Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Being a leading institution in the digital age, the BA rose to the challenge to digitize all of its paper-based documents—the first Egyptian public institution to do so. The transformation project was designed to improve document creation, capture, handling and storage across the entire organization. By doing so, the BA would increase efficiency, save time, reduce costs, improve compliance and enhance the user experience.

The BA appraised available solutions to digitize and manage the large quantities of existing paper documents and implement business process automation for thousands of parallel workflow processes.

“We knew we needed a powerful platform that would be capable of handling the huge quantities of documents and concurrent processes, and could provide the fast search and reporting capabilities we need,” said Michael Milad, project manager at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. “Our evaluation process resulted in selecting the OpenText™ Documentum™ Platform as the core for our project, OpenText™ Documentum™ xCP for our business process management needs and OpenText™ Intelligent Capture to scan both our existing and new documents. All around, OpenText was the best solution when compared to the others we evaluated.”

A contributing factor to selecting OpenText was its ability to handle all content types, including email, thereby creating a true, enterprise archive. Additional capabilities, such as electronic document annotations, also contribute to BA’s goal to remove paper from the organization.

The BA project team, including solution architects, business analysts, project managers and developers, worked closely with representatives from each of the business functions to ensure all requirements were captured and met.

“We were able to utilize our own in-house developers and integrate OpenText Documentum with our key enterprise applications, such as Oracle® E-Business Suite and Microsoft^® SharePoint^®. By integrating to our custom developed systems too, we have been able to provide users with a much more holistic information management capability,” said Ahmed Sharkas, Project Manager at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

One of the most noticeable and practical outcomes of this integration is that users now spend less time searching for information, switching systems and repeating searches.

For the first phase of the project, which is now complete and serves about 2,300 users, the BA implemented more than 90 large-scale business processes and automated across Human Resources, Finance, ICT, Legal and other departments. With about 90 percent of the project complete, the second phase is set to finish the implementation, and make improvements to existing processes.

The system now manages about half a million documents, a number which is growing consistently by 15,000 new documents each month.

Prior to implementing the Documentum solution, the BA was heavily reliant on paper to generate and provide reports for both internal and external government compliance purposes.

“One of the many benefits we’ve seen is in reporting and monitoring. Before we had OpenText, we did not always know what stage processes had reached. We can now track the information accurately and more easily, which is helping with our compliance reporting,” said Hosam Salem, Project Manager at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Various reports are now available to users and management that can be generated on demand or automatically, and no longer involve the need to send paper files.

“Reviews can be undertaken within the system to save time. This is a perfect example of the progress being made within the public sector in Egypt, spearheaded by the BA,” said Milad.

User feedback has also been positive and they have welcomed the improvements, especially the ability to focus on a task with less time spent searching for and handling paper documents.

“One of the keys to a successful business process implementation is process engine flexibility and scalability. This allows us to adapt to a fast-changing business environment,” said Bassem Elsayed, director, Enterprise Applications and Integrated Solutions Department at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. “Using OpenText Documentum, more than 90 business processes have been successfully implemented, helping the Bibliotheca Alexandrina move towards a paperless organization."

“Thanks to the solution’s simplicity and ease of use, our users quickly began to see the benefits and provided their input to help further improve our processes. These improvements will help overcome business challenges and provide greater efficiency.”