Case Study - Torbay Council

Cave Tab brings Back-Scanning to the Electronic Riviera

29/10/2004 16:00

Torbay Council's Revenues and Benefits department had a high quantity of paper filing and was in need of a more efficient method of managing that information.  Under the circumstances, and given the recent directive to local authorities regarding e-government, there was only one thing they could do...

Leaving A Legacy

The Revenues and Benefits department of Torbay Council had made a strategic decision to move to an Electronic Case Management environment and had engaged Civica/Comino plc as their software partner for this major excercise.  This was to include electronic document management as an intrinsic element.

From implementation going forward, documents created within the department would be automatically saved into the Civica/Comino system and incoming paper documents would be scanned using desktop scanners, indexed and thus captured into the system to complete the electronic record.  The problem lay with the legacy paper records contained in 15,000 folders held by the department, which needed to be converted to electronic images and passed into the main Civica/Comino software in order for the system to be complete.

This major scanning and indexing task could not be done using low-volume desktop scanners, so Cave Tab were asked to look at the situation and make recommendations.

 

Tailor-Made Solution Measures Up

The folders were address based and held the details of the current claimant, which needed to be scanned and also the details of past claimants, which could remain on paper, thus saving scanning costs. Furthermore, the department held approximately 3,000 old files, which occupied a complete filing room.

The department's team and Cave Tab specialists worked on tailoring a solution to exactly meet the Council's requirements.  The current claimant records averaged about 50 pages in each folder, making an approximate total of 750,000 pages to be scanned.  These consisted of a multiple page application in booklet form, together with associated documents, some single-sided, some double-sided.

Cave Tab devised a system using barcoded seperator sheets, which Council staff placed between each set of documents as they were extracted from the folders prior to being placed in archive transit boxes provided by Cave Tab.  Meanwhile, the Cave Tab team had set up a database of the full index information.

Scanning to Schedule

The records to be scanned were uplifted by Cave Tab in six batches so that the Benefits Team were never without more than a sixth of their very active records.  The records were processed in Cave Tab's Northampton Bureau and the images returned on CD ROM in accordance with a tight production schedule set by the Council.

Tracking the Long-Term Benefits

Cave Tab provided two sets of CD's per batch, one of just images for eventual upload to the Comino system when it went live, and the other set with Alchemy Search so that the Benefits Team could view images in the interim period.  Cave Tab also provided several client access licences for this purpose.  The scanned paper records were to be stored by Cave Tab for three months and then securely destroyed.

Cave Tab has also provided long-term for the very old records in it's Northampton warehouse, thus freeing up much space for the Council.  These records are contained in Cave Tab's archive boxes, barcoded and managed by our FileTrail tracking system, enabling a full retrieval-on-demand service to be offered to Torbay Council.

News category: About Cave Tab, Digital Records Management, Specialist Sectors


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