In the fall of 2004, a leading Real Estate Operations company identified the need to implement an enterprise document management system with the goal of significantly decreasing the storage space required for retaining pertinent business documents. The company chose EMC's Documentum platform as the basis for the new system and BRT to implement it.

The main goal was to gain space needed for the redesign of the corporate offices. In addition to this goal, this firm wanted to make finding information like leases and legal documents very easy so research into routine inquiries could be done more accurately and efficiently.

Challenges

Before any documents could be loaded into Documentum, each department needed to be surveyed to ensure that the new system was configured correctly. The new system had to mirror the current filing system so that employees could easily find what they were looking for.

High Cost of Finding Answers

Before the new system was in place, it was common in the Lease Department for employees to spend a significant amount of time researching inquiries made by various tenants who had questions regarding their leases.

Finding answers to these inquiries took a great deal of time. The department housed all lease related documents in a large room. There was a system that contained high level summary information on the leases that were on hand (think of the old style library card-catalog) but in order for an employee to review the actual lease, they would have to go to yet another system and log a request for that document. A couple of hours later, a clerk would wheel up with a hand cart and drop off the requested document.

One aspect of the process that caused delays was that there was no one checking to see if the documents actually got returned. The employee could, however, run a report that would show them a list of all of the documents that had been checked out and by whom. But it was common for documents to be checked out for long periods of time and then become lost. Some of the entries were years old and in some cases the person who originally checked out the document had actually left the company! So a relatively simple question could take days to answer.

Once the lease documents were in Documentum, it was easy for the employees to look up a lease and search the document by key words so that an answer could be provided immediately. The whole process of answering inquiries was reduced from days to minutes.

Similar inefficiencies were experienced by the Legal Department. For example, an executive might call the VP of legal services and ask a seemingly simple question. “What are the operating hours for all of the Marshall Field's stores in the shopping malls that we operate?” The VP of the legal department would then ask one of the lawyers to find the answer. It could take up to a couple of hours. Why? One would first need to go down to the area where all of the shopping center related files were kept. The files were filed by “center.” So the next step would be to check if a shopping center included a Marshall Field's store. If a mall did contain a Marshall Field's store, then one would need to find the operating covenants for it and write down the hours of operation. This was not an easy task since the information would be buried in some legal document. Actual lawyers had to be the ones to do the research since an office clerk might not know where to look. The lawyer would then need to check every other center to see if it contained a Marshall Field's store. Even if the lawyer knew from experience in which centers to look, they still needed to write down the operating hours for each store since it was common for different malls to have different hours of operation.

It should be mentioned that these files were all very well organized; yet, it could still take hours to glean the necessary information to answer a seemingly simple question.

Once the entire group of legal documents were on line, it was easy to use Documentum's WebTop interface to search for “Marshall Field's” across all center related documents. It would then be easy to refine the search to the operating covenants of the legal document that contained the information. What once took a couple of hours now takes just a few minutes.

Documentum Solution

After reviewing a number of content management solutions for efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility, this firm chose the EMC Documentum Enterprise Content Management platform.

This firm hired BRT Inc to help implement the new system and coordinate the migration all of its paper documents to the Documentum application. BRT also wrote an interface to this firm's lease system to provide the flexibility to access lease document through the existing lease system or through Documentum's WebTop interface.

BRT also helped create a process for backfiling or imaging the existing documents and ensuring that all documents that went off site to be scanned by a third party scanning company came back in good order.

Once the existing documents were scanned and copied to disk, BRT created a load function that imported the data of thousands of documents into Documentum. For the firm's ongoing scanning needs, BRT implemented a process by which documents could be scanned, have OCR (optical character recognition) performed on them and then have them loaded into Documentum.

The project was completed within budget and took approximately five months to complete.“When we went live with the Documentum system, I received many compliments. Our employees told me that their jobs were just made so much easier.” the customer's project manager said.

Summary

The new system has allowed this firm to meet their goals for saving floor space and while saving them money in several ways. Because the system is so easy to use, this firm doesn't need to employ a specialized IT staff to support it.

In addition to making the business more efficient, the firm was able to reduce office space by about 20% since the large file rooms were no longer needed. Once the customer completes their office updates, tens of thousands of dollars in lease costs will be saved.

BRT provides solution consulting, project management and implementation services designed to provide an efficient and easy-to-use content management system. Call BRT at 248-324-9775 and see what we can do for your organization.