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Baldwin Police, New Document Management System Takes a Bite Out of Criminal
/ Accident Report ManagementWhen the
Baldwin Police Department responds to a situation – be it a traffic
accident, general complaint or criminal offense – its patrolmen generate an
incident report.
It’s the job of Judy Michalski, the department’s office manager and records
administrator, to archive and retrieve those 1,500 reports generated
annually along with the tens of thousands of pages of accompanying
documentation.
The original incident-related documents are archived in the station’s
records room “forever,” said Michalski, and, until recently, were
transferred to microfilm for reference and space storage purposes. It was,
said Michalski, a cumbersome, time-consuming system.
“The
incident reports are important documents that are used regularly by
probation officer, security companies, FBI and other law enforcement
agencies and the Defense Department for criminal back-ground checks,” she
said. “Insurance companies look at accident reports when processing
claims. Each inquiry means physically pulling the file, putting it onto a
microfilm reader-printer and providing the requestor with a
copy.”
“Whenever I get a request for a record from, say, 1980 or earlier, I tell
them, “Have a seat, it’s going to be a while”, she said.
For help
in devising a solution, the Baldwin police turned to COMPUCOM’S Dave
Lauterbach. The solution includes a high-speed scanner to scan all incoming
incident reports documents. The digitized documents are placed on the
police station’s network, which now runs an OTG document management
application.
While
COMPUCOM also helped convert Baldwin’s indexing system for several years’
worth of records, it’s up to Michalski and her assistant to scan archived
records. “So far, we’ve scanned about five years worth of records,” she
said.
Now,
when a requestor needs an incident report, it’s just a few clicks and
keystrokes away.
Said
Michalski, “Once I saw how simple this new system is to operate, I thought,
“My goodness, I could have saved myself so much time and trouble all of
these years. This system will make my job easier, and allow me to do more
things.”
Butler
County's Past Rescued by 21st Century Tools
COMPUCOM has helped the Butler County Historical Society reclaim a bit of
its past and make the society a tidy profit to boot.
The
society recently discovered more than 400 newspapers dating to as early as
1805 in the basement of an area home. The papers, which had been untouched
for more than 150 years, contained an enormous amount of lost Butler County
information. While too fragile for individuals to read, Becky Sheeler, the
society’s executive director sought a way to make the newspapers available
to the public via computer disks. “When we found out what an undertaking
this was going to be, we enlisted the help of COMPUCOM”.
COMPUCOM
developed a two-step strategy to transfer the newspapers to disk. “The
papers were so delicate that we couldn’t simply use the scanners we would
ordinarily use,” said David Lauterbach. COMPUCOM’s sales consultant. “Our
solution was to transfer the papers to microfilm, then scan the digital
image of the microfilm onto CDs.”
The
project included more than 40 different newspaper titles and 2,000
individual editions, spanning the period 1805 to 1901. Everything from
Daniel Boone’s obituary to Annie Oakley’s local shooting exhibition is
covered in the archives. The papers were indexed by date so that users can
easily conduct a search to locate a particular newspaper.
“This is
cutting edge technology,” explained Sheeler. “I don’t know of anyone else
in the country that has done this, and we are quite proud to be a part of
it.” Researchers and history buffs can purchase the completed CD sets from
the Butler Historical Society.
COMPUWeb
Conversion Helps Columbia Gas Boost Efficiency of Field Operations
The Company
Nelson
White is Civil Engineer Services Manager for Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania,
Inc., a NiSource Company. NiSource, which includes the former Columbia
Energy Group, provides natural gas service to hundreds of communities from
Indiana to Maine.
The Situation
Among
White’s responsibilities is the records management of land rights of way,
leases, deeds, permits and supporting documentation-maps, engineering
drawings and original correspondence. Many of these files contain between 20
and 30 pieces of paper of varying sizes and quality. The records, some of
which date to the 1800s, are used by 20 remote engineering and planning
departments in determining property rights of way.
For
example, on average, White’s office receives PennDOT notification on between
40 and 50 roadway projects each year. Some may require relocation of natural
gas pipelines, necessitating land rights information. That information, said
White, was previously stored in filing cabinets in the company’s Washington
Road office. “The Field people would call Wanda, who would look up the
information, fax it to them, and refile it. It was a very inefficient and
outmoded system, and was only available while Wanda was working. It was also
very expensive. The files consumed a lot of space- office space for which we
were paying top dollar.”
The Solutions
White’s
goals were to streamline record retrieval fro field offices and to reduce
file space needed to house records. COMPUCOM won the contract to consult and
provide microfilm conversion and scanning services. Microfilm has an
excellent record for high quality, meeting government standards for
archivability. By digitizing the microfilm, the documents are ready to be
used in a computer format.
But
White took another step into solving the records accessibility problem, and
opted into COMPUWeb. This COMPUCOM service consists of placing scanned
documents onto the Internet or organizational Intranet.
COMPUWeb
affords organizations all of the benefits of an in-house imaging system
without the capital expense and maintenance worry. In effect, you only pay
for the images scanned and stored.
COMPUCOM
scanned all of Columbia Gas’ relevant documents; the hard copies are now
filed in Butler County’s Iron Mountain underground storage facility.
The Result
The
Pennsylvania records were available on line in June 1999; the Virginia
documents will be available in the first quarter of 2001. Any new deeds
issued are also incorporated into the COMPUWeb system, to keep records
up-to-date. Employees can search the Columbia Gas archives by deed number,
and instantly access the information they need. White estimates that about
40 people in the company’s engineering and planning now have 24/7 access to
the data.
