How SLAC Cut Contract Retrieval Time by 90% Under New Federal Guidance

About

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

SLAC holds contracts and internal policies that must meet federal standards. When those standards change, the lab has to check its documents against the new requirements and correct the ones that fall short.

Challenge

No Way to See Which Documents Were Affected

Updated federal guidance required substantive changes to the wording in documents like SLAC's. The lab needed to review its existing contracts and policies and confirm each one met the revised standards.

The first problem was finding them. Contracts and policy documents sat in different systems, and there was no central way to identify which ones the guidance affected. Doing that by hand would have taken significant time from several teams before anyone could start fixing language.

The contract-owning group started the effort and brought in IT.

Solution

One Workspace, Searched for What the Guidance Touched

IT set up the work in Legion in three steps.

1. Centralize. The team gathered the relevant contracts, policies and compliance artifacts into dedicated collections in Legion, giving everyone one workspace to work from.
2. Retrieve. With the documents in one place, the team used Legion to pull the ones likely affected by the updated guidance.
3. Review. The contract assurance team reviewed those documents in context and decided what needed to change. Legion found the documents; the compliance decisions stayed with the team.

Impact

From Searching to Fixing

Retrieval time fell by 90%. Affected documents surfaced without a manual search through each system, and the contract assurance team spent its time on validation and corrective action.

Contract owners, IT and compliance worked from the same set of documents in a shared environment. For SLAC, the slow part of responding to new guidance had been finding the documents, not analyzing them. With that step shortened, the lab could act on the updated federal requirements sooner.