“Helping McGraw-Hill Construction Turn Valuable information into a Revenue Stream”

“It’s not easy to take millions of documents, scan them, keep them all together, index them for keyword searches and then transmit them to different locations and different databases at the same time for repurposing into different media. Xerox showed us that they had really mastered this technology.” – Tim Ryan Senior Vice President, Business Operations McGraw-Hill Construction
Background
McGraw-Hill Construction—which includes Dodge Reports, Sweet’s and other web information services and publications—is the leader in providing information, intelligence, tools and resources to the $4.6 trillion construction industry. It’s constantly looking for ways to improve its operations to connect its customers to projects, products and people.

A few years ago, the company’s MHC Dodge division decided to streamline the way it added new content to its vast digital database of architectural plans, specifications and other information related to active construction projects. The valuable database is subscriber based and contains more than 65,000 projects that are updated daily.
At the time, the organization relied on five geographically dispersed in-house imaging facilities to convert hard-copy construction documents into digital form. The internal imaging process was not optimized, however, because it required scanning each document twice—once to produce microfilm and once for the digital image file.

The operation also was time-consuming, because the hard copy originals had to be returned to the people who provided them. That required meticulous tracking. To sharpen its focus on its core competency— providing the best source of up-to-date construction information to subscribers—the company decided to outsource its imaging operations. The company was looking for