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Articles by Sue Marquette Poremba
For most of us, a few days away from the computer results in a few hours of sifting through email messages and other documents delivered during the offline period. Now imagine that you've been asked to sift through several years of email and other documents to find information specific for a lawsuit against your company.
As one of the fastest growing companies in the production chemicals industry, Multi-Chem offers oil field products, gas well treatments, and pipeline solutions that are designed to enhance the production, processing, and transportation of oil and gas. Although a leader in its industry, Multi-Chem's internal business process was lagging behind."We needed to have a way for documents throughout our company to be cataloged and to be tracked through the workflow process," Jim Honea, director of information technology, explains. A lot of papers were getting lost, email was being shuffled, and information that was supposed to be approved was missed. "Accounting couldn't figure out certain things about capital expenditures, and human resources had trouble tracking who was taking time off."
The Copernicus Group Independent Review Board (CGIRB) has a mandate to protect human research subjects within clinical research projects. This results in millions of pages of documents coming in to CGIRB, including things such as the study's protocols, the informed consent forms signed by the human subjects, and the credentials of the investigators. On an average weekly basis, CGIRB was generating the equivalent of 22' of paper.
Early this decade, the U.S. Navy was involved in a number of major global crises - such as disaster relief for tsunamis and hurricanes. The U.S. Navy Office of Information was responsible for sharing photos, videos, reports, and images to media outlets. Damon Moritz, video program manager, was just beginning his career with the Navy Office of Information at this particularly hectic time. At that same time, the department was changing from a tape-based workflow to an all-digital workflow.
In April 2010, the U.S. Department of Transportation put new regulations into effect regarding long tarmac delays. For Continental Airlines, transforming this regulation into a workable reality means ensuring that dozens of internal departments and individuals can quickly and easily communicate with any of a number of outside vendors at any given point.
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