How many of us spend hours of our day performing manual tasks, knowing that our time would be better spent elsewhere? Companies, grow and adapt throughout the life of any given development or project, which can have a significant impact on contractual agreements with contractors, vendors and 3^rd parties.  When company changes occur, the contract can remain stagnant, thus creating more manual effort tasks internally if external parties cannot adhere to new requirements.

In the beginning

Large companies are typically built through a series of projects. Those projects involve information generated by the company, their contractors and other third parties. All of this generates vast amounts of documentation and data, and over time, a company may deal with hundreds of thousands of paper and electronic documents contained within both unstructured and structured environments such as  development designs, contracts, specifications, drawings ,etc. Each document is accompanied by critical metadata which describes the what-where-when-how-why of the related material.

For example, when companies hire other companies to help them grow, a contract will often be created to outline the scope of work. The contract may include expectations, roles, schedules, procedures and specifications for ensuring alignment and mitigating risk, with that contract becoming the foundation for delivery.

The challenge

Complications arise when a growing company needs to make changes to documentation, related metadata or system requirements. When hundreds of thousands of documents are produced over time, this is where the manual effort comes in, if a company’s contractual change requirements cannot be accommodated. Hours may be spent manually locating, extracting, capturing and sharing information. While it may feel like time well spent, it’s also time spent away from other critical duties, which will have a long-term impact on resources and schedule.

Digitizing for long-term efficiencies

Luckily, advanced data wrangling technologies are freeing people’s time for more meaningful efforts. Structured and unstructured files and data can be evaluated with rapid automated metadata extraction from files using artificial intelligence, while protecting and retaining the integrity of data and files during significant change, thus allowing an organization’s valuable resources to focus on critical daily duties. Data wrangling software and processes need to be tailored to ensure that the accuracy, consistency and reliability of all files and data is uncompromised.

Once content is organized, a company can maintain a streamlined approach to a global taxonomy for managing their organization, as opposed to maintaining disparate and disconnected repositories of information. The advantages are clear:

• Document management systems can be populated with engineering and maintenance systems’ information.
• Critical data can be migrated from system to system or company to company.
• Newly-acquired data from another company can be identified, organized and interrogated.
• Identification of critical information from disparate locations while restricting unwarranted access.
• File deduplication ensuring that one true source file is identified and maintained.
• Automated audits of data sources can occur rapidly.

If future agreements, designs or other parameters in a business need to be changed at any point, it is efficient to do so using the company’s streamlined approach.

Alisdair Cook

Managing Consultant

Alisdair Cook is a Managing Consultant with over 18 years’ experience in Information Management in the Oil & Gas Industry. He has extensive expertise in Operations and Projects data requirements, taxonomy, cleanse and migration. Alisdair leads 91¿ì»îÁÖ’s Information Management consultants in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He also manages 91¿ì»îÁÖ’s large-scale IM program delivery.

Alisdair can be reached at: Alisdair.cook3@wipro.com