SPI building world’s largest repository of science info

SPI Technologies Inc., a business process outsourcing and data conversion company in the Philippines, is building what would be the world’s largest repository of science information on the Net.

SPI bagged a five-year project with Elsevier Science, an international market leader in the publication and dissemination of literature covering the broad spectrum of scientific endeavors.

The project, which has been ongoing for the last six months, involves the conversion of up to 50 million pages of content to the Internet. It includes the whole collection of Elsevier Science’s publications dating back to the late-1890s all the way up to 1996. The result of this project after five years will be the world’s largest repository of science, medical and technical information on the Internet for research.

Elsevier Science has taken a leadership role in advancing the technologies necessary to crate a seamless electronic information delivery environment. Part of the worldwide scientific information system, Elsevier Science links researchers and readers with the latest developments through almost 1,200 English-language journals containing core scientific research articles.

‘Science Direct’

SPI will hand Elsevier Science over a million pages a month for publication on a website called "Science Direct." This is the company’s biggest foreign contract to date, which necessitated the establishment of a new SPI subsidiary called Content Science Inc. to execute the project in a new plant at the Carmelray Industrial Park in Laguna.

According to Ernest Cu, chairman and CEO of SPI Technologies, they have employed about 1,000 data conversation personnel, who have helped keep the project on track.

Cu says SPI won the privilege to do the entire project, which started as a multi-source endeavor involving several other foreign vendors, after doing a pilot subset of the Elsevier Science collection in 2000. Given their good performance in the pilot, Cu said they convinced Elsevier Science to award the whole project on a sole-source basis to SPI.

"Our performance convinced them that SPI can take care of the project as a single source as we can handle all the coordination, archiving, database creation for them and make its maintenance hassle-free for the client," says Cu.

In addition to the legacy project, which is based on existing journals, Elsevier Science also tapped SPI to work on its scholarly publishing side. This one involves prospective brand new journals that SPI must turn to publishing media for Web, print and downloads.

"What we do is compare the new manuscripts of scientists for final publication in the US or Europe," explains Cu.

This second project is being executed in SPI’s office in Parañaque.

Ready manpower

Cu says it is SPI’s ability to have a ready skilled manpower by the hundreds, while guaranteeing quality and scale that gives them an advantage in the BPO field.

"How quickly can you scale is sometimes the only remaining advantage," he says. "We build the Laguna plant in a matter of three months. The hiring of 1,000 people was done in 90 days, and we were in production 30 days after. People are our core competence and labor force is good in the Philippines."

Meanwhile, SPI is also doing its first data conversion project that deals with several millions of pages, for the United States’ Department of Justice (DOJ).

"This year was a breakthrough since we’ve been talking about it for three years now. I’m glad to say that the quality of work we deliver is wonderful and better than what the Federal government is getting in the US," Cu says.

At present, SPI has presence in other vertical markets aside from publishing, legal and medical. The company also has horizontal offerings such as software maintenance and call centers. With the business diversification, the original root of the company in data encoding only becomes a small portion of its entire business today. — Alma Buelva