Morgan Est Ltd
Morgan Est is the company responsible for the up-keep, maintenance and renewal of all the existing underground water and waste pipelines currently in use throughout the UK, they are also responsible for the design and implementation of any additional or new pipelines, which need to be laid
Clearly servicing and managing such a key area of the Uk’s vital infrastructure results in huge volumes of paperwork and technical information for Morgan Est generated both internally and created directly via correspondence with their customer base. Over time, a massive archived paper mountain had grown containing documents and drawings from across the companies various business responsibilities.
Traditionally, the Company had archived this paperwork in folders and stored it in large forty foot secured containers at their sites throughout the UK an expensive exercise that also resulted in a waste of valuable staffing resource. However due to the need for frequent retrieval of items from the archive for all area’s of the company especially in situations like off-site personnel for re-work or subsequent upgrade or modification notes to be applied, internal planning staff for the designing of newly required pipelines and security and compliance issues.
To overcome these problems, the Company decided to implement a modern electronic document management system based on the ‘Alchemy’ product suite. The system handles a growing number of critical documents and records that feed into the main operations of the company, such as Research & Development, maintenance, Compliance and Administration. The documents were scanned into a fully editable and searchable Alchemy database made compatible to Morgan Est’s own existing internal filing and indexing systems with various levels of personnel access security, resulting in an environment which now hosts and manages documents electronically for vital area’s throughout Morgan Est’s operational systems.
Original paper documents which did not need to be retained for legislative reasons were confidentially shredded and disposed of by TWD (UK) after Morgan Est had quality checked the scanned images and approved the paper documents destruction.
These electronic documents are accessed by Morgan Est staff from all relevant departments throughout the UK and they are now able to search for and retrieve documents in just a few seconds – a huge improvement over the delays previously suffered when requesting paper records. Paper costs have reduced accordingly as well since many documents no longer need to be photocopied or printed.
From a technology perspective, the Alchemy environment sits comfortably within the Company’s existing strategies for IT. The Alchemy repository and all the user interfaces to it reside on standard PCs, linked by the network. The scanned images are written to CD media, then stored on dedicated company hard drives with nightly backup.
One of the project advantages was that Alchemy was easy to role out and gave no performance issues to the existing network infrastructure as the images are compressed. Additionally, the system requires minimum housekeeping and has been found to be totally reliable.
