Renault employ new information management system

From its headquarters in England to the final checkered flag in Brazil, championship ING Renault Formula One (F1) team has turned to Oracle content management solutions (formerly Stellent) to manage, share, and secure its most critical documents.

Content management may seem foreign to the world of high-performance motor sports, but according to Alexandre Rigal, IS project manager, ING Renault F1 Team, it's become a vital piece in a very complex puzzle.

"We are an information-heavy organization, where the slightest bit of data can be the difference between winning and losing," Rigal says. "We are confident that we have an ECM platform that will help us stay in the lead."

Business Challenge

To keep the ING Renault F1 team operating at peak performance, Rigal and his teammates must wrangle more than 100,000 documents (80 GB of data) shared across two factories and two mobile teams, as well as numerous subcontractors and partners across the globe.

The team also needs access to vast stores of unstructured and structured information, even in the split-second environment of a Grand Prix pit stop. Over just one weekend during the 2006 British Grand Prix, the ING Renault F1 Team had to create and share 4 GB of data, including 150 documents containing car designs, technical specifications, and other important testing and race data.

All this unstructured information used to be stored in a dispersed network of shared drives, local hard drives, e mails, intranets, and Web applications.

"We realized that we were wasting too much time searching for documents and correcting errors because we could not keep track of versions or track changes," says Rigal.

Up to Speed

After a lengthy evaluation process of content management vendors, the ING Renault F1 team chose Oracle. For a team obsessed with speed, rapid deployment and ease of use (and therefore faster adoption) were key factors in selecting the Oracle solution.

Now team members can access documents and information from multiple locations via VPN as well as the intranet. And advanced search capabilities, including support for metadata, retrieve documents more rapidly and with greater precision—especially important on race weekends when time is of the essence.

By providing a single, unified repository, the Oracle solution also dramatically reduces the amount of complex and sensitive data circulating as e-mail attachments. Instead, team members simply send links to files in a central repository, reducing duplication of enormous files while also better ensuring accuracy and version control.

The Secret of Their Success

For Formula One teams, trade secrets are indispensable to victory. To safeguard highly sensitive information such as car designs and technical specifications, the ING Renault team turned to Oracle Information Rights Management (IRM), formerly Stellent SealedMedia.

With Oracle IRM, only authorized team members can access, view, send, and receive sensitive material—even if the documents and e-mails leave the Oracle Universal Content Management repository. Content is encrypted, or “sealed," associating each with a set of policies and providing a digital signature to defend against tampering and unauthorized viewing.

An easy-to-install IRM Desktop application then enforces these policies on end-user systems, integrating seamlessly with the Windows environment and Microsoft Office and other critical applications.

Now that the Oracle solution is in place, what does the future hold for the 2006 world champions?
"We are confident that our solutions will provide the team, both trackside and at their technical center, with easy access to documents and data to power their world championship challenge in 2007 and onwards," says Bhavesh Vaghela, marketing director for Enterprise Content Management, Oracle EMEA.

Watch a video: Oracle Helps Renault Formula 1 Team Manage Important Documents