Case Study - Defence Vetting Agency
Barcode Tracking at the Defence Vetting Agency18/05/2010 09:00
Background
In 2001, the seperate Vetting Departments of the Royal Navy, the Army, the Royal Air Force and the Ministry of Defence were brought together into a single entity - The Defence Vetting Agency (DVA) to be located at Imphal Barracks in York.
The combination of these departments would create a File Registry of over 400,000 paper records, complicated by the fact that each service had an entirely different indexing system. The management at the new DVA could see very early on that a comprehensive Records Management and Tracking software system would be essential to control this very large and somewhat unstructured registry. the system would need to be based on a powerful database and utilise barcode technology for capturing the movement and whereabouts of all records.
A commercial tendering process was announced with Cave Tab Ltd winning the bid and installing their then current system - File Tracker for Windows - for 150 users. Subsequently, this system was upgraded to Cave Tab's current web-based platform - FileTrail.
The initial plan was to populate the new tracking system with file indexing information electronically - the usual method. However, for various technical reasons stemming from the different legacy IT systems used, this proved to be impossible and Cave Tab was then asked to manage a major operation to create the file indexing manually.
Methodology
The DVA had already installed an extremely large mobile shelving system with 27 double-sided mobile units; each unit being seven metre-length bays long. Each bay had seven levels of shelving; each shelf was sub-divided into thirds. Each 'third' was to be a barcoded file location making almost 8,000 locations in total. Filing records in a storage system as vast as this using conventional indexing can be a very laborious business (imagine trekking to the far end to access a 'Z' file, then to the front for an 'A' file and back to the far end again for a 'Y' file and so on). Cave Tab looked at this potential problem and advised the DVA to adopt a 'Floating Location' system which would be controlled by the Cave Tab software. With this system, staff carry portable barcode scanners and merely scan any file into the nearest convenient location, avoiding much time wasted in walking backwards and forwards. The File Tracking software knows the location of every file and produces pick-lists of requested files in shelving sequence, greatly facilitating this operation.
Following the usual vetting process, a team of 42 fully managed part time staff were employed to carry out the data entry of over 400,000 files. A barcode label was attached to each file and the essential information of name, rank and date of birth was entered into the tracking system. The team carried out a complete audit of the finished system; Cave Tab also ensured the end users were fully trained and familiar with the new system. The project was successfully completed in five months.
The metadata created by the Cave Tab service Team was also used to populate the DVA's in-house Case Management System.
Sue Freeman – DVA IS Manager, said:
“FileTrail is an integral part of the DVA’s electronic processing. Without it we would have to track upwards of 400,000 hard copy files manually within the DVA and to and from our customers – a mammoth task requiring considerably more than the current number of library staff. The installation and ongoing support of first File Tracker, and then its replacement FileTrail, by Cave Tab has been excellent.”
Present and Future
The FileTrail application is easily accessible from over 200 workstations across the DVA site via an Internet browser. the powerful search facility allows a user to search for an item with as much or as little information as they have to hand. A user can log in and search for items, view the metadata, the items current location, whether it is currently out with another colleague or if it is within the file room and then send a request to the library staff. This vastly reduces the amount of internal email correspondence in the search for missing files and minimises the disruption caused to the business. It may not be the physical value of the files, but the importance of finding a file at the right time, which matters most.
Another key benefit is the full audit trail provided; not only can staff view any location or user movement for each item but the system also logs any changes made to the metadata. Even deleted items are not lost forever. This provides both the historical and current value and by whom the changes were made, thus providing invaluable information should an internal or external inspection arise.
Barcode technology significantly reduces the labour intensive method of keying in data and manages information efficiently in every way.
Since using FileTrail at the DVA to manage Vetting files, the application is being expanded to track and manage other vital files in their care. FileTrail's ability to manage many different records with different levels of security and access-viewing privileges across any organisational structure makes this entirely feasible.
News category: Physical Records Management
Go back
