GASCO (Abu Dhabi Gas Industries Ltd) Selects Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange to Automate Document Processing and Increase Efficiency
Kofax Solution Enables Leading Oil and Gas Company to Automate the Processing of Hundreds of Incoming Documents Each Day
The Situation
Incorporated in 1978, GASCO was established to utilize Abu Dhabi's significant resources of associated gas. Today, the associated gas is converted into a wide range of marketable products, which are used domestically and exported all over the world. GASCO was recently integrated with ATHEER (Abu Dhabi Gas Company), which employs more than 2,500 people.
After the integration, GASCO (Abu Dhabi Gas Industries Ltd) became not only one of the biggest industrial complexes in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), but also one of the largest gas processing companies in the world. GASCO has six sites in the UAE, and is responsible for the processing of natural and associated gas from onshore oil operations nationwide.
The Challenge
To maintain its position as one of the largest gas processing companies in the world, GASCO needed to ensure that all incoming documents were logged and processed as quickly as possible. GASCO’s mailroom in the Abu Dhabi corporate headquarters received incoming correspondence for twenty-two divisions of the company.
The information arriving in the mailroom at company headquarters required immediate processing and follow-up. Previously, the hundreds of incoming documents that the GASCO corporate office received each day were distributed through the mailroom to the relevant division, before being forwarded to the archiving department.
Outgoing documents were filed and archived in the same way. Whenever a document needed to be retrieved, an archiving assistant was asked to search for the document in the archiving department, and then to scan, email, or fax the document to the appropriate person.
GASCO needed the ability to search for and retrieve documents quickly and efficiently. Both corporate office and off-site employees required fast and easy access to information to certify that it was up-to-date and accurate.
‘’We realized the need for change and the demand for a long-term solution, which would bring efficiency to the processing of documents passing through our mailroom,” stated Najim Al Romaithi, Head of ITS at GASCO.
The Solution
GASCO wanted to implement a system that would capture key information from both incoming and outgoing mailroom documents. This information would then be indexed and saved to a document archiving system.
‘’We recognized the need for change in the current system architecture. Documents contain the core information of a business, making it essential to be able to search and retrieve the information stored within them,’’ added Najim Al Romaithi.
GASCO approached ITQAN, a specialist systems integrator and local Kofax Certified Solutions Provider (CSP), to discuss the goals of the project. ITQAN worked with GASCO to identify a solution that would provide the company with maximum flexibility and complete automation. The solution also had to integrate seamlessly with the backend archiving system GASCO had chosen, Livelink ECM.
ITQAN developed a solution using Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange, the foundation for Kofax’s strategy to help organizations streamline business processes. The key elements for the document archiving solutions included:
Kofax Capture, the world’s leading automated information capture platform,
Kofax VirtualReScan (VRS), the de facto standard for capture productivity and quality throughout a document’s lifestyle and
Kofax Transformation Modules (KTM), which streamline the transformation of business documents into structured electronic information by automating the processes of document classification and data extraction.
The Kofax solution was quick and easy to deploy, and was specifically designed to capture information from unstructured documents without having to manually enter index fields. This made it the ideal solution for GASCO to be able to efficiently capture all correspondence passing through its mailroom.
The Results
For GASCO, the implementation of the Kofax solution yielded immediate results. The system was easy to use, so employee training was kept to a minimum and the transition period was very swift.
‘’We felt from the start that our processes were taking a revolutionary turn since Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange offered so many features and capabilities’’, said Al Romaithi. “The interface is friendly and the system is pretty clever at detecting where specific information fields are located on a document. Documents can now be found at the click of a button.’’
Currently, when dealing with documents written in Arabic, a controller must spend a few minutes translating and inputting the Arabic information. In the future, GASCO intends to implement and update the Kofax solution to enable the automatic capture of Arabic and eliminate this process.
‘’Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange has changed the way we work. It has not only raised the bar in terms of our expectations, but also in terms of our development in terms of advanced document processing. We are truly satisfied with the decision to implement an advanced document capture system. It is a very real and productive asset. Everyone should be using this, and we plan to share our knowledge with other businesses regarding the benefits of automated document capture, ‘’ shared Al Romaithi.
