Process-driven industries like Oil & Gas deal with huge volumes of documents which should ideally be digitally managed and stored with an electronic document management system or EDMS. Why? To begin with, any kind of centralized system is the best way to manage and share data in general, and today’s EDMS are actually ‘intelligent’ digital platforms with centralized data storage as well as in-built workflows that control the way documents are created, updated, and shared. This helps the organization maintain document continuity and data integrity throughout a project’s life cycle.

An EDMS can be thought of as playing multiple roles; it can be a digital document comparison system or a digital search-and-retrieval system – or an enterprise-wide platform for managing files and documents within an organization.

Let’s dive in a little deeper; one of the key benefits of an EDMS lies in its ability to ensure accuracy across document versions, something that is extremely difficult to implement without an EDMS.  (I’ll use this example of a document comparison system to show how an EDMS can ‘optimize’ mission-critical functions within the project organization.) First, let us understand the function; document comparison is the process of cross-checking newer versions of documents against the older versions or copies to track the edits/changes that were made by the various people who worked on it – from minor changes like formatting like font, size, spacing, language or grammatical changes to major changes like the insertion or removal of whole paragraphs or sentences. This is critical to the monitoring of project progress because digital files are very easy to edit, which means you often end up with multiple versions of the same document with minor differences between each version.

So, how do you keep track of all this without an EDMS? It’s almost impossible in today’s world! Especially the post-pandemic world with hybrid teams across a range of locations! That’s why an effective EDMS has to be a self-driven document comparison system that empowers managers to accurately track every change and modification in a document without hours of phone calls and emails and meetings.

Another critical aspect of project management that can be improved by using an EDMS is Compliance.  In oil & gas projects there are many laws, procedures, policies, protocols, etc., that need to be followed and this keeps companies under constant pressure to meet the requirements in their region. Ensuring compliance is a tedious process involving continuous modification of documents before storing them in the prescribed format. An EDMS makes this process incredibly easy because it replaces the manual effort with digitized processes that are driven by built-in workflows (that are themselves based on the various laws, protocols, best practices, etc. that the organization needs to follow). Thus, Compliance becomes the natural outcome with a fraction of the effort and none of the error.

There’s more. Apart from being the most effective document-comparison system and compliance-ensuring system available to organizations, an EDMS helps streamline communication and collaboration across the lifecycle of an oil/gas project. For example: if a user has to store proposal files in a centralized digital location, that document becomes immediately available to other members of the team in real-time. Not just that, if one of those team members modifies one piece of data in that proposal document, the EDMS will save it in that exact same location for future reference and also tag it as the latest (up to that date) version. This continues throughout the chain of events for all future modifications and changes and makes it possible for administrators and document controllers to manage the huge masses of documents involved without losing track of a single version of a single file – thereby making collaboration amongst stakeholders conflict-free, while still keeping everything up to code.

Finally, there is the matter of Data Security. In this regard, an EDMS is the most foolproof solution available to an organization. Right from the password-protected sign-in to user-specific password-protected access to sensitive files or folders, security is built into the EDMS platform at multiple levels as per the organization’s policies and discretion. This means that some users will be able to view but not edit while others will be able to view and edit but not share, and so on, depending on how the organization wants to structure its document clearance levels. So, the company is sure that its sensitive data is protected at multiple levels. They can even build in fail-safes or checkpoints, such as requiring notification in case unauthorized users try to view or edit a protected file.

To sum up, an EDMS is useful in many ways in oil & gas projects (some of which I’ve touched on above), from acting as a reliable document comparison system to enabling easy data retrieval to manage data security – and the uses will only grow with time and familiarity.