By drawing from field studies on three different types of business projects the paper outlines a improved document management approach. The three global cases, which comprise business process re-engineering (BPR), new product development (NPD) and one-of-a-kind manufacturing, enable to track a common set of document based operations which hold the vital information for the success of respective cases. This information reveals what is the true active organisation of the enterprise, what are the document usage profiles of the people and how knowledge-related creative processes are really performed by the organisation. In addition, the management is provided with new means to measure operational performance with better encompassing metrics. The approach and its partial implementation act as glue between various systems used within and between the collaborating companies.