reduce risk and enhance corporate accountability with ...€¦ · ecm suite): • opentext records...

S U C C E S S S T O R Y

E N T E R P R I S E I N F O R M A T I O N M A N A G E M E N T

ONE OF THE LARGEST INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS IN CANADA

INDUSTRY

Pension Fund

CUSTOMER

One of the largest institutional investors in Canada

CHALLENGES

• Protect and control program data

• Require audit trail and version control throughout life of document

• Large volumes of paper documents taking up storage space

SOLUTIONS

OpenText™ Content Suite Platform (formerly ECM Suite):

• OpenText Records Management

• OpenText Document Management

• OpenText Internal Controls

BENEFITS

• Content secured and centrally managed throughout its lifecycle

• Easy access to information, improving efficiencies

• Consistency of information; version controls

• Better overall understanding of the business and its operations

Reduce Risk and Enhance Corporate Accountability with OpenText

™

Content Suite PlatformLeading Canadian pension fund automates business processes, improves information management, and manages internal controls processes

With a commitment to sound governance, maintaining strong partnerships, and continued growth, the pension fund looked to technology to help streamline its critical business processes.

Regulatory, privacy, and compliance matters provided new challenges from an adminis-tration standpoint and posed new requirements on the environment within which it needs to operate. When the organization began looking for an electronic records management solution, it had several issues that needed to be resolved. Electronic documents were saved on hard drives or file servers with no corporate-wide structure or methodology for managing information. Some inactive paper files were stored offsite and not as readily accessible as the onsite files. Effective version control was a challenge. Essentially, the organization wanted to improve how it created, managed, shared, stored, and communicated information.

Improved access to business recordsIn order to get better control over information, the pension fund invested in OpenText Records Management following a formal RFP and evaluation process. The system has helped the organization to automate key processes, ensure records are easily accessed and retrieved and kept as long as legally required, and significantly reduce the amount of time employees spend on document-related activities, which has improved efficiencies.

“We needed to put some type of records management structure on content, and we couldn’t do that in Windows. We found that OpenText offered the strongest records management capabilities. We liked the different facets that we could employ, like matching

With billions in investment assets, this leading Canadian pension fund is one of the largest institutional investors in Canada, providing pension services to several hundred thousand members. It manages a diversified global portfolio of stocks and bonds as well as real estate, infrastructure, and private equity investments.


S U C C E S S S T O R YONE OF THE LARGEST INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS IN CANADA

physical objects, electronic objects, and the creation of labels. It really is an all-encompassing solution,” says the director of corporate applications.

However, it wasn’t until the pension fund started focusing on specific areas of business that records management really started to take hold with its employees. As their implementation expe-rience matured, the company realized that it needed to change its strategy from asking staff to save their documents into the OpenText repository with a records management classification to taking a business function approach.

“We asked the business groups, ‘What are your documentation challenges? How can we support you?’ Records management was a consideration for every project,” he states. “The lesson learned was that mandating something and bringing it in simply from a compliance perspective does not always work. You need to address it from the perspective of what business challenges do you have and how can you incorporate the records management initiative into solving those business challenges.”

Adding imaging of records to the mix was also key to moving content management forward. “We have been able to take a paper process and make it electronic and central rather than ‘walking paper around.’ We have boxes and boxes of pension documents dating back to the 1960s that have been stored offsite for years. To ensure the integrity and readability of those records, we purchased Kofax Capture® and took on an initiative to scan the documents into the OpenText repository, adding records management classification and tagging it for disposition.

”Key pension-related paper documents, including some of the older records, are now being scanned into the system. Because of this initiative, the imaged records will be the official record, and we will be able to dispose of 8,000 to 10,000 boxes of paper,” the director says.

To the end users, the benefits of the electronic records manage-ment system are easy to recognize. “They used to have to contact Office Services, ask them to find a file, have them track it down, go to offsite storage, pull the box off the shelf, have it delivered back to the building, and sort through the box to find the file. This could be a 24- to 48-hour period,” he said. “Now, with OpenText Records Management, when a member calls and says, ‘I have this file outstanding.’ They sign into the system, type in the member information, and see a list of documents that are associated with

“We found that OpenText offered the strongest records management capabilities. We liked the different facets that we could employ like matching physical objects, electronic objects, and the creation of labels. It really is an all-encompassing solution.”DIRECTOR OF CORPORATE APPLICATIONS

that member, click on the file, and the image pops up on the screen in a matter of seconds.”

