The Hurunui District Council, with the help of Canon New Zealand, turned what appeared to be an unaffordable dream into a cost effective reality when it converted 850,000 bulky paper documents into easily accessible digital files in just three months.

Retrieving bulky paper files, which date back more than 40 years, whenever members of the public or property professionals want to access property records, is a very time consuming process. With both storage space and staff time at a premium, the Hurunui District Council decided to electronically archive the property records, making them easily accessible to both staff and members of the public.

The Windows-based Alchemy platform was chosen for the task. Alchemy is an electronic document archiving system that is resold in New Zealand by Canon. An A1 scanner was purchased by the council so scanning of the paper files could be done in-house, significantly reducing the high cost of outsourcing scanning to contractors.

And the result? Drastic reductions in time and cost. All property related documents are now displayed on staff computers via the council's intranet - soon to be extended to enable public access on terminals in the reception. Staff no longer have to rummage through hoards of paper files to find what they are looking for, instead they are able to retrieve files with the click of a button, and Alchemy's detailed tagging system enables them to pull up only the pages they need rather than entire files.

The next goal of the Hurunui District Council is to make the newly-digitised property records available for public access over the internet. And again the organisation will be relying on Alchemy's document management system to provide it with a low-cost, highly effective solution.

For more information contact
Mike Hooker
Canon NZ Ltd
mike.hooker@canon.co.nz
+64 9 489 0367

September 2006