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NewswireTODAY - /newswire/ -
Tampa, FL, United States, 2013/05/30 - Oregon Department of Justice achieves greater efficiencies, faster response times and reduces paper with new workflow system - HighTechViews.com.
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The Oregon Department of Justice (DOJ) reports achieving great efficiencies after deploying NSi AutoStore at six of the DOJ’s nine divisions and others are in line for developing workflows and additional OCR capabilities.
With legal oversight for a variety of diverse activities, DOJ was a paper-rich environment, logging hundreds of documents a day resulting in thousands of pages that had to be reviewed, acted upon by numerous people in different sections, and finally stored in a secure repository for collaboration or future access.
Looking to better manage its paper processes, inter-agency collaboration, ease of document retrieval, and to meet electronic filing compliance for the court system, DOJ looked to Dan Ramos, Enterprise Technology Services Manager and Karen Yakis, Customer Support Analyst to identify challenges and create a best practices environment that would bring greater efficiencies, save tax payer dollars, and enhance services to the citizens of Oregon.
Each division is expected to have at least two different workflows feeding into the document management repository and it will be easy to create additional workflows, if necessary. “The real consistency of the system comes into play when users fill out the initial AutoStore form. When users have a document on the scanner, the scanner brings up NSi’s QuickCapture Pro which directs the AutoStore server to bring up an electronic form on the computer that’s part of the electronic workflow. The user fills out the required fields on the form, submits the form and scanned document to the server where it’s OCR’ed and sent to the document management repository,” said Yakis.
Along with the DOJ’s new conformity with their PDF files, it has also gained consistency using electronic workflows with routing and standard file naming conventions making it very easy to collaborate, view and retrieve documents. “Previously there was inconsistency in file names which made it extremely difficult to access files from the share drive. With this solution, we gained a consistent naming convention upfront that was created by the users. Today, there’s a number of ways you can find a document,” Yakis added.
“Not only are our response times much better, we are anticipating a significant savings in storage space by eliminating boxes of paper files,” said Ramos. “We’ve also been able to re-engage some of our staff and allow them to work smarter by reducing the more mundane tasks of searching through file cabinets and boxes for random documents.”
DOJ is planning to expand the capabilities of the system by adding other divisions and additional workflows as needed. They also plan to expand their development environment to test new workflows and become more efficient in deployment. “The development environment is extremely important in order to get the workflows running and tested without having to stop production in any area. The ability to add more OCR engines to the AutoStore server is a critical part of this expansion,” Ramos added.
In terms of specific dollar returns, DOJ indicates that they are currently spending about $135,000 a year to maintain storage facilities. While these costs will not likely be reduced, they won’t be increased due to the savings gained from electronic file storage. “We’re practicing cost avoidance with this system,” Ramos said. “And that’s a very good thing in an environment that is focused on creating best practices to reduce spending and better serve our state’s taxpayers.”
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