ESSILOR: 75 Hours a Day Gained

For ESSILOR?s 400 researchers, finding a specific document among 40,000 on 4 different servers was a long and tedious task. Now they can save valuable time with an Electronic Document Management (EDM) system.

ESSILOR?s R&D department decided to implement an EDM system in 2001. They had several important reasons: in addition to the expected productivity gains, it preserves the company?s expertise, facilitates information sharing and ensures the security and confidentiality of documents produced by the researchers. The application, called ?G?ode?, is used by the 300 French researchers and their 100 American colleagues.

?Its knowledge of our business and the software package, combined with its project management experience, enabled MDTVISION to guide and advise us effectively throughout the process, making G?ode a success.? Christel Le Petitcorps Responsable des syst?mes d?information R&D

Involving Users at an Early Stage

ESSILOR began by creating a model based on Documentum software. At the same time, and with the aid of MDTVISION, it devised the master plan, which confirmed the need to rapidly implement an EDM system. ESSILOR then carried out a comparative analysis of several tools, again with the support of MDTVISION, and chose the leading product on the market, Documentum, in its new web version. The software meets the company?s document management needs, providing a high level of security and precise access rights management. ?Aware that the success of such a project relies on the involvement of future users at an early stage, we organized a survey via our intranet. The high response rate reinforced our choices,? adds Christel Le Petitcorps, R&D information systems manager at ESSILOR. Based on the results of this survey, the company asked MDTVISION to interview 25 key users in order to determine their expectations and then draft the initial functional specifications for the project. ESSILOR produced a model, which, after validation by key users, enabled MDTVISION to draw up the final specifications.

Project Guidance

To make new tool accessible, MDTVISION proposed and implemented a communications plan including a project presentation and bilingual e-learning software that was both attractive and interactive. In addition, the services company developed a specific application to recover information from the existing system: the documents on the servers were transmitted to their authors, who decided which to include in G?ode. MDTVISION also assisted the prime contractor with monitoring Documentum configuration and specific developments. ?Its knowledge of our business and the software package, combined with its project management experience, enabled MDTVISION to guide and advise us effectively throughout the process, making G?ode a success.?

Measurable Benefits

30% of the 40,000 documents on the servers have already been transferred to G?ode, which currently contains 4,500 documents. ?We noticed a lot of ?waste? during the migration, which can be easily explained: our R&D team works on two scales ? business and project. This is impossible to take into account on the servers, which therefore contain numerous duplications or several versions of the same document.? The new system will guarantee the uniqueness of the document, as it will be updated directly in G?ode. ?Our researchers save an estimated 75 hours per day, enabling us to reduce time-to-market and cut development and production costs? G?ode will also provide managers with useful information on project progress, and it will be easy for the whole R&D team to find information relating to a particular research project along with its results, regardless of when it was carried out. This avoids the need to repeat costly physical tests. The application also contains 23,000 bibliographical references, which are automatically transferred to a database by a tool developed by MDTVISION.