BRE to transform working practices through knowledge management

Potential key benefits for the construction industry at large

Beaconsfield, UK - 1999-09-23 - BRE, the UK s leading professional services and research centre for buildings, construction and fire, has chosen Livelink® from Open Text(NASDAQ:OTEX; TSE:OTC), to manage and exploit the knowledge that the organisation has accumulated. The implementation of such a knowledge management strategy could potentially serve as a future model for the construction industry.

A vast quantity of construction industry knowledge is held at BRE. This includes the current expertise of its 600 staff and the extraordinary wealth of knowledge accumulated over more than 75 years of construction research.

The effective management and development of this asset will clearly bring great benefit to BRE, but could also help to improve the performance of the industry as a whole.

BRE s chosen means for delivering this knowledge is the development of an interactive intranet system. The system brings information instantly to everyone who needs it documents, procedures, specifications and standards are all accessible through a single browser interface. Updating information is a simple matter of loading the new version onto the server.

Karim Esmail, Director of IS at BRE, reviewed various knowledge management applications before deciding to implement Livelink. "A key consideration in our selection of a knowledge management system was the need to be effective and easy to use from day one, as well as scaleable to grow with our requirements" says Esmail.

"Six months ago some of our employees didn t even know how to access the Internet, so we had a huge learning curve to overcome in a very short timescale," Esmail continued.

BRE s requirement for a knowledge management application was underlined by the following needs:

• Management of large amounts of information, currently stored in BRE s paper-based library and local repositories
• Reduction of time required to access relevant information for business development and technical delivery
• Improvement of internal communication between divisions and business centres of expertise
• Increase in project collaboration and delivery of broader expertise to the industry

Esmail continued: "BRE has a unique position within the industry as an independent and authoritative provider of expert knowledge. As a result of this, BRE has a responsibility to improve knowledge exchange within the industry and we propose to achieve this through extranets."

BRE is now considering how its knowledge management system can be widened to encompass the whole industry. It is looking to develop an extranet for shared knowledge exploitation and is planning a pilot study with wider industry involvement.

Jill Wilkin, Marketing Director, for Open Text comments: "Livelink will clearly help transform working practices at BRE and will be a major factor in the cultural change being implemented by the organisation. The selection of Livelink to form the basis of such changes demonstrates the confidence for this to succeed."

About Livelink

Livelink is a highly scaleable, collaborative knowledge management application for intranets and extranets. Livelink's richly-featured enterprise document management, virtual team collaboration, business process automation, enterprise group scheduling and information retrieval services are tightly integrated into an off-the-shelf application that is easily customised and extended to fill a broad range of information and knowledge management needs. Livelink servers are fully Web-based and open-architected to ensure very rapid deployment, requiring just a standard Web browser on users' desktops to access its full functionality. Livelink runs on Microsoft Windows NT®; and the leading UNIX platforms and supports most popular relational database management systems.

About Open Text

Open Text Corporation's software and services enable the world's largest companies to leverage the global reach and openness of intranets, truly "Putting the Web to Work" . Open Text has a world-wide installed base of 2.5 million users in 3,500 corporations. Open Text's dramatic growth has been fuelled by the rapid market acceptance of its innovative collaborative knowledge management system, Livelink. The company has been named the growth leader by the Delphi Group and the market share leader by International Data Corporation. Further information about the company, its products and services, and its partners and customers can be found at http://www.opentext.com.

For more information, please contact

Myriam McLoughlin
Account Manager
Grant Butler Coomber
(00 44) 0181 322 1922
myriamm@gbc.co.uk

Jill Wilkin
Marketing Director, Northern Europe
Open Text UK Ltd.
(00 44) 01494 679700
jwilkin@opentext.co.uk