Challenges

Manage and maintain thousands of transportation assets
Ensure always-on access to mission-critical engineering, finance, and legal business documents
Reduce the cost and complexity of content management by eliminating document silos

This large transport company serves millions of customers every year. A spokesperson for the company said, “The coming decade will be extremely important for our business. We are on a modernization journey that will touch every part of the organization—including refreshing our infrastructure and redefining the customer experience for the modern era.”

To operate and enhance its operations, the company’s employees depend on reliable access to documents and data. In the past, the organization operated multiple different systems and processes for enterprise content management (ECM) across the business—but this approach created a number of challenges.

“Almost all our business functions rely on effective document version control,” the spokesperson continued. “Take our engineering department as an example. The engineers responsible for our transportation assets need to be certain they order the correct parts from our manufacturers and suppliers. If they use the wrong file by mistake, there’s a risk that we end up having to do very costly re-work.”

To solve the challenge, the company looked for a way to deliver a single source of truth for information across the organization. The company targeted an ECM platform that would make documents and data easily accessible to employees, while at the same time ensuring tight control over information security and data governance.

The bullet train speeds along the railway track

In our experience, OpenText delivers services of the highest grade. The team went out of their way to help us complete our cloud migration on time and within budget.

Spokesperson
Transport company

Solution

The company selected OpenText Documentum as its central ECM platform. Working with experts from OpenText Professional Services, the organization has configured the solution to act as a single source of truth for functions across the business.

Products deployed

OpenText™ Documentum™

Organize, preserve, and make information easily accessible while ensuring it adheres to all privacy and security protocols
OpenText™ Documentum™ SmartView

A flexible, intuitive UI to access and interact with content stored in the OpenText™ Documentum™ platform

Services provided

OpenText™ Professional Services

Engage flexible engagement models, end-to-end solution implementation services, and more than 1,000 product-certified consultants globally

Deploying a central document management solution

Initially, the company deployed Documentum to support the engineers responsible for equipping its fleet for safety and operational efficiency.

“Our engineering group has built up a large quantity of documents over the years, and keeping track of document versions was a tough challenge,” recalled the spokesperson. “With Documentum, our team uses automatic versioning to help manage their content—including text documents, computer-aided design files, and more.”

Based on its successful adoption of Documentum in the engineering group, the company expanded the solution to act as a central repository for all enterprise content. The company worked closely with OpenText Professional Services to roll out the solution. Today, multiple teams across the business use Documentum to support their day-to-day work.

“Documentum enables us to automatically apply retention policies for different types of records, which is extremely valuable for groups such as our legal and labor relations teams,” explained the spokesperson. “The OpenText solution helps us ensure compliance with strict legal requirements governing the retention and disposition of documents.”

Moving from an on-premises platform to the cloud

As part of its ongoing modernization journey, the company is embracing a cloud-first strategy. The company decided to move its Documentum environment to a containerized environment—enabling more efficient maintenance, improved security, and easier development.

“We set ourselves an aggressive six-month timeline to move our entire on-premises Documentum environment to the private cloud,” continued the spokesperson. “The first stage was to lift and shift our application to the cloud, and we then migrated from our traditional server deployment to a containerized infrastructure.”

Following another successful engagement with OpenText Professional Services, the company completed its migration. The spokesperson commented, “In our experience, OpenText delivers services of the highest grade. The team went out of their way to help us complete our cloud migration on time and within budget.”

Boosting employee productivity with an intuitive UI

At the same time as its cloud migration project, the transport company decided to seize the opportunity to move to the latest Documentum user experience: OpenText Documentum SmartView. An intuitive user interface, SmartView offers employees a customized view based on their roles and preferences.

“Many of our employees are digital natives, and SmartView delivers a user experience for Documentum that mirrors the speed and convenience of the social media sites they have grown up with,” said the spokesperson. “As well as helping our employees work more productively, we see SmartView as a valuable opportunity to reduce the amount of customization in our environment—making future upgrades much easier.”

With support from OpenText Professional Services, the company has fully modernized its Documentum environment. Running in the cloud and powered by SmartView, the company’s developers can leverage OpenText APIs to integrate Documentum with other enterprise applications, including SAP® and Salesforce™.

The person holding a cup of coffee while using a mobile phone

As well as helping our employees work more productively, we see SmartView as a valuable opportunity to reduce the amount of customization in our environment—making future upgrades much easier.

Spokesperson
Transport company

Results

The transport company has made Documentum integral to its content management strategy. Looking ahead, the organization plans to build on its investment in the OpenText solution to support its ongoing modernization journey.

Increased operational efficiency

By moving Documentum to containers on a secure private cloud platform, the company has gained the flexibility to elastically scale its environment based on the usage patterns of its employees.

“Typically, our users don’t require 24/7 access to Documentum, which means we can spool our cloud resources up and down based on the real-world needs of the business,” explained the spokesperson. “For example, we can reduce the number of nodes in use at certain times of day, and automatically spin up more nodes when RAM or CPU consumption rises above a set threshold. In the long term, running Documentum in the cloud will drive significant operational cost-savings.”

Delivered new ECM capabilities 90% faster

The cloud approach is also helping the company streamline the management and maintenance of Documentum. The company has developed zero-touch provisioning workflows backed by DevSecOps methodologies, enabling it to deploy newly released features from OpenText faster than ever.

“In the on-premises world, it used to take at least a year to upgrade our environment,” said the spokesperson. “With our cloud-native solution, we can upgrade Documentum in less than four weeks—helping us get new capabilities and security features to our users over 90% faster.”

The spokesperson added, “One area we are very interested in exploring is composable UIs. If our engineers are designing an asset, they shouldn't need to think about document management, because that’s not their core activity. We plan to embed content from Documentum into our other business applications, helping our people to work even more efficiently.”

Laid the foundation for AI innovation

As its modernization journey gains pace, the company aims to leverage AI technologies to support its business—and OpenText solutions will play an important role.

“Looking forward, AI is going to help us to do things better and faster, both for internal processes and customer-facing services,” concluded the spokesperson. “For example, AI-created functional tests, performance tests, and user interface tests could help us significantly improve the quality of our code for critical systems. We’re very interested in exploring how other solutions—such as OpenText ValueEdge for value-stream management—can assist us in these areas in the future.”