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Situation
This County went bankrupt after the treasury
guessed wrong on the direction of interest
rates. As a result, the County’s
Information Technologies Department struggled
to address rising demands with limited resources.
Residency rose to 2.8 million citizens,
making this County the state’s second
most populous county. Demand for information
swelled at an unprecedented pace –
transaction counts rose 40 percent between
1998 and 2002. The County’s 35 different
agencies generated over 5,000 types of
reports.
“My first desire was for data mining,”
states County Auditor-Controller. “I
had 400 accountants and clerical staff,
and we had no rational way of extracting
information out of our system. I watched
people take greenbar reports and manually
enter the data into Excel. There was a
ton of transcribing!”
Then there was a problem with paper.
The different departments in the auditor’s
office printed over a million pages per
year at a cost of $334,000. The 1,500
square-foot central repository bulged
with 90 five-drawer file cabinets, representing
two years of claims. More than 100 paper-filled
cabinets aged offsite. Every document
existed in triplicate, with most of the
copies at outlying facilities.
The most obvious solution was prohibitively
expensive: an enterprise resource planning
(ERP) system with an estimated price tag
over $50 million. When client searched
for less expensive options, he turned
to document management and, coincidentally,
found other County officials looking for
similar solutions.
Solution – Productivity and Cost
Efficiency
One of the systems under review was the
OnBase integrated document management
solution from Hyland Software , whose
proposal to the County beat out five competitors.
“They had the best and lowest cost
solution with easy to use, rich software,”
comments County's CIO.
OnBase features a strong computer-reports
management module (COLD or ERM), and it
integrates well with Monarch, a data-mining
tool from Datawatch. When Hyland’s
chief technology officer, teamed with
OnBase’s regional integrator to
demonstrate the power of the software,
client saw a solution to his department’s
quandary.
“I was looking for three things,”
client notes, “transparency, seamlessness,
and frictionless transactions. With OnBase,
I have the first two, and I am starting
to work on the third with the software’s
workflow capabilities. It is important
for people in government to know there
is no value in physically touching paper.
That is only friction.”
Mainframe advocates disputed the ability
of a server-based system to provide services
that their big iron could not. The staff
generally mistrusted the reliability of
electronic images, feeling reassured by
tangible paper.
“There were issues, especially
from the mainframers,” cleint notes.
“We had some political and psychological
challenges. It took a lot of coordination
to be sure it all worked well.”
A three-part plan for end users:
- Give them better tools
- Get them comfortable with the tools
- Turn off the paper
Client Benefit
The results are impressive. After the
first year of operation, and over a million
accounts payable documents later, a file
room was freed for more critical needs.
Twice that much space (3,000 sq. ft.)
became free away from the government center.
In mid-2002, they opted to convert his
collections system to OnBase technology.
A service bureau’s back-file conversion
of 200,000 documents freed an additional
600 sq. ft. storage room for more critical
needs. “The beauty of adding additional
applications to OnBase is that virtually
no additional costs were incurred (outside
those of the service bureau),” client
notes, “and the learning curve was
flat because users were already accustomed
to OnBase’s intuitive interface.”
The workers’ favorite benefit,
their “big wow” as manager
of County’s Emerging Technologies
department, puts it, is OnBase’s
integration of report management and imaging.
Staff members looking through reports
often need to find a transaction’s
supporting documents. Under the manual
system, that meant a potentially arduous
trek and search for paper. Under OnBase,
users click on a transaction and, in a
matter of seconds, images of supporting
documents appear on screen.
“Our staff has saved hours looking
for source documents such as payment vouchers,”
reveals a financial manager for the Sheriff-Coroner’s
office. “Now we don’t have
to make a special trip to the Auditor’s
office to manually pull the documentation.”
Document security has tightened tremendously
because, as client says, “There
is only one legal copy [of each document],
and I own it.” He calculates that
for every dollar saved in printing, the
County saves two dollars in filing and
distribution costs. This includes the
elimination of delivery trucks, which
brings a side benefit of less air pollution.
Scanners and optical disk libraries (jukeboxes)
have replaced those internal combustion
engines.
“The beauty of OnBase is its ability
to integrate data mining and imaging/report
management into one solution,” client
continues. “It is hard, however,
to describe the synergy the products bring
to create one control system. It is much
more than a single complex. It creates
a total efficiency, something for everyone.”
That “everyone” includes
the 35 agencies that each had their own
networks. The team linked them to an Asynchronous
Transfer Mode (ATM) backbone. With that
in place, documents and reports were stored
centrally but available remotely.
“It was an uphill challenge to
pry paper from people’s hands,”
client wryly notes. “I took their
paper, but I gave them all their information
and total search ability. Then my claims
manager and I put all the accounts payable
and after-payments information on the
system.
“As useful as all of this has been,
possibly the most extraordinary value
added by the project has been the cultural
shift away from paper that the County
is making. This will ready us for our
planned workflow project roll-outs,”
he adds.
When the County was paper-based, managers
were reticent to question transactions
because it was time-consuming and difficult.
Now, they say, it is simple. Errors and
irregularities are easier to uncover.
“We made auditors out of a whole
lot of people,” client smiles. “They
do their own checking and review. It brings
transparency; you can see everything;
there is no place to hide.”
The County based its hard dollar payback
on reduced printing. There, the savings
returned the $547,000 price tag for hardware
and software in roughly 18 months. Client
notes other advantages:
- Increased productivity and analysis
using data mining
- Increased accountability
- Instant access to reports and documents
for geographically dispersed workers
- Savings from hard copy costs for distribution,
storage and destruction
- Improved security
- Extension of the useful life of the
existing financial system
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