Miller Group Customer Story

Results

• Replaced OpenText and migrated to Alfresco Content Platform
• Reduced long-term ECM costs by moving to open source ECM solution
• Improved user collaboration on documents and designs
• Central repository for managing documents that is as easy as a Shared drive
• Secure and scalable document system that meets long-term business needs
• Anticipate the Alfresco repository growing to 15 terabytes
• Fast support response times a single point of contact that understand Miller’s ECM priorities with Alfresco Premium Support

Challenge

The Miller Group is the UK’s award winning House Building, Property Development, Construction and Mining business. Based in Edinburgh, with operations throughout the UK, the Miller Group employs over 1,000 people.

Managing documents across The Miller Group’s different businesses is no easy task. For the past 10 years the company has used OpenText as its central document management system. In 2009, The Miller Group wanted to reduce its expenditures and began looking at IT licensing and maintenance costs. With OpenText’s yearly maintenance a significant portion of the IT budget, it was time to evaluate other document management systems that offered the same, if not more functionality, at a lower cost of ownership.

While cost was the primary driver, Miller performed a detailed evaluation of products, rating products based on feature sets and functionality. The products needed to include the core document management functionalities but with a modern architecture and user interface. Miller was also looking for social collaboration features that would make it easier for users to share and collaborate on documents.

Solution

The scores for each evaluated product were close, however, the Alfresco Platform stood out as a robust document management system that offered greater flexibility and integration opportunities. As an open source product Alfresco also offered significant cost advantages and provided the best platform for Miller Group’s long-term needs.

To help speed up its implementation and provide ongoing support for its use of Alfresco, Miller signed up for Alfresco’s Premier Services, which provides them with a dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM) to help manage any issues and provide best practice advice. The TAM serves as a single point of contact for Miller and understands their specific needs and priorities. Premier Services ensures that Miller will be able maximize its use of Alfresco and leverage the system to its full capabilities.

Today, each business group within Miller has tailored Alfresco to meet their specific document management needs and processes. The IT department customized Alfresco to ensure that users could upload CAD drawing into the system and managed revisions. The House Building and Property Management Divisions use Alfresco as their central repository for designs, legal forms and other documentation. Alfresco works like a shared drive making it easy for users to drag and drop documents into the repository. Documents now have version control and can be easily found in Alfresco.

For the Construction Division, Alfresco Share is used to manage documentation for each individual construction projects. Miller is able to provide contractors and partners access to the project site documentation allowing them to view and collaborate on designs. Using the security permissions, Miller can ensure that users only have access to the appropriate documents. Alfresco Share makes document collaboration easier than with the previous system with its dashboard view and content activity feeds. Users can quickly see when documents have been added or modified allowing them to review or provided comments.

Miller’s HR department is also taking advantage of Alfresco to become a paperless department. HR related paper documents are scanned into Alfresco using a document capture solution from Kofax. Using custom web scripts, metadata is attached to the document and an electronic record is automatically created. This saves the HR department time, physical space, reduces errors and simplifies the auditing process.

With Alfresco fully implemented, Miller is in the process of migrating its OpenText repository which has over 8 million documents to Alfresco. Miller will be archiving some documents but anticipates scaling its Alfresco repository to 15 terabytes.

Conclusion

• Replaced OpenText with an affordable, feature rich document management and collaboration platform across the company’s four businesses.
• The Alfresco Share dashboards have improved user collaboration and finding and accessing documents easy.
• With Premier Support, questions are resolved quickly and Miller had one single contact dedicated to their success.
• Miller achieved an immediate 40% reduction in overall ECM costs and expect to increase this to 50% at project completion.

What’s Next

Miller Group’s IT department is always looking to improve their document management processes and maximize their use of Alfresco. Once they have completed the migration from OpenText, the IT department plans to look at implementing the latest version of Alfresco One, including some of the new mobile features such as customizing the Alfresco Share application for mobile devices. Miller is also looking at implementing additional workflow capabilities to improve business processes and eliminate paper. The company would like to become a paperless office.