Tacoma Power Selects Kinnosa from First Trace for Engineering Document Management

Tacoma Power generates, transmits and distributes electricity to more than 166,000 residents in Pierce County, Washington. As with most utilities, Tacoma Power must manage thousands of engineering documents and CAD files of transmission lines, underground networks, sub-stations, hydro sites and physical drawings of equipment. There are approximately 250 engineers, technicians and field personnel that require access to documents at any given time.

Until recently, Tacoma Power utilized a legacy EDM system to manage DWG files produced by AutoCAD/LT/Civil 3D, scans of manual drawings in the TIFF format and archived PDFs. “We had multiple projects going on at one site and it had just been a nightmare to manage the documents,” explains Susie Hansen, CAD and Document Administrator for Tacoma Power.

Tacoma Power chose to change to Kinnosa for their EDM solution since it provides the right level of EDM functionality, ability to manage complex document types easily and interface options for Tacoma Power’s different types of end users. “Kinnosa is the product we were waiting for,” explains Hansen. “It was an easy choice for us to make, especially since we could migrate our 8 years worth of legacy documents into Kinnosa, without losing any old revisions.”

Kinnosa integrates with Windows Explorer, MS Office, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, MicroStation and more. This tight integration gives users a choice on how they want to manage files. “It’s so familiar to everybody; it cuts way down on the learning curve for people. I can train my people to find their drawings in 5 minutes, if that. And the fact that it uses your default viewer is a real bonus,” adds Hansen.

Kinnosa enables system administrators to utilize its authentication system or Active Directory for user rights. Access can be provided at the system, file, folder and user level. “I prefer to use Kinnosa’s authentication because many people only need view privileges. In Active Directory the whole department is in the same group and just some of them need full permission. So we have those permissions granted on an individual basis,” said Hansen.