SUCCESS STORY
Salt River ProjectIndustry• Public utilitySolutions• OpenText™ Content Suite• OpenText™ Extended ECM for SAP® Solutions• OpenText™ Media ManagementServices

Salt River Project powers operational
efficiency with OpenText

Electric and water utility enhances speed, safety and compliance with newenterprise information management strategy• OpenText Professional Services

Results
Operational efficiency
Risk mitigation
Improved customer service
Reduced costs“Whatever pain point we had within theorganization, OpenText seemed to havea solution that allowed us to not onlymanage our information but extend it toour other business applications where
we could add value to the organization.
Now that we have OpenText solutions inplace, it’s going to allow us to transform
our organization for the future.”
Vince Boccieri

ECM Program Manager
Salt River ProjectSalt River Project powers operational efficiency with OpenText

Salt River Project maintains a constant flow of information. Without
direction, that flow puddled in outdated, disparate systems. Thatis, until SRP developed an effective content strategy that included
OpenText solutions. Salt River Project (SRP) began directing waterto Arizona farmlands more than 100 years ago. Today, the public
utility company provides water and electricity to more than one
million customers in the Phoenix metropolitan area and employs aworkforce of more than 5,000.
With a long-standing history and a combined service area covering
more than 3,200 square miles, SRP creates and collects vast amounts
of information including procedural guidelines, equipment diagrams
and more. “For the longest time, it was all on paper,” says Vince
Boccieri, ECM program manager for SRP. But in the 1980s, thecompany started accumulating large amounts of electronic content.
“It got to the point where we were just storing that information on
file shares and email systems and it was becoming a challenge tofind that information and properly manage it.”

Inaccessible information caused risks and lengthy delays
SRP previously relied on a number of repositories in disparate legacy
systems, some of which were out of support. With information
everywhere, independent efforts sprouted to address contract
management, document preservation or other efforts of limited scope.
It was a challenge to quickly find the right document in thisenvironment. For example, an SRP director recalls spending hours
looking for one document requested by an external agency. More
importantly, inaccessible or outdated information can put worker
safety at risk. “It is important that the most recent versions ofdrawings and operation procedures are available to our fieldcrews to improve the safety of our employees,” says Boccieri.
As a public utility operating in a heavily regulated industry andsubject to numerous record requests, reliable data search andretrieval stands at the core of regulation compliance for SRP.
“We are required to make sure we are in compliance with ourretention schedule and policies and that’s difficult and timeconsuming to accomplish when you don’t have enabling
technology to make it easier for employees. What we needed
was an all-encompassing Enterprise Content Management
program to ensure easy accessibility and the single source oftruth for all documents,” says Boccieri.

A true enterprise-wide information
management strategy
SRP chose OpenText Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
solutions based on past evaluations and industry leader
recommendations from analysts at Gartner, Forrester Researchand others. SRP and the ECM leader connected on the vital role ofinformation in today’s content-driven environment. “It wasn’t justabout a content management system, but really looking at how
to add value to the business by integrating our unstructured
content with other business applications such as SAP ,SuccessFactors and more,” Boccieri says. “The overall vision ofOpenText to manage information and bring everything together
matched our vision and it also had many of the solutions in place
to help us get there.”®

®

“Protecting the waterrights of our shareholder is a crucial
function for SRP andit’s important thatthese documents
are securely storedand managed.
With OpenText,
information thatused to drown in fileshares is now secureand ‘on tap.’ The ECM
program is preparing
SRP to manage all ofits information today
and into the future.”
Vince Boccieri

ECM Program Manager
Salt River ProjectSalt River Project powers operational efficiency with OpenText

Active projects help streamline the efforts of close to 1,000
employees. When SRP reaches the full scope of its enterprise contentsystem, all files will be moved from legacy repositories into OpenText™
Content Suite, with information retained according to schedules. SRP
employees can now access the latest version of files immediately,leading to a number of process efficiencies.

