As part of a digital transformation initiative, South Walker Creek Mine migrated its engineering drawings into a new Document Management System (DMS).
While the files transferred successfully, critical drawing metadata did not. Titles were missing, revisions were unclear, and thousands of non-drawing artefacts were mixed into the live engineering environment.
Engineers could no longer rely on search results. Drawings had to be manually opened and checked before use, slowing productivity and increasing the risk of referencing incorrect or superseded documents.
With over 146,000 artefacts in the system, manual cleanup was not feasible. Confidence in the new DMS was rapidly declining.
Waterline treated the issue as a trust restoration challenge, not just a data clean-up task.
We deployed a hybrid approach combining proprietary automated metadata extraction with engineering-led verification.
Our process included:
Automated extraction of drawing numbers, titles and revisions at scale
Structured validation rules to ensure high-confidence results
Segregation and quarantine of non-drawing artefacts (no deletions without client approval)
Human-in-the-loop review for complex or low-confidence files
This approach ensured governance, transparency and full client control while restoring metadata accuracy across the system.
Waterline processed 88,000 files, identifying and remediating 46,000 legitimate engineering drawings.
Eighty-eight percent of drawings were restored with accurate, searchable titles, significantly improving system usability and reducing time spent locating critical information.
Non-drawing artefacts were classified and quarantined to protect data integrity, lowering the risk of incorrect or invalid documents being used in operations.
The result was a measurable uplift in searchability, governance and reliability, restoring confidence in the DMS as a trusted operational system, without disrupting site activities.
“After migrating to our Engineering Drawing Management System (DMS), our engineers and coordinators couldn’t find the drawings they were searching for. Waterline reviewed our current state, re-processed all our drawings, removed duplicates and populated the metadata fields for all the drawings. We found that 88% of the existing system metadata was generic and unsearchable. We are now at close to 100% metadata extracted from our drawings. This rebuilt confidence in the system without compromising governance. Our DMS is now a system our technical personnel on site can rely on again.”—Electrical Engineering Manager, South Walker Creek
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