Along North Carolina’s coastal marshes, development is booming. And along with this new construction comes new pollution, which the state Department of Natural and Environmental Resources is tasked with curbing. The department’s Division of Water Quality (DQW) relies on Laserfiche to track development on North Carolina’s coast, helping them achieve their environmental and operational goals.

According to Information Services Officer Beverly Strickland, Laserfiche Web Access™ is changing the way the DWQ’s regional offices do business, enabling multi-site access to large-scale maps and building permit applications.

State law requires developers to obtain development permits before moving forward with a project. Sound planning is critical to building new facilities while preserving local wetland ecosystems. With that in mind, the DWQ reviews building permit applications to ensure that developers follow environmentally-friendly policies before, during and after construction.

Prior to installing Laserfiche, this was a cumbersome process that involved filing development plans, supporting documents, maps and photos of all sizes in the DWQ’s central office in Raleigh, the state’s capital. Before the central office could issue approvals, however, all these documents had to be physically transported to regional offices, where staff could review them and provide locally-relevant information not available to staff in Raleigh.

Due to the large size and complexity of the documents, circulating them between offices was costly and time-consuming. A 41-cent stamp can’t cover maps of wetlands and storm water-runoff patterns, erosion control proposals and wetland restoration plans. “The size of the file depends on the scope of the project, but if, say, a project involves a road crossing 50 streams, the application could be huge,” says Strickland. “If a project involves restoration, it requires a restoration plan, which can be 300 pages long.”

With an eye towards preserving the environment—in terms of both local construction and natural resources—Strickland implemented a Laserfiche solution, and staff immediately got to work scanning and indexing applications as they were received.

Web Access enables staff in regional offices to open entire application files from a password-secured Website. That means no more copying, faxing or mailing documents the size of the state flag. “We process 2,000 applications a year,” Strickland says. “Photographs, topographical maps, large-scale engineering maps, storm and flood maps are all now instantly available to the regional offices as soon as we scan them in.”

While the Laserfiche Client and Web Access have made for a lot less paper and time spent handling it, Strickland says the DWQ has greater plans for Laserfiche. The next step is for regional office staff to map development-affected areas with handheld GPS devices, and then upload that information into maps stored in Laserfiche.

“Being able to pull GPS points on-site will give us a better feel for where the affected areas actually are,” Strickland says. “That will help us make better-informed decisions about what’s going into our water, how much damage is being done, and how to correct the problem.”

In addition, Strickland hopes to install Audit Trail™ to keep a running tab of who accesses the DWQ’s files and when they do it. But for now, she says, the DWQ is happy to have improved its quality of operations—and thus, the quality of the local environment. “Right now, we’re just trying to make our business processes quicker with Laserfiche, and I have been very, very pleased so far.”

Posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 3:03 pm under Customer Stories, State Government, UserNews. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.