World’s Largest Environmental Cleanup Site Uses Open Text Solution To Improve Records Management
The Hanford nuclear site is the world’s largest environmental cleanup project. Built in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project, the Hanford Site was a Cold War workhorse, producing nearly two-thirds of the plutonium used for national defense purposes from the 1940s to the 1980s. Fluor Hanford, an operating unit of the Fluor Corporation, is a prime contractor to the DOE at the Hanford site, located in southeastern Washington State.
Fluor Hanford uses its Open Text ECM solution to tackle a massive information management challenge. One such task is creating detailed correspondence that Fluor Hanford must generate and send to the DOE on all aspects of the project, averaging more than 2,000 letters and reports per year, plus supporting documents. There is also the challenge of managing the activities of 3,500 Fluor Hanford employees spread out across the 586-square-mile Hanford site in some 200 facilities. Overall, the Hanford project involves a workforce of 11,000 people and millions of pages of records, including emails and documents, as well as photos, videos and engineering drawings.
Records management and retention have become critical at Fluor Hanford. An important step has been to help preserve deteriorating engineering drawings from throughout Hanford’s 63-year history by moving them into Livelink ECM. Fluor Hanford also required a solution that could help the organization address government rules for managing correspondence and official records, including the Government Paperwork Elimination Act; the Electronic Records and Signatures and Global and National Commerce Act, known as the E-Signature Act; and the Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
“These days, the focus of document management at Fluor Hanford has shifted to the monumental task of keeping records,” said Benay Doolittle, an IT Consultant and Business Analyst at Fluor Hanford. “To address this task, we installed Livelink ECM — Records Management. Like many organizations, we have millions of records — e-mails, documents, and various media products. We’re working on an accelerated schedule to move legacy records into Livelink ECM.”
So far, Fluor Hanford has migrated more than 160,000 records from various systems across the Hanford site to Livelink ECM. According to Doolittle, the system will immediately help Fluor Hanford save on document storage costs. “We are currently paying storage fees for legacy paper records being kept at the Federal Records Center in Seattle. By using the records management capabilities in Livelink ECM, we can store documents electronically. That can save us thousands of dollars that would otherwise be spent on storing hard copies of documents.”
Automating Correspondence
Fluor Hanford’s ECM solution also eliminates a costly and time-consuming, paper-based correspondence process. The old system involved varying review and approval procedures, with no way to effectively control versions of documents or to capture comments. The Livelink ECM solution automates correspondence and offers features to help ensure security and document authenticity. The solution supports electronic signatures, provides the ability for proxy signers and offers “watermarks” to ensure the signature is only used for that document.
The solution also helps manage vital work and certification documents attached to correspondence. The Environmental Protection organization in Fluor Hanford must have multiple signatures on certification attachments. “We had various certifications that had to be signed by several different companies and regulatory organizations. We scan the attachments with the signatures and enter the correspondence package into Livelink ECM as a PDF file, so nothing can be changed on it,” Doolittle explained.
The automated workflow for correspondence and electronic signatures is leading to greater transparency and accountability, as well. “We can generate a workflow status report for each correspondence package, so Fluor employees can check workflow status reports and see whether a correspondence package has been sitting at ‘Jane Doe’s’ desk for three hours,” says Doolittle.
Accessing project information is also made easier with the new solution, according to Doolittle. “You can put everything you need for a project in one place. That can include documentation such as a project schedule, a contract, risk information, or a ‘scope-of-work.’ It also gives people access to all of the documents for that project. In the past, there were occasions when employees would use multiple shared drives for the same project, and it was harder to find information.”
Doolittle points out that Fluor Hanford is dealing with many types of “controlled-use” information, including unclassified-nuclear information and applied-technology documentation. “In our records area, we have several folders set up for information that is sensitive from a legal, regulatory, or security standpoint. We can now limit access to those folders to ‘need to know’ personnel.”
One of the strengths of Livelink ECM is document version-control. “Within our Integrated Document Management System (IDMS), our records area receives final correspondence packages. The package includes a list of all attachments for each letter, as well as a record showing who reviewed the correspondence package,” says Doolittle. “Before it goes into the records area, we remove older versions of the correspondence package. For auditing purposes, we archive older versions of the package separately.”
