Eskom`s Rotek installs Meridio document management software

Rotek Engineering has installed the Meridio document management software supplied by Fujitsu, which is able to store and manage millions of documents, many over 50Mb in size.

Rotek Engineering has been in operation for over 80 years and provides maintenance engineering services to Eskom. It is one of the largest heavy engineering companies in the Southern Hemisphere, employing some 1 300 people. The company is a division of Rotek Industries, a member of the Eskom Group.

Rotek experienced problems managing its technical manuals, which were unavailable when engineers needed to take them to remote sites for maintenance work. Sometimes manuals were left behind, lost or mislaid, causing problems for future work, particularly where the manuals describe equipment that is decades old or products no longer supported.

Rotek also wanted to streamline the creation and management of project reports, which are sent to customers in paper form but often mislaid. Customers would then request duplicates, which was a time-consuming and unproductive task.

"We initially tried to create an in-house electronic application but found we could not afford to write a comprehensive document management system. We then began an investigation of the document management market," said Brendan Clark, systems analyst at Rotek Engineering.

"The requirements were to have access to millions of documents online, some up to 50Mb in size. We needed a solution that would provide scalability for our existing documents, and to accommodate an expected increase in business from the rest of Africa. The software also had to be scalable and reliable."

"The solution had to undergo a true return on investment analysis and hence had to be cost-effective with real business value. For legal and commercial reasons, some Rotek documents must be kept confidential to a small group of users for certain periods," said Anthony Coetzee, senior technician of Power Distribution Services (PDS) at Rotek Engineering.

Rotek needed a surefire way of preventing documents being `marooned`. It needed a way of finding the right documents quickly and preventing them from getting lost, for example as a result of an index being mistyped, the equivalent of misfiling in the paper world.

"We received proposals from a number of vendors including our incumbent supplier. A number of the solutions proposed were Unix-based which punted the scalability and performance issue against Meridio, which only runs on a Microsoft platform utilising SQL as its only supported database," said Clark.

Rotek had a very clear understanding of what they wanted. "Rotek understands its business processes very well and has the discipline to adhere to them," said Fujitsu chief technology office Mike Ross.

"Rotek was the first SA Meridio customer, and we had to be sure that Fujitsu had the right product and the wherewithal to implement it locally," said Clark.

"Meridio was selected as a truly enterprise scale document management system (DMS) that could integrate well with Eskom`s IT infrastructure. The solution was costed within Rotek`s expectation, and has a formidable track record and reference base in Europe and the UK. It provided the scalability to compete with the largest document and records management solutions that run on rival platforms, and the performance on SQL showcased the tight integration between Meridio and Microsoft with real scalability."

Meridio`s integration with Microsoft Office and Web browser facilities meant end-user training was minimal and provided access anywhere anytime. Full solution methodology provided by Fujitsu and its partners meant Rotek received a solution that provides document management, utilising Enterprise SQL and Windows 2000.

"Fujitsu could reassure Rotek that, as part of the worldwide Fujitsu group, it could guarantee delivery because of its close relationship with Meridio," said Ross.

"Before the final order, Fujitsu built an in-house demo system to show the product`s features and prove their own capabilities. Rotek obtained a trial version of Meridio to validate various capabilities," he said.

Rotek now hosts all documents for their PDS engineering maintenance lifecycle on Meridio. Rotek PDS division has selected access to documents for all users via the Eskom intranet, and where required, the Internet.

"We are now also in a position to charge outside customers for downloads, and the Meridio-based documents are safe from loss, damage or tampering and kept confidential to their target audience.

"We can host electronically produced documents in Meridio from the outset, making them more manoeuvrable, and paper documents are retained in the document library to provide a final backup for rare, abnormal cases," said Coetzee.

Rotek user feedback confirmed that the Meridio system has been easy to learn and use. After placing the order, a project plan was drawn up and the Fujitsu project team assigned. The project took two-and-a-half months from kick-off to handover.

The design phase entailed identifying the various document types, their respective attributes and user communities and then designing the system accordingly. A suitable paper scanning solution was found and integrated into the solution.

A trial implementation was done to perform tests in Rotek`s environment and to discover any lurking problems. Going live meant the removal of all test data and documents after which the implementation could be swiftly repeated on a clean system.

"The key to Rotek`s success lies in the exemplary cooperation between the people assigned to the project, the Fujitsu sales and technical consultants and project management and the Meridio consultant who came out to SA to assist Fujitsu with the first Meridio implementation and the support received from Meridio in Belfast," said Clark.

"The success is in no small measure attributable to Rotek`s active and enthusiastic cooperation, which turned out to be a crucial element for a project delivered in a model way, in time and within budget," said Ross.