Delivering world-class infrastructure in Latvia and beyond
Blog: OpenText
Since 1993, Binders has been at the forefront of Latvia’s construction industry. National infrastructure projects—including roads, railways, runways and more—make up around 90% of our annual portfolio. Our goal is to build sustainable, high-quality infrastructure that supports people and businesses across the country. We even operate our own private laboratory (the largest in Latvia) to test our construction materials and ensure they are of the highest quality.
It’s an exciting time for construction in Latvia. There are major public infrastructure projects on the horizon, including Rail Baltica: an ambitious project that aims to connect all the Baltic states to the wider European rail network. At Binders, we want to play an active role in these projects—which means it’s crucial for us to deliver high-quality work as cost-effectively as possible.
Building lean operations
To enable us to successfully bid for these new projects, we want to make sure that our operations are as lean and effective as possible. We were confident that replacing our paper-based business processes with digital workflows would deliver a big boost to efficiency.
In the past, we relied almost exclusively on paper to support every aspect of the project lifecycle: from responding to public tenders and drafting engineering documents to financial accounting and regulatory reporting.
We used to create three identical copies of most of these documents (one for our operational use, one for our records, and one for our regulator), which meant most projects generated more than 1,500 pages of paper. In a single year, we often needed to manage over 90,000 documents, which was a significant drain on our time and resources.
Optimizing project management
To optimize our approach to project management, we turned to OpenText and our local technology partner Digital Mind. Using Extended ECM, we’ve fundamentally transformed the way we manage documents throughout our business.
Integrating OpenText with other digital solutions, we’ve replaced almost all our paper documents with digital records—eliminating the previous challenges with the paper-based approach. For example, our legal and accounting teams no longer need to physically transfer contracts and invoices from desk to desk for review and approval. Instead, the appropriate teams now perform these actions in the OpenText content management solution. Via a VPN connection and mobile browser, they can even do this from their smartphones while on the move; it’s faster and easier than ever.
Throughout the project, the support we received from Digital Mind has been outstanding. The team took the time to understand how our business works and helped us to find effective ways to digitize our processes in accordance with industry best practices. Digital Mind also gave us access to a number of pre-built templates, which meant there was no need to reinvent the wheel to get the functionalities we wanted. The whole deployment process was very fast and smooth.
Unlocking the benefits of digitization
It’s now been five years since we first went live with the OpenText content platform, and it’s really hard to imagine life without it. Almost all our back-office employees now use the solution to support their day-to-day work, which speeds up our project management activities significantly. For example, our end-of-project handover process is now 50% faster, as there’s no need to manually trawl through our records to find the documents we need.
Gone are the days when we used to create three identical copies of each document. Today, we store documents created in the OpenText content platform in our regulators’ platform. At the end of the project, we don`t need to send almost any document to Client, all is stored already digitally in the platform.
Thanks to our partnership with OpenText and Digital Minds, Binders is lifting operational efficiency to new heights. As a result, we’re in a stronger position to bid for—and win—more public infrastructure projects and deliver world-class infrastructure for the people of Latvia.
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