Improving Team Productivity

Meridian energy is New Zealand’s largest energy provider, generating power from 100% renewable resources. Meridian operates 13 power stations, with over 700 staff members across multiple sites.

Meridian’s document management system (FileSite) had significant cost and usability challenges for the business. The issues experienced were:

• Significant operational costs for support and maintenance
• Projects regularly encountering roadblocks with having to manage the complexity of FileSite integration. This commonly increased the cost and time for these projects.
• The uptake and use of FileSite across the business had been limited, with users often having issues with usability and the solution’s ability to meet their needs, e.g. FileSite not supporting all file types
• A privacy review was conducted highlighting issues around internal and external data sharing and commercial confidentiality risk

Approach and Solution

As a result of the above, a decision was made to upgrade to a new EDMS and DTL was engaged for the FileSite Replacement Project. With Meridian already having O365 licenses, SharePoint was the chosen document management solution.

Within a six-week period, DTL put together a migration, testing and user training strategy. This approach delivered a cost effective, multi-factor solution, which was well received across the business. A phased migration approach was taken, with each business unit having designated weeks for training and migration. This phased approach allowed DTL to gain a deep understanding of the variance in requirements across each unit and plan accordingly.

After analysing FileSite content, DTLs SharePoint solution consisted of three hub sites, each catering to a business need.

• Active Hub – a collection of sites allowing teams to create and collaborate on content
• External Hub – a collection of sites allowing teams to store and collaborate on content needing to be shared externally. External hub site was the only hub with sharing enabled, addressing previously raised security risks
• Inactive Hub – a collection of read only sites used to store legacy documentation. The sites structure, permissions and metadata exactly matched that of FileSite. Business rules were set up to determine what would go in the Inactive hub.

During the migration, DTL analysed legacy documents and performed mapping exercises with stakeholders across each business unit. This ensured key content would not be lost, or a struggle find in the new structure.

Migration was done in waves to eliminate disruption. A UAT migration was conducted before every production migration, to identify any errors. Post UAT wave, DTL led testing. A DTL test manger provided a test strategy to the business. Test scripts were given to Meridian nominated testers, with DTL resources remaining on call every test weekend to assists and address errors. As a result of this, everything was ready for each business unit at the start of their go live.

Alongside migration, DTL lead interactive workshops for Meridian nominated site administrators. Training was provided across the country, from Wellington through to Twizel. In-depth, personalised training guides were developed as an extra resource post go live. 40+ Site administrators attended one of many 3-hour interactive workshops, providing them all the tools needed to maintain their teams SharePoint environment. This enabled positive uptake across the business with users no longer having to go to IT for their document management requests.

Post migration, a DTL representative stayed on site for three months to provide any additional training and support. This support allowed users with a good grasp of SharePoint gain assistance to further utilise the new tools available to the business, with DTL building complex workflows using Flow (now Power Automate). At the end of the of the support period, Meridian users had a strong understand of their new environment, with weekly changes/incidents in the single digits.

Outcomes

At the end of the engagement, all noteworthy documents had been removed from FileSite and housed in SharePoint, with their respective permissions and metadata from the previous system still intact. A total of over 3 million documents were migrated. Meridian was able to decommission FileSite and users are now taking advantage of a modern, cloud enabled workplace.

Once users were comfortable with their new environment, DTL was requested to develop a customised tile based navigation and breadcrumb, providing a simple navigation solution. This UI was brainstormed with stakeholders, designed, tested and deployed rapidly.

Today, Meridian’s only EDMS is SharePoint and it has been adopted as standard practice for all staff. Through the numerous training and support documents, users feel empowered with the new system and reap the benefits of a modern system with well thought out information architecture.

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