Case Study

HP

Background

Hewlett Packard's technology is used by millions of people around the world every day. HP's customers include consumers, small businesses, large corporates and public sector organisations.

Every year HP spends $4bn (US) on researching new products, solutions and technology, and ensuring it maintains its sector leadership.

HP's European research laboratories are based in Bristol, where the company's researchers work on developing cutting-edge technology.

The Problem

Information relating to research can be both confidential and extremely valuable. The researchers keep meticulous hand-written notes in bound notebooks, detailing progress on projects, from start to finish. These laboratory notebooks are important for reference and for use in patent disputes.

HP Labs decided to solve this problem by electronically scanning all such notes and saving them digitally on to a library of CDs, so that they could be easily accessed, shared and copied in the future. HP decided this task should be outsourced to a third party.

The Solution

In 2003, a representative from HP Labs contacted Remploy Offiscope and was impressed with its ethical stance as well the level of service it could provide. As a result HP Labs chose to use Offiscope's outsourced document management service to transfer all laboratory notebook information to CD.

The team at Offiscope's Bristol office spent a year transferring HP's backlog of laboratory notebooks to CDs. The process involved scanning, indexing and saving each page of every book to comply with legal requirements. For security reasons, the scanning was carried out in batches of 10 laboratory notebooks at a time, ensuring that only a small amount of sensitive information would be outside of HP's offices for any set period of time. While these books were with Remploy Offiscope, they were kept in a secure building with keypad-only access to the specific area. Once the books and CDs had been sent back to HP Labs, all information saved on Remploy Offiscope's PCs was deleted.

The Outcome

The decision to outsource this document management process to Remploy Offiscope has allowed HP to focus more effectively on its core business.

Jess Blower said: "We rely on Remploy Offiscope to provide a secure and dependable service so that we can work more efficiently with the highly sensitive information stored in our researchers' laboratory notebooks. The Remploy Offiscope team offers a quality solution and is adept at handling confidential intellectual property."