Oil and Gas Permitting Made Easy with Laserfiche and E-forms
Contributed by: Susan Lesovsky, Applications Support, Colorado Water Conservation Board
The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) developed a custom e-forms application with the Ground Water Protection Council. By integrating Laserfiche with this custom system, COGCC streamlined its oil and gas permitting process.
How does this process work?
1. An operator working in the field logs into the COGCC’s Website and submits a regulatory form with all the required attachments through the custom e-form application.
2. These documents are then reviewed by staff at COGCC.
- If they are incorrect, staff sends an e-mail to the operator letting him know what to correct and asking him to correct any data entry problems or add missing documents.
- If they are correct, the files get uploaded to the production database server.
3. Every 15 minutes, a Windows service runs the following VB script written in the Laserfiche SDK to import the documents from the database server into the Laserfiche repository.
' Instantiates a new document importer.
Dim DocImporter As New DocumentImporter
' Retrieves a document from the repository.
Dim doc As LFDocument = db.GetEntryByPath("Doc1")
' Assigns the document to the document importer object.
DocImporter.Document = doc
' Sets document importer to insert pages before page 1.
DocImporter.PageAction = Import_Page_Action.IMPORT_PAGE_ACTION_INSERT
DocImporter.PageIndex = 1
' Imports an image file.
DocImporter.ImportImagesFromFile("C:MyImage.png")
' Cleans up unused handles.
doc.Dispose()
4. At this point, Laserfiche Workflow initiates and assigns a Confidential tag to the documents.
5. The Laserfiche document entry numbers, which are stored in a table in the Laserfiche database, are also collected in a separate table in our own Workflow database. These numbers are used by Laserfiche WebLink to provide a download page so that users can view these attachments.
6. A SQL script then validates whether these documents are really confidential. If they aren’t confidential and can be viewed by the public, the Confidential tag is removed.
DELETE
FROM entry_tag
FROM entry_tag INNER JOIN
propval ON entry_tag.tocid = propval.tocid INNER JOIN
ConfidentialDocuments ON propval.num_val = ConfidentialDocuments.attach_doc_num
WHERE (propval.prop_id = 31) AND (ConfidentialDocuments.conf_date < GETDATE()) AND (entry_tag.tag_id = 2)
7. The public can then log into the Website and view those documents in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
This flowchart outlines the entire permitting process.
Benefits of Laserfiche
As a result of implementing this new permitting process, COGCC:
- Saved an average of 15 minutes of scanning and indexing time per file by allowing operators to upload attachments electronically.
- Further reduced processing time by allowing multiple people to work on the same forms simultaneously.
