AMEC plc (LSE: AMEC) is an international project management and services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. With office networks across the Americas,continental Europe and Asia, AMEC manages projects worldwide. It generated annual revenues of £4.7 billion in 2003 and employs 45,000 people in over 40 countries.

The company works across the public and private sectors, locally and internationally and in a range of sectors including transport, oil, gas, power and across general industry and commerce.

Internal communications is extremely important to AMEC and the company consistently delivers tools to ensure its employees remain informed and knowledge is shared. One such tool is the company's Intranet - AMEC Net.

While AMEC Net serves its purpose by delivering information and sharing knowledge, AMEC quickly realised its use could be extended to improve communications further.

AMEC has a comprehensive image library that is used extensively by external agencies and also by employees. Images are used in corporate reports, advertising and promotional materials and also in internal reports, proposals and presentations.

"AMEC commissions and generates many new images every year, however, the generation and ownership of these images is dispersed across the company's many geographic locations. Whilst these images are readily made available for the purpose for which they are intended, such as advertising etc, we wanted all AMEC personnel to be able to access and use these images,"

Mark Taylor, AMEC communications.

Mark and his team undertook a period of consultation and research with the authors and users of images. "The results were very interesting," explained Mark. "There were basically three key issues that needed to be tackled. The first was to provide a tool to enable people to search the wealth of AMEC images. The second was to resolve issues relating to ownership - where images are stored, who had access to the originals and how they were used. Finally, whatever we implemented needed to be easy to use and manage on a worldwide basis."

"We decided to look for a database solution and started investigating technologies to facilitate the needs of authors and users, and how this could be integrated with our Intranet," said Mark.

"After evaluating custom web solutions, hosted solutions and off many ‘off the shelf' products we opted for a Cumulus web publishing solution." The Cumulus client server architecture has provided AMEC with a means for remote users to add their images to a central database. From here, the images are published to AMEC Net where users can search and use the images in their internal proposals, presentations and other similar documents.

"The system has provided many benefits," said Mark. "Cumulus allows authors to store a preview of the image in its database. The authors categorise the image and add additional information or keywords (metadata) to the database to help searching. The preview and metadata is delivered to AMEC Net where users can see and search for images. The original files remain with and are stored by the author. This means we do not have to manage and store huge numbers of images at one location and the authors retain control and ownership of their images."

"Cumulus has enabled us to save time and money by implementing a flexible solution to deliver a corporate image database to all AMEC Net users."

The Cumulus web publishing interface has been modified, so that once an image is found, the users have two options. First, if they want to use the original file, they simply request a copy from the author and the author locates it quickly using their Cumulus client. Second, if the user wants to use the image in internal communications materials such as proposals or presentations, they have access to a larger, low resolution image delivered by the Cumulus web interface. This functionality has been a real bonus. Prior to implementing the solution, high resolution image files were commonly used and this created documents with unwieldy file sizes. This caused many problems for the company's IT personnel.

"With our current system, Cumulus has enabled us to save time and money by implementing a flexible solution to deliver a corporate image database for all AMEC Net users," said Mark.