Saving 90,000 printed pages a year (Case Study)
Skip to end of metadata Go to start of metadata
|
October 2010 |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 31 | ||||||
Publishing to the extranet (Case Study)
Protocols - Vital to Hospital Care (Case Study)
MCW Consultants Ltd is the division of MCW Group of Companies that focuses on Institutional, Educational, Industrial, Commercial and Residential clients. Based in Toronto, Canada, they work internationally on new construction to state-of-the-art retrofits. MCW Consultants Ltd. are the people to call for energy-efficient, mechanical and electrical systems.
|
|
In a project envisioned and led by Alex Rodas, MCW selected Confluence in early 2007. Alex was focused on MCW's Design Guidebook, a key resource they've refined in the 40 years they've been in business. Inspired by business possibilities of driving efficiency and innovation into the process, Alex set out to convert this centrally updated, 300 page, 4-inch binder. And from yearly updates to an ongoing collaborative initiative. MCW picked Confluence because Comalatech's Workflows, which adds just enough control to ensure coherency over the pure-wiki paradigm. "It really stood out", says Alex, "it's functionality was simple and clear". |
|
Switching the Design Guidebook to Workflow-driven Confluence has had a big impact. First, that's 90,000 pages that don't need to be printed, shipped, and filed to the engineers desks. Second, the content became searchable, increasing the likelihood of use. And third they can collaborate, from minor typos all the way to writing new areas or cross-cutting concerns. Using a wiki on the Design Guidebook (it's known internally as their National Quality Initiative) opened up the content so all engineers can participate in the production process, engaging staff in a way never possible with the paper binder. And adding Workflows ensures that MCW engineers rely only on ideas about best practices and architectural standards that have been vetted - knowing critical is not half-baked is vital when client's are spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year. |
|
Adoption
As with many wikis, adoption is key. But without controls there is no way Confluence would have been suitable as a change to one page often demands changes to other pages, and only a subject matter expert acting as authority on the content can make that call. For MCW it's clear - with Comalatech's Workflow Plugin, company know-how is being captured, filtered and made available in a radically better way. An Engineer's insight disseminated to colleagues can spark a rethink across the firm, improving compliance, costs and competitiveness.
Workflow
Blended Perspectives, a Toronto strategic partner of Comalatech, worked with MCW to architect and complete some of the more complex requirements of the workflow.
Any engineer can make a modification to the documentation, but the changes are not visible to others before they have been reviewed by the subject matter expert. A final approval is required by the Partner in charge of each area. The Subject Matter Expert is usually the original author of the document, whereas the Partner is determined based of the type of the document.
Whenever a document is modified, the review process is restarted, with some refinements to allow some steps to be skipped if the approver was also the author of the change (e.g. modifications made by the partner or subject matter expert don't restart the entire review).
Potential
"It's all been great value for money for us", says Alex. And while workflow is presently used in only one space, these successes give Alex faith that Workflow would add value to MCW's Centers of Excellence. More broadly, it promises to bring heightened productivity and effectiveness for collaboration in the parent organization, MCW Group of Companies.
