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New Mexico Utility Lights Up with Hummingbird Enterprise

Hummingbird Ltd. - HA-Suite

REVIEWER: Carl Seider, technical lead for the Public Service Company of New Mexico Resources.

BACKGROUND: Public Service Company of New Mexico Resources (PNMR) serves 405,000 electric customers and 459,000 natural gas customers in approximately 100 communities statewide and also sells electricity on the wholesale market. The company is based in Albuquerque and has offices in more than 20 cities.

PLATFORMS: Compaq DL series servers. Microsoft SQL Server is a quad processor with Web, file server and DM servers running dual processors. All servers are running Microsoft Server 2000. Desktops run Microsoft XP.

PROBLEM SOLVED: Government authorities require us to retain all records and produce them upon request - a time-consuming task because our mainframe records management system wasn't integrated into our other business applications. Our staff receives thousands of customer inquiries, and our call center was also inefficient. Searching for and retrieving records was a slow process. Because our bill views were different than our customers' views, call center interactions were longer and often delayed resolution of the customer issue. We had a serious storage problem - 55,000 boxes of paper documents and millions of dated microfiche and microfilm records were being stored on site and off site.

PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: Moving to Hummingbird Enterprise was less costly than upgrading the old mainframe system and supplied us with greater functionality. Now, more than 48 million documents are profiled and more than 150 million pages of documents are stored in the system. Hummingbird's solution also gives us the flexibility to set business rules at the software level, with built-in levels of security and compliance assuring employees that their original documents won't be modified.

STRENGTHS: The superior searching capabilities have been instrumental in decreasing the time it takes us to handle requests. This dependable system provides efficient document storage and convenient solutions for day-to-day issues. Powerful imaging capabilities in the content management suite have produced instant savings of time and money, while providing a new level of customer satisfaction.

WEAKNESSES: The import program needs additions to allow for scheduling and operator-free operation. It would also be nice to have improvements for removing users from the system.

SELECTION CRITERIA: After comparing document management products from several vendors, including FileNet, Documentum and Hummingbird, we chose the Hummingbird system because it had the most open architecture and would enable us to integrate it with a records management system and future applications. It required less staff training, and the company can customize the Hummingbird solution to meet our specific requirements. Hummingbird's advanced search, retrieval and categorization capabilities fulfilled the varying requirements of users in different departments. This system was the best-priced and most cost-effective solution among those considered.

DELIVERABLES: Our employees in customer service gain the most obvious benefits from the power of Hummingbird Enterprise. With Hummingbird's imaging capabilities, our representatives can view PDFs of a customer's bill and answer questions in real time. Our stored documents were scanned and shredded, freeing hundreds of square feet of file cabinet space.

VENDOR SUPPORT: Pre-implementation work with the professional services group has been one of the keys to the success of this installation! Ongoing support is above average. The Web site for support allows us to directly search problems and solutions, and provides easy and timely access to updates and patches. Our technical account manager has been great to work with.

DOCUMENTATION: Installation documentation is complete and detailed enough to successfully install in one try. Multiple levels of end-user documentation, from the detailed PDF users guide to the context sensitive online help, ensure that our users find what they need easily. Documentation is easy to read and well organized.


Product reviews are customer testimonials. We thank the author of this review for taking the time to share his or her expertise.

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