Government offices create more paper than any other industry by a wide margin. Most offices waste valuable real estate by keeping paper in filing systems or in offsite storage. The paper never stops accumulating; you just find new places to put it. Instead of exacerbating the problem, stop the influx of paper by creating digital filing cabinets in a document management system.
Document management system for government agencies
Having a single location where documents can be added, reviewed and shared is the key to a paperless government office. Our government clients typically begin with their biggest pain point before tackling smaller projects over time.
Popular starting points include:
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managing employee files
Starting with any of these paper-intensive processes can provide a rapid ROI.
Expand your document management system to other departments
Once a department is comfortable with the system, you can attack other record types stored in paper form. By creating digital filing cabinets for each record type, you eliminate the need to store paper in filing cabinets. This enables you to instantly retrieve documents, know the status and location of every document, and maintain compliance.
How document management helped a county clerk’s office
A county clerk in Mississippi grew sick and tired of paper taking over his office. He decided to take on the paper by contracting Revolution Data Systems for a document management project. We took a close look at his major pain points and decided to begin with board minutes - a manual and paper-intensive process.
We picked up his entire collection of board minute books and transported them to our document scanning service bureau for conversion. Each book was taken apart and prepped for scanning by placing a patch sheet between each document. The documents were scanned at 300 dpi to ensure that they could be OCR'd. Next we indexed them by meeting date.
Our professional services team built an application to manage board minutes in the county's ApplicationXtender (AX) system. We then uploaded the roughly 150,000 documents to AX. Our team trained users how to manage records going forward in about two hours. New agendas, agenda packets and meeting minutes are now uploaded and managed digitally in AX, eliminating the once paper-intensive process. Users can now perform keyword and phrase searches across the entire history of board meetings with the full text search ability built into AX. .
Once the major pain point was eliminated, the clerk turned his attention on the rest of the paper that regularly flowed into his office. After meeting with his staff, he determined five other record types that were filling up filing cabinets. Our team met with his staff to learn how the new records should be indexed within the system. Then we built applications for each record type. This ended the influx of paper in his office. Instead of buying new filing cabinets, his deputies now have a digital repository for all documents.
If your office doesn’t already own a system to manage its records, now would be a good time to invest in one. These steps should get you started on a path to a digital future. Contact us for a free consultation.