Washington Group International Improves Productivity and Streamlines Business Processes with EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that Washington Group International is using the EMC Documentum enterprise content management (ECM) platform with Documentum eRoom® and the Documentum Process Suite to streamline business processes throughout its international enterprise. Leveraging the Documentum solution, the company has trimmed the process for approving project access from days to minutes while retaining rigorous information safety standards.

Washington Group International is a leading international engineering, construction, and management solutions company. Headquartered in Boise, Idaho, with more than $3 billion in annual revenue, the company has approximately 25,000 people at work around the world providing solutions in power, environmental management, defense, oil and gas processing, mining, industrial facilities, transportation, and water resources. At any given time, the company is working on more than 400 major engineering and construction projects. Facilitating collaboration among geographically dispersed employees, vendors, partners and clients can be a challenge because Washington Group must maintain tight control over who has access to detailed engineering information. Previously, reviewing and approving each new collaborator on a project was a manual process that took at least a day.

Washington Group has been using the Documentum ECM platform to manage more than 2 terabytes of vendor documentation, bid proposals, contracts, drawings, correspondence, procedures, specifications and other content related to engineering and construction projects. Recently, the company expanded its EMC solution by implementing Documentum eRoom Enterprise software to facilitate collaboration among thousands of employees, partners, vendors and clients working on bid proposals, marketing services and other non-engineering projects. eRoom has eliminated the significant expense and time delays associated with shipping documentation between parties.

Pedro Ortiz-Villajos, Senior Manager for Enterprise Content Management and Collaboration applications at Washington Group, said, “We initially implemented eRoom for one specific need, but it was so easy to use and facilitated collaboration so well that it quickly spread throughout the organization. Because eRoom provides easy, ’24x7’ access to shared information, it has become an indispensable tool.”

Collaboration improved at Washington Group, but new users still had to wait, sometimes days, before being granted access to projects in the Documentum repository. To increase efficiency, the company implemented EMC’s Documentum Business Process Manager software, a part of the Documentum Process Suite, to design an improved account activation process that enables faster activation of new collaborators. The tool helped automate activities and eliminate non-value-added steps that caused delays.

“Documentum software enabled us to standardize and automate the majority of the account request-through-activation process as well as ensure proper security clearances for new users,” said Ortiz-Villajos. “As a result, a cumbersome process that previously could take days now takes a few hours and sometimes just minutes.”

Additionally, Washington Group is using EMC Documentum Forms Builder (another tool from the Documentum Process Suite) to extract information from a web-based account request form and trigger process workflows. The new account activation process then validates information from the form against a back-end authentication directory and creates a new account request without IT help desk intervention. As part of the process, all affected parties are automatically notified of the request. Based on certain criteria Documentum automatically passes the form to reviewers who manually check the information for security risks. The Documentum system then routes the request to all appropriate parties for review and approval before activating the account or sending a denial notice to the requestor.

By reducing errors caused by manual input, eliminating the chance of misplacing paper documents, creating an audit trail and making the request authorization process consistent and repeatable, the Documentum solution has enabled tighter security while improving collaboration at Washington Group.

“Today’s business world demands that organizations strike a delicate balance between keeping information secure and providing easy access for individuals who need it,” said Balaji Yelamanchili, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Content Management & Archiving at EMC. “Washington Group International is another example of how organizations are benefiting from EMC Documentum solutions by streamlining business processes, facilitating collaboration and better leveraging their information, all while improving information security.”