The controlling body responsible for all aspects of nuclear safety in South Africa, the Council for Nuclear Safety (CNS) has installed a core workflow system, based on Lotus Notes, at its Centurion and Koeberg Sites to streamline the flow of information. CNS GM, Jeff Leaver, explains: "The Council`s vision was to create a working environment where all the information and data required to perform the broad range of technical functions would be made available at the desk of the responsible engineer or scientist." Depending on the problem, information must be routed along structured paths or e-mailed from person to person in an ad hoc manner. The system had to allow for this form of communication while also being flexible to facilitate searches of historical data. "Notes was chosen because of its rich functionality and ability to integrate e-mail and Internet services," Leaver says. "Of particular interest to us is using Notes` Internet capabilities to bring all our stakeholders into our processes." According to Clive Belsham, consulting partner at Lotus business partner, Microknowlogy, the company assisting CNS, "Information technology - particularly collaborative processing is the main component driving the Council`s business process. It is important that each communication, whether it be a letter fax or e-mail, is handled efficiently." "Another strong reason for adopting Notes was the replication feature," says Leaver. "Although this does not negate the need for proper backup and disaster recovery procedures it is reassuring to know that we have a mirror image of our essential applications and documents at another site." Having installed approximately 85 seats of Notes, the Council is currently replicating its five essential applications from Centurion to Koeberg (W. Cape) at ten minute intervals. Microknowlogy also assisted in the development of the document management system using Notes and its associated imaging application, LN:DI. "All incoming documents are scanned, indexed and truncated in the mail room," says Leaver. "In the case of faxes these are routed via the fax server to the document centre where all requests are promptly dealt with. "After the document is scanned, some primary indexes are added," he elaborates. "It is proposed to full text index the images using the OCR Workgroup facility." Leaver goes on to detail the process. "A mail message with document link is sent to the responsible officer who then creates a number of sub-tasks requesting other officers to provide opinions and information. Each taskee then responds to the request by entering comments or including documentation. When all tasks are complete a response is composed and printed e-mailed or faxed. This response is stored in Notes with the original task." Leaver says the challenge ahead is to capture all the other benefits of collaborative processing. "We believe we can gain major productivity and efficiency benefits by improving our ability to create, extract, share and track information both from inside and outside the organisation. "Applications such as discussion databases and skills inventories can cut down on lengthy and unnecessary meetings and improve the quality of management decisions. We are looking at Notes to provide the infrastructure to enable us to do just that."
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