Faranani DocTec and SANRAL – on the road to efficiency

Adolph Tomes, Business Operations Executive at SANRAL (right) and Kiran Parbhoo, OpenText EIM Solutions Consultant at Faranani DocTec (left) with a lively discussion at the OpenText Africa Summit.

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The South African National Roads Agency SOC, or SANRAL, is a South African parastatal responsible for the management, maintenance and development of South Africa's proclaimed national road network, which includes many national and some provincial and regional route segments.

Faranani DocTec has been contracted by SANRAL for the maintenance and support of their OpenText Content Suite implementation since November 2019 and, more recently, with the SANRAL OpenText Content Suite Platform (CSP) upgrade, business digitisation and managed services programme.

SANRAL operates within a rapidly changing social and technology environment where systems, policies and specifications are changing continuously. There was, therefore, a need to ensure uniform and consistent approaches and standardised systems and processes across all SANRAL offices.

In pursuit of its Vision 2030 Strategy, the company has invested heavily in technology to re-engineer its business processes. Although there was an electronic document management solution in use at SANRAL, it was not running optimally as a document management system. It was also not running in a standardised and integrated approach, where duplication is reduced or eliminated. The architecture implemented also needed to be reviewed and refined.

The key focus of this programme is to provide the right enterprise information management (EIM) foundation for SANRAL, enabling business units to manage their data better, run more complex analyses and visualise outcomes in a more understandable way, to ultimately create a paperless environment and contribute to SANRAL’s digital transformation.

The EIM process is generally grouped into four general areas – information processing, information management, information delivery and information governance.

These loosely equate to content being brought into the business process; content being managed; content being generated out of the processes; and content being stored in a compliant fashion.

• Information processing (digitise): Taking care of information that comes from outside the organisation, eg, from customers, suppliers or just from different departments or stakeholders in a process.

OpenText Intelligent Capture (Captiva) transforms high volumes of documents into actionable data for use in vital processes and applications. By combining intelligent capture with process management, SANRAL can dramatically reduce costs, errors and risks by ensuring that complete information is available when and where it’s needed.

• Information management (utilise): Keeping the information assets required for the process, structure them in a reasonable way and make them accessible for the users working in the business process.

OpenText Extended ECM Platform combines the capabilities of EIM of OpenText Content Server with business data and business processes provided by a business application such as SAP S/4HANA, Office365, etc. This includes functionality for document and records management, archiving, workflow and collaboration.

• Information delivery (deliver): Aggregate information from different sources, publish them to a target group in a reasonable format and integrate them in different applications – in real-time!
• Information governance (control): Information processing, information management and information delivery are underpinned by OpenTextArchive Center and OpenText Records Management, making sure that compliance requirements are properly covered.

The implementation of the OpenText Intelligent Capture and OpenText Extended ECM platforms offered SANRAL a way to transparently integrate content management to business applications.

This will improve business processes by bridging content silos, unlocking the value of content to drive insights, efficiencies, automation and governance. The extensive capabilities of OpenText Extended ECM Platform form its foundation, ensuring secure and dependable life cycle management without compromising adoption and productivity.

The OpenText Enterprise Information Management solutions being implemented during the programme includes the following:

• Extended ECM for Office365
• Extended ECM for SAP
• Extended ECM for SuccessFactors
• Extended ECM for Engineering
• Intelligent Capture
• Content Server Mobile
• Archive Center
• Email Archiving, Management and Monitoring
• Records Management
• Core Share/Core Signature Integration

These will ultimately enable the enterprise content management system to deliver a full set of capabilities to support information flows in the SANRAL Digital Enterprise.

At the recent OpenText Africa Summit, Adolph Tomes, Business Operations Executive at SANRAL, and Kiran Parbhoo, OpenText EIM Solutions Consultant at Faranani DocTec, took part in a discussion on the transformation that happened at SANRAL.

“Faranani DocTec engaged with SANRAL on a detailed level to understand what they do and how they operate. It became evident that a 'one-size-fits-all' solution does not apply in this large-scale digitisation project,” said Parbhoo.

According to Tomes, there are several important considerations to keep in mind when embarking on a project of this nature.

There needs to be a maturity assessment from a record and content management perspective, where processes, systems and practices related to record keeping and content management is analysed. It is crucial to identify areas for improvement or optimisation.

Incorporating the user's perspective is crucial because it ensures the project meets the real needs of those who will use it, enhancing adoption, satisfaction and the likelihood of success.

Integrating change management from day one is also vital because it prepares employees and stakeholders for the changes ahead, minimising resistance and ensuring a smoother transition.

“The importance of having a local partner with a physical presence is paramount, as it enables SANRAL to focus on its core responsibilities while collaborating with expert companies like Faranani DocTec in their respective areas of expertise,” said Tomes.