Umicore - formerly known as Union Minière - is a Belgian based multinational and world leader in the domain of non-ferro materials. Over de past decades, the company switched focus from mining operations to production, product research & development of advanced metals and materials. In this context, knowledge and advanced research became one of the core and crucial assets of the company. Umicore consulted eXpanded Media for selecting and implementing a knowledge and document management system, securing Umicore's competitive advantage for years to come.

Based on the challenging requirements, eXpanded Media proposed Open Text Livelink as the ideal platform.

During a first stage eXpanded Media deployed Livelink environments at the Umicore headquarters in Brussels and the Research and Development centre in Olen.

Umicore Legal department

The Umicore Legal department is responsible for creating, verifying and approving all the contracts and legal documents between the company, suppliers, customers and partners. Needless to say that these documents contain sensitive and secret information strategic for the company. Consequently advanced and reliable document management is a must for the department. Open Text Livelink matches these requirements by offering a rich set of features including version control; document check-in, auditing, advanced searching, document reservation and many others. Revision workflows are easy to set up and route the document for approval to different users and groups.

eXpanded Media helped the Umicore Legal department in deploying the platform by defining the taxonomy, classification and document meta data for all legal document types. Custom training has also been provided bringing Umicore employees quickly up to speed in efficiently using the new environment.

Umicore Research

The activities of Umicore Research are aimed both at improving and adapting existing products and processes, and at developing new directions as required by the major strategic issues and needs.

Turning information into knowledge and distribution throughout the organization is the main challenging task for the Research department. In contrary to other sectors, information in the chemical industry never expires and stays relevant. Findings from 100 years ago are still the basis of today’s production processes. Since information has such a long life cycle, the total volume of content and information grows exponentially year after year. For researchers under the pressure of continuously improving materials, production processes are developing new products. It is a daunting task to find relevant information in an ever-growing amount of content. Information is not only available through documents – paper or electronic – but is also concentrated in the experience and skills of researchers.

Umicore Research also works closely with partners and universities worldwide on a project basis. Meaning that external users need to be given secure and flexible access to selected information during a specific period. Therefore the focus was not only on advanced document management, but also on collaboration possibilities. Again, Open Text Livelink turned out to be the ideal solution, offering these functionalities out of the box and providing Umicore employees not only efficient access to content, but also bringing them into contact with peers based on skills and interests.

Since Umicore had already several databases as well as a legacy document management system - totalling several gigabytes of information - in place. The decision was made to migrate all this content into Livelink. For this complex task, eXpanded Media developed custom integrations and migrations components guaranteeing full data consistency.

eXpanded Media designed also the complete application (Livelink) architecture, including hardware specifications, configuration and backup procedures guaranteeing optimal functioning of this business critical platform.

During and after deployment eXpanded Media provided training courses for both end-users as system administrators.

The result for Umicore Research is a more efficient and secure use of information and knowledge within the company and beyond, resulting in a faster time to market of new products and enhancements.

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