Ensuring Compliant Data Retention & Contract Auditing Procedures for IPO with Adlib

OVERVIEW

An international energy company based in Houston, Texas, that owned and operated interests in multiple power generation assets as well as natural gas transportation and distribution businesses in emerging markets, including Asia, Central America and the Caribbean, and South America planned to grow its business.

After deciding to withdraw a planned public offering, the company embarked on a major restructuring and repositioning effort, selling-off the majority of its regulated assets and reorganizing the company around a smaller business focused on power generation.

CHALLENGE

In anticipation of the intense public and regulatory scrutiny of practices and procedures that a public company is normally subject to, the company had developed a records management strategy as part of preparations for its Initial Public Offering (IPO). The strategy, based on using Microsoft® SharePoint® as a central document repository, provides for a robust and reliable storage environment for important business records and defines policies and procedures for what documents need to be stored and for how long.

“Even though the IPO was ultimately withdrawn, we did not want to rule out the possibility that senior management might someday take the company public in its simpler and more focused form, so we decided to continue implementing the new records management strategy”, explains the company’s Director of Applications Development & Integration.

As part of the normal course of doing business every day, the company receives a large number of legal and accounting documents—typically related to legal agreements, billings and contracts with vendors. These arise from business transactions conducted throughout the firm’s operating companies worldwide. The documents are usually received as electronic files that arrive on the company’s MFP (Multi-Function Printer/fax/copier/scanner) devices.

The documents arriving via the MFPs are in PDF format suitable for storing in the SharePoint records management system; however, they are not automatically processed through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) by the MFPs to make the documents text-searchable. As a result, users are not able to fully access the content of these documents using SharePoint’s powerful search engine.

‘‘Our Legal department has documents that are upwards of 200 to 300 pages long, making it a very time-consuming and arduous process for someone to try to find something in them, so we recognized the need to have those documents electronically searchable,” says the Director.

Even though the MFP device vendors offer native scanning software for making PDF files searchable, the company found these to be quite expensive and difficult to configure. Another downside was that the software can only be used on document files that arrive via the MFP devices. This created a problem for the Legal department, for example, which already had a vast number of contracts, agreements and other critical documents stored in the company’s legacy document management system in PDF format that were not searchable.

“In addition to needing an OCR solution we could apply to incoming documents, we needed one that would allow us to bulk-OCR the thousands of existing documents residing in our old records management system that had been scanned in over the years in PDF and TIFF formats but were not searchable.”

SOLUTION

After looking at what products were available on the market that could possibly help the company with its document handling requirements, the Director and his team chose Adlib, a PDF transformation solution that provides the capability to transform image-based content into editable, searchable format, using OCR technology. Adlib also converts hundreds of file types into PDF format as well as into the ISO-standard PDF/A file format, a derivative of PDF that has established itself as the de facto document format for high-fidelity, long-term digital archiving.

“Some OCR products come as MFP solutions, while others come as PC desktop software; but in most cases, the user must initiate the OCR process. With Adlib, on the other hand, we could configure the OCR process to happen automatically as part of the process of receiving files.”
- Director of Applications Development & Integration

He explains their decision further by adding that because their MFP devices are able to move incoming files into a specified destination folder, they chose Adlib because of its ability to automatically monitor that folder, pick up files from it to be OCR’d and return the resulting files to another folder in the repository.

“I was aware of Adlib from the successful use of it at my previous company, where we licensed Adlib for about 250 servers,” says the Director, describing how that firm used Adlib to prepare PDF response files for the thousands of information requests—involving hundreds of thousands of pages—they received from the SEC, the Department of Labor, creditors and numerous other organizations and government agencies.

Adlib for Enterprises —A Big Step Forward

“There is no comparison in terms of usability and the interface is just so nice—it’s all visual and ‘drag & drop’, which makes the process of setting up PDF conversion and OCR processing rules a simple and concise experience,”
- Director of Applications Development & Integration

The administrative tool that comes as part of the Adlib platform was also a strong selling point for the Director and his team, who found that creating and setting up jobs was very efficient.

‘‘With Adlib, we felt we would be getting a really solid product that was scalable and at a reasonable price,”
- Director of Applications Development & Integration

According to the Director, setting up Adlib was a simple matter, including setting up the ‘watch folders’ and the SharePoint workflows, that only took about an hour and a half in conjunction with Adlib Professional Services.

“Once I went through the setup exercise once and saw how intuitive the interface is, I didn’t really need any further knowledge transfer from Adlib. One of the deciding factors in choosing Adlib was that it wasn’t just scanner/copier centric or SharePoint centric or file system centric, but rather it could interact easily with all three environments.”
- Director of Applications Development & Integration

RESULTS

Adlib is now being used by the company’s 50 users, mostly from Legal and Accounting, processing a few hundred documents per week. There is no concern about Adlib’s ability to handle the demand as throughput increases or as other departments decide they also need OCR and document processing capabilities. A document that gets put into the Adlib watch folder is processed and back in the system folder in only two or three seconds.

“Adlib is working great and we’ve never had any complaints from users about document fidelity or being able to find what they are searching for—even with my own tests, I’ve yet to have a case where I was unable to search for something in a document,” reports the Director.

“Our focus for now is on trying to do a lot more with fewer people, and Adlib is proving itself to be very helpful for this,”
- Director of Applications Development & Integration