Leading energy company
Large utility company empowers field staff and ensures excellent safety standards for infrastructure maintenance with OpenText solutions
About the company
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Revenue:$15 billion USD+
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Employees:20,000+
Summary
Challenges
- Distributing paper-based safety documents resulted in the use of outdated guidance, jeopardizing compliance.
- Engineers traveled back to site offices to update safety documents, reducing efficiency.
Solution
- Digitized and stored millions of documents.
- Enabled field teams to update documents remotely.
- Established access controls for external users.
- Moved document management platform to the cloud.
Results
Accelerated access to 10 million cloud-based records.
Strengthened workplace and public safety.
Paved the way for AI-powered maintenance.
Challenges
- Manual information-sharing processes increased the time spent briefing field teams on maintenance work
- Engineers returned to offices to update safety documents, reducing efficiency
This energy company is one of the largest natural gas and electricity companies in North America. To provide reliable and affordable energy to millions of people, the company maintains a vast network of gas pipelines and electricity transmission lines, and every part of its distribution network must always meet high safety standards.
“Ensuring the safety of our customers, our field engineering teams and the public is our top priority,” explained a spokesperson from the company. “To achieve this goal, we regularly perform maintenance checks on our critical national infrastructure—everything from transmission cables to underground pipelines.”
When carrying out repairs and maintenance checks, engineers must follow a set of strict procedures and ensure all work is completed in compliance with regulatory standards, with a clear, auditable record of all actions taken during inspections. Providing this vital documentation to engineers can be a challenge, especially when they conduct maintenance checks on infrastructure in remote locations, which often have no internet or mobile connectivity.
Over the years, the energy company has evolved the way it provides engineers with up-to-date maintenance information. In the past, the company created binders of paper documents that engineers would store in their trucks; later, it shared the same documentation on compact discs [CDs].
While CDs took up less space in employees’ vehicles, continually burning new CDs took a lot of manual effort for document management teams. There was also no quick and easy way for engineers to log information on the company’s systems while they were out in the field, so they had to return to offices to fill out the required paperwork—taking valuable time away from important maintenance duties.
Ultimately, OpenText solutions allow us to keep engineers informed, so they can avoid potential risks.
Solution
To improve information-sharing across the organization and enable field engineers to access and update documents in near real-time, the energy company moved to a modern, centralized document management platform, powered by OpenText solutions.
Products deployed
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OpenText™ Documentum™ D2
Simplify access to content and streamline information management
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OpenText™ Intelligent Capture
Reduce costs and accelerate business with intelligent document processing and automation
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OpenText™ Core Share
Enable secure remote content sharing from existing platforms, applications and processes
Accelerating the flow of information
As the first step on its digital transformation journey, the energy company used Intelligent Capture to automate the digital intake of millions of documents, securely stored and managed in Documentum D2.
“Bringing millions of documents into a digital repository was a massive project, but the results have been outstanding,” the spokesperson said. “By using optical character recognition [OCR] from OpenText Intelligent Capture, we extracted information from our records with a high level of accuracy. As a result, teams can use OpenText Documentum D2 to search for keywords that appear anywhere in our documents and instantly surface the information they need.”
Streamlining collaboration with field teams
Next, the utilities provider enhanced its document management activities by enabling near real-time information sharing with Core Share.
“OpenText Documentum D2 and OpenText Core Share enable our field users to access all the information they need, even if they are traveling to an area with limited connectivity,” the spokesperson said. “Instead of carrying binders of paper or CDs, field engineers can download critical maintenance documentation via the OpenText Core Share app on their iPads. Any edits they make to these documents—whether that’s filling out forms or adding notes—are automatically updated as soon as they move to a location with internet connectivity.”
Establishing rock-solid security for external users
In addition to its own expert engineers, the energy company regularly works with external contractors to support construction, maintenance and repairs.
“With OpenText Core Share, we can onboard external contractors quickly and easily and set up robust user access controls,” the spokesperson said. “This makes sharing critical maintenance and safety information with contractors simple, while also reducing the risk of sensitive documents being circulated outside of our internal networks. At the same time, we can set automated policies so we can always meet regulatory rules around document retention.”
Building next-generation services in the cloud
For over a decade, the utilities provider has worked closely with OpenText to evolve its document management policies and procedures. Recently, the two organizations collaborated to move the company’s on-premises document management platform to the AWS cloud.
“We were one of the first OpenText Documentum D2 users to move to AWS, but OpenText provided us with the support resources we needed to ensure the migration went smoothly,” the spokesperson explained. “In the past, patching and upgrading our on-premises environment was a time-consuming process that left us with limited time and resources available to focus on service innovation for the business. With OpenText Documentum D2 on AWS, we can deploy upgrades more quickly and easily than ever. Today, we are continuing our partnership with OpenText as we move our records from the on-premises platform to the cloud—helping us to reduce costs, boost availability and enable business users to work even more productively.”
We’re very pleased with the robust approach to records management we’ve created with OpenText and look forward to working together to further enhance our capabilities.
Results
Today, the energy company’s cloud-based collaboration and document management platform helps ensure maintenance teams get quick access to the latest information—strengthening safety and increasing efficiency.
Offered fast access to 10 million records in the cloud
Using Intelligent Capture and Documentum D2, the energy company has converted more than 10 million records into digital documents, hosted securely in the AWS cloud. With OpenText solutions providing field teams with up-to-date maintenance and safety data, engineers can work even more productively.
“With OpenText Core Share, our engineers no longer need to travel back to the office to complete important paperwork,” the spokesperson said. “And because we have integrated OpenText Documentum D2 with our geographic information system [GIS], field teams can get links to all the relevant documents simply by clicking on the asset in our GIS app.”
The energy company’s assets are spread across over 70,000 square miles, so avoiding unnecessary travel back to a site office represents a huge time saving for field teams. Employees and contractors can now complete their maintenance checks and move straight to the next job, helping to significantly increase productivity while ensuring that maintenance information is regularly updated.
Strengthened workplace and public safety
Thanks to its OpenText solutions, the utilities provider is helping its engineers find work instructions, safety and maintenance information more easily.
“By equipping our teams with fine-grained search capabilities, we reduce the risk of maintenance personnel missing important safety notices,” the spokesperson explained. “What’s more, near real-time document updates help us keep our people apprised of hazards posed by wildfires, extreme weather or changes to maintenance protocols. Ultimately, OpenText solutions allow us to keep engineers informed, so they can avoid potential risks.”
Paved the way for AI-powered maintenance
To date, the energy company has integrated over 70 different systems with its OpenText environment, including SAP business systems. Looking ahead, the company plans to standardize retention and records management policies associated with these integrations and harness AI to deliver relevant data to field teams in real time.
“In the future, we will leverage OpenText Documentum D2 to enable automatic document disposition after records have reached their mandated retention periods, helping us to optimize our storage spend,” the spokesperson concluded. “Looking further ahead, we aim to use AI to automatically collate all available data for our field teams as soon as they roll up on site—boosting efficiency further still. We’re very pleased with the robust approach to records management we’ve created with OpenText and look forward to working together to further enhance our capabilities.”
