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Big Cost Savings for Small Town
The Town of Henrietta implemented DocuWare and saw a Return on Investment in close to a year, based on hard cost savings alone. They eliminated over $20,000 a year in paper storage fees and dramatically improved document retrieval times and efficiency.
Initial Situation
The Town of Henrietta is located in the heart of Monroe County, just outside of Rochester, New York. Home to 45,000 people, it retains its small town feel as a wonderful place to live, work and play.
As the Town grew in size, the volume of documents it needed to manage also grew. Documents were filling onsite and offsite storage facilities at a costly pace. Town meeting minutes, planning and zoning case files, registration forms, claims and lawsuits – nearly everything needed to be permanently archived. Searching for important documents in filing cabinets and vaults had become a daunting task and offsite document storage and retrieval was also costly. Overall, access to paper-based files was tedious, expensive and took up valuable space.
“Our major issue was space, and that was our leading reason for looking at document management software. Now that we are using DocuWare, we’ve benefited far above just gaining extra space,” said IT Coordinator for the Town of Henrietta, Mario Angotti.
Solution
An Authorized DocuWare Partner worked with the Town’s IT team to implement DocuWare and develop a streamlined system perfectly suited for the Town’s specific document management needs. A fleet of Toshiba MFPs – ranging from the Toshiba e-STUDIO 523T, 203, 2330C and the 555 were implemented as dedicated scanners and shared between departments through the use of mobile wireless carts containing a computer and Fujitsu high speed scanners that were wheeled around the office. Documents are automatically indexed using Optical Character Recognition or OCR for short.
Today, the Town has over half a million documents stored in DocuWare. The Town Clerk’s office was the first place DocuWare was rolled out because this office is the record management office for every document the Town owns such as real estate and land records; birth, death and marriage certificates, sporting licenses, dog licenses, records of board and commission meetings to name a few.
New records are stored electronically and the Town’s in-house staff is working to back scan existing paper records, starting with the frequently accessed documents. Once the contents of each box from the storage facility are scanned into the system, the paper records are destroyed, which means one less box costing the Town of Henrietta.
Benefits
Before implementing DocuWare, finding certain documents could take days or weeks, depending on the amount of research involved. With DocuWare in place, retrieval is easy and happens in seconds.
The Town’s Return on Investment was realized in only 15 months, based solely on the reduction in storage related and preparation fees, not including gains from increased productivity. In fact, the Town will save more than $20,000 a year by reducing paper document storage. Town of Henrietta Supervisor Michael Yudelson stated “We need things that increase our efficiency and save us money. There aren’t a lot of things that do both, but DocuWare does.”
Every five years, the Town of Henrietta conducts a comprehensive land use survey. As part of the process, the Town sends out a 6-page questionnaire to more than 15,000 households. In previous years, the results of the returned questionnaires had to be typed into a database. After implementing DocuWare and third party software ABBYY FlexiCapture, the Town of Henrietta was able to export all of the responses into their database electronically.
FlexiCapture was able to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to read the completed questionnaire’s check boxes and export the data to Microsoft Excel. The software also pulled the addresses to determine which quadrant each address was in, allowing for trend figures to be easily calculated within the Excel file. FlexiCapture then exported all of the information into DocuWare for simple retrieval and review as needed.
The Town Recreation Department was also paper intensive. They frequently accessed program registration slips for tax purposes and to see what classes the child had previously enrolled in. Registration slips are stored for seven years or until the child is 22 years old. By scanning the documents, the department eliminated numerous filing cabinets and many trips to the document vault to look for information.
The Building Department has also begun using DocuWare. By storing and back scanning completed residential and commercial building and renovation permits, Town employees can quickly retrieve vital information on various projects for residents and contractors.. A document request that would have taken anywhere from a full day to weeks to research, now takes only seconds.
Conclusion
The bottom line is the Town has realized huge benefits in increased efficiencies and cost savings. These savings will continue to be realized moving forward and with the addition of other Town departments. As the Town of Henrietta Supervisor Michael Yudelson stated, “It was a no-brainer. We are saving money because we’ve improved our efficiency and eliminated offsite storage costs.”
