Six half-used systems to one record

This owner's compliance life lived in six places: a document library of about 400,000 files, close to a terabyte; a governance, risk and compliance platform bought eight months earlier and still mostly empty; spreadsheets for compliance status, regulator data requests, commissioning and roles; email threads used to track those data requests; a ticketing system for tasks; and consultant point tools that overlapped with all of it.

Each held part of the truth about the fleet and nobody could see all of it. None was complete, so none could be retired on its own. With deadlines arriving under several new NERC and regional standards, every study started with a search.

A compliance program needs one place where each plant's equipment, settings, documents and obligations are kept current, with access by plant and role. Without it, the same file is requested again for every study and nobody is sure which version is right.

Our embedded team pulled the whole document library through the owner's own systems and kept every file and its history. We mapped the owner's folders onto one standard layout of about 600 paths, sorted about 350,000 files plant by plant across about 100 plants, picked the trusted source for each document type, and pulled about 3,000 files that had been filed under the wrong plant.

Then we loaded the rest of the record from the spreadsheets: about 100 plants, their people and plant roles, about 1,900 plant-by-standard statuses, about 41,000 requirement rows, about 500 open tasks and about 160 regulator requests. In all, about 44,000 records.

The owner's staff granted access, sent files and answered naming questions. They built nothing.

The six systems overlapped and none of them was complete, which is why none could be retired on its own. Everything had to land in one place first.

Sixty days after the first file arrived, the owner's compliance, engineering and site teams were working from one record. New uploads are sorted automatically. Later work landed on the same record: an evidence review that read 23,000 documents, and an implementation program of several hundred dated, assigned tasks.

Moving to one record is usually a multi-year project the owner has to staff. Here it took 60 days and the owner's staff kept their day jobs.