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Saipem logoSaipem

Engineering and construction services company for the energy industry moves OpenText™ Documentum™ Content Management to the cloud, saving 30% in costs

Saipem logo

About Saipem

Saipem is a global leader in engineering and construction projects for the energy and infrastructure sectors. With lines of business including drilling, offshore wind, and robotics, the company aims to accompany clients on their path to net-zero emissions.

Offshore oil platform illuminated at dusk
  • Operations:
    > 50 countries
  • Employees:
    ˜ 30,000
  • Headquarters:
    Milan, Italy

Summary

Challenges

  • Wanted to modernize their existing content management deployment by moving to the cloud.
  • To prepare for the future, they wanted to take advantage of the latest AI innovations.

Solution

  • Moved their existing content management solution to the cloud.
  • Engaged with expert support from OpenText and Accenture.
  • Migrated 60 TB of historical data to the cloud.

Results

  • Reduced operational costs by 30%
  • Saved hours per week on user and profile management
  • Enabled future generative AI innovation

Challenges

  • Manage 10,000 document transactions per week for global energy projects
  • Need to deliver information to remote locations with poor internet connectivity
  • Wanted to move to the cloud to improve the performance, availability, and cost-effectiveness of content management services
  • Sought a way to modernize legacy content management infrastructure and enable future AI innovation

A world leader in major engineering and construction projects across energy and infrastructure sectors—offshore and onshore—Saipem operates in more than 50 countries and employs over 30,000 people. As an energy innovator, Saipem also focuses on areas such as offshore wind, subsea robotics, and other low-carbon-emitting technologies.

To drive its pioneering work, Saipem collaborates with hundreds of external partners, including clients, vendors, and subcontractors. Simone Ceccolini, manager of documents and data at Saipem, said, “Documents such as plans, engineering drawings, and construction agreements play a key role in the lifecycle of energy projects. It’s therefore crucial for us to manage that information in an efficient, compliant, and secure way.”

Saipem operates from numerous sites around the world, including remote locations, like offshore drilling platforms, where internet connectivity is intermittent. To enhance collaboration across all parts of the business, the company deployed OpenText™ Documentum™ Content Management (CM).

“We chose OpenText Documentum Content Management because it enables us to deliver secure, reliable access to key information anywhere in the world—even on vessels out at sea,” confirmed Ceccolini.

Over more than two decades, Saipem has significantly customized and enhanced its deployment. Building on the OpenText Documentum CM case management framework, the company developed automated workflows to help manage key documents throughout the lifecycle.

“Our OpenText solution has delivered rock-solid security for document management,” said Ceccolini. “For more than 20 years, we ran OpenText Documentum Content Management on-premises. As part of our cloud-first transformation, we aimed to boost the performance, availability, and cost-effectiveness of the solution by moving to a modern, cloud-based architecture. Looking further ahead, we wanted to take advantage of the latest advances in generative AI to streamline document-driven processes.”

Offshore oil rig worker in safety gear

By upgrading PAGE, our document management solution, to OpenText Documentum Content Management, we’ve reduced our operational costs for by 30%. At the same time, we’ve boosted performance for end users by more than 50% and reduced the number of technical support requests we receive by around 90%.

Simone Ceccolini
Manager of Documents and Data, Saipem

Solution

Working with OpenText Professional Services and Accenture, Saipem modernized its document management platform. With OpenText Documentum Content Management in the cloud, the company is strengthening its collaboration capabilities and enabling future innovation.

Products deployed

Services deployed

Moving their content management solution to the cloud

For Saipem, moving the document management platform to the cloud was the natural next step in a wider move towards as-a-service solutions across the business.

Ceccolini elaborated, “OpenText Documentum Content Management continues to be the right choice for Saipem for many reasons. As well as providing a highly scalable and reliable content repository, the solution offers us fine-grained access permissions backed by a full audit trail.”

He added, “Every week, we import around 100 GB of content to the OpenText platform, which represents around 10,000 document-related transactions. With the cloud, we were confident we could improve scalability, reduce costs, and enable faster disaster recovery.”

Engaging expert support from OpenText and Accenture

Shifting a complex, mission-critical platform to the cloud was challenging. To mitigate the business risk of its transformation project, Saipem engaged OpenText Professional Services and its systems integrator, Accenture.

“As our OpenText Documentum Content Management solution has evolved and grown, it has become tightly integrated with other key business applications across SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, and our quality management system,” explained Ceccolini. “Because of the amount of custom code and the number of dependencies with third-party applications, we wanted an expert team to assist us. That’s exactly what we found in OpenText and Accenture.”

Migrating 60 TB of data to the cloud

Working closely with OpenText and Accenture, Saipem deployed the latest version of OpenText Documentum CM in the target cloud environment. After thorough testing to ensure all existing features and use cases were functioning correctly, the project teams migrated 60 TB of historical data from the on-premises platform to the cloud for its two key document management solutions: “PAGE” and “xCPAGE.”

Offshore wind farm

As our OpenText Documentum Content Management solution has evolved and grown, it has become tightly integrated with other key business applications across SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, and our quality management system.

Simone Ceccolini
Manager of documents and data, Saipem

Results

After upgrading PAGE, Saipem boosted end user performance by more than 50% while cutting support requests by 90% and operational costs by 30%. Looking ahead, the shift to cloud opens the door to AI-powered content management.

Reduced operational costs by 30%

By modernizing its mission-critical OpenText Documentum CM solution, Saipem can support the long-term growth of its business while unlocking the efficiencies of cloud.

“Upgrading PAGE to OpenText Documentum Content Management and refactoring the underpinning architecture for the cloud has delivered big improvements,” confirmed Ceccolini. “We’ve reduced our operational costs for OpenText Documentum Content Management by 30%. At the same time, we’ve boosted performance for end users by more than 50% and reduced the number of technical support requests we receive by around 90%.”

Saved 10 hours a week on administration work

Moving to the cloud saves significant time on manual administration work. Saipem now uses an API integration with Microsoft Active Directory Services to replace manual access management tasks with a streamlined, automated process.

“When users move on or off a project, it’s important that we quickly make the necessary changes to their document access permissions,” explained Ceccolini. “In the past, our IT team spent around 10 hours per week provisioning and deprovisioning users in PAGE by hand. Today, we make these changes as soon as they happen in Microsoft Entra ID—freeing our team from manual, repetitive work.”

Enabled generative AI innovation

Looking ahead, Saipem plans to build on its new cloud-based platform by deploying the latest Documentum SmartView user experience and incorporating generative AI capabilities from OpenText™ Content Aviator™.

“Using an AI-powered intelligent assistant from OpenText will empower our users to find, analyze, and summarize content faster than ever,” concluded Ceccolini. “Through our decades-long collaboration with OpenText, we have equipped users in some of the remotest locations in the world with consistent access to key information. By modernizing our OpenText Documentum Content Management solution with help from OpenText Professional Services and Accenture, we’re ready for whatever the next decade brings.”

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