Operating procedures
SRP set a workflow to guide review and approval of operatingprocedures, which are then centrally stored for easy access. “All theoperators have the most accurate procedures. Having the mostcurrent version of a procedure allows our operators to manage ourgrid more effectively,” Boccieri says.

Environmental services
SRP moved compliance documents into Content Suite with forms andsearch tools. The controlled environment ensures files are protectedand easy to supply at a moment’s notice.

Water rights
Some files span a timeline reaching far into the past and into thefuture. SRP handles water rights documents from more than 100 years
ago; it must preserve the files to show who has first right of water inthe territory. “Protecting the water rights of our share- holder is a
crucial function for SRP and it’s important that these documents
are securely stored and managed,” says Boccieri. “With OpenText,
information that used to drown in file shares is now secure and‘on tap.’ The ECM program is preparing SRP to manage all of its
information today and into the future.”

Cartographic GIS services
Other unique documents, including large maps, were previously
scattered across multiple locations. Now, GIS personnel are avid ECM
fans: “They are very pleased with the solution, and it’s making
them more efficient in their day-to-day operations,” says Boccieri.

Media collaboration
SRP manages advertising in-house and previously, its marketing
professionals felt disconnected from each other, and the content
they produced landed in silos. In response, SRP is implementing
OpenText™ Media Management, a consolidated asset library forcommercials, brochures and other rich media produced in SRP’sprint and creative shops and accessible to marketing, customer
service and other departments.
“We’re brokering a collaboration effort between those organizations and looking at how they work together to improve theirbusiness processes,” says Boccieri. “We’re automating workflows
between those groups so that the content being created isaccessible to the other organizations to use—making everyone
more effective.”

ECM business value
Surveying the progress and potential of its program thus far, Boccieriand others at SRP move forward with fortitude. “By pursuing bestpractices in content management and implementing leadingindustry technology solutions like OpenText, SRP will recognize
business value and mitigate risk,” he says.

Salt River Project powers operational efficiency with OpenText

In addition to reducing risk and enhancing safety, SRP reports
additional benefits as it continues its ECM journey:

Reduced costs
By finding files immediately, employees save at least an hour every
week and redirect that time to other tasks, according to a SRP
director. While a conservative estimate, the hours quickly add up
when accounting for the thousands of employees that will leverage
OpenText. In addition, Boccieri estimates cost-savings through more
efficient search and enhanced record capabilities.
SRP also reduces maintenance and IT support expenditures through thedecommissioning of legacy systems after migration to Content Suite.

Improved service
Though valuable cost-savings remain secondary to SRP’s mission for
exceptional customer service. For multiple consecutive years, thewater and electric utility earned top customer service awards. As
such, “any opportunity we have to improve how we provide service
to our customers is important to us,” says Boccieri.
Upon integration of Content Suite and SRP’s customer information
system, call center agents will receive all correspondence associatedwith a customer on the spot. “They can more easily answer thequestions a customer has, reducing the number of callbacks that
we have to perform and improving our customer service levels byusing Content Suite,” says Boccieri.

Teamwork and future plans
To realize its ECM vision, SRP worked closely with OpenText
Professional Services. Design and deployment became a united effort,according to Boccieri: “They’re actually a part of our team. It’s notlike it’s the OpenText and SRP teams. We’re one team and it’s beena really good working relationship.”In time, SRP expects to connect its SAP environment with Content
Suite and expand the repository to include additional types ofdocuments such as purchase orders and contracts. No matter thefuture challenge or need, Boccieri and his team express confidence inits ECM strategy powered by OpenText.
“Whatever pain point we had within the organization, OpenText
seemed to have a solution that allowed us to not only manage ourinformation but extend it to our other business applications wherewe could add value to the organization,” he says. “Now that wehave OpenText solutions in place, it’s going to allow us to transform our organization for the future.”

About OpenText
OpenText, The Information Company,
enables organizations to gain insight
through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information aboutOpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
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