St George to slay the multiple systems and converge
St George to slay the multiple systems and converge
Australia's fourth largest bank, St George, has an old dragon of a document management strategy and plans to slay it like its namesake knight of old. St George has released a tender request for its document management strategy (DMS), as part of an effort to align four streams of its business - print management, device management, essential mail and archiving.
The tender is part of St George's "Even Better Bank" project, and aims to align traditional functions such as hardware purchases with service-oriented contracts such as commercial printing and data-driven printing.
The stated objective of the DMS project is to "consolidate business requirements and build an integrated enterprise Document Management Services solution". The Bank is looking for suppliers to handle "the whole basket of work", said Claudia Teal, Category Manager of Group Procurement at St George. With the aim of aligning the Bank's print life cycle process, there are "advantages in handling it all as one stream", she stated.
"The challenges of the DMS program are not to be underestimated in size, complexity or the importance of DMS to the bank", St George warns in its tender release. The Bank has thousands of devices for internal printing, it generates over 40 million pages in on-demand and commercial print, and it has a huge document print portfolio complete with over 2000 stock print items and another 500 e-forms.
All of this must be merged into one supply chain solution that will allow the Bank to shift the burden of supply chain management back to the suppliers.
Currently, the Print Management system is run by the Blue Star group, the Bank's Essential Mail stream is operated by Salmat and Device Management is handled by various suppliers. Archiving has no supplier at present, Teal describes Archiving as the "lynchpin" of all the systems. The tender winner will be responsible for overlaying a management system across all four streams.
None of the activities is handled in-house at the moment, except for the actual management of all four disparate document systems. Teal anticipates that will not change and that under the new regime everything will be out-sourced, including the management of the entire system.
The DMS tendering process will conducted in two stages. Stage one will be the pre-selection process, in which suppliers of complete document life-cycle solutions and single services (such as archiving) will be invited to submit a tender. The bank will review contenders based on the "depth of the players", their understanding of the bank's needs and the skill-sets and past experiences that are offered in their responses. From that the Bank will compile a short-list, due out shortly.
The stage two shortlisted candidates will be given the detailed requests for quotes (DSQs) on the specific DMS business areas. The successful contender will provide a "strategic and functional solution" that will encompass all the DMS layers and categories. A decision will be made in February.
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