A large builder, developer, and real estate management company with thousands of employees and $1 billion in revenue reached out to Fishbowl Solutions for help with their employee onboarding and project-related content management processes.
Approximately eight percent of their employees were projected to retire by 2020, 43 percent of new hires were under the age of 35, and 41 percent of the workforce had less than two years tenure. The salary cost to onboard a new hire nearly tripled after an employee left. Additionally, the average cost of reinventing projects was $16,000 while the average cost of estimating with incorrect rates was $25,000. All these factors were causing the company’s project initiation/startup costs to be much higher than expected leading to less profit.
Business Objective
The company was in search of a solution to streamline their onboarding process and provide easier access to content overall. Their documents were scattered across file shares, Oracle WebCenter Content, and SharePoint— not including the multiple regional offices and departments with their own copies of documents. Therefore, there were multiple versions of content, outdated content, and no reviews or ownership of content across the company. Due to the unorganized content management, the company had no connection between project-specific content and the master documents. The manuals were tedious to assemble and constantly out of date.
Inevitably, the company decided to change their content management system to accommodate the changing corporate landscape. They wanted to achieve financial value with their content management processes, as well as support their strategic goals such as mitigate risk, create a competitive advantage, and improve customer focus.
The desired capabilities of their new content management system were:
- Browse menu for structured navigation
- Google search for keyword searches
- Structure search pages for advanced search
- Visual navigation based on their lifecycle framework
Oracle WebCenter Paired with Fishbowl’s ControlCenter
The real estate company chose to work with Fishbowl Solutions because of their WebCenter Content Consulting services experience and expertise. WebCenter was an existing technology investment for the company, but also provided advantages for their content management goals. WebCenter boasts flexible metadata and document profiles, as well as robust version control. Additionally, there is a tiered security, flexible workflow engine, and integration with other applications such as JD Edwards. The other reason the company chose Fishbowl was because of its ControlCenter product. ControlCenter is an all-in-one solution for ensuring compliance with regulatory standards and automating document control. It has a dedicated user interface and extends the functionality of WebCenter with document control, knowledge management, compliance and audibility.
After consulting the company on their existing situation and goals, Fishbowl implemented ControlCenter with Oracle WebCenter Content for the employees to manage, maintain, and share corporate knowledge, assembled manuals, and real estate archives. ControlCenter provided a modern, mobile-ready interface which included search, retrieval, and document control capabilities. It also offers a role-aware interface, including a dashboard for documents requiring attention which would be driven by workflow review notifications. Additionally, the interface enabled relevant content to be located based on the phase of a project (i.e. preconstruction) and the project member role (i.e. developer); therefore, the employees have relevant, necessary information for their positions. The system was also integrated Oracle JD Edwards to sync lease information as lease agreements were kicked off in ControlCenter.
Results
With the implementation in place, the new ControlCenter platform made it easier to train the general user (approximately five to 10 minutes) and decreased onboarding cost per employee by two times because of better process documentation, knowledge sharing, and mobile access. With that, less time is now spent on training and onboarding. ControlCenter also ensures compliance through a schedule review process and the highest degree of content and metadata accuracy. Content owners are now aware of out-of-date information and data and users can easily find the content anytime and anywhere on both desktop and mobile devices. In addition to creating a more effective workspace, Fishbowl helped reduce project startup costs by $400,000 through the reduction of duplicated work.
