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Search and Regulatory Compliance Auckland Transport

Auckland Transport needed to comply with the Public Records Act but an audit report found that the organisation wasn’t compliant from a document management perspective, while poor meta data resulted in problems with document findability.

Auckland Transport, a council-owned entity in New Zealand, similar to Transport for London (TfL) in the United Kingdom, grappled with searching and managing its many document repositories. Everything from business cases to engineering designs and supplier documentation needed to be managed – a lot of unstructured data!

Problem

Compliance with the Public Records Act 2015 was jeopardized by inconsistent metadata practices, leaving users frustrated with inefficient searches across OneDrive and SharePoint – and an inability to find documents stored in other (non-Microsoft) operational systems.
This risked regulatory penalties, eroded productivity, prevented reuse of Intellectual property (IP), incurred unnecessary storage costs, and hindered critical processes in an enterprise environment demanding government-level rigor.

Solution

Pingar, alongside Synercon, partnered with Auckland Transport to deploy a cost effective and powerful end-to-end solution, powered by mature AI and machine learning techniques — to transform document management and search. Pingar’s DiscoveryOne automated the tagging and classification of a vast history of document sets using a tailored ontology and taxonomy, eliminating inconsistent and time-consuming manual metadata burdens. Synercon’s complementary a.k.a and Precipio products provided integrated configuration and workflow automation.

This innovative solution provides scalability and cost-effective performance.  Ongoing business and technical support enable outcomes to be continually maintained as Auckland Transport need’s and its environment continues to evolve.

Results

The end-to-end solution deployed around DiscoveryOne delivered a game-changer - winning the New Zealand ALGIM Information Management Project of the Year Award 2023


Auckland Transport achieved Public Records Act compliance and boosted operational confidence. Search accuracy soared, slashing retrieval times and streamlining tasks like document management for staff exit procedures.  A single “Federated Search” experience in SharePoint now enables documents to be found across all the storage repositories that DiscoveryOne scans.  


The solution’s configurability handles large-scale, unstructured data and enables it to be future-ready. DiscoveryOne’s scope and role has been extended over many subsequent phases by Auckland Transport to include workflow automation based on the high precision deterministic and auditable tagging achieved.  Pingar’s collaborative approach continues to ensure a bespoke fit.


For enterprises facing similar challenges, this case study demonstrates Pingar’s ability to conquer document chaos with mature AI-techniques available out-of-the-box, with results assured by the wrap around support of our domain experts.