Our mission is to provide natural gas to millions of customers in the southern United States. We’re trying to do that every day in the safest, most reliable and most affordable manner.
What gets us excited is the opportunity for innovation and to take our business to a higher level. Technology plays a major role in that, empowering our users to do their jobs better and more safely. We wanted to get information off paper and put it at users’ fingertips to drive more efficient processes and better-informed decisions.
Enhancing access to information
Our company owns and operates a large and complex network of critical infrastructure—both above and below ground. Some of the physical assets can be 50 years old. Safely maintaining them depends on knowing exactly where they are and how they work. That’s the role of our “as-built” documentation, which includes technical drawings, plots and maps that help field technicians locate and service the assets.
We wanted to improve protection for this and other important documentation while making it easily available to employees. Our previous reliance on paper documentation reduced our speed and effectiveness, raised administrative costs, and hindered innovation in customer communications.
As we looked for the right enterprise content management tools, cybersecurity and regulatory compliance were top of mind.
Putting documents at users’ fingertips
Based on previous positive experience of OpenText solutions and the availability of pre-built integrations with our SAP applications, we chose OpenText Content Management. The solution enables us to digitally capture, classify, manage and surface information to employees whenever and wherever it’s needed, for enhanced decision-making and operational effectiveness.
We also engaged OpenText Professional Services to help us hit the ground running. Their Document Capture Services digitally scanned the existing paper records from our HR and management board teams. The whole process ran very smoothly, thanks to our ability to leverage that in-house expertise from OpenText.
We’re now extending our use of OpenText Content Management to other departments, from legal to engineering. As we digitize their documentation and bring it into the solution, we’re unlocking new opportunities to connect processes and information across systems that were previously siloed.
Ensuring efficient operations
Before we deployed OpenText Content Management, accessing archived documents was slow and inefficient. An employee would fill out a form, we’d process it in the content management office, call the relevant storage facility, ask them to take down the relevant document box, and then hand-deliver the relevant piece of paper.
Today, users can just open up OpenText Content Management, search for documents based on their metadata and get the information they’re seeking almost in real time. That means our people can focus on their core competency and not waste hours hunting for documents.
We’re also improving the sustainability of our operations, because digitizing our physical records is reducing the need to print, store and manage paper documents. What’s more, digitization is helping us interact in a more personalized way with a new generation of customers, and we’ve moved more than one million of them to paperless billing.
Our experience to date has been outstanding. OpenText Professional Services has been top-notch and OpenText has met or exceeded our expectations from an uptime and a cybersecurity standpoint.
To learn more about our move to digital documentation, read our case study.
Read the case study