He adds, “Once we started scanning in the paper files, everyone agreed that a file server was not the answer because the docu-ments would be difficult to find without a convenient search engine. That’s when Records Management really took hold. We created repositories for business groups, set up search slices to look for the information, and attached additional metadata to make it easier to find these documents. The imaging and scanning project is growing like wildfire. We are focused on one area of the business today, but we know that other areas of business are chomping at the bit, knowing that this functionality exists.”

Classification and retention schedules meet disposition needs The pension fund’s records information management program has become the guiding principle for managing information in the background. “The folder structure is based on whatever suits the business best. We have taken the classification scheme and in the background those folders are mapped to the proper retention schedule and records management metadata. The end user can no longer make arbitrary decisions about the retention of records. The user knows that when I put this document here there’s a records policy applied to it. They just need to make sure they put it in the correct folder based on their business function. We take care of the rest,” he explains.

OpenText Records Management maps the folder hierarchy to the appropriate record classification and retention schedules, which fully automate the process of ensuring records are kept as long as legally required and destroyed when that time elapses. When a retention schedule dictates, final decisions can be made to destroy the document, retain it for a period of time, or keep it indefinitely. ”We know that when we’ve cataloged something in Records Management for destruction, when the time comes, the disposition report shoots up and is ready to be signed off, and the documents can be destroyed,” he states. ”Executing such a large undertaking as destruction is simplified because it is tracked by the OpenText system.”

OpenText Records Management ensures that any document on legal hold (i.e., records held beyond the prescribed retention period that are responsive to a subpoena, investigation, or litigation) will



“We have been able to take a paper process and make it electronic and central rather than

‘walking paper around.”DIRECTOR OF CORPORATE APPLICATIONS

not come up for destruction. “We just need to enter the right crite-ria; Records Management pulls all the records across the system and applies the legal hold. Nothing can happen to those records during that time frame unless the user has a records management privilege or above,” he explains. “Whereas when it was a paper situation, people needed to pull boxes one at a time and decide: is this relevant; is that relevant?”

OpenText Records Management tracks a full history of all actions that have taken place on objects, so if they ever need to go back and take a look, the system will tell them when it was destroyed with all other supporting data, such as who authorized the destruction and based on what schedule.

Availability of information is the greatest benefit to their end users. “They do not have to ask the question, ‘Where do I find this?’ If someone needs a pension document, they know where to find it. If they can’t find it in the OpenText repository it means the document has been destroyed, and there is a note to indicate that. We leave a stub in the system that reads, ‘This document has been destroyed due to enforcement of regular records management policies.’”

To date, over 3 million documents are stored in the OpenText repository. There are 250 users of Records Management, which includes the team that manages the pension documents. “We have a streamlined process. Information stored in Records Management is at our fingertips. We are more efficient as an organization,” he says. “We’ve gotten to the point that when documents come into the building they are scanned right at the mailroom level. And then, once it’s been validated by our users,

the paper version is destroyed after an appropriate period of time. The image becomes the record. There is still more work to be done with some of our business groups because not all records are stored in Records Management, but we are well on our way. Our goal is to use the OpenText system as the only repository for information.”

Building on the foundation with OpenText Internal Controls The pension fund understood that deploying an automated quality process would mitigate financial risk and help create an environment of accountability, while also increasing the organi-zation’s overall effectiveness. For the Information Technology (IT) department this meant documenting IT processes and controls surrounding its financial systems.

“Maintaining all of the documentation related to internal controls and managing the certification processes externally and manually would be an arduous undertaking,” the director says. “Our main objective was making sure that there was consistency of informa-tion, version controls, and so on. We knew that doing this with some type of internal process, such as Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and an Access database or however people choose to do it, was not going to be acceptable. We just weren’t going to get the type of formality that we needed. So IT decided to look at external software packages that would allow us to do that type of maintenance on the process.”

