New Mexico Utility Lights Up
Since its inception in 1917, the Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) has grown to become the state’s largest utility. Currently, it provides electricity to more than 360,000 customers and natural gas to more than 420,000 customers, serving 1.3 million people in 100 communities throughout the state.
PNM wanted to modernize its business processes and identified its legacy mainframe-based records management system as a potential source of problems, blocking the efficient flow of information in the same manner that a downed power line cuts off electricity.
Concluding that it needed a complete document management system, IT directors at the utility evaluated several packages before choosing a document management and imaging solution from Hummingbird.
Now able to share documents electronically across internal business disciplines, PNM has realized both cost and time savings, while implementing a flexible infrastructure that will help the company look forward to its next century of business.
Reigning in the Information Flow
Behind PNM’s core business of efficient electricity and natural gas delivering is a never-ending flow of business information. Carl Seider, systems administrator for PNM, recites a laundry list of departments that generate discipline-specific information, all of which would ideally reside in a document library.
"We focused initially on the needs of the legal staff, the contract administrators, the environmental staff, the right-of-way department, customer service and the accounts payable workers," Seider says. "But everyone short of the meter-readers needs a document library of some sort."
Regulatory pressures from an industry with a long list of governing agencies also made a new document management system imperative. The New Mexico Public Regulation Commission regulates the utility’s rates and charges, service areas and financial and accounting practices. PNM also reports to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the state Department of Environment. Since PNM is a publicly traded stock (NYSE: PNM), it must comply with the regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). To address these pressures, PNM integrated its in-house records management system into the Hummingbird document management solution.
"It’s easy to see how records management touches every part of the business," Seider says. Some of the records managers, he says, wanted management functions that would allow them to secure documents as read-only, or stamp them with automatic destruction dates. "With almost all our records, there are decisions that have to be made about how long to keep them, and who to share—or not share—them with," Seider says.
Until recently, the only automation PNM had in its document and records management arsenal was a mainframe-based index of physical paper documents. For its mainframe-based reports (accounting, compliance, power supply, etc.) PNM used a microfiche system, writing millions of reports that could then be retrieved out of a library and taken to readers for perusal.
"It had become apparent that the mainframe document and record management system was too outdated to meet the needs of the company," Seider says. "We wanted to move from a paper-laden environment to a workplace where the electronic document took on a much greater role." Document management and imaging has allowed PNM to completely eliminate its microfiche systems, an instant savings of between $100,000 and $200,000, Seider estimates.
New Efficiencies in Key Departments
The most obvious example of the power of document management may be seen in customer service. Previously, when a customer called with a question about a bill, customer service representatives had to hunt down the bill in question and call the customer back. Now customer service representatives can view PDFs of the customer’s bill, and answer questions in real time.
"Previously, the representatives on the phone couldn’t see what a customer’s bill looked like," Seider says. "Now, they can call up the bill to compare it, or fax it to the customer."
On the implementation side, PNM had specified beforehand that its document management system needed to be easy to install and maintain. "Our ability to manage the system in-house was part of the selection criteria," Seider says. "Since we do not rely on external companies to make changes and fix problems, PNM has been able to adapt Hummingbird document management, and save money in the process," Seider adds.Now there are over 10 million documents profiled and over 50 million pages of documents stored in the system. "The Hummingbird document management software has freed up hundreds of square feet of file cabinet space, enabled documents that were stored offsite and onsite to be scanned and shredded, and allowed employees more time with customers instead of filing and hunting for documents,"
Security and Compliance
The Hummingbird document management software gives PNM the flexibility to set business rules at the software level, with built-in security and compliance. "By enforcing business rules at the SQL level, you can assure that when people create a valid contract, they know they won’t be able to modify the original," Seider says. "Users, especially remote users, sincerely appreciate the convenience of creating and retrieving documents from their own desktops," Seider says. "Managers enjoy the lower cost of saving electronic records, as opposed to the higher storage costs of paper documents. Moreover, PNM’s users and managers now have a dependable system that provides efficient storage of company documents and convenient solutions to day-to-day document issues.