Success storyVitens

Industry• Energy and Utilities

Solution• OpenText Document Management
TMResults

OpenText Document Management—
one of the core systems at Vitens
Users assured of document version and storage locations,
two key challenges with former management systems

Proactive contract management
User-friendly retrievalof documents
Version management
Information sharing
Reduced storage costs
Integrations with critical
corporate systems
Quick and efficient document
management system“For the Vitens core systems, we apply strict company policies:
OpenText Document Management is the preferred ECM system.”
Chrisjan Van Niekerk

Project Manager
Vitens ICT

OpenText Document Management—one of the core systems at Vitens

Vitens is the youngest and largest water company in the Netherlands.
Contrary to common practice in the utility sector, Vitens is a publiccompany; this means the company shares indirectly belong to theprovinces and municipalities. The water market is not free, andtherefore the customer is not free to choose. According to Vitens,
this brings added responsibility to deliver good quality water at areasonable price.
To comply with this responsibility, the ability to manage unstructured
information via Enterprise Content Management (ECM) will play anincreasingly important role at Vitens in the coming years. The firstmajor step is the successful roll out of OpenText Document Management, which is now one of Vitens core systems. Each year, Vitens extracts,
purifies and distributes 330 million m3 of water for 5.4 million customers
in the provinces of Flevoland, Friesland, Gelderland, Utrecht, Overijssel
and a number of municipalities in Drenthe and Noord-Holland.
TMNeeds and demands

Before getting started with the implementation of OpenText’s EnterpriseContent Management, Vitens identified the most important bottlenecks
and focus points. The most common complaints among the Vitens
employees were “How do I know for sure this is the correct version of adocument?” and “Where exactly are the documents stored?”, so Vitens
management adopted the following ECM vision: Documents should
only be stored once and must be available to all authorized employees.
Version management guarantees only the most recent and approved
version of a document is available. Metadata and full-text indexing will beused to search and retrieve documents. Key is increasing ease-of-use
integration with Vitens corporate templates. Furthermore, records
management is essential to manage and secure the authenticity andretention period of documents.

Vitens metadata model“Vitens sees a crucial role within their ECM strategy for metadata—
data describing the characteristics of documents, such as author,
date of writing, subject and keywords,” said Chrisjan van Niekerk.
“By using metadata, all relevant documents can be found within theircontext, eliminating as many ‘false hits’ as possible. Besides, the useof metadata taxonomy is very suitable to structure digital files andsupports document archiving and document management. In orderto stimulate consistent use of metadata, Vitens developed anorganization-wide metadata model.”OpenText Document Management for Vitens

The OpenText ECM Suite is now one of Vitens core systems; the systemthey rely on for document management. More than 700 different
applications are running within Vitens and for all the key processes likeproduction, sales, distribution, general (communication, HR, purchasingand logistics), the organization has defined core systems. “For the Vitenscore systems we apply strict company policies: OpenText Document
Management is the preferred ECM system,” said van Niekerk.
“The major advantage of this policy is that the core applications havethe support of management, which creates a large support basewithin the organization.”
Vitens has quite deliberately chosen a phased approach. According to vanNiekerk, this approach works well because it provides the direct support ofthe employees. “Instead of making it an Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) project, it is important to involve the business departments and make them responsible as it concerns their problem. This

“We were able torealize cost savingson SAP data storageon our externally
hosted networkby implementing
OpenText Archiving®
for SAP Solutions.”
Chrisjan Van Niekerk

Project ManagerVitens ICT

OpenText Document Management—one of the core systems at Vitens

approach will give you the best chance of success. Standard for theVitens project approach is the creation of a business case (costs versus
revenues) to determine the urgency and economic feasibility. Once thebusiness case has been approved by the IT Governance Board of Vitens,
the project can start,” said van Niekerk.

Major benefits

Vitens uses several packages from the OpenText ECM Suite, including
OpenText Content Lifecycle Management and Contract Management.
“The Virtual Folders module is one of the powerful tools giving us theopportunity to make cross-sections through the content repository byusing metadata,” said van Niekerk. “This makes the organization very
flexible in sharing information with other departments. We were able
to realize cost savings on SAP data storage on our externally hosted
network by implementing OpenText Archiving for SAP® Solutions.
These storage costs had increased enormously over the past few
years because of the explosive growth of our SAP database. Additionally, the OpenText ECM Suite provides out-of-the-box interfaces
with other key corporate systems within Vitens, including Microsoft
SharePoint ®, SAP ®, AutoCAD® and Kofax scanning software.”
TMTo date, the first sub-project has been successfully rolled out at theDocumentary Information Facilities (DIV) department within Vitens.
Van Niekerk said, “The digitization project of incoming and outgoing
mail has been completed in time, as planned.” He explains thatwhen the physical mail arrives at the central mailroom in Lelystad, it isscanned and made accessible through a workflow by adding metadata.
“From this moment, mail can be opened by authorized users, whoreceive an alert through Outlook regardless of their workplacelocation. Training of the 1,500 full-time employees within Vitens
takes place through eLearning. The eLearning tool is sent as a link
and employees can decide whether they will use it or not.”In the second half of 2009, another project with an excellent businesscase will be launched: purchasing contracts management. “This projectwill focus on the proactive management of 400 purchasing contracts,with an annual contract value of 150 million euros,” said van Niekerk.
“It is not an isolated process; it is connected to the incoming mailprocess and eProcurement. We expect to achieve some important
process improvements, like consistent creation of supplier files forannual reviews. Timely reminders on contract endings and management reports about the deployment of staff will also be very valuable,
especially in the case of complex European contracts. Last but notleast, we expect to realize about 0.5 percent savings as a result ofproactive contract management, which means a one-year return on
the investment (ROI).”

Future projects

Other projects planned for 2009 are digitizing the reports of thesupplies department, unlocking documents on quality, labor healthissues and environment (called ‘KAM’ documents) and digitizing
employee files. ”Another major sub-project is handling the increasing
amount of customer emails with OpenText Document Management,”
said van Niekerk. “The challenges for 2010 are managing AutoCAD
drawings and licenses within OpenText Document Management.
As a result of the mergers, these licenses are very diverse and arestored across the entire organization. Furthermore, next year theVitens-wide deployment of OpenText Document Management will becompleted, which includes replacement of the network server andcomplete integration of ECM within the Vitens IT architecture.”

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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