EnergyAustralia gets switched on!

EnergyAustralia, the largest public electricity distribution utility in Australia, knew that choosing the right document management solution would be crucial to its business. Based in Sydney, EnergyAustralia (formerly Sydney Electricity) services 1.33 million customers, supplying more than 21,000 GWh of power every year. With additional responsibility to supply electricity to the Homebush 2000 Olympic complex, the continual safe and effective running of the electricity network is paramount.

To efficiently install and maintain its electrical assets, it is essential for their engineers to retrieve the relevant engineering drawings quickly. Any delays in this process can prove extremely costly. In addition, these drawings must be kept up to date and accurate at all times to ensure both public and employee safety.

Whilst EnergyAustralia already had a document index system with 35mm aperture cards of their engineering drawings, the limited search methods meant on occasions it could take hours to find the correct record. "The system prevented us from gaining quick access to the aperture cards." stated Lynton Jamieson, Acting General Manager, Network Supply at EnergyAustralia. "At times, when a drawing was retrieved, it did not reflect the latest design work made to the electricity network, incurring further delays in finding the correct version."

EnergyAustralia chose the Cimage Document Management Solution to securely manage, control, audit and distribute their key document set (initially 100,000 data records comprising of engineering drawings, both paper and AutoCAD originals, survey plans and related documentation).

"Engineers can now search intuitively from one library of documents using whatever information they have, and view them in seconds irrespective of their origin. Cimage's management of document revisions and annotations ensures our engineers are always working with the most up to date information, adding to the significant increases we have already seen in the quality of work and user productivity." expressed Jamieson.

Initially, over 200 users will have access to the Cimage Document Management Solution. This will increase as other information systems utilized by EnergyAustralia are linked. The first integration planned is with the Network Asset Management System (NAMS) and others are being considered as EnergyAustralia deploys SAP, Lotus Notes and SmallWorld GIS.

Future enhancements to the system include document checkin/checkout facilities as well as its planned expansion with the implementation of DM-Net to provide Intranet access. Jamieson added, "With this in place, we are looking forward to using the Cimage products to bring all the corporate IT systems together. This will allow us to create one securely managed pool of information, improving customer service even further."