Palm tree-shaped islands. The world’s tallest building. An indoor ski resort. In the past 30 years, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, has quickly blossomed from a regional business center to a global destination. But with 30 years of development comes 30 years of paperwork to manage—which is why Dubai chose a scalable, easy-to-implement Laserfiche solution to convert all of the city’s paper into digital format. Now, an extensive back-file conversion project is under way, with Laserfiche poised to take over day-forward scanning as well.

The City of Dubai already had an expansive—and expensive—document management system in place when the scanning project began. Given such an investment, why, then, would they purchase a brand-new Laserfiche system for the project? The answer is simple: Simplicity.

“The City of Dubai’s existing document management system is complex and not very user-friendly or easy to implement,” explains Mustafa Siddiqui, business solutions specialist for Pixel Digital Systems (PDS), the City of Dubai’s Laserfiche reseller. “We needed software that we could implement quickly, and that users could understand right away. We found all that in Laserfiche.”

Siddiqui credits BMB Sal, official Laserfiche supplier to the Middle East, for making the implementation so smooth. “We’ve had a great experience with BMB,” he says. “They responded immediately to our questions during the implementation.”

Installing Laserfiche proved fairly simple. Next came the real challenge: Creating a logical file structure for a diverse array of document types. Siddiqui and company are glad to have Laserfiche’s flexible templates to help them efficiently capture and index documents from multiple city departments. “We have to process documents for all the city’s departments—finance, human resources, building and accounting,” he says, “so the ability to quickly create and modify templates for all these document types is a major advantage.”

It’s not just multiple document types involved in the project. As Dubai becomes ever more multicultural, the need to accommodate documents in multiple languages increases. With 85 percent of documents in Arabic and the remaining 15 percent in English, the Laserfiche system’s strong multi-language support was essential to Dubai’s purchasing decision.

The City of Dubai’s central archive center follows International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Six Sigma quality control standards for archiving and storing documents. To preserve these standards, PDS have engineered a sophisticated quality control process using Laserfiche Workflow. Before they enter the Laserfiche repository, newly-scanned documents are routed to PDS staff for an initial quality check. The second step in the workflow involves template assignment and indexing. Finally, both PDS and municipal staff review processed documents before permanently archiving them. Thanks to Workflow, each step in this process is fully automated, saving time and resources throughout each stage of quality control.

Given Dubai’s surging population and related construction boom, the city deemed it critical to implement a scalable system to manage the sharp increase in incoming paperwork. “It’s definitely the right time for organizations in the Middle East to adopt an electronic document management system,” Siddiqui explains. “Organizations in this region face large amounts of paper coupled with reduced manpower and huge rental expenses.”

It’s somewhat serendipitous, then, that Laserfiche is so well-equipped to handle such growth. Recently, the City of Dubai expanded the current back-file conversion project to include another million pages, and PDS is bidding to for the opportunity to integrate Laserfiche with Dubai’s existing system to handle all day-forward scanning.

“We plan to integrate Laserfiche with the city’s existing system, which will be used for storage,” Siddiqui says. But for everyday work, users will use the Laserfiche interface exclusively, because it’s so user-friendly.” In addition to greatly simplifying business process, the integration will strengthen the city’s IT infrastructure. “Laserfiche will help the City of Dubai increase the value of its existing investment by making it so much easier to use,” he adds.

While the plans for citywide expansion of the Laserfiche system are not yet finalized, if recent results are any indication, expect Laserfiche to become a key part of Dubai’s infrastructure. “We’re very happy to have been awarded a contract extension for the back-file conversion project,” Siddiqui says. “We look forward to continued success with Dubai, and hopefully, to new partnerships with other municipalities in the region.”

Tags: international, local government

Posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 8:12 pm under Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Municipal Government, State & Local Government. You can comment on this post.