Leveraging the Power of Document Remediation: Part Two

This is my second post in which I am highlighting a client case history that demonstrates how document remediation is an important element of efficient records management. The story concerns a major passenger rail service provider that decided to streamline access to important engineering information stored in its relational database.

After creating a project plan, we began implementing our solution with an assessment of workflows and practices. Information management experts spent time analyzing processes at select client sites that included the drawing and engineering departments as well as the production shop floor. Based on our assessment, the Canon team created a report estimating how many documents were missing titles and drawing numbers.

The team then created a detailed strategy for taking the current system to a desired future state—where our client’s engineers could much more easily and quickly access the data they needed. The plan specified that implementing programmatic (i.e. software) data manipulation would not be sufficient; human document review would be required as well. The latter involves people examining documents and drawings that required metadata to be updated or entered if missing, and to review old drawings and images that OCR (optical character recognition) software could not read. An initial test of repairing 100,000 documents confirmed that both approaches were necessary and that the project could meet the goals set by the client and Canon teams.

We moved ahead with a full scale program, accessing documents digitally, repairing them and uploading them back into our client’s system. This workflow comprised programmatic work done in our U.S.-based business processing center. Human review, which utilized our proprietary, cloud-based document review platform, CaseData®, was completed at our offshore business processing center. CaseData enables information management teams to collaboratively process, search, review, and produce documents for purposes including remediation, legal discovery and more. Benefits of using our offshore facility include the capacity to review hundreds of documents daily, lower costs and greater efficiency due to the ability to leverage work across a different time zone.