APA Group, an ASX-listed operator of natural gas and electricity assets, is scoping what it’s calling version “3.0” of its enterprise content management, encompassing technical upgrades and an embrace of mobile and AI.

Enterprise content management specialist Jessica Redway told a recent OpenText summit in Sydney that the company’s main use for ECM technology is to manage engineering documents both for internal use and sharing with external parties.

The company uses both OpenText’s content server and extended ECM for engineering products.

“Our core focus is controlled engineering documentation, so I’m talking technical drawings, specifications, manuals, operating procedures,” Redway said.

“It’s anything that’s critical in operating and maintaining our assets.”

Revision control is a core capability that APA Group uses in the extended ECM for engineering product.

“One of our biggest challenges with engineering documents is making sure that our users are using the latest revisions necessary,” Redway said.

Accessing a document that does not include the most recent revisions could pose “a really serious safety risk”, given the complex infrastructure and scale that APA operates at.

“We also rely heavily on the transmittal module to share documents with our external parties,” Redway said.

“This is anything from sending specifications to our vendors to [sending] updated process flow diagrams to our regulators. 

“We need to know who received those documents, what they received and when they received them. It’s extremely critical for visibility from an auditing perspective.”

APA, which has about 2000 assets nationwide, surpassed 1 million controlled documents in its ECM about six months ago.

It first deployed OpenText at the end of 2018, and spent the following year onboarding users and getting them familiar with the system.

The company went to ECM 2.0 in the first week of 2023, which essentially saw it upgrade the user interface from ‘classic view’ to ‘smart view’.

“We created perspectives that were tailored to those users,” Redway said.

“We made it intuitive by putting the key information that they needed front and centre every time they entered the system.”

Redway said a key benefit of the switch was improved search.

“Our users would get frustrated with the amount of results when they’d run a search,” she said.

“Typically in our use case, our users want to search [for] an engineering document. They know the [document] number, they just want to put that number in and find it, [but] by default, the OpenText  search is going to give you every time that document is mentioned in another document.”

A ‘business workspace’ is also assigned to every project and asset, providing a single place to access all documents, as well as templates, standard folder structures and permissions, to ensure consistency across workspaces.

The big result of ECM 2.0 is takeup and usage, reflected by the number of documents now in the system, which has become a ‘single source of truth’ for engineering information, and in usage figures

Planning is underway for the next uplift, ECM 3.0, which will cover a number of areas including mobility and AI.

“Our users are obviously remote – we’ve got users all over the country and the goal there is to give them access to the documents that they need right from their phone and their tablet,” Redway said.

“That’s going to be a game-changer for efficiency and their response times.”

The company is also planning technical upgrades “to whatever the N-1 version is at the time” for its OpenText products.

Additionally, the potential to run AI across its document repository is shaping up as a key benefit.

“Sixty (60) years of content sits in OpenText,” Redway said.

“We’re really keen to have [AI capabilities] in our system. 

“It would be like one of our users saying, ‘Tell me which vendor has provided valves on this asset over its lifetime’. 

“Being able to find those results accurately would be a huge time-saver and it’s the exact [type of] innovation we want to bring to our users.”