The pension fund purchased the OpenText Internal Controls module. Since it already had an investment with OpenText, the company realized that it made the best business sense to lever-age its existing platform for internal controls. The director explains,

“Our main methodology, at least from an IT perspective is, if we can leverage existing technologies we do, unless it truly doesn’t fit the business need. There was no reason to look at other tools. We have trained people to maintain the environment. We have the technical expertise. We have our support. We have our relationship.”

In addition to managing the documentation associated with a control, there were also processes that needed to be automat-ed. “So in addition to taking care of the document management and content management component of it, we also needed to manage the workflow aspect of the process,” he says.

OpenText Internal Controls helps companies track and store the necessary evidence to show that their policies, procedures, and processes are being followed and that real business risks are truly being mitigated by the company’s defined internal controls. It is based on the framework developed by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO). The COSO Internal Controls Framework is the industry standard for improving the quality of financial reporting through business ethics and effective internal controls. Corporations that fulfill its conditions will be SOX and Bill C-198 compliant.

The OpenText Internal Controls module is currently utilized by approximately 50 employees at the pension fund in opera-tions and financial accounting. It provides a centralized control repository to improve the efficiency of processes and provides enhanced reporting capabilities for management on the state of their controls.

www.opentext.com • [email protected] • 800 499 6544Copyright ©2013-2014 Open Text Corporation OpenText is a trademark or registered trademark of Open Text SA and/or Open Text ULC. The list of trademarks is not exhaustive of other trademarks, registered trademarks, product names, company names, brands and service names mentioned herein are property of Open Text SA or other respective owners. All rights reserved. For more information, visit:http://www.opentext.com/2/global/site-copyright.html


“We have a streamlined process. Information stored in Records Management is at our fingertips. We are more efficient as an organization.”DIRECTOR OF CORPORATE APPLICATIONS

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“Essentially anyone who has a process that needs to be certified has an account on Internal Controls. We have operations, other IT areas, and some pension areas. They all have a certification process,” he explains. Throughout the process, all documents relating to internal controls, such as account policies and processes, are stored in a centralized repository. Internal Controls provides full version control, audit history, metadata management, and more, and connects all activities with an integrated workflow to automate and accelerate assignments, testing, and sign off.

User acceptance comes with user comfort Resistance to change was one of the biggest hurdles the corporate applications director had to overcome when he introduced OpenText Records Management to the company In order to address this challenge he has created a user-friend-ly web page for projects with the web page mapped to the

“Projects” module in OpenText Document Management where all project documentation is stored and managed.

“To avoid the growing pains of going into a new interface, we’ve created an external web page that calls the Document Management repository. So even though we store everything in Document Management—the tasks, milestones, project documentation, news, discussion groups—we actually present that information in a very project-oriented way, with the project logo, etc., on the web page,” he explains. “There are several benefits to this strategy. First of all, content can be stored and managed through OpenText Document Management and have all the records management principles associated with it. At the same time, the end user doesn’t know that the information is

stored there. Instead, they have a customized, user-friendly page to work with to view the information. We can say to the execs, ‘Do you want the latest version of the business requirements document for the Accounts Payable process? No problem. Go to the website. Go to Documentation. Pick the business process. There’s your document.’”

Previously, people had to log into the network and then sign on separately to the OpenText system. Now, there is a single sign-on. “That way, as long as you’re logged into the network, we’ll validate your account for OpenText, and the web page will open and broadcast all of your information to you, using Document Management as the back end.”

He adds, “I recommend, when introducing a new technology, to make it a fun experience for the end user. For this project, we gave out buttons to the users with the new project logo on them to drive them to the website.”

As far as lessons learned, the corporate applications director says you won’t succeed unless you have senior management approval and buy-in. “It’s really tough for people to say, ‘I don’t like this,’ if the manager says, ‘Well, I love it.’ If you can get their buy-in before you launch the product, it makes your job a lot easier.”

He concludes, “Our biggest success with OpenText Records Management and OpenText Internal Controls at this point has been the fact that we had a need and a requirement. So ultimately when we were able to fill that gap, get the manager buy-in, make it fun, and so on, we tended to have a little more success with user acceptance.”

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