documents held in its filing systems. Additionally ... insufficient, and the office consolidation would provide a good o
City of York Council EMC helps City of York Council consolidate data and declutter offices Business overview City of York Council is made up of 70 Local Authority schools with more than 24,000 pupils in the council’s catchment area. The Council has more than 10,500 employees, 2,500 of which are office-based.
Challenges New Council premise requires less clutter City of York Council has numerous offices spread across the city, but was looking to consolidate these multiple locations into a single, purpose-built site in the city centre. The move is currently in planning and will be executed over the course of several years. Because of this, the Council knew it had to prepare for the move by reducing the high number of documents held in its filing systems. Additionally, it needed to improve governance of data and security of information in order to comply with government rules and regulations. In December 2007, Rob Hunt was contracted in as a Project Manager by City of York Council. He initiated the plan to cut down on the volume of paper that the Council had in storage, in preparation for the office consolidation. At that time there were 13 different document management systems in place across the Council that were not integrated with one other. The existing IT environment was complex, with Finance, Children’s Social Care, Human Resources, and Housing each having its own system in place. These systems were all point-solutions and therefore not suitable for rolling out across the entire organisation. In addition to this, adequate records management functionality was not available in any of the existing systems.
“One-stop shop” for Council documentation The Council realised that the sharing of information internally was both inefficient and insufficient, and the office consolidation would provide a good opportunity to implement better processes. Similarly, it also discovered that major efficiencies could be achieved by centralising its disparate mailrooms into one main hub. From an IT perspective the goal was to have a single repository for all of the Council’s documentation—a “one-stop shop” for staff to go to when they needed any electronic documents.
Rigorous evaluation process City of York Council undertook a thorough evaluation process in line with the requirements of the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU), the official EU-approved procedure for handling public sector procurement. Approximately 25 vendors submitted tenders for the project, and each was evaluated by a ten person, multi-discipline team. Four vendors were short listed—Logica, Hedra, Basware and EMC—all of which proceeded to a final stage that involved a half-day presentation of the proposed solutions.
Customer Profile
Hunt explained, “EMC differentiated itself from other vendors through its deep technical knowledge and the vast skill base of its staff. It was also very reassuring for us to know that they had successfully handled many similar projects for other local authorities of our size before.”
“Working with EMC has helped the Council save both space and time in regards to the way we store and retrieve our data. The investment in EMC technology is already reaping dividends for us well ahead of our office move.” Rob Hunt, Project Manager, City of York Council
EMC solution Digitisation of 48 million documents The EMC solutions deployed were EMC® Documentum® and EMC Captiva® InputAccel®. These serve to underpin the Council’s entire information management system. EMC Documentum provides a single repository that all relevant areas of the business can access easily and quickly. EMC Captiva InputAccel, an enterprise document capture tool, was the ideal accompanying solution to cope with the high volume backlog of paper filing the Council had accumulated. Scanning simply turns documents into images and nothing more, but InputAccel enhances these images, automatically indexing them, and converting them into the desired format. It is estimated that, by the end of the project, the system will have digitised 48 million council documents. The roll-out process commenced in September 2008 and will be complete by late 2010.
Summary Reduction in office space and increase in users The City of York Council has been able to save a considerable amount of office space thanks to digitally storing documents. There are currently 60 staff members using the system and it is projected that by the end of the project, there will be 800 users. Commenting on the project, Hunt said, “Working with EMC has helped the Council save both space and time in regards to the way we store and retrieve our data. The investment in EMC technology is already reaping dividends for us well ahead of our office move.”
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Furthermore there will be additional savings gained from improved processes enabled by the electronic storage of documentation and improved compliance with government legislation for Records Management.
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