Open Text wins WA utility contract

Peter Dinham
Monday, 01 June 2009 14:52

IT Industry - Deals

Western Australian utility company, Water Corporation, has completed deployment of Open Text’s document and records management solutions (ECM) to 3,000 of its staff across the State.

ECM vendor, Open Text says the utility has complete roll-out of its Document Management, eDOCS Edition, and the Open Text Records Management, eDOCS Edition, allowing for documents and other critical records to now be stored in a single repository rather than on multiple, separate file servers. 

Water Corporation’s IS relationship manager, information services branch, Konrad Tauber, says the solutions are being used to provide the records management processes and structure necessary for compliance with Western Australia's State Records Act 2000.  The WA utility is responsible for providing water and waste water services to households, businesses and communities across more than 2.5 million square kilometres, as well as maintaining drainage and irrigation services and management of more than $9 billion worth of water-related assets.

Open Text says secure portal access and search capabilities offer authorised staff fast access to documents and enable greater collaboration and sharing of documentation both internally and amongst partners.

According to Tauber, “one of our biggest issues used to be simply finding things.  We have people working in 45 physical locations across the state.  If someone stored a document on their file server, how could anyone else know about it?  Given the type of work that we do and the nature of the assets that we are responsible for, a lot of our documentation needs to be kept permanently and finding past records can be critical.  This is what Open Text is now making possible.”

Trissa Dent, information and eDOCS project coordinator, information services at Water Corporation, says that the Open Text records and document management solutions were deployed over an 18-month period, with three project teams travelled the state setting up the systems, providing work group customisations and training up to 100 staff at a time.