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Surrey Heath Borough Council, serving over 80,000 residents, continually strives to find better ways of interacting with constituents. Wherever possible, they utilise technology to provide staff with new and efficient ways of working, which improves engagement with constituents, stakeholders and partners.

A DM JOURNEY
The Council has been working with ProcessFlows to implement and develop a document management solution for over 10 years, albeit in a very small way to start with, as a simple look-up tool for archived documents. This gradually evolved into the installation of an OnBase solution to provide a firm foundation for an envisaged, future enterprise DM system which would standardise the way documents were processed, shared and stored across the entire organisation.

Opting for OnBase also reduced the number of applications the IT Department had to support and maintain and provide a single supplier point-of-contact for any technical queries and upgrades. To date, Surrey Heath has been able to successfully roll-out OnBase into seven departments, with three more already on the list for the next year.

The project started with saving storage space and improving document retrieval - no document management server was required. Archived paper documents were stored in filing cabinets which were taking up a huge amount of office space - downsizing was long overdue.

Documents in varying formats were scanned into electronic images by a third-party bureau and indexed/stored on optical disk using an OpenText Alchemy Pro software license, to provide an electronic filing cabinet of archived documents. A free, read-only version of Alchemy embedded in the disk enabled staff to browse and view the documents from their desktop. The original paper documents were then destroyed in line with compliance regulations and storage space was freed-up. Office space could be returned to more productive use.

GROWING PAINS
Surrey Heath's ongoing aim to improve document records management and make information more freely available throughout the whole organisation meant that they eventually outgrew Alchemy.

Matt Lindsay, Applications Support Officer, is responsible for driving Surrey Heath's document management journey towards a single Electronic Content Management (ECM) solution for the entire organisation: "Alchemy is primarily an enormous, electronic filing cabinet. It's great for securely storing silos of documents so they can easily be found, but we wanted a lot more than that. Ultimately, all unstructured data entering the organisation will be automatically captured and moved via workflow to the right person. All our users will be able to store, locate, view, edit or print documents, no matter where those documents are located."

An internal review on electronic document and records management was undertaken. How to handle unstructured data/information, compliance, freedom of information and data protection issues, making information available over the web and security were all discussed.

THE FUTURE IS ONBASE
The result was that Surrey Heath selected OnBase as its future ECM solution. Matt said; "OnBase is the only solution available that fitted our criteria for functionality, scalability and budget. It enables us to control the way information moves around the organisation, rather than it controlling us and empowers us to positively demonstrate good governance."

"OnBase can handle all our day-to-day information assets," he went on. "It provides us with a robust foundation which will not have to be discarded when our line-of-business applications are eventually upgraded or discarded. It totally fits our current and future strategy to utilise and build, in a modular way, on our existing infrastructure as demand from departments grows and budgets allow."

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