Transportation Leader Taps Canon for Document Remediation
Changing Existing Practices
A major rail service provider needed a partner that could help significantly reduce the time it took to search for and retrieve documents located in different repositories, content management systems and shared drives. The goal was to change the existing practice in which engineers filed information according to personal criteria rather than complying with an agreed-upon system. A key part of initiating a new approach would be to repair (or “remediate”) thousands of documents by ensuring they contained two metadata elements that would greatly improve searches: the drawing title and the drawing number (also known as the part number).
With Canon Business Process Services’ years of experience in information governance, including document management, document scanning and remediation services, this transportation leader believed that Canon had the right technology, people and programming skills to get the job done on time and on budget. Together, Canon and its client created a project plan that started with an analysis of the transportation company’s current system.
Creating A Future-ready Strategy
The team then created a detailed strategy for taking the current system to a desired future state—where 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 optical character recognition (OCR) 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.
Canon moved ahead with a full-scale program, accessing documents digitally, repairing them and uploading them back into the client’s system. This workflow comprised programmatic work done in Canon’s U.S.-based business processing center. Human review, which utilized Canon’s proprietary, cloud-based document review platform, CaseData®, was completed at the company’s 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 Canon’s 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.
Results
By project completion, over 700,000 documents were remediated. The company’s Engineering Design Department central repository is up-to-date and back on track.
This transportation leader was able to see measurable results.
- A document repository now serves as a central system of record for all engineering documents
- A much-improved user experience. Engineers now searching for documents and drawings can quickly receive an accurate, concise list of potential hits. Previously, this process required multiple searches across various repositories, often returning lists containing hundreds of potential hits.
- Faster data access. Before remediation, retrieving drawings and other documents that facilitate repair work on passenger cars could take several hours. After remediation, this process is often completed in minutes.
- Enhanced customer service. Because important engineering information can now be accessed efficiently, the overall turnaround time for performing maintenance tasks has been reduced. As a result, train cars are back on track and servicing customers much more quickly.
This significantly enhances operational efficiency and furthers the company’s goal of providing its customers with the highest quality service available.