Touristic Enterprises Company is a Kuwaiti government-owned business that develops and operates a range of entertainment and recreational facilities with a particular focus on tourism. These include the eye-catching Kuwait Towers, the spectacular Blajat beach pavilion, and the South Sabahiya Park live events centre.
TEC also has a wider role in promoting overall tourism and entertainment in the country, including working with government, business, and international partners.

While the public-facing side of TEC’s work is all about fun and entertainment, there’s still plenty of documentation and paperwork behind the scenes. This includes the management of the facilities, contractor arrangements, and overseeing bidding processes for specialist service providers and investors.

Having operated successfully since 1976, TEC’s document processing needs have continuously evolved leading to a recent review of how it stores and organizes documents, including paper forms. The company turned to NVSSoft to explore options for updating its document management technology, along with challenges and solutions for making any upgrade or transition without disruption.

Learn more about their experience with NVSSoft’s Tarasol and ArcMate Enterprise solutions in this case study.

Touristic Enterprise Company had been using its previous document management system for a number of years. Although their incumbent solution is a popular and well-established software package, it was displaying some key limitations that indicated a change might be required for TEC:

  • Scanning Arabic text didn’t always work smoothly and limited the usefulness of optical character recognition.
  • There seemed to be a significant mismatch between the cost of the Support and Maintenance Contract (SMC) and the availability and quality of the support provided
  • The combination of the current solution’s proprietary technology and issues with scalability meant TEC wanted to reassess its suitability as a long-term tool for the organization.
  • The legacy storage solution had ballooned out of control with tens of thousands of folders having been created, often with only 1 or 2 files stored within them. This led to a situation where TEC teams were not even using the system because they were unable to locate the files they needed. This was not sustainable for TEC. They needed a storage system that would be adopted by the employees.
  • TEC also had a significant backlog of paper documents to scan. This led to some internal debate about the best way to proceed with any changes to document management processes and tools. Waiting until the backlog was cleared before starting an upgrade or transition wasn’t practical. However, putting the scanning process on hold during the software switch was also not a viable option.
The Touristic Entertainment Company had previously worked with NVSSoft to contract and use Tarasol, a package specifically designed for managing correspondence. TEC was pleased with the service levels and professionalism displayed during this process and they asked NVSSoft to find and set up a solution for its wider document management functions.

The solution put forward by NVSSoft to address these challenges was ArcMate Enterprise and after some consideration, TEC opted to go ahead and take advantage of the product’s key features:

  • Scalable and Secure Architecture: Built on an n-tier, service-oriented architecture, ArcMate Enterprise is designed to handle the needs of businesses of all sizes, offering robust security and scalability for long-term investment protection.
  • Document Capture and Indexing: Supporting batch scanning, intelligent recognition, and integration with email and Microsoft Office, streamlining document capture and indexing processes.
  • Multi-Language Intelligent Search Capabilities: ArcMate Enterprise offers an advanced search engine, allowing users to locate documents and information easily. It includes full-text search, annotation search, and wildcard capabilities, optimized for multiple languages including Arabic.
  • Collaboration Tools: The platform facilitates document collaboration through annotations, version control, and document routing systems, enabling smooth teamwork across departments.
  • Security and Compliance: ArcMate Enterprise provides granular security controls at the document, page, and field levels, along with audit trails, retention policies, and disaster recovery.

At this point, The NVSSoft team turned its attention to the transition process. This included three key elements:

  1. Exploring TEC’s existing data use (a process known as client discovery analysis and scoping) to develop a custom data migration tool.

    NVSSoft’s previous experience with their legacy solution had often uncovered huge core databases and an unwieldy number of folders and this was the case again here. One of the big problems was that their previous solution made it too easy for staff to create new folders as a default option even when that’s not necessarily the most helpful option for managing the system as a whole. This limits and slows operations and analysis, one of the reasons customers look for alternatives.In turn, it means a carefully designed custom migration tool is the most efficient way to transfer this data to a new system such as Arcmate. NVSSoft never underestimates this process, taking the attitude that if the data migration fails, the entire project fails.

  2. Finding the most efficient manner to clear a backlog of paper document scanning

    This was completed in two months which, while no small task, was considerably shorter than might have been expected at first glance. The job required a combination of technology and experience. NVSSoft uses equipment that can scan documents of up to 110 pages at a time and its staff are not fazed by projects that require scanning more than 10,000 pages a day.

  3. Developing a training program for staff across the 26 departments.

    Getting staff on board was vital not only to make the transition to a new system go smoothly but to make sure staff were not deterred from scanning documents as sometimes happened with their legacy solution. NVSSoft worked on a department-by-department basis, speaking to staff to discuss their specific use cases so that the training was relevant and engaging.

  • NVSSoft’s experience in transitioning clients to new solutions such as ArcMate means Touristic Entertainment Services was able to make the switch with no significant disruptions to its day-to-day operations.
  • The training program meant that every department would be able to use the software in the way that best suits their needs, while still making sure the document management is fully integrated across the organization.
  • The new document storage structure has allowed the TEC team to file, store, and manage information in a much more effective way. Information is now easier to find and stored in a logical way that everyone can understand and stick to.
  • Perhaps the biggest day-to-day change is that the entire scanning process only involves interacting with one or two screens. That not only saves time but is an immediately visible benefit that’s easy to appreciate. In turn that makes it easier to overcome any reluctance among staff to learn a new system.

TEC IT Manager Abdul Mohsen added:

“NVSSoft found the right software and helped us transition smoothly. We were particularly impressed with the way they helped clear our paper document backlog at the same time as making the switch.”