Case study: North Shore City Council

“Increasing the scanning throughput by 200% was important when converting 2.5 kilometers of property files to electronic” says Hugh Smith, Project Manager, North Shore City Council.

• Scanning throughput increased 200%
• Project brought up to speed
• Smart use of technology saves adding resources
• Specialist software improves results

Hugh, how was North Shore City Council getting behind on the project?
We had a three-year project and we had to scan x copies each week. We were not reaching our planned turnaround and needed to seriously improve our throughput. There are three ways you can do that. You can either increase the scanners, increase the man power or get smarter with the technology. eCom decided to get smarter with what we were doing with technology.

What impact did eCom have on the project?
That improvement was almost doubled.

What were some of the issues before eCom became involved in the project?
The scanning ability of our document management system would not achieve the required throughput. It’s not a scanning and data capture system.

Was the project behind much before eCom became involved?
Definitely. We needed to achieve 105 properties a day. We did not reach that initially. So we have been backfilling the gap and are almost there. It is fair to say we would not have achieved our property profile targets if we had not introduced eCom’s services and eCom’s Property Profiler.

Could you relate that back to people?
We were putting through 60 or 70 properties a day. We were then getting up to 130 with the same amount of people.

Did eCom perform well?
Yes, the developers worked well and it was quite an innovation.

Why did you choose eCom?
One of the things we were clearly looking for was someone who was successfully doing what we were trying to do. That was confirmed when we went along to eCom’s offices at Grafton and saw their operation. We realised they had the technology and capability.

Can you talk about the technology, where it fits in and what it is used for?
North Shore City Council had around 2.5km of shelving filled with property profile pages that were accessed on a daily basis by internal and external customers. One problem with hard copy is that only one person can hold onto the information at once and there is a reasonable possibility that it gets lost. There is data from the Gartner Group on the cost of retrieving hard copy files and also how often they get lost.

North Shore City Council decided to scan all these files into the North Shore City Council document management system which had already been used for a number of years. It became apparent they needed a high throughput as they needed a turnaround time of 24 hours.

eCom’s side is a capture system called Property Profiler. It captures the meta data but it also reduces the profiling time dramatically. Information is populated automatically against a property automatically instead of typing in and can be easily classified, ie. public, non public, letters of complaint, live litigation.

Also it reduced mouse clicks and you did not have to save anything while you were working.

The scale of the operation is 17 people …
Yes, last month we scanned 145,000 pieces of paper and add to that 14,000 plans, so all up we are scanning 150,000 to 160,000 pieces of paper a month. Including images it could be 200,000.

How much paper storage is there?
There are more than 80,000 properties with 2.5km of shelving filled with property files, which is a mixture of schools, commercial and homes.

How long before the project is complete?
December 2005. It is a three-year project.

Was this a big project by North Shore City Council terms?
My understanding is it is one of the largest back scanning projects ever attempted in New Zealand.

Did North Shore City Council work out if there was a return on the back file?
Yes, North Shore City Council did a cost justification from Gartner. There are several costs involved. Just the retrieval cost is put at $20 and then the cost of lost files and the statistics on that. Say there are 80,000 files and 10% get lost in a year, then if you put a cost on that it’s easy to justify. You have all these intangible costs savings. For example, if the property needs to be looked at by the planner, architect and town planner, it’s all easily accessible. Then it also opens up all sorts of cost saving channels.