Lubrizol's experiences with DAM
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: taxonomy, IT, images, metadata, keyword, FotoWeb Abstract This paper documents the evolution of one company’s asset management system from a filing cabinet, into a 500Gb capacity, multiple site, global system, allowing instant access for their employees to any of the assets from anywhere in the world.
Robert Watts Lubrizol, PO Box 88, Belper, Derby DE56 1QN, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1332 845476 Email: [email protected]
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The Lubrizol Corporation is a global provider of specialty chemicals and materials for a wide variety of markets and end-use applications, such as transportation-related fluids and industrial lubricants. Lubrizol also makes ingredients and additives for personal care products and pharmaceuticals; polymer additives and plastics technology; specialty resins and additives for performance coatings; and additives for the food and beverage industry. Headquartered in Wickliffe, Ohio, Lubrizol operates manufacturing facilities in 22 countries, as well as sales and technical offices around the world, with more than 7,800 employees. Lubrizol has three research centers, in Wickliffe, Ohio, USA, Hazelwood, UK and Kinuura, Japan. Most of our engine testing is done in these research centers. These are either on-site static bench tests or field tests of vehicles and machinery (almost anything involving an internal combustion engine). After the test is run, the engine is stripped down and the various components, pistons, valves, etc, are photographed. It’s at this point I get involved in the process. When I joined Lubrizol in 1996, all of Lubrizol’s photography was still on negative with hundreds of thousands of negatives stored in filing cabinets. The paper-based filing system utilized the individual test numbers and Lubrizol market segment identifications to aid searching. We had over 50,000 promotional images and 200,000 test images on negative going back over 40 years. In those days we didn’t call it an asset management system, we called it a filing cabinet.
The way that users searched for images was quite different. Searching for a test image was straightforward. An engineer would request a photograph of a particular test that had been run using a particular oil sample. Every test that we run has a unique number and the negatives were filed according to that number. So it was relatively simple to find the negatives and print off the required photographs. The person requesting the pictures would usually get them back within a day. The way that users would search for promotion images was completely different. In this case the user isn’t looking for a particular photograph but rather an image that will best illustrate whatever they are trying to say. The only catalogue for the promotional images was a notebook with the relevant Lubrizol segment area and a short description and date for each image. Consequently if the design team needed an image of a Volvo truck on a bridge they would have to look through thousands of contact sheets for a suitable image. As a result we tended to use the same few images over and over again. In additi
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