Business challenge
Our partner’s client, a FTSE 100 company wanted to improve their contract management and felt that their existing EDMS was a constraining factor. Having made the decision to migrate their contractual assets from the legacy EDMS to SharePoint 365 they were delighted that their partner was able to offer them a service to achieve it.
The challenge was to move circa 70,000 legal contract documents and their associated meta data from a cloud based EDMS to Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint. The client wanted to use the opportunity in moving the files, to remove redundant, obsolete, and trivial files (ROT), enforce data retention policies and assess the quality of related file meta data. In turn they sought to enhance the meta data by harvesting insights from the documents through text extraction, OCR and meta data analytics afforded by the infoboss platform.
Our solution
The first step was to utilise the API for the EDMS to ingest meta data and files from the cloud EDMS into the infoboss platform. The EDMS API enabled us to extract not only standard file meta data, file size, name, path, created, modified, mime type etc but the actual file itself. We were also able to extract custom meta data that had been populated by the client over many years. In addition, we were able to extract the audit history for the files, when changed, opened, downloaded and so on. The package of data gathered for each file would help our client to fully understand the document history, use and relevance of the file and ultimately inform strategies to better manage them in the future.
The first pass enabled us to build a view of the meta data that helped the client assess the quality of it. i.e. to look for missing values, consistency and begin to assess accuracy. Insights that subsequently helped inform the design of the target SharePoint site.
Having derived both the standard and custom meta data we set about understanding the relevance of the data by identifying duplicates, retention issues and trivial files.
Client benefits
✓ Reduced risk of cloud migration
✓ Improved contract management
✓ High quality, enhanced contract meta data
✓ Search, discover and understand contract assets and commitments
✓ Improved supplier and customer contractual relationships
Armed with the insight the client was able to develop long term strategies to improve the quality of the meta data, enforce retention strategies and better manage their contract assets in the future.
Process scanned documents
Next, we were required to use the infoboss built in text extraction tools including OCR processing to expand the meta data held to include the actual text of the document. The client was just about to change their head office address and needed to identify parties to contracts that would need to be informed of the change of address. Using a combination of search rules, we were able to identify documents that met the target criteria and use to generate a list of potentially affected parties.
Migration
The next step was to utilise the Microsoft SharePoint migration tool to transfer the files and meta data to the target SharePoint site. Not only did we migrate the data, but we also used the infoboss platform to ingest the data that had been migrated to SharePoint enabling us to undertake a side-by-side comparison of the data between the two systems, ensuring that nothing had been missed.
Data quality degrades over time
One of the lessons learned from the exercise was how easy it is for document meta data quality to degrade. With data held over a long period of time and so many different participants to the process of managing the data, it is inevitable that without some degree of automated checking in place, meta data will degrade over time. However, for our client, this is no longer the case as they have decided to implement infoboss’ automated data management features to establish meta data quality monitoring rules and other rules around retention, new document creation to ensure that data and documents are not only stored and populated correctly from the beginning but maintained through every stage of their life cycle with full stakeholder exception alerting in place.
Summary
The client has been able to transfer their most precious contractual assets from a legacy EDMS onto a new system with fully automated monitoring of their document life-cycle processes and meta data quality. They now have confidence in the quality of the data they hold about their contracts but by enhancing the meta data and having the means of analysing their document assets they are also able to more efficiently manage their contracts along with supplier and customer contractual commitments and relationships.
Partner benefits
✓ Reduced sales cycle
✓ Reduced delivery costs (less para legal resources required)
✓ Competitive differentiator
✓ Broader solution proposition to offer their clients
– More to talk to their customers about
– Opens up more account opportunities with the client
✓ Improved referenceability and client stickiness
Discover how infoboss can unlock the huge potential of data management. Maximising its value and driving your business forward.
Sample data assessment.
infoboss can undertake a data assessment to determine the impact of data quality issues on your operations and revenue streams. Request a demo.
infoboss.co.uk/contact
T: 0333 772 1963
E: lduffield@infoboss.co.uk
L: www.linkedin.com/in/lee-a-duffield/
Meet Infoboss
Infoboss can transform businesses through the power of data.
This innovative, enterprise-wide software solution makes it simple to find, clean and enhance structured and unstructured data.
Right now, businesses have data across different sources. Not to mention outdated platforms, expensive storage, and unknown numbers of duplicate records.
Infoboss solves all these data issues, easily.
Ideal for organisations with large numbers of assets – from customer records to contracts – it takes away the clutter and confusion. All with a single, integrated data management platform. Streamlining decades of data and putting millions of files at your fingertips. Saving time and money. Making data work harder and smarter for business.
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