Marshall Aerospace and Defence Group (Case Study)

With over 80 years’ experience in aerospace engineering Marshall Aerospace and Defence Group is one of Europe’s leading privately-owned aerospace companies with all the capabilities of an aircraft manufacturer.

Marshall has extensive experience in the conversion, modification and maintenance of military, corporate and civil aircraft, and all of these aspects - including design, manufacture, test and certification, and logistic support - are firmly backed up by a dedicated team of over 1,750 highly trained personnel and an exceptional range of facilities housed in 1.2 million sq. ft of hangar space.

IPC has been supplying EDM systems and services to Marshalls since 1995 and continues to work with them to expand the scope and capabilities that IPC can supply.

Starting with the installation of an EDM departmental solution, IPC now offers a range of products that provide Marshalls with fast access to a wide variety of paperwork:

IPC supply

• Bureau scanning services with VPN transfer
• mStore EDM solution for viewing Bureau scanned data
• V3 full mStore EDM system with multiple departmental cabinets
• Accounts Nominal Ledger system incl. interface with PeopleSoft
• Physical document storage and retrieval

IPC’s mStore system currently sits on over 200 company PC’s and the system is also accessed from remote sites via Citrix; it has just recently gone through an upgrade to the latest version - 7.1.

Support is provided by remote access to the mStore server under control of Marshall’s IT team, with whom IPC has a close relationship. Daniel Page, responsible for all first and second line support at IPC commented ‘ Support for Marshalls systems, as for all our clients, is set at a high level of fast response, and the co-operation of client’s IT team is key to ensuring we meet the required SLA’s.’

Over the years the mStore system has been developed to provide specific and custom functionality for Marshall’s and a very high level of security now exists for the control of documents to meet the latest aerospace regulations and requirements.

IPC has also been involved in other Marshall supported projects, such as ‘Vulcan to the Sky’ where IPC provided a Bureau scanning and viewing system for the rare paper based Vulcan Manuals. This enabled a team of engineers working on the Vulcan re-build to access drawings and associated parts via a sophisticated text / drawing search system, via PC.

Graham Light commented ‘ Marshalls are one of our oldest customers, and we are pleased that over the years we have developed a range of solutions for their information management needs. The level of co-operation between both of us to achieve this has been a testament to our working relationship’

Alan Paul (Marshalls head of IT) said ‘We have a wide range of system and service suppliers, and I have to say that in all the years we have worked with IPC, they have always been able to come up with innovative and functional solutions to meet our, and our customers’, needs. Their support has always been of the highest level, and I now personally oversee the development of mStore, as it is a key part of our information management strategy.’