Dan Ramos and Karen Yakis from the Oregon Department of Justice.
Dan Ramos, enterprise technology services manager for the Oregon Department of Justice (DOJ), was seeing boxes of documents everywhere he turned and storage costs for those documents were going through the roof. It was a crime what was happening at DOJ until Enterprise Technology Services decided to lay down the law and take the appropriate steps to enhance the Department’s court system’s efficiencies. The enhancements now impact nine Divisions/Sections within DOJ, and based on the efficiencies and savings realized so far, the DOJ is considering expanding these initiatives into other Divisions.
The culprit was paper. “Paper, lots and lots of paper,” laments Ramos.
Paying some $135,000 per year in storage costs was bad enough, but when those hard copy records needed to be accessed by someone from DOJ for a court case or whatever, someone had to travel to the off-site storage facility and retrieve them, and then bring them back when they were done. It’s little wonder why eliminating that inefficiency was at the top of Enterprise Technology Services’ to-do list.
Another reason a fix was necessary was that back in 2007 DOJ acquired Hummingbird OpenText, a document content management program. However, they still needed an efficient way to get scanned documents into Hummingbird for easy search and retrieval.
“Everybody was scanning and we were doing electronic documents and they were coming in from all avenues, but not going into one particular place in a consistent manner with any uniformity,” explains Karen Yakis, DOJ’s customer support analyst.
Before searching for a solution, Ramos and Yakis met with the various business segments within the DOJ, asking them to identify their problems, trace their workflow, and share their ideas about what was needed to make things better.
“We looked at all their wants and needs and talked about what they were currently doing with their manual systems and then we looked for a solution that was scalable and enabled uniformity and efficiency while creating an electronic workflow that mimicked their manual processes,” says Yakis. “We saw consistency through the interviews in what people wanted to do.”
At the same time the solution had to be affordable and compatible with DOJ’s current hardware while allowing for multiple on ramps to accommodate paper, electronic documents, scans, and e-mails.
On the hardware front, DOJ already had a mix of Ricoh MFPs in addition to MFPs from other vendors, which would eventually serve as the on ramp for most divisions. “The key was to find a solution that was agnostic and didn’t care what the on ramp was, and didn’t require people to make hardware upgrades,” states Yakis.
After evaluating various solutions the one solution that stood out from the rest was NSi AutoStore. Arriving at that decision was the easiest part of the whole upgrade process. Getting to that point by interviewing users within each division was time consuming, but worth the effort since it narrowed down the solution options.
By and large, users were ready, willing, and able to make the change, especially since Ramos and Yakis took the approach of explaining to users how it would impact their day-to-day jobs. A little hand-holding was necessary, walking users through the system so they had a visual and physical sense of how the electronic process was different from the previous manual processes.
Before the system went live, Enterprise Technology Services created a Test & Development Department where they could test the workflow without interrupting production. One thing they discovered was that to get the documents into a document management system they needed different engines to handle different types of documents. They also discovered that the server running NSi AutoStore had to be upgraded to accommodate the higher level of demand and large volumes of documents being processed. Now users can scan thousands of pages at a time and not impact a smaller job where someone might only be scanning 200 pages.
The upgrade implementation started in March of this year with final implementation completed 12 weeks later. The DOJ has been scanning like crazy and saving reams upon reams of paper while at the same time making those documents easier to find and retrieve.
Yakis reports that the biggest benefits of the solution to date are the number of jobs, files, and documents available to people, the streamlining of the OCR process to make document text searchable, the consistency gained in the naming convention, and uniformity in the output of digital files. Plus not increasing the necessity for physical file storage.
If DOJ hadn’t made this investment, the department would still be buried in paper and storage costs would continue to mount.
“We had to go down this route,” says Ramos. “We knew that electronic storage was something that had to happen.”
Now that NSi AutoStore has been implemented and the MFPs are functioning as on ramps for all these documents, and users are reaping all the requisite benefits, what’s next?
“This only touches the surface,” says Yakis. “The initial project was to implement two or three workflows for each section. Now that we have a taste of what it does we can take this to other sections/Divisions. There are so many more opportunities and we’re going to be embracing them as we move forward.”
