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Knowledge Management Questar Callon St. Mary Land Energy Company Evarts- Tremaine- Flicker Fidelity Exploration All Studies |
Case StudyQuestar EnergyDocVue Imaging and Electronic Document Management initiative improves document access and distribution.Business Challenge: Improve the distribution and retrieval of paper documents within Questar's head office and satellite offices around the country. Solution: Software - DocVue Electronic Document Management system, including Full Circle Systems' DocVue Document Manager repository and DocVue Imaging Hardware - Canon DR5020 scanner, Dell Pentium III server, Dell Pentium II scan station, Novell TCP/IP network Background Questar Corporation is a $2.2 billion integrated energy resources and services company based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Questar contracted Full Circle Systems to implement the DocVue Suite in their Land department as a pilot project to determine the logistics of implementing an Electronic Document Management system. In addition to well file documents, accounting, lease and legal documents have been included in the project to determine the feasibility of managing these documents electronically on an enterprise level. The goal of the pilot was to determine the efficiencies that can be gained in distributing documents electronically both within the head office in Salt Lake and to remote offices in other cities. "Before we implemented the DocVue system, we were photocopying and faxing entire Well files to several branch offices," says Stan Hauser, Questar's Manager of Information Services. "It was always a challenge to ensure that files were up to date and complete in each office. It took hours of staff time to maintain the files in each office and ensure the proper documents found their way to each office." Implementation In October 1999, Full Circle Systems began working with Questar to customize the DocVue Suite to their specifications. "The Full Circle team helped us understand the principles of Electronic Document Management and showed us how to apply those principles to our unique needs," says Hauser. "They took the time to understand our business as well as our documents, and helped us develop scanning, indexing and document security processes that are specific to our needs." Questar expects to scan a wide variety of documents, totaling up to 25,000 pages per month. At these scanning volumes, it is a challenge to apply index information to documents in an efficient and meaningful way. As different documents require different combinations of the 29 index fields chosen by Questar, bar-coded header sheets were used to identify the index information that applied to each document type. The header sheets are filled out by the person who generated the document, streamlining the scanning and indexing processes. This process is further streamlined by accessing data that has already been entered into a database. Up to 90% of the index information that applies to certain documents already exists in Questar's Excalibur accounting and data management system. This data is exported into an Access database and auto-populated into DocVue based on Well or Lease ID numbers. "It was important that we were able to use existing index data quickly and easily. Full Circle integrated DocVue into our existing infrastructure and we are very pleased with the accuracy and efficiency of the system," said Hauser. Appropriate Document Access Document security was also an important issue for Questar. Though the vast majority of documents are accessible to all users, there was a requirement to keep certain documents confidential. As with all documents, the confidential documents were assigned a unique header sheet prior to scanning. The bar codes on the header sheets are read by DocVue Imaging and routed from the scan station to the user responsible for that document. "Although this system is intended to provide access to documents for many users, there are certain documents that, by their very nature, are confidential," says Hauser. "Legal documents, some well information and a few other documents needed to be restricted to select users. The DocVue security model allowed us to do just this, with the flexibility to alter document access as required." By early December 1999, DocVue was operational at the Questar offices in Salt Lake City and Denver. The first step was to scan and index existing files. "The scanner was running almost non-stop in the first few weeks. Now that we've entered a critical mass of documents, more and more users are being brought on-line," says Hauser. "The system works well and has been well received by our users." Support and Modular Deployment The initial DocVue implementation is only the first step in Questar's Electronic Document Management initiative. As a pilot project, the impact of the system will be evaluated and the lessons learned will be applied to DocVue installations in other departments. As a modular system, DocVue will be scaled to include more departments, more users and more document types. "We plan to start publishing electronic documents right away. This seems to be a logical next step as this is functionality built-in to DocVue," says Hauser. "Following this, we are looking forward to scaling the system to include our accounting department, likely in the first half of 2000. We have learned a lot about Electronic Document Management in the past couple of months and are beginning to see the power of this system." Back To Case Studies |
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