What to Consider When Choosing an Information Management System

Major capital projects face many hurdles and managing information on those projects is key to delivering a project on time and on budget. For organizations starting with no information management solution, they will often consider building their own system starting with tools such as SharePoint. And although this type of a tool can offer quick benefits in helping teams collaborate and put all documents into a single place, it is limited in terms of full scalable project information management solution features and functions. For project teams looking to use Microsoft SharePoint to manage projects, first consider the following important points that help illustrate why a better option is choosing a tool specifically designed and built to manage information on capital projects, such as our Proarc Document Control solution.

1. Industry Experience

Ascertra has years of industry experience working with some of the best names in project execution – that experience is built directly into our software solutions and leveraged during each and every implementation engagement. Some of the benefits projects receive as a result of this industry experience include:

• Built specifically to manage information and related processes for complex engineering & construction projects
• Design is based on years of rich customer experience and extensive industry research
• Extensive user and quality testing ensures projects are up and running fast to achieve a quick return on investment - and extensive quality testing also helps to ensure the system keeps running without issues for continued value

2. Automated Best Practices

Proarc out-of-the-box workflows allow you to quickly automate proven business processes to ensure your project team members are compliant and get the most accurate information at all points in the project lifecycle. Some of the benefits derived from these proven workflows include:

• Best practice workflows ready to use – require configuration to set-up, not length and costly development customization
• Quality-tested workflows are optimized for best results
• Built-in audit trails and in-depth distribution matrix keep the right people involved automatically and tracks all activities performed within the system

3. Automatic Security

Metadata-based security design allows users to intelligently import documents into the system and have their security settings automatically applied. Benefits of this design include:

• Security permissions get applied based on the document type or other configured attributes
• In-depth permissions matrix created at project inception and honoured throughout project lifecycle
• Granular permissions matrix enables detailed configuration for each piece of content, each user, and each process

4. Advanced Markup

Each markup layer is stored as a separate vector-based file linked to the original file in the project repository. Benefits of this design include:

• Each markup is maintained in a separate layer
• Original information is protected on its own layer
• Authorized consolidators can review and consolidate comments from all participants into a single layer for approval and return to the originator

For project teams looking to use Microsoft SharePoint to manage projects, these are just 4 quick reasons you should consider the Proarc EDMS instead. Spend your valuable time managing your projects instead of designing and building a project information management solution. We have the industry experience and solutions to get you up and running quickly so you can focus on successfully executing your projects.

For more information on our document control solution, see Proarc Document Control software.