"I knew from some previous experience that Lotus Domino Document
Manager was a soid infrastructure, combining fast document searching
and retrieval capabilitites with easy administration," said
Kwan. "What struck me about eProjectDM
was how Wincas Tech had succeeded in building an application on
top of IBM's foundation technology that takes ease of use to the
next level."
eProjectDM is
an application, accessible through lBM Lotus Notes clients or
web browsers, that facilitates communication and collaboration,
document and project management, and business process management
in a flexible, highly secure environment. lt can manage standard
office documents, scanned images, emails, faxes, and computer-aided
design files. Optional features also include fully integrated
multilingual optical character recognition capabilities.
" Other systems we evaluated were very rigid and had a lot
of elements that were of no real use to us so we decided to work
with Wincas to tailor eProjectDM
to our specific requirements," said kwan.
Under a HK$600,000 contract from MBH Joint Venture, a team of
eight developers from Wincas spent two weeks at the T3 site office,
going though an iterative process of trial-runs, feedback and
enhancements - to customise eProjectDM
for deployment. Many of these customizations have subsequently
been adopted as mainstream elements of Wincas Tech's eProjectDM
offering.
The T3 Road Project document management system went live in August
2003 with more than 50staff using
eProjectDM on-site and additional end-users - located at Maunsell's
head office, at a pre-cast concrete fabrication site in Donghuan
and at the Territories Development Department - accessing the
system though secure Internet and leased line connections. The
system is powered by IBM eServer xSeries server and IBM ThinkCentre
PCs are used throughout the T3 Project site office.
Given the fact that about half the Maunsell team have not used
a document management system before, Kwan says user acceptance
has not been much of an issue.
"If you are used
to working with a PC then the system doesn't require much in the
way of training. We've done our best to model our normal workflows
and have provided a very intuitive user interface. So, for example,
we can drag and drop email stright into the doucment management
system and use email to circulate documents for review,"
he said.
"This has enabled us to turn what was previously
a serial process with paper documents being circulated to readers
over days and weeks into a parallel process where everybody gets
new documents for review as soon as they have been completed.
This certainly helps the project managment process and we've been
able to make considerable savings because people don't need to
go to the filling cabinets and photocopy sheaves of paper anymore."
"Of course, paper has not been eliminated - some of
the older engineers still like to print things out to read - and
we still sign documents rather than use digital signatures at
the monment. It is clear, however, that technology like IBM Domino
Document Manager and Wincas eProjectDM
can significantly improve on the way things get done during engineering
projects.
Kwan's faith in Wincas Tech's solution has been vindicated not
just by the stramlined processes it is enabling on the T3 Road
Project but also by wider IT industry recognition. In January
2004 eProjectDM was selected from among hundreds of nominated
solutions from 32 countries around the world as the winner in
the "Best Industry Solution" category at the 10th annual
Lotus Awards. |
