Customer Solution Case Study
/ PEM Division of BHEL Improves Team Collaboration and Customer Satisfaction
Overview
Country or Region:India
Industry:Engineering
Customer Profile
BHEL, one of the largest engineering and manufacturing enterprises in India in the energy and energy infrastructure sector, was established over 40 years ago. Today, BHEL manufactures over 180 products.
Business Situation
BHEL’s Project Engineering Management (PEM) Division manages projects that could take up to four years to conclude. In these projects, the company generates large amounts of documentation and drawings, which need to be shared internally with the team and the customer.
Solution
The PEM Division decided to implement a central data repository, which would be accessible to employees through a Web browser. The PEM Division deployed this solution with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server.
Benefits
Lower deployment costs
Seamless technology integration
Flexible modification and updates
Easy and comprehensive search results
Built-in security features / “We chose SharePoint Portal Server because it gives us a central repository for all documents and it can be easily integrated with our existing IT infrastructure such as Exchange 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Server.”
Mr. Rajiva K. Sood, Additional General Manager (IT), BHEL–PEM
Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), one of the largest manufacturing and engineering companies in India, has over 180 products in the energy and energy infrastructure sectors. The Project Engineering Management Division (PEM) is responsible for providing end-to-end solutions to their customers in the power sector.
BHEL-PEM has implemented a knowledge management solution for information sharing based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003.
A central repository stores all business information, giving users access to relevant information in real-time. It also provides easy search functionality to find the documents and other content that they may need. Since the system is similar to the former paper system at BHEL, it has found greater acceptability among employees.
Situation
Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) is one of the largest engineering and manufacturing enterprises in India in the energy and energy infrastructure sector. The company was established over 40 years ago. It ushered in the indigenous heavy electrical equipment industry in India. Today, it manufactures over 180 products in sectors such as power generation and transmission, transportation, telecommunication, and renewable energy, among others.
The Project Engineering Management (PEM) Division of BHEL is one of the 19 profit centers of the company. It is responsible for bidding for international and national power projects, creating engineering blueprints, procuring and integrating all systems, and delivering a complete project to the customer within stipulated timeframes. This often requires multiple teams working in tandem together, along with the customer and its consultants, on a project that could last as long as four years or more.
BHEL-PEM has amassed a huge amount of intellectual property and knowledge while working on projects. The knowledge, acquired by virtue of project experience and sustained interaction, was earlier stored partly on paper and partly in digital format, and was available within the teams for reference. At times it might also be found stored in employees’ desk drawers.
However, such information tends to get buried in the maze of computers, hard disks, and directories of the people who have written these documents. Further, multiple copies of these documents would circulate, thereby making it impossible to track the original documents or the latest versions.
BHEL-PEM executives realized that to effectively manage the knowledge within the division, it required a central repository for structured as well as unstructured data. All its team members would benefit from this information throughout the life cycle of projects, as well as from a reference database after projects are completed.
The other criteria, while developing this knowledge database, was to ensure that the central repository would have a control mechanism for access by authorized personnel only. Additionally, there was a focus to make this repository easily searchable based on full text as well as keywords.
Solution
BHEL-PEM needed a robust and flexible document management system, which would be easy to deploy and manage. “We chose Microsoft® SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, because it gives us a central repository for all documents. It also can be easily integrated with our existing IT infrastructure, such as [the Microsoft] Exchange 2000 Server messaging and collaboration server and [the Microsoft] Windows® 2000 Server [operating system],” explains Mr. Rajiva K. Sood, Additional General Manager (IT), BHEL–PEM.
SharePoint Portal Server has allowed PEM to create a divisional portal Web site. The solution integrates the Microsoft Outlook® messaging and collaboration client and SharePoint Portal Server.
The portal features a separate knowledge section, plus a section for each project and proposal. The categorization has been kept similar to the system used by PEM earlier, to ensure higher acceptability among employees. Separate team Web sites were provided within the portal solution to improve intra-team collaboration.
Since a lot of project and proposal-related information appears in e-mail messages and attachments, which are now to be shared by several team members, it was critical to address this information first.
The ‘New Mail Message’ form in Outlook was modified to ensure that each e-mail message is properly categorized. Once sent, the e-mail message is catalogued in the appropriate section of the portal. To populate the portal, the attachments are detached and saved into the relevant section of the intranet. A link embedded in the e-mail message now leads to the attachment.
A process on the SharePoint Portal Server Web site was also created to automatically capture all incoming e-mail messages. It strips the attachment and stores it in a common document repository, embedding the link to the document that appears within the e-mail message.
In the future, PEM division will categorize these attachments for faster access.
The search abilities and version control features allow users to access relevant documents at any time. Access to each folder is defined by the existing user-based access control and the Active Directory® directory service found in Windows 2000 Server. Based on these predefined access levels, appropriate access to resources on the Web portal is made available to the various users within the organization.
The portal not only organizes the data and documents, but also helps the BHEL-PEM team to provide a single window interface to all users for various intranet applications that were already developed and deployed in the organization.
Knowledge management was taken a step further through Windows Media® Services (a component of Windows 2000 Server), which streams audio and video content. This streamed content helps to disseminate information, such as presentations, live talks, and training. A separate section of the portal provides team leaders a centralized location where they can find and upload the presentations with audio and video, to be viewed by employees at a time of their own choosing. This often enables better learning because the presentations may be viewed at each individual's unique pace. The division has also made provisions to webcast live events, such as the company chairman’s addresses, annual financial results, and so forth.
Benefits
Save Cost in Integration and Deployment Time
SharePoint Portal Server is a flexible solution that integrates search and document management with everyday tools such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office applications to help create, manage, and share content.
BHEL-PEM’s strategy to standardize on the Microsoft technology environment enables the company to save costs involved in deploying and integrating products from multiple vendors. “This is important especially when an organization wants to deploy multiple applications on the intranet, to achieve faster access to information for its stakeholders,” comments Rajiva K. Sood, AGM (IT), BHEL-PEM.
The organization was able to integrate Exchange 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Server, and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 in just four calendar weeks.
Searching for Relevant Documents Has Never Been So Easy
With documents residing in a central repository, BHEL-PEM has reduced the dependency on a particular employee—who might possess a desired document—being available in the office. Now, at any time documents can be searched and referred to by any staff member with relevant access rights. Also, the search facility provided in SharePoint Portal Server creates an index of all information such as files, Web sites, and e-mail messages. This index is easily searched using both keywords and full text, thus, making it effortless to access any information.
Built-in Security Features
Role-based access to documents provides BHEL-PEM employees with the flexibility of giving access to documents only to those employees who need and should have the information. By creating appropriate roles, the administrator can prevent users from adding additional documents to the intranet site in an ad-hoc manner. All documents detached from e-mail messages, for example, are first sent to a designated administrator for approval before being published on the intranet.
The portal Web site is a hierarchy of sub-sites that enables the administrator to add lists, images, and documents to their respective categories. Team-based Web sites foster flexible collaboration between different departments, thus enhancing corporate knowledge. One compelling feature, which users have appreciated, is the capability to create personalized sites called ‘My Site’. Users can customize the content based on their business requirements, while a consistent look and feel is maintained centrally across the personalized Web sites.
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