Brazilian Steel Producer modernizes engineering content with OnBase

A leading steel producer in Brazil and one of the largest steel complexes in Latin America, they operate across multiple Brazilian states and cities. Its steel products are part of everyday life in industries such as civil construction, home appliances, and automotive manufacturing. Because the organization operates across multiple market segments, it is structured into several business units.  

The company’s primary objectives were to modernize the solution used by the engineering department and to replace its legacy enterprise content management system. With these goals in mind, the organization evaluated vendors listed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and conducted an internal assessment. After completing its research, the company contacted several shortlisted providers, including Hyland. 

Hyland was selected because it offered the strongest capabilities for managing engineering documents and approval workflows. In addition, OnBase provided higher integration capacity with existing systems and more flexible licensing options compared to other solutions evaluated.

During the migration of information from legacy systems, the organization also developed a plan to improve document management across multiple departments. Keywords such as document type, employee ID, and supplier ID were created to streamline and accelerate the search and retrieval of any content within the enterprise.

The first phase of the project focused on implementing OnBase as the company’s core document management solution, fully integrated with other systems such as SAP and internally developed applications. The second phase involved a larger initiative: the complete replacement of the legacy Documentum platform with OnBase. This phase centralized all business processes, enabled document sharing with third parties, and established OnBase as the primary platform used across the Mechanical, Steelmaking, and Mining business areas.

They required a modern, comprehensive platform capable of supporting a wide range of enterprise processes, including document management, analysis, control, and approval across multiple formats. Prior to the project, limitations in search functionality for Engineering and administrative areas—such as Human Resources and Finance—slowed daily operations and made it difficult for employees to quickly locate critical documents.

The engineering department, in particular, relied on a highly specialized review and approval workflow involving specific document types such as Document Transmittal Guides (GRD), Document Lists (LD), and Numbering Reservations (RN), as well as secure file exchanges with suppliers via SFTP for internal technical analysis.

These processes were complex, time‑consuming, and often lacked visibility into workflow status. In total, the organization managed approximately 500 document types, representing 21 million files, all of which needed to be migrated from the legacy ECM platform, Documentum, to OnBase within a very short timeframe—one of the project’s greatest challenges.