The Challenges
Many of the documents housed by Metso Minerals must be maintained for life. The York, PA location leases a 10,000 square foot facility specifically for the storage of mission critical documents. These documents range in size a great deal – including standard 8.5” x 11” documents to large format plans, aperture cards, wide format drawings, and microfilm, The facility holds 1.2 million aperture cards alone. As these documents often contain information needed for maintenance of existing equipment, the process of finding data as needed could be cumbersome.
Equipment and parts manufactured by Metso Minerals have been running for decades. If a part breaks, the schematics needed to remanufacture it and get things up and running again could be found among the millions of documents stored in the York warehouse.
When a request would come from a Metso plant for a part number, an employee in York would have to write down the data needed, go to the warehouse and then physically go through documents to find the right information. A copy would be made, and it would ultimately find its way into the hands of the requester.
In addition to the problem of the lengthy searches and response times, normal wear and tear also put these important records at risk. Many of the original documents were up to a century old.
To properly maintain all the records and ensure backup digital files were available in the event of a disaster, Metso Minerals reached out to the Document Conversion experts at HIG as a partner in digitizing the records.
Digitizing records would not only ensure the preservation of the data in the event of a disaster but would also offer the additional benefit of simplifying on-demand imaging and sharing of the information.
HIG Solution
The team at HIG was eager to partner on the large-scale project and be a part of the solution. Metso Minerals had previously used HIG’s document storage services and was familiar with their expertise in the area of document management and conversion. Ultimately HIG was awarded the multi-year agreement to scan millions of documents and securely return the originals and deliver the digital files to Metso Minerals for integration with their document management solution, OnBase software.
Metso Minerals uses OnBase – a platform for managing content to easily locate and share the records that are now in digital format.
Key Results
Along with a faster and easier method for finding information, Metso Minerals now has millions of documents securely backed up. Employees can spend their time on essential and productive activities and less time searching for information.
- Enhanced security. Now that vital records are in digital format and integrated into Metso’s OnBase Document Management system, the data is backed up and secure.
- Greater information availability. Metso Minerals team members have access to easily locate documents and share globally as needed.
- Increased productivity. Having easy access to digital images that have been indexed by keywords reduces the employee time necessary for handling, storing, retrieving and distributing.
