Background

"The Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation" (EGPC) is the first economic corporation established & having a legal personality in Egypt according to the Law no. 135 of 1956 under the name of "The General Corporation of Petroleum Affairs" and subjoined to the Ministry of Industry.

Working as a holding corporation, EGPC owns 12 public sector companies and is sharing in 58-petroleum companies with foreign partners. EGPC and its companies are sharing in 39 companies with a total paid capital of $938 million and 2.6 billion Egyptian pounds.

The EGPC provides a wide set of services including: Petroleum agreements, Exploration, Crude oil & Natural Gases Production, Refining & Processing, Local consumption, Petroleum Projects, Petroleum & Environment, and Training & Manpower.

The Challenge

As one of the leading corporations in the Oil & Gas sector, EGPC is always looking forward to embracing the latest technologies and investing in its infrastructure in order to maintain its leadership in the marketplace. EGPC sought after finding a solution that supports and structures the ongoing growth of the information interchange either internally or externally in form of letters, memos, faxes, contacts, … etc.; as well as planning for better customer service procedure that ensures reaching high levels of customer satisfaction by providing an automated procedure for CDs production of the requested data.

The solution has to provide a smart way to store, retrieve and process information between EGPC’s different departments, while maintaining a centralized system that ensures the unification of data and applying high security measures for information interchange. Additionally, the system has to support the internal processes automation such as: Agreement Preparation, Vacations Requests, Medical Requests, Purchasing Orders…etc., in order to reach EGPC’s goal of having a paperless work environment. Moreover, the chosen solution also had to provide a point of integration with the previously used system in a transparent manner without any loss of existing data.

The Solution

During the search for the most suitable solution, EGPC found that ASSET’s Enterprise Content Management Solution – “Jupiter” would represent the perfect match for its needs. ASSET team prepared a general study based on the customer needs and offered its Content Management & Business Process Automation Solutions to handle EGPC’s continually increasing volume of information which comes in all different kinds of formats and put them to work together, through ONE unified, integrated system.

ASSET recommended a solution based on Jupiter Enterprise Suite including:

• Documents & Records Management for handling and centralizing the capturing, organization and retrieval of all EGPC’s documents as well as planning for each document’s lifecycle within the system
• Business Process Automation of the internal workflow including:
  • Agreements Preparation Process: ensuring ease of the agreement issuing process and providing predefined revisions and approval procedures. All procedures are secured, monitored and audited by the Agreements Department to insure the quality of the issued agreements
  • Vacation Request Process: used to store all the vacation requests and provide the Managerial Affairs Department staff access to employees’ history vacation and balance updates
  • Purchasing Process: responsible for the automation of the purchasing process in the Planning and Projects Department, starting from the issuing of the Purchase Order until its closure
  • Medical Requests Process: used to store the medical request and speed up the medical request cycle with an access to the employee’ s medical history for further reference
• Office Integration helping users to be more productive by storing and retrieving documents directly from within MS Office interface
• ­Fax Integration resulting in cost and time reductions by activating the immediate archiving of the faxes into the system that integrates with the internal correspondence system
• ­CD Production allowing users with appropriate grants to produce Media CDs based on selection criteria or query results with a possibility to copy the folders and documents’ meta-data and indexing information as well. The CDs can be viewed offline using Jupiter’s offline viewer without the need to connect to Jupiter Server
• ­Full Text Retrieval that locates the documents, not simply by their keywords, but by the text that is contained in them and generate reports to support the decision making and research activities

The implemented solution was smoothly delivered to EGPC after covering all the requirements and needs, and was successfully implemented in the flowing departments:

• Agreements & explorations Department
• Monitoring Department
• Planning Department
• Finance and Economic Affairs Department
• Managerial Affairs Department

The Results

With the successful system implementation, EGPC different departments are currently using the system and rely on it for their day-to-day work activities.

“I can proudly say that one of the major achievements regarding the delivered project is that EGPC Staff started dealing with the designed workflow systems and are currently using those processes heavily. This positive feedback is just the first step required to reaching a paperless environment objective, and if the users continued on this pace, this objective could be easily achieved in the upcoming few years” Manal Al Seesi, Projects & Technical Support Manager – ASSET Technology Group

The system helped to effectively facilitate and expedite the daily operations resulting in:

• Reduction of the operational costs of photocopying and distributing documents internally
• Faster response to requests, reduction in reply times, and centralization the CDs production process
• Data centralization as all documents and information are stores in one place using Jupiter system
• Easy-to-Use data retrieval system that is available to all EGPC departments leading to effective time savings
• Internal processes automation resulting in an increase of productivity and decrease of the overall costs
• Strict security measures for internal documents transmission to ensure data confidentiality