Transport Research Laboratory —transforming into an open information environment

TRL Headquarters, Crowthorne THREE YEARS AGO , the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), the company with an enviable global reputation for its contribution to improvements in road and vehicle safety, moved to new offices. Prior to the move, TRL business processes were heavily dependent on paper. Document retrieval was difficult, it took up expensive real estate, and there was simply not enough space in the new building to continue storing documents on site. Using the Open Text Livelink ECM suite of products, TRL transformed its information environment by converting a massive store of essential paper records, collected over 40 years, to electronic files—in just four months.

Three years later, Open Text Corporation and TRL analysts evaluated the longer-term benefits of maintaining an information environment based on Livelink ECM from Open Text.

TRL - the organisation

TRL is a world-leading provider of independent research, consultancy, and testing covering all aspects of transport. The centre employs 550 staff, including 400 scientists—many of whom are world leaders in their respective fields. Through its work, TRL provides original and innovative solutions to a range of clients from both the public and private sectors.

Situation

The organisation’s initial implementation of Livelink ECM from Open Text allowed it to store and manage a warehouse of physical files electronically. This led to a reduction in the amount of floor space required in the new building, which enabled TRL to rent out the spare capacity. Kevin Miles, Head of Knowledge Management, TRL commented, “With the rental income from the newly available floor space, we saw a return on investment after just nine months. Three years on, we continue to rent out the space.”

TRL is constantly managing ongoing research projects, sometimes hundreds at a time, each of which needs to be peer reviewed. In the past, quality reviews were conducted using a paper-based system. Managers wanting to check progress would have to contact each reviewer separately, often causing severe delays on each project.

Closure of projects was also an issue. Kevin commented, “Different departments weren’t communicating with each other. When a project finished, the project manager might contact the finance department to bill the client but not the other departments. For example, the Records Centre needs to know to archive project documents, Corporate Communications to initiate customer satisfaction enquiries, and the Library to publish academic research papers. We needed a system that would automatically alert the key people required to close the project on all fronts.”

“Also, the employees weren’t noting down any issues that had arisen in a project and not completing the lessons-learnt forms when projects closed. I have always been a fan of lessons learnt—especially in an industry like ours. We should always be looking to what worked less well in previous projects to avoid a repetition in the future.”

Solution

Using Livelink ECM from Open Text, researchers were able to address the inefficiencies of the paper-based review method by developing a window on the system that allowed them to track progress, determine which projects are ready for review, and indicate the state of every review in process.

By using Livelink ECM, TRL managed to develop the core of the solution in about four hours using the solution’s Task Lists and integration with email. If they had ordered a bespoke solution to do this, it would have cost around £60,000 and taken six months to develop and deploy.

To address the project closure issue, TRL used the Livelink ECM workflow functionality to allow managers to create and complete a project closure form online. The form included a lessons-learnt section, which could be filled in easily and efficiently. Once all the information had been entered and the project completed, an email alert would be sent to the project manager for a final check and sign off.

The system would then notify all the relevant departments, alerting them of the project closure. It would also file the lessons-learnt section electronically, making information available and easy to find should it be needed in the future. In an organisation where effective project management is critical, this development has changed the company culture by encouraging people to comment on past projects, which helps improve future ones.

Livelink ECM’s audit technology also allowed TRL to see which employees in the company had opened corporate announcements—thereby helping to identify the relevance of those messages. The results showed that a healthy 75 per cent of employees were actually reading the announcements, further validating user acceptance of the system.

Benefits

Kevin commented, “Three years on, Livelink ECM is still fulfilling all our needs and constantly surprising me with what it can do. When people in the organisation come to me with a problem concerning the business, my first thought is to look at Livelink ECM and see if it has the capability to solve it. At a corporate level, workflows, procedures, and template documents are now replacing locally developed activities, providing greater consistency in both customer-facing and corporate activities,” Kevin explained.

The result has been a more uniform approach to managing business at TRL. Project decisions are now captured with more effective access to supporting documentation, while the decision to retain records has significantly improved, supported by full audit trails. Under the previous system only four percent of documents were in registered files, as opposed to today, when all project documents are kept in their Livelink ECM project folders.

Business challenges