There are reasons some fishermen in the United States value their commercial fishing permits more dearly than their boats.

Boats can be replaced. Lose your permit, and you lose fishing rights that can date back generations.

So, when the federal agency that issues those permits, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), needed a computer system to safely store them, it turned to the only company with the software to do the job, Laserfiche.

Not just any software. NMFS needed Laserfiche’s Records Management Edition, specially designed to keep those all-important permits current.

Federal commercial fishing permits can be worth millions of dollars each, depending on where the permit allows a fisherman to fish—some fishing spots are a lot better than others. If a permit expires and is not renewed on time, the rights to work those spots are opened up to a long line of fishermen itching to get their hands on them.

Legal battles over those jealously guarded permits have generated mountains of paperwork that date back to the 1800s. Keeping those records straight and up-to-date is top job at NMFS.

“Many government agencies have mandates for keeping their records up to date. RME is there to ease the compliance with those mandates.” said Laserfiche software engineer Andrew Schoonmaker. “It’s sort of an add-in for the Laserfiche server, but a very important add-in for many government agencies with document retention schedules.”

There are 1.5 million commercial fishing vessel permits —worth several billion dollars— that are on such schedules in NMFS offices across the country, according to John Montel, director of document management at General Dynamics Information Technologies in McLean, VA. A Laserfiche server armed with RME lets the authorized NMFS staffers know when a permit is up for renewal as reliably as an alarm clock.

But the folks over at the Southeast Regional Office of the NMFS, St. Petersburg, FL,where Montel installed Laserfiche with RME, had a more pressing concern: hurricanes. After Hurricane Katrina, they realized their offices would be underwater should such a storm visit them and that would create a tidal wave of problems.

General Dynamics installed Laserfiche with RME and the agency soon was scanning its permits into an electronic database hardwired to computers throughout the Southeast Region’s offices. Now staffers can instantly retrieve documents without leaving their desks.

“Katrina showed them that they had no real data recovery system in place and, with the value of these permits, there could have been a tremendous amount of litigation if those permits ended up underwater,” Montel said. “Now, with Laserfiche installed, everything they do is double-redundant. They can’t lose their records.”

This is a system the Southeast Regional Office of NMFS has searched long and hard for. Since 1996, the agency’s office has spent millions of dollars trying to install a records management system. First they tried Filenet, then Docushare, but neither system seemed to do the job, Montel said. After Katrina, those folks knew it was time to look elsewhere and fast.

General Dynamics was tapped for the job and in a week’s time a Laserfiche server with RME software was on the job. Scanning is now going full tilt and Laserfiche is working so well, there’s talk at the Southeast Regional Office of installing the system in NMFS regional offices nationwide, Montel said. Permits at the NMFS Southeast Regional Offices are now always up-to-date and instantly available for all authorized staff working right from their desktops.

“The staff doesn’t have to leave their desks to get these documents and they can respond quicker and handle more work at the same time,” Montel said. “Laserfiche is saving them a tremendous amount of time and agency response time for John Q. Public is much quicker, especially in relation to litigation cases.”

And the attorneys have taken note. General Dynamics is now at work installing Laserfiche for the lawyers at the NMFS Southeast offices. They, too, need instant access to the legal papers, charts and open-ocean surveys that fill the files of so many of the vessel permits NMFS holds and they can’t wait to get a Laserfiche system of their own, Montel said. And that will mean fishermen will be able to spend less time worrying about their permits and more time on their boats.

“A lot of people around NMFS see what we are doing and they are very interested,” Montel said. “It’s nice to see that after struggling for so long, NMFS sees that this technology can work and they don’t have to spend $10 million to make work. For me, it’s kind of nice to be able to say: ‘I told you so’.”

Tags: federal government, records management, RME

Posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 10:34 am under Federal Government. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.