Work management sparks efficiency at Florida utility

Florida Power & Light, one of nation's largest investor-owned electric utility companies, is implementing a work management solution from Universal Systems (USI) to help cut back on paper and make information more accessible.

FP&L serves over seven million customers ­ about half of the population of Florida ­ in an area covering almost the entire eastern seaboard of Florida and the southern third of the state. The utility operates numerous gas, fossil, nuclear, hydro, and wind turbine generation facilities across Florida and throughout the US. FP&L also operates plants in Columbia,Ireland, and Indonesia.

FP&L initially installed USI's Documetrix 3000 system in its HR department to manage employee files; it has since expanded the system across eight corporate departments. Since deploying RPM enterprise-wide, more than two million documents have been loaded online in various departments, including HR, procurement, risk management, land management, customer service, energy marketing and trading and the utility's nuclear division. In addition to saving a lot of valuable storage space, the system lets FP&L users rapidly and simultaneously access critical network information by scanning and managing documents electronically.

The next logical step is to roll out the system universally, connecting over 9,000 desktops, according to Debra Martinez, supervisor of integrated document management at FP&L. "Over the next few months, we also plan to implement information-sharing via the Web, making RPM available to our employees in remote locations worldwide," she said. FP&L expects to increase enterprise-wide connectivity and productivity, and vastly reduce the paper flow throughout its organization