How enterprise content management is making a difference

What is the most common issue that you see impacting the utilities industry that enterprise content management (ECM) is addressing?

Philip Cleghorn. Environmental awareness has changed significantly over the last decade. Concerns about the environmental impact to land, air and water quality have been growing and that has led to further legislation and regulation in the utilities industry. Emphasis on employee health and safety has never been more stringent, and   to complement that the rules governing quality and service levels to customers have also increased creating a combined impact that drives up costs significantly. The resulting impact in a business environment today is that businesses are required to have a much greater and broader emphasis on legislative and regulatory compliance in order to be sustainable. Open Text has continued to develop its solutions like document management, records management, email management, web content management, and digital asset management to meet these ever increasing compliance demands, not only by adding flexible features but by also expanding the variety and volume of content that can be managed, everything electronic and all physical records. The ever-changing requirements demand that the solutions be both flexible and configurable. By addressing all the different business issue driven content that a utility company must deal with, we are truly an enterprise solution enabling our utility customers to reduce the cost of compliance and position themselves for long-term sustainable market growth.

What about changes to the technical environment facing utility companies?

PC. Utility organizations are implementing smart grid and smart meters as part of the worldwide move in this direction. We often get asked about where we fit in that solution puzzle. We see our solutions for Asset Management: Engineering Records, Contracts and Transmittals Management help tackle the additional complexity that smart grid infrastructure requires. By keeping a better track of CAD drawing revisions, construction documentation and by logging communications on-line via Transmittals Management we see customers taking away the pain from sharing out of date information or from an inability to find a critical piece of content.

With respect to smart meters we see different challenges there. Consumers can have an impact on their consumption and costs but in order to do so they need information that they can utilize. Our customer relationship management (CRM) solutions include web content solutions that can help consumers digest the information coming from their smart meter to help them make informed decisions as to how to change their consumption patterns and save money. Call centre costs can be impacted through both delivering more information via the web and by providing operators an identical copy of the customers billing record to speed up the time to resolve inquiries. Open Text social media solutions can give utility companies the edge to leverage new ways to communicate with customers to drive up customer satisfaction and reduce costs. 

What about service reliability and security?

PC. System security, reliability and redundancy have become a frequent conversation with utility operators. Regulatory service demands have increased and new sources of environmentally conscious energy are entering the grid. Open Text has always been concerned about providing a secure platform with built in redundancy to ensure that services are secure, steady, predictable and scalable. When the latest release of Content Server comes out later this year, customers will appreciate our next leap forward in providing reliable software that can meet the tremendous growth in data and information that has exploded in organizations.

Our archiving solutions have a track record of taking historical data from on-line systems and placing it in our secure repository. This not only improves system performance but it also decreases the time to recover in the event of an upset. Many of our utility customers have benefited from moving information into the archive and applying the appropriate records retention schedule to meet regulatory and legislative needs.

So, what are the new ways in which you are meeting the needs of utility customers?

PC. Recently we have responded to our customers needs to achieve better management of the information surrounding their fixed assets; Engineering data such as Controlled Engineering Records - CAD drawings, spreadsheets, and other documentation. More than ever, our customers want to continue to improve the environmental, safety and production of their assets. They are often faced with millions of pieces of content and they want more efficient methods of storing and maintaining this content. We have risen to the challenge by supplementing our Transmittals Management and CAD Manager solutions with Controlled Revision Tracking and Advanced State Management. Solutions that complement Content Server capabilities of security and information management by providing features specifically designed for engineering content. New features that give additional business controls tuned to the individual needs of the utility organization, providing consistency in the business process of adding new assets through capital projects or changing existing assets in the operations and maintenance phase.

What other demands do you see coming from the utilities industry?

PC. We see more and more customers looking to us to solve the challenge of connecting their ERP and ECM platforms. Organizations no longer want to see a silo based approach to their structured and transactional data from their unstructured and document centric information. They desire an integrated environment where their supply chain, human resources, projects and operations staff can easily find the relevant content related to activities in the business unit. Open Text has built solutions for both SAP and Oracle ERP's. As a result ERP and ECM are no longer standalone. Contracts can be found with the supplier or customer master data. OEM manuals can be found with the equipment master, procedures can be stored at the functional location where they belong. It's quite revolutionary and amazing to see ERP users contributing to ECM and ECM users supplementing the structured data available in the ERP.

We are often asked to help organizations deal with the glut of content that is an ever-increasing problem. Several companies have seen their cost of litigation steadily increase as the amount of content grows in their organization. When an organization realizes that each significant case requires tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in discovery and legal review and the cost of defence can exceed a quick settlement, they become motivated to address the issue. Our customers use our records management and retention schedule capabilities for content that comes from email or from other desktop applications to classify information and retain it for its period of relevance. The records retention schedule is often dictated by legislative and regulatory requirements or by company policy. Much of what we receive in email is not a corporate record and this content can be disposed of in 30-180 days. Other email needs to be retained for a few years while other key email records need to be kept for the contract duration, employment term, etc. The result is that once an RM program is in place, irrelevant information is disposed as per the schedule, overall content is reduced significantly. This not only reduces legal review costs when litigation arises but it significantly impacts the overall IT management costs for storage, backup and recovery of information.

What can we expect to see from Open Text in the next 12 to 24 months?

PC. Without doubt you will continue to see new releases of the Open Text products, for web content management, email management, engineering records, digital assets, electronic and physical records. You will also see improved integrated solutions for SAP and Oracle, a new release of our Open Text Everywhere solution for mobility. You can expect to see Open Text continue to address the needs of utility organizations as regulations tighten, new technologies are deployed and the downward pressure on operations costs continues.

Biography

Philip Cleghorn is the Industry Manager for Energy at Open Text. With over 20 years experience in the Energy business, he has worked for Suncor Energy, Syncrude Canada and Petro-Canada. Cleghorn has a Bachelors Degree of Science in Computing Science and a Masters Degree in Business from the University of Alberta.