Petroleum Pipeline Company Case Study
Established in 1975, PPC is a leading stockist and distributor of casing, tubing, and line pipe, operating across a worldwide network of offices, including Dubai, Houston, China, Columbia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Adelaide and Moscow. PPC is certified under ISO 9002, operating a Quality System externally audited by Moody’s International and trading only in mill-certified tubulars and accessories.Also part of the PPC group are Pipeline Supplies Gulf and Maxtube, each dealing with pipeline materials for the oil and gas industry.
Love it or hate it, email has dominated business communications over the past 10 years and continues to demonstrate unrelenting growth.
Spurred on by integration with mobile voice and data technologies, such as BlackBerry®, 3G and SMS, email has become systemic within business processes and has adopted ‘business critical’ status within ICT management, both as a carrier of critical information and as a vital link in integrated communications systems.
Equally, the quantity and size of emails has grown for less positive reasons. Spam, unnecessary copies and personal emails proliferate in every organisation, wastefully loading servers with data that the business will never use. The problem is compounded by employees who prefer to ‘hide behind email’, writing lengthy messages in preference to a brief telephone call.
Either way, for good or for bad, email management has risen amongst the priorities faced by all IT managers. In particular, the task of providing storage capable of keeping pace with exponentially expanding volumes has become paramount. Managers need to cope with the vast quantities of often unknown emails being stored at the desktop, in filing systems customised to individual users’ requirements.
Paradoxically, the same managers are under pressure to standardise and comply with the requirements of corporate governance and regulatory bodies that demand evidence of business documentation to be retained for a mandatory period of time.
For these reasons, the task of email storage and archiving must address four key issues:
1. Separating the critical from the unimportant
2. Eliminating wasted storage arising from duplication of message
3. Controlling the use of email for personal use
4. Providing rapid access to critical information held in the archives
These were the very issues faced by Chris Starling, IT Manager for the international supplier of pipeline components, the Petroleum Pipeline Company, affectionately known as PetPipe.
PetPipe’s business is based in the oil and gas industry, dealing with large, high value contracts. Consequently, the need to maintain supporting documentation for commercial and legal purposes is vital. To add to the challenge, PetPipe’s customers and operations are based across three continents where procedures and working practices vary considerably.
Chris explains how it was:
“The problem we faced was keeping track of emails in a system that was fragmented and varied from user to user. Emails would disappear into archives, typically into Outlook public folders, with no consistency in filing and storage. This lack of control resulted in technical issues, such as exceeding mail box size. More importantly, though, we had no reliable way of validating, tracing or accessing emails with the speed and efficiency required by the commercial side of the business.
“We understood that we needed to provide a degree of flexibility to let individuals adapt their email usage to their working practices, particularly when you are dealing with organisations across different countries and different cultures. However, an unmovable prerequisite was that we had to know exactly what came in and what went out, in order to satisfy our legal obligations.”
Chris’s first move was to call Daisy to address the challenge. With extensive experience of data storage and management solutions, Daisy specified Archive Manager, a web-based email archiving application from the data storage specialist Quest. Within a short time, Chris could see exactly how email was being used throughout the organisation.
“We now have Archive Manager installed in the UK, US and UAE. It tells me what email is entering and leaving the business and who has looked at each email. This is the sort of audit trail information we need to support our compliance policies.
“From the user’s point of view, not a lot has changed. They can still access all their mail. Now that employees know that we’ve got this insight and control over the systems, personal use of email is less of an issue. Archive Manager is a natural deterrent to employees sending fraudulent material, without being perceived as ‘big-brother’. In other words, if employees use emails for personal use now, we’re pretty sure it’s going to be harmless stuff and we’ll tend to turn a blind eye to it.”
Whilst PetPipe employs only around 70 people, it is surprising (though some may say typical) that they receive in the order of 10,000 emails a day within the group, of which 80% are spam.
How does Petpipe deal with that?
“We filter the spam at system level with the help of Barracuda, before it hits Archive Manager. When it comes to storage, we need about 25 gigabytes. Within parts of the business we use photography and design work and this can result in the delivery of some pretty big files. Archive Manager lets me now back up everything onto a single SQL server, releasing space on others”.So, is that it? No more email problems? What does the future hold?
“The growth in email is always going to present more challenges but, with Archive Manager in place, I doubt that we’ll have to increase storage capacity in the near future. In particular, the ‘single instance’ feature cuts out duplicated email and definitely makes an impact on reducing volumes.Admin is very straightforward. I can create new users simply in Active Directory and can upload PST files automatically from the desktop.
“Without doubt, Daisy has transformed our email management with the introduction of Archive Manager. It’s a simple answer to the extremely important issue of compliance.”
Daisy is a leading provider of integrated voice and data services to more than 75,000 customers in the UK business market. Providing a combined product set, including managed data access, hosting, voice, systems and mobile telephony, Daisy’s wide portfolio of services enables customers to consolidate their supply chain for telecoms, reducing the day to day management overheads of supporting multiple suppliers. This also aids with cost control as by bundling services, we have the ability to reach an extremely competitive price point.
Industry leading service and support are at the centre of Daisy’s ethos, with Dedicated Service Managers and support teams available 24x7 for support escalations, as well as providing comprehensive service reports on a frequent basis.
