The Challenge

The Eastleigh Council Revenue and Benefits Department faced a considerable challenge: increasing operational efficiency while transitioning from their rapidly-declining Document and Image Processing System (DIPS). Their current DIPS was slowing down information access and hampering staff productivity, due to an aging, ineffective query function. Whatever system the department chose, however, had to eventually integrate with the council’s planned enterprise-wide customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Lesley Cox, Local Taxation Manager, knew that the revenue and benefits department was working with a limited budget and had to procure the best-quality system available. By implementing a Laserfiche® digital document management solution, she was able to centralise the department’s records in a single repository, saving her staff time and aggravation while simplifying future integration with the council-wide CRM system.

The Situation

The legacy DIPS was causing more problems than it solved for the department’s 20 employees. Slow inputting, incorrect indexing and inefficient searching meant that department staff were spending significantly more time looking for information than actually acting on it. Their most urgent needs were to first replace the dying system that was slowing their workflow down and, second, to increase operational efficiency.

Thanks to Laserfiche, the department found a solution that met both these needs.

The Solution

“Our system was very basic, and had been on its last legs for years now,” comments Cox. “We needed not only something quicker and more sophisticated, but we also needed a platform for workflow later on. Ultimately, we needed to migrate our legacy data to the new system. So we had to find something that would meet all those needs.”

The department put the project out to tender, and, with the help of their IT Manager, Andrew Walmsley, began reviewing different systems. Specifically, the department needed a system that would enable them to file documents securely. They were also looking for a system that would support a single, centralised electronic repository, replacing their current system that consisted of a repository spread across a number of optical drives. Their system also had to support efficient, quick search and retrieval functions.

Ultimately, they chose Laserfiche not only because it is easy to use, but also because its data and structure would make it simple to move existing information into the new CRM system when it became available. “Although the council is trying to introduce a CRM system across the whole of the authority, we needed to integrate whatever platform came along with our DIPS workflow,” Cox says. “However, the project wasn’t moving forward quickly enough—our old system would have been obsolete far before the CRM system could go live. So whatever solution we chose had to ultimately tie into the CRM system when it was up and working.”

Steve Livermore, Director of Laserfiche authorised reseller Crusader Technologies, helped the revenue and benefits department implement their solution. The initial installation took place over two days, with additional integration and customisation tasks taking about four weeks. “We had around 160 optical drives to convert to Laserfiche from the legacy system,” Livermore says. “These optical drives were over ten years old and worked on a DOS-based system, which made it time-consuming to copy data into a format that Laserfiche could identify—it was possible, however.”

Once the drives were converted, Livermore worked with the department to develop a program that auto-populated the Laserfiche template with data from the current revenue and benefits database. Users can easily identify documents populated with template data and move them to the correct system sub-folder. “The training went smoothly, due to the fact that we built a system that requires minimal operator intervention,” Livermore comments. “We made sure that the user profiles were set up correctly so that users could retrieve information within seconds when on the phone to their clients.”

Currently, the revenue side of the revenue and benefits department is using Laserfiche to store community charge documents, council documents and non-domestic rates documents—all documents supporting the council’s local taxation activities. They have one employee who scans and indexes documents manually. Documents are kept for three months to assure they’ve been indexed correctly and then are shredded—a holdover from the legacy system, which frequently indexed documents incorrectly and required re-scanning and re-indexing. “We haven’t had that problem with Laserfiche at all,” Cox says. “We’re scanning documents in quite happily.

“Compared to our old system, the new Laserfiche system is so much quicker,” she adds. “The problem was, the old DIPS didn’t work. We couldn’t access documents, and our prime concern was to have a replacement. We had to have access to our existing documents and we had to scan and retrieve the documents we receive on a daily basis.”

Because the revenue and benefits department is currently using their Laserfiche system for document imaging, finding information quickly is of paramount importance. Staff usually search under their account reference order, as documents are only scanned in after staff have finished working with them and have placed the appropriate reference numbers on the documents. This makes it simple to track multiple accounts. “It’s a lot easier for staff to access and to interrogate to find things,” Cox says. “Scanning is quicker and simpler—our old system used to be very laborious and would take several minutes. If the information was on an optical drive that wasn’t in the jukebox at the time, you had to go through, find it, put it in the jukebox, install it, reset the jukebox and rerun your search. With Laserfiche, there’s no messing around. You just go in, look for your document and it will search across the entire database in seconds. You don’t have to muck around changing drives in the jukebox.”

In the future, the revenue and benefits department would like to expand their Laserfiche system to include the benefits side of the department, as staff there still use paper documents and manual filing systems to store and index information. In fact, the Department believes that other council departments could implement Laserfiche, and that ultimately, the solution could serve as the backbone of an archival system for the entire council. With its open architecture, Laserfiche is the perfect tool to connect mission-critical front-end applications with a repository full of information.

“We view Laserfiche as our platform for moving on to bigger and better things,” Cox says. “It has a lot more potential for us.”

Tags: international, Local Government, UK

Posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 3:29 pm under Customer Stories, Municipal Government, State and Local Government. You can comment on this post.