Maire Tecnimont streamlines contract processes with Microsoft Syntex

Summary

Headquartered in Milan Italy, Maire Tecnimont is a leading industrial group in the natural resources transformation sector: technology, engineering and construction in the oil and gas downstream and in energy transition. The organization operates in 45 countries through approximately 50 companies, involving more than 40,000 people including vendors, contractors, and partners from 70 nationalities worldwide.

Maire Tecnimont is well known for innovation and adoption of leading technology and is a champion for modern workplace, data center transformation, and modern content services projects. Throughout the company, there’s a deeply held belief that leveraging the latest technology will provide opportunities to migrate from monolithic, legacy tools to service-based components and solutions that will better serve the business and its people. This belief fits into their companywide mission to transform human behavior and unlock human intelligence through automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

Challenge

Maire Tecnimont manages an abundance of engineering projects each year resulting in the production of millions of documents. These documents are shared and collaborated on by more than 20 departments across the organization as well as their clients, resulting in numerous versions.

Whether the documents are related to technical designs and specifications, process controls and verifications, customer shipments, or other critical engineering collateral, Document Controllers must check and verify each document against the customer’s code – every time it passes from one collaborator to the next. Performing such quality checks ensures the Maire Tecnimont teams remain contractually and legally compliant.

With millions of documents, oftentimes up to 50 team members supporting engineering were tasked with quality checking documents. Considering the total number of documents that needed to be checked, managing documents alone would take an average of 8 days.

As an organization focused on innovation, employees at Maire Tecnimont were quick and eager to engage Microsoft Partner, Protiviti, and Microsoft experts when they learned of Microsoft Syntex – Microsoft’s latest Content AI solution.

Microsoft Syntex is a Content AI solution that automatically reads, tags, and indexes content and connects it where it’s needed – in search, in applications, and as reusable knowledge.

Strategy

Using Microsoft Syntex, Document Controllers can now automatically capture key information from each document associated with their given project, allowing them to perform their quality checks more quickly.

At Maire Tecnimont, employees have used structured document processing models included as part of Syntex, to analyze structured documents, such as engineering contracts and extract key identifiers such as customer names, project numbers, document number, revision, and approvers. In this case, Maire Tecnimont Document Controllers trained structured document processing models to find the customer code, document number, and other pertinent information related to the contract. After a team member uploads documents to their SharePoint Library, a Power Automate flow triggers the structured document processing model. The model extracts the key information and then a second Power Automate flow is triggered to enter the extracted attributes into the project register.

With the power of AI available to them, Document Controllers can significantly reduce the time spent on tedious, manual tasks and focus their efforts on adding value to the engineering organization.

Results

By leveraging Microsoft Syntex, leaders at Maire Tecnimont feel that they’re giving value back to their employees. Where up to 50 people spent an average of 8 days on document controlling processes, the processes have been reduced to minutes across two employees. The same employees that spent days verifying codes and key words across project documents can now support engineering by building new systems – providing more business value as well as value to their individual careers.

Document Controlling is just the beginning for Microsoft Syntex at Maire Tecnimont. “We’re very enthusiastic about Syntex”, says IT Engineer, Luca Simonelli, “and we are lucky because our leadership has more ideas about the technology and the future.” As the technology develops, they hope to leverage Syntex to extract information from images and video to improve compliance at construction sites as well as verify licensed documents.