At Enterprise World 2019 in Toronto, we hosted a panel with a few of our customers to discuss their various digital transformation journeys and how they’re supporting their organizational goals by deploying content services technologies.
One of the panelists was Jill Stelter from Snohomish County PUD (aka SnoPUD), an electric and water utility company North of Seattle. In recent years, SnoPUD was losing the battle, struggling to manage an ever-increasing set of information assets and meeting its stakeholders’ information needs. This included everything from technical specs, work orders, public records requests, to regulatory audits.
For SnoPUD, the answer was clear. They needed to leverage key solutions from OpenText™ Content Services like OpenText Extended ECM for SAP® Solutions. The OpenText™ Extended ECM Platform offers a digital content platform that seamlessly integrates with SAP, which was critical given the utility’s SAP environment. This deep integration provides structured metadata from SAP that’s applied to the unstructured content related to business process, giving it context. Now content is managed and shared through Extended ECM and served up inside the SAP UI users work in every day to get their job done.
Here are some highlights of the SnoPUD digital journey and what they achieved partnering with OpenText.
How does Extended ECM change the way people work?
“When people realized the improvements we made for the work order process, and began to understand it, they wanted to apply the same principals to improve other processes for greater benefits within their own department.”
How does Extended ECM add value to your organization?
“With multiple business departments that touch the same process, Extended ECM provides a business workspace tied to Content Server that all users can upload and access the same information. It’s created more of a community feeling in these business areas, providing consistency and structure to content, as everyone is now placing everything in the same place.”
How does Extended ECM add value for your employees?
“There are all of these players in the organization trying to get the (unstructured) information when they need it, being able to have one business workspace location alongside with SAP transactions (structure information), has made a huge difference with consistency and speed – business process has really improved”
How does Extended ECM add value to your records manager?
“We wanted somewhere to place documents that tied to our SAP transactions. After seeing the benefits of OpenText we realized we could manage records with retention and permission to a higher level to connect different people through business process improvements. We asked ourselves, why are we not doing this with all of our information?”
The innovative concept to drive their company-wide information governance initiative based on OpenText™ Extended ECM for SAP® Solutions was wildly successful and went a long way towards ensuring strong user adoption of the enterprise project. Thanks to the implementation of this solution, SnoPUD was able to do a massive cleanup of their electronic and physical files.
Additionally, SnoPUD replaced their outdated and cumbersome digital document generation system with OpenText™ Document Presentment for SAP® Solutions, a flexible, efficient platform that integrates with SAP and easily handles the utility’s correspondences, including 500,000 letters per year and up to 20,000 bills per day. Moving forward, migrating to a Cloud Managed Services environment is a key next step in SnoPUD’s digital transformation journey.
Read more about the SnoPUD customer success story here.
