ElectraNet, an electricity transmission operator in South Australia, is setting up a central information management system and “single source of truth” built on OpenText.

The company had previously implemented OpenText but only in part of the business.

The software has since been “reconfigured” to run across the whole of ElectraNet and to “provide a better user experience” to encourage engagement with the system, information management lead Sharon Schumacher told a recent OpenText summit in Sydney.

Schumacher said that when she joined ElectraNet, “there was very little in the way of a framework [for] information management”.

“[We’ve] got decades of information that needed to be managed in some way [and be] centralised to provide a single source of truth,” she said.

“There were many disparate locations – not uncommon in information management in most companies. 

“It could be that [information] was stored in a server location, in a SharePoint or in personal OneDrives; these hold lots of different information that could be business critical.”

Schumacher said that OpenText is now being positioned as a “strategic enabler … ensuring that our data, documents and our information assets are managed effectively right across the business.”

The company is using the OpenText content management – also known as Extended ECM – platform with the enterprise connect desktop client and an integration with M365.

“The reason that we’ve put that in is it allows co-authoring on ‘single source of truth’ information that resides in OpenText and it allows different entry points for your entire company,” Schumacher said. “It’s a very powerful tool and it works seamlessly.”

Departments of ElectraNet are responsible for cleaning up and migrating their own information items into OpenText.

Migration activities started in May last year.

“We’re now nearing 800,000 items of migration and we’re not finished,” Schumacher said.

“Our journey is very young. We’ve probably got six-to-12 months left of this journey before the migration is complete.”

So far, the company has seen benefits including reduced administrative overhead and improved regulatory compliance.

“We are aligned with the SOCI Act; that’s a really big thing for us as an infrastructure company,” Schumacher said.

The company has plans to enhance the OpenText environment in the future.

“We’re just about to release OpenText mobile, [which] makes it easy for workflow approval for anybody that’s on the road and accessibility to field staff, meaning that they are always accessing the current information,” Schumacher said.

ElectraNet is also set to upgrade to version 24.4, and “investigate integrations with other business systems like SAP and SuccessFactors”.

The company is also looking to Aviator, which is the brand name of OpenText’s AI product.

“I’m not a very big AI user but the power that AI will give to our OpenText platform is enormous and so I’m really looking forward to the intelligence and governance that it’s going to give us,” Schumacher said.