Adobe announces that the French aircraft manufacturer will centralize its document management using 32,000 seats of Acrobat.Adobe announced this week that Airbus, an international aircraft manufacturer, has decided to employ Adobe Acrobat 7.0 software on a worldwide basis.
Airbus SAS plans to deploy 32,000 seats of Acrobat 7.0 Professional and Acrobat 7.0 Standard throughout the company over the course of the current calendar year for PDF document generation, collaboration, added security and archiving.
Although Airbus could not be reached for comment, Pam Deziel, director of product marketing for Acrobat at Adobe Systems Inc., spoke with Ziff Davis Internet News about the enormous document management project.
"Airbus has been a customer [of Adobe] and a user for quite some time," Deziel said. "This deal just represents them buying into the larger solution and into the life cycle management system."
Airbus, based in Toulouse, France, has employees located around the world, and, according to Deizel, had been using numerous software applications and file formats to complete projects.
"They are going from having this unstructured, ad hoc way of dealing with documents to a very structured way of dealing with them. They were working at a departmental level and now they'll be working with all documents integrated into a single document services platform," she said.
Airbus needed to maximize the efficiency of its document-based processes by standardizing on a solution that met the specific, demanding needs of its operations—manufacturing airplanes, Deziel said.
"The core of their business is doing a lot of interaction within the supply chain," Deziel said. "There are all these supporting documents to worry about like specs, spreadsheets, and 2-D and 3-D CAD drawings, and now it's all going to be moving through this system."
Acrobat 7.0 and Adobe PDF will enable Airbus teams to share and collaborate on documents created from virtually any application, including the specialized CAD software. By doing so, the company can enable all of its employees, partners and customers to view, interact with and print files they exchange using Acrobat or free Adobe Reader software.
"There are three particular areas that appealed to Airbus [which caused it to] to move in this direction," Deziel said. "Being able to capture 3-D with Acrobat 7.0; being able to have user comments in a document and move a document through the approval process; and, finally, having the ability to have a fine level of control over their intellectual property and be able to control their documents even after they've left their buildings and been released out into the world."
Using Acrobat 7.0 Professional, Airbus engineers and designers can consolidate 2-D or 3-D CAD drawings from the company's PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) system, along with spreadsheets, technical diagrams and images, into one Adobe PDF document.
After adding any necessary security options, the PDF file can be shared with others in an extended workgroup for review, markup and approval. Those using Acrobat 7.0 who have the Adobe PDF document can collaborate on it using familiar Acrobat commenting tools, across a wide variety of platforms and devices.
When enabled by Acrobat 7.0 Professional, even users of the free Adobe Reader 7.0, which Adobe has distributed over half a billion copies of since its 1993 introduction, can participate in electronic review and approval of the PDF file.
Up through May of this year, Airbus, according to its Web site, had orders to build 196 aircraft and had delivered 37.
"This is a company with people in many countries and many time zones, who work in many different languages," Deziel said. "This offers them a very sophisticated workflow system to manage all those different aspects."
This isn't the first big contract Adobe has landed, Deziel said. "We've worked with the IRS for a very long time, and we've had enormous success in the financial industry and pharmaceutical industry, with companies like Pfizer."
Document Management 
