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Clearing The Paper Trail
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Mike Hawman doesn't have to look very far beyond his office walls to find the inspiration for his ambitious effort to turn Pratt & Whitney's worldwide network of repair and overhaul shops into a paperless operation. Just 15 or so miles from Hawman's office at the company's East Hartford, Conn., headquarters is the company's new engine assembly plant in Middletown. Not long ago, the facility had its own print shop, optimized to produce one thing: assembly instructions for the engines built at the plant.
That was before Pratt & Whitney embarked on a major IT initiative in the late 1990s that included, among other things, selecting SAP as the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) backbone on both the OEM and aftermarket sides. Today, a visitor to the Middletown plant won't find any paper on the shop's floor, said Hawman, director of information technology, Global Service Partners, Pratt & Whitney. Millions of sheets of assembly instructions printed each year have been replaced by electronic manuals; time card entries replaced with keystrokes; and ink signatures swapped with electronic swipes of encrypted badges. Hawman's repair shop network isn't quite that far along, but it's getting there. With the help of SAP and several best-of-breed gap-fillers, such as iBASEt's Solumina work instructions software, Pratt & Whitney's shops have cut down on paper and boosted efficiency. Table of Contents
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© 2009 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (The)
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