One of the country’s largest local government organisations, the Auckland Regional Council (ARC), has changed significantly in the wake of a recent Local Government Act amendment, which has added several new organisations to its operation.

The transformation has placed a greater emphasis on the ARC to better manage the life cycle of its organisational knowledge and documentation.

A recently implemented document management system (DMS) has been a great leap forward. However, while taking care of documents authored electronically, ARC’s new DMS didn’t directly address the mountains of incoming paper-based correspondence requiring management by freshly mandated workflow.

Working with IT and consulting company and Kofax and Kodak imaging partner Fujitsu, the ARC is using electronic capture and optical character recognition to bridge the gap between paper trails and best practice document management.

The challenge
Implementing a DMS was a necessity for the ARC – it was the only way to control its corporate information and minimise duplication and the IT overhead that it attracts.

The ongoing problem was dealing with the huge volumes of paper-based correspondence flooding into its organisation.

Every day, quite literally, stacks of boxes containing invoices, consent applications and compliance documentation arrived at its doorstep. By law the council is required to retain much of this correspondence in hardcopy form, but without the means to funnel it electronically the ARC would never be able to fully implement DMS. Physically routing extra paper only served to cut an unsightly paper trail between desks and departments, and add administrative friction.

This is the last thing any organisation needs, particularly one in the midst of an ongoing campaign to engage all its users in using a freshly implemented DMS. There was little point in instituting a new regime if it didn’t cover the ARC’s entire document flow.

The solution
Kodak i200 document scanners solved the problem of document conversion, creating a simple image file of individually scanned documents for indexing within the ARC’s DMS.

However, unless users could recall a unique identifier it was unlikely they would ever be able to retrieve the document. And, the ARC thought, what good is a document management system if it relies on total recall, rather than the facility for executing key word searches of actual content, much like Google offers web surfers?

To address this need Fujitsu integrated Kofax Ascent Capture software with the Kodak scanners and the ARC’s SAP document management system.

Using optical character recognition (OCR) technology to render document scans as searchable text, Kofax Ascent Capture creates an accompanying text translation file, which enables every scanned document to be located by keyword searches executed within the DMS search engine.

However, OCR is only part of the solution. The ARC anticipates the greatest gains in accelerating certain business processes, particularly in accounts payable, where Kofax Ascent for Payables searches the textural content of invoices, extracting key information, such as dollar amounts, GST components and purchase orders, used to populate the ARC’s SAP financial system. So, rather than accounts administrators re-entering invoice information, data is automatically collated and transferred through a simple ERP connector.

Benefits and outcomes
The ARC’s enterprise systems manager, Noel Espinola, says creating a DMS that couldn’t search by key words contained in documents would have been seriously deficient.

“You can’t build a central repository and have everyone guessing which documents might be relevant,” Espinola says.

“Users have got to be able to recover any document in the system just by typing a few key words they think might be contained within it.”

The combination of Kodak scanning and Kofax Ascent Capture effectively bridges the gap between rudimentary data capture and readily useable information, rendering scanned information as accessible as electronically authored documents.

By managing this conversion at the head of the paper trail, its otherwise long tail almost disappears. The subsequent flow of information is much faster, travelling at the speed of IT networks, and its accessibility unfettered – rather than sitting in piles on the desks of a few, scanned documents are now at the fingertips of everyone.

However, Espinola says the biggest returns are coming from new levels of control, automation and accelerated workflow Ascent for Payables has introduced to accounts payables.

Re-keying invoice information has all but been eliminated. Instead, the Ascent system extracts data from an unlimited number of fields, validates it and directly delivers it to the ARC’s financial system.

Image-enabled workflow expedites payments, helping the accounts payable team to take better advantage of prompt payment discounts, which adds up when you’re processing hundreds of invoices a day.

The process also introduces greater auditability, supporting the ARC’s intended pursuit of ISO certification. Each scanned invoice is date and time stamped, and the vendor information textualised, providing the necessary information to recall any invoice when it’s needed.

“Invoices that would have normally taken three-to-four weeks to process are processed within days,” says Espinola.

“The entire process is now much tighter and better controlled.”

He says Fujitsu has worked closely with the ARC, configuring systems and tweaking the OCR technology to recognise and appropriately treat the right information.

“We relied on their technical expertise and ongoing support, particularly in training and ongoing enhancement. Fujitsu is always responsive.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION//

FUJITSU NEW ZEALAND
+64 9 921 8093
www.fujitsu.co.nz

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