AES Northern Ireland

The Client

The AES Corporation (AES) is a global power company with approximately 18,500 employees that owns and operates a diverse portfolio of electricity generation and distribution businesses, which provide energy to more than 10 million customers in 18 countries across four continents.

Melon had been supporting the SharePoint system of the largest energy complex in South-East Europe Maritsa East for three years, when in May 2014, on their recommendation the Europe Strategic Business Unit of AES in Amsterdam contacted Melon. They engaged us directly to deliver a workflow document management system for two plants in Northern Ireland (NI). 

The Project

Every piece of equipment and service and upgrade activity in the Kilroot and Ballylumford power plants is thoroughly documented in electronic format. Each station in the two plants has an extensive library with technical documents, blueprints, instruction manuals and many more that amount to tens of thousands documents, primarily PDFs.

AES NI were already using a legacy Lotus Domino document store in combination with a web based document management system that hadn’t been fully adopted. Both systems lacked functionality and potential to implement the change management process and develop further. As AES are in the process of adopting SharePoint the obvious choice was to migrate both content and functionality onto the MS platform.

They engaged Melon to architect and implement an indexed searchable document system, featuring a robust 3-level change management workflow.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was managing the large volume of documents and their proper metadata. Another technical challenge was to be able to work with the documents both online and in Word – same documents to be accessible and editable both in SharePoint and in Microsoft Office. The third challenge was the multi-level and multi-actor change management process with email notifications and interactive workflows.

Approach

The project started with a detailed analysis and prototyping phase that helped significantly gather all requirements from each stakeholder and align them into a functional prototype. Melon prepared wireframe prototypes, workflow diagrams, architecture diagrams, and a detailed functional specification that were discussed and revised on several iterations until all requirements were satisfied. Melon uploaded and indexed all the existing electronic documents, and provided consultancy guidance to AES on how to proceed with the digitalizing and uploading of the rest.

Results

• A document management system with change management workflow that implements all the functionalities the client required;
• Digitized technical documentation and policies, procedures and user manuals subject to change control;
• Plans to implement this system globally across the entire company, by deploying localized versions for each station around the globe;
• We provide system’s ongoing technical support;
• Long-term partnership;
• The clients says they liked the most about Melon that we are flexible, customer oriented and responsive.