Success story: Agency drowning in paper gets above water
September 18, 2009 by Steve HannafordPosted in: In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Solutions
This agency’s employees were wasting a lot of time sorting through 50 years’ worth of paper documents. How’d it escape from the overload?
Lake County Water Authority (Florida) was overloaded with paper documents: maps, surveys, reports, and so on. Thousands of documents going back to the 1950s were choking office space and eating up staff times in searching through the pile. In addition, the agency, which controlled the status and allocation of fresh water in a large county near Orlando, was in danger of losing all the records in a fire, tornado, or hurricane.
According to an article in the Orlando Sentinel, “The solution came in the form of a copier, a computer program and some handiwork.”
The agency replaced its aging copier with a new Ricoh MFP. Moreover, it installed DocuLex Archive Studio, software to route and index scans. That software was customized to cover the needs of the county, and set up so that employees in the department could search for documents and bring them up on their computers with a few keystrokes. Then it set to work scanning in the documents.
The job of scanning in 50 years of documents is an ongoing one, with an emphasis on recent documents first. But the key is that employees can find what they need much faster than before.
According to the Sentinel article, “Already, workers are seeing improvements with document retrieval. Instead of flipping through pages and pages of documents, the information is just a keystroke away.”
It is interesting to note that cost of the new hardware was very economical (around $5,000), while the software package and its customization cost far more (about $19,000). Still, that was far less than the $100,000 or more that the agency’s management had feared.
DocuCrunch.com delivers the latest IT and Imaging news once a week to the inboxes of over 200,000 IT and Imaging professionals.
Click here to sign up and start your FREE subscription to DocuCrunch!
Tags: DocuLex Archive Studion, Lake County Water Authority, Ricoh
Loading ...
