Serimax optimised their document management

It has been a long time coming but knowledge management has now become a reality for Serimax, a group specialising in welding services, at sea and on land, in the most extreme conditions. It all started back in June 2008 when Serimax (with more than 800 employees in 20 different countries) called on Smile to help with the installation of a new content management system. There were two objectives. On the one hand to facilitate the provision of technical documentation to all the group's employees. The second objective consisted of checking the validity of documents through a workflow system and commenting tools. Technology created by the French publisher Nuxeo, a specialist of open source content management tools, was chosen. But why? "From all the software packages we looked at, Nuxeo was the only one that could provide us with an offline mode, with just a few product developments", explained Elodie Pénet, document director for the "operational methods" department of Serimax. "Given the high mobility of our employess, who travel for international projects and do not always have access to the Internet, the possibility for them to have offline access was vital.", she continued. In preparation for deployment, Serimax carried out an assessment of documents to ascertain those that really contained knowledge that needed to be saved and shared. With the help of Smile, the company decided on the classification structure for its documents. Work was also carried out to "streamline workflows for technical documentation" , said Vincent Maucorps, project manager. He said that "this optimisation process was based on the workflow engine embedded in Nuxeo". Particular care was taken with the interface of the new application. Simple and user friendly, it has a customised search engine. Furthermore, the connection with Serimax's LDAP ensures very precise management of access rights to documents which was a vital element in order to guarantee the confidentiality of information. After several months of testing, it was launched in December 2009 and was a great success. And it doesn't end there: "We started thinking about the deployment of this application in other fields such as project document management", said Elodie Pénet.