Veolia Water Technologies (VWT), a subsidiary of the Veolia group, is the leading specialist in water treatment. The company designs and delivers drinking water treatment plants as well as smaller standardized water treatment equipment for industrial or municipal customers. VWT also offers a range of services (audit, maintenance, digital) to cover all water treatment plant management needs. In 2019, the Veolia group supplied 98 million people with drinking water and 67 million people with wastewater service, produced nearly 45 million megawatt hours of energy, and treated 50 million metric tons of waste.
VWT has dozens of offices located on nearly every continent in the world, and every one of them had its own system or approach for document management. Employees working in offices in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia were storing documents and files on network drives in a way that differed from office to office.
A Centralized Platform for Eliminating Information Silos
VWT needed a centralized and more effective approach for managing all of its documentation related to its numerous engineering and procurement projects. VWT needed a content services platform that would be utilized throughout the organization and serve as an internal “blueprint” for how the company can benefit from modernizing and harmonizing its IT stack and eliminating information silos.
“Our company moved from Microsoft to the Google stack in 2014, and in 2016 our CEO made the decision that our company needed a solution that would standardize document management across the organization,” said William Laloyau, Corporate IS&T Collaborative & Engineering Solutions Manager at Veolia Water Technologies. “This meant that we had to find an offering that would fit seamlessly with Google Workplace.”
The organization evaluated several different document management solutions, but they all fell short. Then VWT found AODocs.
“We identified numerous constraints with the other two solutions we closely evaluated, but not with AODocs. It is a far more advanced platform than anything else we looked at,”
William Laloyau,
Corporate IS&T Collaborative & Engineering Solutions Manager at Veolia Water Technologies
VWT selected AODocs as their centralized platform for content management, and deployed it across their global network of offices. Approximately 1,500 VWT employees residing in offices in North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia are now leveraging AODocs for managing business-critical civil project documentation.
Managing and Validating High-Volume Document Transmittals
VWT manages multi-million and multi-billion civil projects, and effectively managing the hundreds of thousands of files and documents associated with each one is paramount. Document transmittals, the process of sending packages of project documentation to VWT clients for review and approval, is a critical part of how the company works with partners and customers on its projects.
“You simply cannot manage many of the civil projects we do without a formal document control system. AODocs’ content and workflow management capabilities enable us to elevate our ability to collaborate with clients on document transmittals,'' noted Laloyau.
VWT configured AODocs to optimize its document transmittal process and created document classes (with related metadata attributes included) for each transmittal basket of files and records. This enabled the company to ensure document control and provided a history of all related document transmittal activities, which ultimately helped VWT validate that the right people reviewed, annotated, and/or approved the right files and records and at the right time.
“We can easily and securely manage high-volume transmittals to ensure project invoices, supplier documents, technical specifications, delivery schedules, proposals, engineering specifications, procurement documentation, and all other project files and records that our customers must review and approve is done accurately and efficiently,” said Laloyau.
Considering the highly-confidential nature of the records included in document transmittals (invoice-related financial information, agreements, design files, etc.), ensuring security is vital.
"With AODocs, we have the confidence to share confidential information with customers and partners outside of the Veolia domain. As long as they have a Google account, it’s very easy for us to do this in a very secure manner,"
William Laloyau
Always Accessible, Always Performant
In addition to the benefits achieved by streamlining its approach to document transmittals, AODocs has proven helpful in helping VWT drive overall adoption of Google Workplace across its organization.
“Whether they’re residing in one of our global offices or working from home, our employees use AODocs on a daily basis. We’ve never experienced any technical or performance issues with AODocs, the platform is always available. This has proven to be invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Laloyau.
With its success in leveraging AODocs, VWT is looking into assimilating other systems and repositories into the platform. The company is in the process of migrating all of its existing SharePoint sites into AODocs, and is also looking into expanding the use of the platform in its human resources, legal, and finance departments.
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