Archiving for posterity and prosperity

Infineon Technologies, a German semiconductor manufacturer, formed a steering committee to address the demands of document and knowledge management. The goal of the group was development of a comprehensive, enterprisewide archiving solution.

Explains project manager Wilhelm Overkamp, “We must be a market leader with a reputation for speed, flexibility, quality and customer satisfaction. Large amounts of information and company knowledge are held in documents. Besides the obvious reasons--the streamlining and transparency of business operations, document security, retrievability for long-term retention files and global access to all relevant information--an enterprisewide, coordinated archiving environment was absolutely necessary.”

Overkamp says that Infineon must be able to transparently reproduce the entire international manufacturing process, from development to delivery, to meet the requirements of product liability, patent law, intellectual property and environmental protection. That challenge is even more demanding because certain documents must be kept for anywhere from 11 years to nearly seven decades.

“Beyond the question of archiving,” Overkamp continues, “it was a matter of making the knowledge potential of a company available in shared information pools and to be able to have this information called up at any time by any authorized user.”

To meet its needs enterprisewide, Infineon has launched a solution that includes archiving and document management software from Saperion. Now, six months after the software was introduced, the system is being used in 14 different projects worldwide, according to Saperion, with 30 more projects scheduled for implementation in the short term. Over the next two years, implementation will expand until Infineon is using the solution in all its business application areas, from product development, production, materials management and accounting to contract and corporatewide knowledge management.