CaseStudy

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 17 No 04 - July/August 2009

Daventry District Council found a cost-effective solution when faced with a potentially expensive upgrade of their existing centralised scanning system

Daventry District Council found a cost-effective solution when faced with a potentially expensive upgrade of their existing centralised scanning system.

Daventry District Council provides essential local services for the district, supporting the daily needs of its 25,000 residents, as well as its businesses and visitors. The Revenue Services Department of the Council was using an ageing standalone scanner for centralised scanning of all taxation documentation in order to incorporate these documents into the property tax database in the Council's Anite Information Management (AIM) document management system, Anite@Work.

Workers would scan batches of documents to a "batching" PC for retrieval by colleagues in the group responsible for indexing. Once indexed, documents were filed in AIM. Faced with the need to replace or upgrade the scanner, the Council learned it would incur a very significant cost. An investigation was conducted to determine if there was a more cost-effective approach to this problem that would not require the group to change its existing and familiar workflow.

Daventry Council had recently acquired 20 multi-function devices (MFDs). Neil Smith, Senior IT Officer, and Leon Spence, Revenue Services Manager, were delighted to learn that they could add eCopy ShareScan to their existing MFDs at a cost substantially less than upgrading the standalone scanner.

"We had a demo unit sent out," said Smith, "to gain an understanding of how it would work in our environment." The Council also took advantage of the eCopy Connector for AIM which had been developed by Anite to enable scan batches to be automatically directed to AIM indexers for further processing. Anite@Work is used by around half of the local authority organisations in the UK. Smith and Spence were happy with the way the system worked at Daventry and with the cost reductions it afforded the Council. The solution was installed for initial use by the Revenue Services Department.

With the eCopy solution, the Revenue Services employees responsible for scanning tax-related documents are now able to use their MFD to scan information directly into the Anite@Work system. "These individuals can easily create scan batches," explains Spence, "and even choose which indexer to send them to. The indexer is able to see who scanned the batch and when. Once a batch is opened within AIM, indexers can add appropriate metadata to the files and attach them to the appropriate location within Anite, adding comments as required."

Documents are processed in batches of 70 to 100, and each batch has a unique reference number created at the time of scanning using the AIM connector for eCopy. Paper documents are annotated with the batch number and stored for three months prior to disposition. "It was important to us that any new solution be able to maintain our existing workflow," adds Spence. "Our team is very familiar with Anite@Work since we have used it for more than 10 years, and we want to continue to leverage that knowledge and experience. We are quite pleased that eCopy ShareScan with the AIM Connector speeds up the scanning and indexing process as compared to our previous workflow." User log-in at the MFD is instant; as soon as the user chooses the indexer to whom they wish to send the batch, the scanning starts at 70 pages per minute. "Users are rarely at the scanner more than two minutes," remarks Spence. "It used to take that long just to log on to the batching PC in the past."

Spence also points out that from a cost perspective, by placing the MFD with eCopy ShareScan and AIM Connector on a five-year lease agreement, the five-year cost is actually less than two years of maintenance on the old scanner. "So not only do we improve our productivity, but we also significantly reduce our cost base for this work process," he says. "Because the system is so easy to use, I have not had to use busy IT resources to support users. With more than 50% in cost savings over upgrading the old scanner, it has also been a boon to the District's Budget."
More info: www.ecopy.com

CaseStudy