Different modes of communication are used in an enterprise environment and a key challenge across the board is to ensure that this information is disseminated efficiently across offices in different countries as the case was with GASCO.

A conglomerate like Abu Dhabi Gas Industries (GASCO) accommodates incoming mail from twenty two divisions across Abu Dhabi and UAE. Many of these offices work on critical and major projects which require information entering the company to be processed and followed up on immediately. Hundreds of incoming documents are received on a daily basis and distributed to departments. This huge traffic of incoming and outgoing documents has to be managed, archived and retrieved at all times.

Business Drivers

On normal days when a document had to be retrieved, an archiving assistant was asked to search for the document within the division archive and then scan, e-mail or fax the document to the relevant person. This process was slowing the business inside GASCO and was not accurate enough to fit the business needs.

The business needed to search and retrieve documents fast and efficiently for both head office and off-site employees. Ensuring that data remains up to date and accurate was also a key consideration. Additionally knowledge between employees needed to be shared and the photo-copying of documents had to be minimized for archiving purpose and distribution through the other divisions.

GASCO needed the ability to integrate all channels with one focal point corporate repository for managing the company’s documents. Naturally, a major objective was to start off by bringing efficiency to processing of documents passing through the mailroom.

Benefits gained

The company decided to implement a document management solution with power functionalities and a user friendly interface that would be beneficial to the users. Though this project, the company intended to minimize the information search process effort.

In order to get enough support from its employees it was necessary to conduct an awareness and orientation session prior to the implementation. This was conducted for the management and user representatives from each division before the implementation.

According to Feras Al-Jabi, GM from ITQAN the GASCO’s electronic content management system will prove itself, “This system reduces time to locate documents, saves office space that was used to store unnecessary physical documents, share documents among concerned staff members and secure business related documents.”

Solutions implemented

GASCO decided to work with Abu Dhabi based solution provider ITQAN. Both did a site survey on the existing documents, size, sharing and utilisation. The major needs that were marked to address included loads of business critical documents stored across the company (which is approximately 1500GB), shared documents (almost 4%), and physical documents (approximately 1.3 million pages and more).

The project was conducted in two phases, which took five and four months respectively. The products implemented in the project were mainly Livelink ECM for document management from Opentext, Kofax ascent capture and ascent Capture Xtrata pro.