Project : Taking the paper out of Petropars

Petropars builds refineries and rigs for Iranian oil and gas. They had a twelve billion dollar project in South Pars, the gas field Iran shares with Qatar.

We put office automation between the Tehran head office and the operational sites in the south. Many offices, many sites, and Iranian bureaucracy on top: an enormous volume of paper letters moving between them.

The letters moved into a web system instead. An online registry, where a letter could be received, tracked, signed and forwarded in minutes, and sent to outside organisations too. This was 2011. For administrative work in Iran it was a large change.

The part that was hard

Not the software. The resistance.

Departments pushed back. Powerful managers pushed back. Paper was where their authority was visible.

What worked was going to the chief executive, the deputies and the senior managers, and showing them what the system was actually worth to them. Then walking with them through a year of leaving paper behind, rather than switching it off.

Afterwards they told me their paper use had dropped by seventy percent. That saving was about six times what they had paid us for the software.

We also synchronised the HR data with their SAP system, so the two stopped disagreeing about who worked there.

A number that large was never a software argument. It was a year of conversations.