NEWS - TMSS Awarded $700K Contract.....will anyone ever care.....I still think so.
TMSSequoia's Unique Solution for Extracting Data from Aircraft Engineering Drawings Wins SBIR Grant From Tinker Air Force Base
PR Newswire, Monday, August 03, 1998 at 09:29
STILLWATER, Okla., Aug. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- TMSSequoia(TM)
(BB: TMSS) announced today that it has been awarded a Phase II
contract for a Small Business Innovations Research (SBIR) grant from Tinker
Air Force Base (Oklahoma City), one of the largest military aircraft
maintenance facilities in the U.S. TMSSequoia will create an intelligent
automated data extraction process to remove information from scanned images of
legacy engineering drawings. The new process will replace the current, manual
data extraction process, which is very labor intensive, slow, time-consuming,
and thus costly.
TMSSequoia's intelligent data extraction process will:
* Enhance and clean up scanned engineering drawings, like those currently
stored as CALS or TIFF raster images in Tinker's JEDMICS document
management system (Joint Engineering Data Management Information and
Control System),
* Locate text data on the engineering drawings that reside in title blocks,
parts lists, notes and revision information,
* Use OCR, ICR and forms processing techniques to capture the text data,
* Identify the content of the text data,
* Provide a validation method for verifying data and applying indexing
identifiers,
* Pass the required indexing information to a Metaphase(R) product document
management (PDM) system.
The new automated process, which Tinker plans to apply to over
5,000,000 drawings originally created by Boeing Aircraft and other vendors,
will result in a more efficient and cost effective operation. Further benefits
include integrating the new software with the existing hardware infrastructure
to avoid costly hardware replacements. The sophisticated imaging component
will contribute to the knowledge management solution Tinker is developing for
more efficiently managing aircraft production and maintenance projects.
SBIR grants provide opportunities for small businesses to develop new
technology models to solve problems within government agencies that also occur
in private enterprise, then encourage them to market the solutions to the
private sector. TMSSequoia intends to market its solution to manufacturers and
organizations needing automated information capture from legacy engineering
drawings. This may include the aerospace, automotive, aircraft, utilities,
transportation industries and others. Furthermore, the technology in this
solution can also be used to extract information from a wide variety of
sources such as invoices, purchase orders, technical documents, reports and
other textual documents, which can populate many types of databases (i.e.,
Oracle, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, ODBC).
TMSSequoia's Professional Services division was awarded the Phase II
contract of up to $694,000 after it successfully completed the Phase I
feasibility research. The company was selected for the project based upon its
expertise in image enhancement, OCR/ICR, forms processing and image display,
its broad base of proprietary core imaging technology, and its engineering
excellence. Ed Kincaid, coordinator of design and drafting technology for
Oklahoma City Air Logistics Command, TIET Tinker Air Force Base, commented,
TMSSequoia was selected over several other proposals due to their experience
and the demonstrated capability during their Phase I SBIR program. The tool
set they are developing will automate our "Meta Data" capture processes for
our Product Data Management systems. All of DoD will benefit from this
effort."
Mike Payne, general manager of TMSSequoia's Professional Services
division, stated, "The problem that Tinker is addressing is not unique. Any
company that has an investment in paper or microfilmed engineering drawings
can gain a substantial return on investment through the use of this
technology."
TMSSequoia is a software technology company that provides image-based
software solutions for businesses worldwide. The company offers software
engineering services, designs, develops and markets software tools and
applications for image capture, enhancement, viewing and forms processing, as
well as offers document conversion services. Founded in 1981 and based in
Stillwater, Oklahoma, the company maintains field sales offices in Tulsa,
California, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. The company has shipped over
1,000,000 document imaging units worldwide. Product and service clients
include Kaiser Permanente, Caterpillar, Learjet, World Bank, Toro, Ricoh, EDS,
General Dynamics, Xerox, Informix, Hewlett-Packard, Plexus, Documentum, the
U.S. Navy and Army, Polaris, Minolta and others.
NOTE: TMSSequoia is a trademark of TMS, Inc. Metaphase is a registered
trademark of Structural Dynamics Research Corporation (SDRC). All other
companies and products named may be trademarks of the respective companies
with which they are associated.
SOURCE TMSSequoia
-0- 08/03/98
/CONTACT: Ellen Beeby, Dir. Corp. Communications of TMSSequoia,
405-377-0880, or fax, 405-742-1707, or ellen@tmsinc.com/
/Web site: tmsinc.com |
