With almost 1.4 million members, the Teamsters is one of the largest labor unions in the world. While the union performs many important roles for its members, including pension management, communications, community outreach and managing government affairs, one of its most important roles is to negotiate collective bargaining agreements and to help enforce contracts once they have been signed. As a result, for almost 30 years the Teamsters has managed a growing repository of contracts that average 30 pages in length. As its repository of current and archived contracts grew, it became an increasingly difficult and time-consuming process to find specific information within a particular contract. Even after the Teamsters installed document management software from Documentum, searching for specific information involved running a query that took several minutes and was restricted to a limited range of documents. Furthermore, these queries could only return a link to the entire contract, forcing the person looking for specific information to manually search the entire document to locate the relevant reference.

"Before we deployed Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, our information location and retrieval system involved a lot of manual intervention and was hard for many users to master," said Jim Kimball, Director of Economics and Contracts for the Teamsters. "We had a vision of how enterprise search should work, and the EBS Group and Oracle helped us make that vision a reality."

Beginning in October 2006, The EBS Group began helping the Teamsters convert existing contracts and agreements into a text-searchable format. Once the documents were converted, The EBS Group leveraged Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g to create Web-based drop-down lists and guided questions that help users quickly access the exact information they need while helping to ensure that only authorized users have access to confidential or sensitive information. In addition to reducing the time of each search from minutes to seconds, The EBS Group-powered Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g deployment has significantly expanded the number of accessible contracts, allowing users to search far more information and make more informed decisions.

"The Teamsters' role in the American labor movement is unique, but its need to quickly access relevant information within a growing avalanche of content is common across many industries," said Scott Jenkins, CEO and Managing Partner of The EBS Group. "Oracle Secure Enterprise Search is the most comprehensive, secure and easy-to-use search platform on the market. As a result, we were able to get the Teamsters' new system up and running in just six weeks, and they started realizing the benefits the very next day without any user training."

Based on the success of the initial deployment across its contract repository, the Teamsters staff is looking at ways to expand the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g implementation to gain value in other areas of the organization.

"The EBS Group and Oracle delivered a solution that allows us to better serve our local unions," said Dr. Kimball "The value of applying the technology was immediately apparent across the organization. As soon as we showed this to our president, James Hoffa, Jr., he was an adamant supporter. He said, 'this is how IT should work. This is where we should be headed.'"

span class="boldbodycopy">About Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g gives users rapid access to enterprise information while enabling users to enforce corporate security policies. Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g indexes and searches public, private and shared content across internal and external Web sites, databases, file servers, document repositories, mail servers, enterprise content management systems, applications and portals. Its user-friendly Web interfaces return highly relevant results with rapid response times. For more information about Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, go to: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oses

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About Oracle
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

About The International Brotherhood of the Teamsters
Founded in 1903, the Teamsters Union represents more than 1.4 million hardworking men and women in the United States and Canada.

About The EBS Group
The EBS Group is a Professional Services and Engineering firm focused on high-impact, low-risk IT, technology, and application solutions delivered efficiently, affordably with tangible results. For more information about The EBS Group visit or Web site at http://www.theEBSgroup.com.

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