Success Story

Enabling KFAS to modernize their legacy application and digitize their paper records from the past 10 years

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Services Used:

Application Modernization
ECM Solutions

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The Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS) is a private non-profit organization (NPO), based in Kuwait. It envisions creating a progressive culture of science, technology, and innovation through different ways, such as books, scientific publications, research & development, community-based events, etc. In order to support these initiatives, private sector companies contribute 1% of their annual net profits to KFAS. The total funding amount for these new research proposals in 2017 reached KD 2.3M ($7.5M).

  • 1M+ Documents Digitalized
  • 9 Departments Automated
  • 18 Months Estimated Time to Recover ROI
  • 10 Years Of Records Digitized

The Problem

KFAS was burdened with an out-of-date legacy system Task Space, which is a part of the EMC Documentum Transactional Content Management offering for ECM and BPM operations. The user adaptability of the entire application had become a strategic challenge due to poor implementation of processes. The system had also become overly complex and costly to maintain. Moreover, the user licenses were not being effectively utilized, which were adding an extra cost to the system. The need was to migrate its business critical applications to a more flexible, modern platform in order to simplify operations, support and optimize costs. The key challenges that team Daffodil discovered were:

  • The user adaptability of the entire application had become a key strategic challenge due to poor implementation of processes.
  • The UI involved multiple screens to perform a task, added with navigation issues and rigidity in the UI.
  • Systems have become overly complex and inflexible. Implementing new features were hence challenging.
  • Digitizing older records had become a tedious task due to multiple bugs and functional gaps in the system.

The Solution

After an in-depth analysis of the existing solution and available licenses, Daffodil recommended KFAS to migrate from Task Space to Documentum D2. The latter was selected due to its responsive design, write once run anywhere ability, minimum navigation, profile-based configuration, and several other benefits for enterprise content management.

Daffodil executed a three stage roadmap that initiated with replacing the legacy system, building optimized workflows and then modernizing the organization as a whole. The process included optimizing the licenses, security model, object type model, removal of unused products, synchronization of all three environments (development, test, and production), and finally migrating the entire business data to the new system. Daffodil also helped KFAS integrate the Documentum D2 platform with Microsoft Dynamics CRM in order to extend its reach. 

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One of the key challenges was to import existing data to the new system. This was accomplished using Daffodil’s proprietary Import/Export Utility, that enables seamless data and metadata transfer between disparate ECM repositories. Without this utility, the task of exporting and importing data into Documentum D2 repository would have been tedious and time-consuming as the end-users used clients such as DA and WebTop, where they would have to perform a single import/export every time. In order to ensure that the data is migrated with compliance, the entire data was sanitized according to new fields and processes before migrating. 

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Along with the ECM upgrade, team Daffodil also digitized 1 TB data for three of their departments: finance, director-general office, the board of secretary. This included scanning the hard copy of documents, creating folder hierarchy, and migrating data with corresponding metadata & access-based list. For exporting data to the Documentum D2 repository (along with required artifacts), Daffodil’s Import/Export utility was used. 

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The Impact

With the upgraded document management system, KFAS has managed to digitize its records from the past 10 years and significantly reduce their processing time. The use of the Documentum D2 platform has been extended from a single department to 9 departments within the organization, including Finance, Legal, Tax, Advisory, Admin, and HR. The modernization of their ECM system has enabled KFAS to focus on its core objective of creating a thriving culture of science, technology, and innovation for sustainable Kuwait.

  • 1M+ Documents Digitalized
  • 9 Departments Automated
  • 18 Months Estimated Time to Recover ROI
  • 10 Years Of Records Digitized

 

“We want to thank team Daffodil for their professionalism in work. You have managed to remove many of the existing obstacles from our content and process management system.”

 

Shehab A. Al-Tohami,
IT Head, KFAS

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