Electronic Document Management for E.ON

Project

Like every large company, E.ON has a multi-layered IT infrastructure to handle business processes more efficiently whilst supporting functional areas in their tasks. However, their stringent IT requirements limit the access of external and project partners to internal systems. E.ON began a search for an optimised electronic document management solution for their communication processes, with guidelines that met their needs technically and securely.

Challenges

A large, ever-changing number of external project partners needed to be integrated easily and securely so that common infrastructure project work could be performed efficiently. The exchange of data and other information needed to be controlled and traceable between all internal and external partners, as well as providing an audit trail for clarification, release and inspection processes. The thinkproject platform also had to enable seamless project documentation that was accessible from every location.

Solutions

Project documents including specifications, certificates and drawings are managed with the help of thinkproject’s electronic document management. There is an E.ON-specific key for documents that are uploaded, and these can be used to determine the sub-project where a document belongs, who is responsible for it and what status it has.

Distribution rules are used to organise which plan or which document should be sent to whom for inspection. Every person responsible is assigned a task, and the result of the inspection is attached to the document or plan. This step may be carried out several times, and the final status is only achieved when a document has been released for construction.

Outcome

After a comprehensive appraisal, E.ON decided to implement a tailored software solution rather than adapting an already existing standard solution. The decision was influenced by the platform’s short commissioning phase; high flexibility; scalability within short timeframes; moderate costs, and above all the simple integration of external project partners. All while observing E.ON-specific security guidelines.

Client

Energy provider E.ON operates in over 30 countries, serving over 33-million customers. Based in Essen, since 2000 the company has gone from strength to strength with a series of mergers and acquisitions. E.ON operates in several energy areas including nuclear and renewable energy.