CIOIN

Ajay Kumar Meher

Sony Entertainment Television

“The document management system has increased employee productivity substantially.”

Executive summary

CIO 100 Winner: A manual system to handle the paper work of over 400 employees was taking a toll on productivity at Sony. The solution:a document management system that saves staffers hours of work every week. Here's how Ajay Mehers, CIO did it -

Sony Entertainment Television (SET) is one of India's leading television channel operators. It's stable includes SET, a leading Hindi general entertainment channel; MAX, a premium movies channel; and PIX, a Hollywood movies channel; among others.

To run its business, SET employs 400 people. Managing all their paperwork was getting hard because all office processes including employee reimbursements, inter-office memos and travel management were paper driven. This manual system was beginning to take a toll on productivity. "It took employees a lot of time to search for documents," says Ajay Kumar Meher, VP-IT, MSM. And because it was hard to find anything staffers "created similar documents again and again," he says.

Worse, hard copies of important documents like contracts, tax-related papers, and revenue management documents were stored on file servers, individual hard-disks and even e-mails. This created a security issue that was an executive concern.

Meher knew he had to set things right quickly. He wanted a solution to manage documents efficiently, so he turned to a document management system (DMS). The solution would scan all documents and store them inside the DMS with proper metatagging. This would make them easily searchable. It also allowed MSM to manage all its internal and external websites easily with a Web content management system.

However, before SET could reap these benefits, it had to overcome several challenges. The scattered documents were stored in diverse platforms and in various formats. Collecting all the different types of documents required extensive coordination, says Meher. And metatagging was not easy. "That required a detailed meeting with users to understand how they searched for documents," says Meher.

Once Meher handled these challenges, the Rs 60 lakh project went live in February 2009. Post the implementation all workflows were integrated with SAP and e-mail, making them completely automated. "That means a reduced turnaround time for every transaction," says Meher.

The project has also improved document quality and data integrity. More importantly, it decreased document duplication and search times significantly. Today the project saves each employee two hours a week, the average equivalent of Rs 250 a week. On an annual basis that works out to Rs 13,000 per employee or Rs 52 lakh across the organization.