Reyrolle & Co.'s 120-year-old microfilm archive is now held in a secure, fireproof room offsite - with engineers able to access 300,000 separate files on-demand, 24/7.
Though it now sits as part of Siemens Power Generation Portfolio, Reyrolle & Company has a long past stretching back as far as 1901. In its heyday, Reyrolle was an established pioneering scientific instruments business, responsible for manufacturing most of the world’s high voltage switchgear and power stations.
Currently making protection gear as part of Siemens, Reyrolle also keep legacy systems properly maintained. Naturally, some of these systems date back decades – a testament to their quality – so to accomplish this, Reyrolle engineers need to have access to thousands of diagrams for all the equipment they have manufactured over the years; which are stored in a microfiche archive containing more than 300,000 frames.
As the standard method for safe and secure archiving in the 1920s, microfilming was instrumental to building Reyrolle’s diagram database. However, as part of Siemens, this information needed to be made easily accessible to engineers from any location – therefore, an onsite physical archive was no longer an option. As a long-standing supplier, Apogee needed to find a solution that would allow remote archive access from all over the world.
However, in this case, simple digitisation wasn’t actually the optimal solution. Digitising 300,000 microfiches would have been exceptionally costly – and considering that people didn’t access the information often; a simpler, yet equally efficient preservation solution was required.
For a 120-year-old microfilm archive of this size, the obvious answer was a tailored Digital Records Management system; which negated the need and cost of digitising the entire database. The microfilm was carefully transported and stored in our secure records management facility; with a unique Digital Point of Access service set up for authorised users.
Through this service, Reyrolle are now able to request specific records – from anywhere, at any time - and Apogee will simply locate the microfiche, digitise it, and upload the image to a secure server for them to access at their convenience.
Thanks to this service, Reyrolle has safely preserved the value of their entire microfilm archive – all without needing to waste unnecessary funds, or employee resources – with the 24/7 point of access service allowing engineers to provide a dynamic maintenance service to customers as, when, and wherever they need to.
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