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Coveo Search Improves Consulting Company's Operation

Posted by Paul Korzeniowski
October 07, 2009

Tags: content management, enterprise search, search, storage

Channel: Data Center, Servers & Storage, Content Management

Disinterest, maybe even disdain.

Those words illustrated how employees at Haley & Aldrich, a Boston large scale construction consulting corporation, felt about the company's Intranet. While a lot of potentially helpful information was stored on it, the workers were often unable to find it. "Our search system returned tons of results, but many had no value," stated Trent Parkhill, Vice President and Director of IT Services at Haley & Aldrich. In replacing the system, the firm found more than a search system; it found a tool that fundamentally changed the company's operations.

In business for more than fifty years, Haley & Aldrich, which has about 400 employees spread out in 22 offices in the US, specializes in complex projects. It has been hired to help construct high rise office buildings and large municipal infrastructure projects, such as bridges. Because it works with complex blueprints, contracts and copies of various municipal laws and regulations, the business is data intensive. The company has about 15TB of storage now and recently has been experiencing 50%-70% annual growth.  

One challenge is that the company's content is spread out among their twenty-two offices. To complete various projects, the corporation forms teams where employees in as many as thirty offices work together. Information is stationed all over the country, and employees need quick and easy access to it.

In early 2006, the company realized that the inherent search capabilities found with its Microsoft office productivity search system were inadequate, so Haley & Aldrich set out in search of a new option. The company looked online, solicited information from vendors and examined about a dozen different products. The selection process was becoming muddled until Parkhill went to a search conference. There, he attended a session on content search and purchased a report from CMSWatch on enterprise search. Those events led the company toward Coveo Enterprise Search.

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