[Case Study: Search Improvement]

Acquisition-Driven Information Chaos Tamed

The challenge: A company that grew rapidly through acquisitions at a rate faster than assimilation could be achieved. The acquisitions were of related companies in the same industry, but no investments were made to streamline processes, combine cultures, or share information management practices. Thus, when information about certain assets was needed, employees made a practice of purchasing (and repurchasing) that information from external sources, as they had no way to know if the information existed within their company and - if it did exist - how to find it. Based on some industry estimates, the purchase costs of this information alone (not to mention the time people spent trying to find information) was in the tens of millions of dollars annually.

Access Sciences was engaged by this client to help them organize, classify, de-duplicate, and repopulate their asset-oriented information. As such, this newly clean and classified unstructured content and structured data could be migrated into and referenced by the new ECM repository for search, retrieval, and active use. 

The outcome: The Access Sciences team achieved rapid results, and provided the client tangible benefits in the form of accurate search. They achieved this by designing appropriate classifications and assigning metadata appropriately, and by providing clean, de-duplicated content and data. By providing quick results on this project, this client was able to clearly demonstrate to management and business unit leaders how the ECM solution would drive business benefits further into the organization.