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Customer stories

Industry customer storyNatural gas company

An operator of critical infrastructure with over 2 million customers protects documents and smooths process flows with OpenText Content Management

Industry customer story

About the natural gas company

This American utility distributes natural gas to over two million customers in the southern United States.
A person inspecting a natural gas facility
  • Customer base:
    Over two million
  • Founded:
    1930s

Summary

Challenges

  • Must manage critical infrastructure and documentation.
  • Paper records hindered work efficiency.
  • Internal systems needed better integration.
  • Regulatory and cybersecurity standards need to be met.

Solution

  • Put information at users’ fingertips.
  • Hit the ground running with scanning services.
  • Prepared for personalized, AI-driven customer services.

Results

  • Protected critical information
  • Accelerated access to documents
  • Ensured safe operations over time

Challenges

  • The company needs to manage complex critical infrastructure and associated documentation
  • Paper documents delayed field technicians, raised administrative complexity, increased costs, and hindered innovation
  • Internal systems needed smoother integration to reduce administrative friction and free up workers to focus on their core competencies
  • Regulatory demands and cybersecurity standards need to always be met

Providing natural gas to millions of customers in the southern United States, this natural gas company focuses on maximizing the safety, reliability, and affordability of its services while minimizing its environmental footprint.

As the operator of a large and complex network of critical infrastructure—both above and below ground—the company must maintain detailed records of its assets. This “as-built” documentation includes technical drawings, plots, and maps, enabling field technicians to locate and service physical assets.

The natural gas company wanted to improve protection for these and other important documents while making them easily available to the relevant employees. In the case of as-built documentation, reliance on paper delayed the response of field technicians and raised administrative complexity. Similarly, the company’s use of paper elsewhere in the business, including in customer communications, increased costs and hindered innovation.

The chief information officer at the natural gas company said, “We want to empower our users through technology to do their jobs better and more safely. By getting information off paper and making it readily available on any kind of device, we can put it at our users’ fingertips and help ensure safe, efficient, and impactful operations. We’re also moving to support personalized ways of interacting with the next generation of customers.”

In addition to moving from paper-based to digital documentation and workflows, the natural gas company aimed to enable smoother integration between internal systems. The goal was to reduce administrative friction and free employees to focus fully on their core competency.

The company looked for an advanced enterprise content management solution capable of supporting its demanding requirements for cybersecurity and regulatory compliance. “What keeps me up at night is cybersecurity,” said the CIO. “We get two million hits per day, and we have to be right all the time; the bad guys only have to be right once. We also need to stay in line with regulations at both the federal and the state level.”

A picture of a gas stove

With the OpenText solution in place, our employees can now focus on their core competency and not waste hours searching for documents.

Chief Information Officer
Natural gas company

Solution

Working with OpenText™ Professional Services, the natural gas company deployed OpenText™ Content Management—enterprise content management software that securely governs the information lifecycle and seamlessly integrates with key applications.

Products deployed

Services provided

Putting information at users’ fingertips

Adopting OpenText Content Management has given the natural gas company a robust platform for managing documents of all kinds with speed and efficiency. With pre-built connections to the company’s SAP business systems and SAP SuccessFactors applications, OpenText Content Management enables the natural gas company to surface relevant information to employees whenever and wherever it’s needed for enhanced decision-making and operational effectiveness.

“As we implement financial and supply chain modules within SAP, we are leveraging OpenText as a solution extension,” said the CIO. “We also plan to use OpenText Document Presentment for SAP Solutions to handle customer billing. That is currently outsourced; bringing it back in-house will reduce our costs significantly.”

Hitting the ground running with scanning services

The natural gas company engaged OpenText Document Capture Services to digitally scan existing paper records from its HR and management board teams. The OpenText team used high-speed production scanners and OpenText technology in a secure, state-of-the-art facility.

“Those records are now fully accessible in a well-managed digital store,” said the CIO. “Both our HR department and our Board are very happy with the solution, and the whole process, while working with OpenText Professional Services, ran very smoothly. Being able to leverage in-house expertise from OpenText really helped the process go faster.”

The natural gas company will extend the use of OpenText Content Management to other departments, from legal to engineering. As their documentation is digitized and brought into the solution, there will be further opportunities to connect processes and information across systems, increasing speed and efficiency.

Preparing for personalization with AI

In addition to digitizing existing paper documents, the natural gas company is hard at work on data quality. The company plans to use AI technology—including the embedded AI in OpenText Content Management—to enhance operations, realizing the quality of output depends heavily on the quality of data input.

“For example, if we can leverage AI in the call center, then we can see why a customer is calling before we talk to them,” said the CIO. “If they're calling because of an unexpectedly high bill, we can assign them to a rep who specializes in that topic. AI can help us address customer concerns and make sure that we're exceeding their expectations.”

Two people preparing a meal on the stove

OpenText Professional Services was top-notch, and OpenText has met or exceeded our expectations from an uptime and a cybersecurity standpoint.

Chief Information Officer
Natural gas company

Results

By digitizing documents and workflows with OpenText Content Management, the natural gas company is improving the protection of critical information, saving time and effort in administration, reducing its carbon footprint, and enhancing customer service.

Protected critical information

The natural gas company has experienced the risk of relying on paper records: one of its storage facilities was damaged by a tornado, leaving boxes of paper strewn across the road outside.

“The OpenText solution has paid for itself ten times over just for that peace of mind,” said the CIO. “It’s hard to put a price tag on the tornado damage, but certainly there were documents lost forever. That was immensely problematic because we’re required to keep records on the assets we have in the ground. Fortunately, HR and board documents had already been scanned, so they avoided that catastrophe.”

Accelerated access to documents

Prior to the adoption of OpenText Content Management, accessing archived documents at the natural gas company was slow, laborious, and inefficient. An employee would fill out a processing form for the company’s content management office, and the office would call the storage facility to access the document box, then hand-deliver the paper record.

“From a resiliency and a latency standpoint, the old process was problematic,” said the CIO. “Today, users can just open up OpenText Content Management, search for documents based on their metadata, and get the information they’re seeking almost in real time. With the OpenText solution in place, our employees can now focus on their core competency and not waste hours searching for documents."

Sustainability is an important topic for the company as a gas utility company. The company is moving most of its applications—including OpenText Content Management—to the AWS cloud, which will reduce carbon emissions compared with the existing data centers.

“The second sustainability point is that digitizing our documents will remove the need to print, store, and manage paper documents,” said the CIO. “We’ve also moved more than one million customers to paperless billing.”

Ensured safe operations over time

The physical assets described in as-built documentation can be as many as 50 years old. For underground assets, significant changes could have happened at street level in the intervening years, making it vital for engineers to have clear information about the location and status of assets.

“With direct access in the field to documents managed in OpenText, we can ensure that our field technicians have the information they need for safe and efficient maintenance,” said the CIO. “One of the things we find so positive about the OpenText solution is the ability to access information across all of our devices.”

The company is digitizing all operational and training manuals to store in OpenText Content Management so that they are readily available for employees. This will also help ensure that manuals are updated and approved throughout a managed lifecycle.

“Our experience with OpenText has been outstanding,” concluded the CIO. “OpenText Professional Services was top-notch, and OpenText has met or exceeded our expectations from an uptime and a cybersecurity standpoint.”

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