Fishbowl Solutions has been working with a nuclear-components manufacturer for over ten years, helping them leverage Oracle WebCenter to manage critical project and change management documents. Change management and step-by-step process review is critical for this company as they are highly regulated and must be able to provide exact details on specific content items created and by whom, who reviewed, edited, and ultimately signed off on the content to be used as part of a project or process to support the customer’s manufacturing business.

To help initiate, manage, review, complete, and report on projects of this type, Fishbowl built a project management wizard in Oracle WebCenter. This wizard provides WebCenter users with a step-by-step process to add all the metadata fields necessary for the project, as well as attach any corresponding documents. The various forms and data are all saved as managed content items within WebCenter. This kicks off a workflow process for others to review the project details with each workflow step aligned to the wizard tab or step of the project.

With these project wizard capabilities in WebCenter, the company has experienced more projects completed in shorter time periods with better oversight, ensured compliance through better auditing and workflow capabilities, and easier reporting through a project dashboard that details secure information relevant to the logged-in user. The company has seen as many as 1,000 projects completed within a year’s time by using the project management wizard. The company estimated that the wizard eliminated approximately 20,000 labor hours to manually enter project data across multiple systems and documents, leading to a savings approaching $1,000,000.

A big portion of this savings was made possible with Fishbowl’s Document Automation Suite. This product can sync properties between native documents and WebCenter metadata, ensuring that managed electronic versions of project management documents and their associated metadata are the same as native documents (Microsoft Word or Excel, Adobe PDF), which may be printed for reference and included within a physical manual. Document Automation Suite includes two components that enable this. The first, called Metadata Parser, extracts or parses information from these content types into WebCenter metadata fields. In this customer’s case, the PDFs used for change management and other project processes include input or fillable form fields. Text input or selections made on these PDF forms are parsed into the content’s associated metadata upon check in. This saves the user time as the data only needs to be entered on the form and not the metadata check-in screen as well. Here is an example screenshot of how Metadata Parser works:

Fishbowl’s Document Automation Suite showing Metadata Parser

The other Document Automation Suite component helping this company save time on data entry is called Native File Updater. This component takes the content metadata parsed from the PDFs and adds them to the native document. This metadata is typically added to the header or footer of the document and provides the reader/user with information to help them discern such things as which department owns the document, who was the last author, when was the document last updated, and more. Native File Updater also updates the properties of the native document, ensuring this information is in sync with WebCenter. All these capabilities ensure that regardless of what version or format of the document the user is accessing, the relevant content information is the same. For this customer in a highly regulated industry, this was critical for auditing and compliance purposes. Here is an example screenshot of Native File Updater:

Fishbowl’s Document Automation Suite showing Native File Updater

This customer has millions of content items stored in Oracle WebCenter. In 10 years’ time, the company has had around 8,000 different authors of that content. Reducing the amount of time these authors spent doing data entry has helped the company get more projects started and save on labor. Furthermore, with so many different authors being a part of this process, the company needed to ensure that author and other relevant content information could be easily captured and updated across WebCenter metadata fields and native document properties. Document Automation’s Metadata Parser and Native File Updater components provided these capabilities, ensuring the company can fully audit and show compliance across various content types.