Change Going Digital -1 by Godrej

GENERAL INTEREST

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It is estimated that the cycle time of the cutting process stands reduced by a hefty 75%.

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OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE

Going Digital Going Global Godrej business archives now accessible readily Amruta Marathe, Godrej Archives

In today’s fiercely turbulent and competitive world, it is difficult for business organisations to anchor themselves solidly beyond the depths of turbulence to seek a sense of direction, pace of change to survive and grow. It is not possible to anchor into turbulent shallows - the recent past, hence the organisations must dive deeper into the years gone by to articulate their core, unchanging identity. After all, everyone, individuals or an organisation are the products of their past whether they like it or not, admit or not.

Business archives preserve the past and are meant to make it available to those who want to take a look into its past whether they are researchers, historians, business and non-business organisations, general public, media, or the people of the business itself who may want to leverage the past to invent their future. From this it’s clear that the major task of any archives is to preserve the past in various forms, records or artefacts and make them readily accessible to an audience as large as possible, both in the present and in the future. Emerging digital technologies have been making preservation and managing of data easier and accessible albeit at an eﬀort and cost. Godrej Archives, realising these developments, decided to ride the wave of change and embrace technological developments in order to serve its constituencies. After documenting archival records in an Excel database since its inception in 2006, Godrej Archives decided to move on to a more sophisticated digital platform that enmanagement, enhanced data retrieval and seamless access. In 2014, the Digital Assets Management System (DAMS) implementation was initiated and it was soon realised that it wasn’t a cake walk, particularly for

100,000 items whose entries were to be standardised. The features of Excel had severe limitations and did not support many of the standard archival practices of documentation that posed problems for retrieval and generation of reports. To overcome these limitations and to serve our purpose better, a new technological solution was called for. Godrej management gave their go-ahead and we chose Cumulus DAMS to meet our needs.

What is Cumulus DAMS? It is a proprietary Digital Asset Management System from Canto Inc. (Germany) with over implementation started in July 2014 with their nominated vendors as our project consultants. After six months of dedicated hard work we made the system functional in January 2015. These six months gave us an important opportunity to revisit all our existing processes and practices and improve them for greater stability and responsiveness.

The Implementation The implementation was carried out in three phases. The Pre-implementation phase included

assessing the existing processes and practices. The team did a detailed study of every existing archival process and analysed the logue structure, digital structure, query patterns, and so on. The Implementation phase included inGodrej server during which the team alongCumulus architecture, catalogue structure that complemented the structure of the templates, and the like. This phase posed many daunting tasks pertaining to the bridging of the gap between what we had and what we wanted, as well as the way data was managed and the way we wanted it to be managed, making eﬀective use of various Cumulus tools. Training and testing phase involved not only the users’ operational training but also the administrative training so that the team cal requirements. As a result of this extensive training, the team could now add and modify functionalities as required on its own without any external support. It has been more than two years since the Cumulus DAMS system has been fully functional. The team is using it not only to ingest

VOL 15-16 DEC 2017

Batteries would have to cost half as much and last twice as long as those that are currently available

VOL 15-16 DEC 2017