Go Systems And Kodak Alaris Help New South Wales Council To Accelerate Digital Transformation

Kodak Alaris partner Go Systems, is a leading provider of technology, services and solutions designed to help public sector clients to work smarter and accelerate their digital transformation. The Sydney-based firm is a trusted advisor to its clients, helping them to leverage the full potential of the latest hardware and software solutions required to run best-in-class scanning operations, and maximise their return on investment.

A strong track record of high customer retention rates and long-standing relationships can be attributed to its commitment to delivering outstanding customer value. Through its proven ‘Process and Workflow’ methodology, Go Systems ensures clients’ investment in ICT is smart, and that the technology provided maximises efficiency, increases application productivity and saves money.

Go Systems counts many local councils across New South Wales amongst its client base, including one of the largest in the region, and has partnered with Kodak Alaris to provide best-in-class capture hardware and software solutions. Leveraging its vast experience in the public sector, Go Systems works closely with the Sydney-based council, digging deep to fully understand its requirements and objectives in terms of digital strategy. The end result – a technology roadmap designed to ensure the council meets and exceeds all of its goals, from increasing throughput, improving the accuracy of information captured, to saving money.

The Challenge

The council’s Electronic Document Management (EDM) department is staffed by three full-time people. The team is supported by other employees who are on rehabilitation from various injuries who help out with the most time consuming element of digitization - data prep.

The EDM team is charged with digitising all paper-based documents created across all departments – from financial records, development applications, childcare centre files, to HR files, staff timesheets and rotas, through to planning applications. Volumes continue to increase year on year and the biggest challenge is that there is little sign of this trend abating in the immediate future.

In recent times, there has been a property boom in the region, and this has resulted in a surge in development applications. These files are typically very large, stored separately and sent in their entirety to be digitised once approved. With rooms packed full of boxes to be scanned, keeping on top of the day to day scanning is a challenge, so much so that outsourcing to various bureaus is a pre-requisite.

Solution

The department head is consumed by keeping on top of daily workflow and as such relies on ongoing consultative support from Go Systems to ensure the operation continues to leverage best-in-class technology to stay ahead of the game. The council has a fleet of eleven networked Kodak Scanners. This includes two i2600 and i3200 Scanners, three i3400 and i4200 models, as well as one i1440 Scanner, running with Alaris Capture Pro Software Network Edition. In addition to the scanners installed in the EDM, other scanners are also located in off-site locations where they are utilised for specific tasks such as within the accounts payable function.

Capture is shifting from scan to archive, to scan to process, in support of this, the council recently migrated to the TechnologyOne Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform. Go Systems worked with the council, to automate and streamline workflows, enabling information to be scanned directly into pre-defined folders, stored in line of business (LoB) applications, used and managed from any device, anywhere and anytime.

Results

With a small team and an ever-increasing workload, ensuring maximum efficiency and productivity within the EDM is essential in order to ensure successful digital transformation. An annual support agreement, which includes up to two preemptive site visits by a qualified engineer, ensures maximum uptime. The EDM department handles documents of different sizes and formats from onion paper, carbonised delivery documents and everything in between to A0. Image quality is a high priority, a requirement that led the team to migrate from a multi-vendor fleet to one that now only comprises Kodak Alaris scanners. There is so much paper to process that it also uses bureaus, however as consistency of quality is key, it only outsources to bureaus that operate Kodak Alaris fleets.

Prior to switching to a fleet of Kodak Alaris scanners, the council was frustrated, having to deal with paper handling issues, legacy models not capable of dealing with the desired throughput, ease of managing the scanned documents and inadequate quality of images captured. Using the Kodak Alaris scanners, once paper has been prepared, scanning into business applications is very fast and effective. Thanks to unparalleled image quality, the scanners have significantly cut the number of documents that require rescans and manual operator interventions, which costs both time and money. The ability to feed mixed batches, without worrying about lower throughput speeds or consistent, high quality output, is also saving time spent manually pre-sorting documents.

Engineered to work seamlessly with any Kodak Alaris scanner, Alaris Capture Pro Software, provides intelligent capabilities that increase productivity and improve efficiency.

Key Benefits

Thanks to best-in-class capture technology and the ability to process and route information across various systems quickly and accurately, the council has been able to lower the cost of the scanning process as well as endto- end processing times.

• Capture Pro Software which enables batches of paper to be quickly converted into high quality images, makes image clean up a breeze. It offers robust data extraction and seamless delivery to business applications too.
• Ongoing consultative support and advice from Go Systems ensures the council’s solution is scalable and that it achieves best value out of every new technology investment.

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Greater productivity starts with smarter sorting

Most high-volume scanners with sorting capability require proprietary software. Alaris has designed the i5650S and i5850S Scanners to enable most sorting jobs via standard drivers such as TWAIN and ISIS. This makes it much easier for operators to get to the next level of productivity without having to learn a completely new system.

Production scanners from Alaris offer three-pocket sorting designed for the extreme scanning demands of Service Bureaus, BPOs and corporate mailrooms. Combining smart sorting with high speed throughput and superior image quality leads to increased productivity and significantly lower document capture costs.

In some applications within the banking and insurance sectors, original documents such as proof of ID have to be returned to the customer after digitization, which means operators have to carefully prepare documents before scanning begins, then separate them once scanning is complete. This manual process can be prone to error, labor intensive and costly.

The i5650S and i5850S Scanners simplify the process by reducing the amount of manual labor. Using the patch-sheet recognition feature to separate document batches, reusable patch sheets are separated and output to the rear exit tray, while original customer documents are automatically separated and output to an exception tray at the front of the scanner. With the automated sorting capabilities these scanners deliver, separator sheets can now be used many times. Scanning service providers no longer have to throw away millions of separator sheets each year. The ability to re-use separator sheets delivers substantial cost savings and reduces the waste footprint.