KPN Reforms Design Review with eReview-FileNet

An eReview-FileNet Case Study

The Business challenge:

From concept to completion, every activity in a project demands very frequent interactions between the participating teams of workers. Having project teams scattered throughout the globe, effective day-to-day collaboration and communication between designers, developers, consultants, managers and other participating team members was the core requirement that KPN wanted to satisfy .Development and design review processes that are inevitably associated with any project lifecycle would naturally involve a host of project-related documents spanning a variety of file formats, ranging from AutoCad, MicroStation, Scanned Images, PDF, Excel Spreadsheets and a host of other file types. KPN needed a solution that would let members of different functional units of a project team, inspite of being dispersed physically, communicate and collaborate on projectrelated documents and records, redline them in course of the approval and review procedures and store and retrieve these markups later on with a history of the markup revisions.

The mission was to eliminate the time and cost constraints that would typically be associated in supporting design review and approval procedures through their distributed team structures. But at the same time, given the fact that more often than not, these documents had stringent access protection guidelines, quick and easy access to relevant documents had to be accomplished without overriding the need to ensure document sanctity.



The key challenges were:

The eReview-FileNet integrated solution transforms conventional, time-consuming and errorprone review and approval procedures, reforming design review into a fast, reliable and accurate process.

• Automated enterprise workflow achieves faster design document review and approval procedure.
  
• eReview’s rich set of APIs makes the integration easy and seamless and ensures platform independence. Documents from the FileNet P8 repository can be viewed and annotated in eReview.
  
• Being an intelligent viewer, Review allows users to view AutoCad and other design documents in their native format in a truly collaborative web-based environment. Retaining the original elements of the files (such as layers, blocks, xrefs in AutoCad, brighness, contrast etc. in scanned images), eReview allows design teams to view and annotate the native documents without the help of any originating application. Annotations get associated with the parent documents and can be saved back to the FileNet P8 repository for later retrieval.
  
• Being web-based and server-centric, eReview eliminates the need for installing any application at the client end; It allows users to view a host of file formats from one single intuitive interface in a collaborative environment. Dispersed teams can share the same set of documents and put in their review comments and annotations which can be applied as layers on the base documents and can be saved back to the repository for retrieval at a later time.
  
• Document security and sanctity are preserved completely, as in eReview sessions documents are streamed through the eReview server. Moreover, being typical viewer, eReview never edits the original documents.
  
  

The Bottomline ROI:

Deploying the integrated solution immediately paid dividends for KPN:

• The entire process of collaboration on designs and the subsequent approval procedure can now be executed at a much faster rate, thus saving time and cost immensely.
  
• The ECM environment being entirely platform-independent and enterprise-ready requires minimum overhead to maintain it.
  
• eReview being one single application to view print annotate and manage almost any file format greatly reduces the complexity and associated cost of installing and maintaining on every desktop the originating application that created each file.
  
• All the results of the collaborative sessions can be retained and protected, adding accountability to the procedures.