDF Catalog
Location: Kansas City Area
Client: Snorkel USA
Project Description: Two Relational Database systems. (One for Product organization/Project Management and One for generating the HTML and PDF content) Large scale digital document management, scanning, image prep, PDF Document assembly, PDF Catalog creation, CD-ROM and Companion Web Version.
Background: Snorkel is a leading worldwide manufacturer of scissor and platform lifts. Snorkel has been manufacturing lifts for decades and many of the earlier models are still in use. Snorkel is charged with providing support for the life of all its products. Consequently, Snorkel’s warranty and service department sought to create a CD-ROM that would contain the hundreds of service bulletins and warranty documents required to manage the entire Snorkel line of lifts. The project’s documents thousands of pages of letters and/or mechanical drawings dating back to the 1970’s. The documents ranged from 20+ year old aging copies of copies to recently created MS Word documents and CAD drawings.
Project Goals: (1) Create a searchable CD-ROM that would contain all the service bulletin documents for all the Snorkel Products. (2) Locate, scan, label and compile the thousands of pages into Adobe PDF documents for distributing to customers and printing at the customers locations thereby alleviating the time and labor spent locating, duplicating and sending documents to customers.
TooBaRoo’s Solution: Using FileMaker Pro, TooBaRoo created a relational database system for managing the project’s thousands of assets. Specialized layouts were created and placed into a runtime version of the system. The runtime versions of the system allowed the Client’s Warranty/Service Department Employees to create the links from the hundreds of service documents to the hundreds of model numbers and versions of the Snorkel Products. While the client was adding relational links, TooBaRoo took the existing documents in print and digital form and scanned hundreds of pages and converted the scans to PDF pages. The PDF pages were compiled into PDF documents and recorded as completed in the Project Management system. Next, TooBaRoo created a custom GUI in FileMaker Pro to display the linked information. This database was used to create the PDF Catalog’s pages by printing to postscript the FileMaker Pro layouts and converting these to PDF Pages. Links to the PDF documents were added using Adobe Acrobat. Last, the FileMaker Database system was used to combine the Document information with HTML and create a 96-page web site that contained thousands of related links.
Tags: Database Publishing, digital document management, FileMaker, kansas city area, Kansas City Database Publishing, PDF Catalog, relational database system, runtime versions