“We
easily could open access to more individuals if we needed to,” he said.
And
while the field engineers and technical staff of Columbia Gas have much
greater access to the documentation, White said it’s the company’s law
department that has given the new COMPUWeb system the most ringing
endorsement.
“Our
attorneys are the ones most raving about it,” he said. “They tend to go
deeper with the information and would need 300 pages or more of
documentation for their research. Now, they don’t have to wait for copies to
be made to do their work-they can do it anytime they want, including working
late at night.”
White
said that the shift to COMPUWeb has improved Columbia Gas’ efficiency in
recordkeeping and information access in a number of ways. “Most importantly,
we’re now much more effective in providing information quickly to the
field,” he said.
“And
from a business standpoint, it has enabled us to improve our cost
efficiency. With fewer people, we’ve been able to do more. First, it
recaptured a lot of lost time, by eliminating repetitive administrative
tasks of making copies, faxing, logging, refilling and so forth. Second, we
were able to move into smaller, more cost-efficient office space, which
saved money. Overall, it’s a 100 percent improvement.”
Contractual Obligations: Rapidigm Employees Enjoy Faster Access to
Mission-Critical Data
Pittsburgh-Based Rapidigm, Inc. is a leading provider of e-commerce,
enterprise resource planning and information technology consulting service.
The company recently was named by Inc magazine as one of the fastest-growing
U.S. companies for a second consecutive year.
When
entering into a consulting assignment, Rapidigm generates a formal business
contract. The original paper contracts are maintained by Rapidigm’s legal
department in a centralized master file in Pittsburgh.
However, according to Tina Reisdorf, Rapidigms’s senior legal services
facilitator, other corporate departments, including the company’s 18
international sales offices, also may need access to contractual information
– a situation that created a lot of busy work
“For
example, we would receive a request from accounting for a copy of a specific
contract,” Reisdorf explained. “We would physically pull the paper files,
then fax them copies of the requested documents.”
Considering Rapidigm has several thousand paper contracts, each ranging in
length from seven up to 40 pages, it’s understandable that simply fulfilling
interdepartmental requests was becoming a complicated and time-consuming
task.
P-doc to E-doc
Rapidigm’s challenge was to simplify and speed sharing of its contract files
while ensuring document integrity and security. After consulting with
COMPUCOM, Rapidigm implemented a Web-based imaging retrieval system.
First,
COMPUCOM scanned five years’ worth of historical contract files. Then,
scanned documents were organized using Legato’s APPLICATIONxtender software
and posted to Rapidigm’s intranet using WEBxtender.
The
digitized contracts now are code-indexed and searchable by date, office
location and customer name. There’s also a comments section that Reisdorf
uses “to help differentiate multiple contracts with the same customer. It’s
a method to customize a search for specific contractual terms,” she said. To
keep the contracts database current, Reisdorf now scans incoming documents
using Fujitsu digital scanner.
“This
system saves an enormous amount of time,” said Reisdorf. “Now when I receive
a request for a contract file, I do a simple search and click ‘Mail
Document’ to e-mail the contract files to the requestor.”
In
addition to the contracts database, the Legato system, housed on a robust
server, manages personnel documents for Rapidigm’s 2,500 consultants, a
database that’s instantly accessible via password-protected security
channels across Rapidigm’s enterprise.
Additional upgrades to add users and functionality have expanded the role of
the two databases, and other mission-critical applications are now being
planned.
Loan
Consolidation: WesBanco Centralizes Loan Operations, Gains Efficienciese
WesBanco, Inc. is a highly regarded, multi-state, bank holding company with
headquarters in Wheeling, W.V. Among its subsidiaries is WesBanco Bank, Inc.
which operates branches in West Virginia and Ohio.
In keeping with its community banking and personalized customer service
orientation, WesBanco Bank has sought to combine technological advances with
its people assets. This philosophy manifested itself two years ago when
WesBanco undertook a corporate-wide consolidation.
“Previously, our loan operations were managed within each of the four
regions – Wheeling, Parkersburg, Charleston and Fairmont,” explains Dennis
Yaeger, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of WesBanco,
Inc. “Our goal was to consolidate the management of our commercial and
consumer loan operations, as well as our other business units, under on
roof.”
A Plethora of Paper
According to Mr. Yaeger, banks must retain certain loan documents for the
life of the loan and for some time after the loan is paid off. “For
personal or commercial loans, that may be up to seven years, or more. For a
30-year mortgage, however, that means we may keep a file for three decades
or longer,” he says.
The
result of the loan operations consolidation was a plethora of paper
documents—more than 3.5 million pages – arriving in Wheeling.
For help
in effectively managing this information and in making it accessible to its
loan managers and other critical users, WesBanco turned to COMPUCOM. After
reviewing WesBanco’s operations and goals, COMPUCOM recommended a
multi-level, easily scalable strategy that included digitally scanning the
important archival records, organizing and coding them for simple searches,
then placing those documents on WesBanco’s Intranet.
The
process started in January 2001. COMPUCOM records all historical files
using multiple scanners; WesBanco scans all day-forward information. All
information is stored on WesBanco’s servers, where it is instantly
accessible to more than 100 concurrent users via password-protected security
channels across the enterprise. “We scan all of the original documents,”
explains Dennis. “If a loan is still open, it it’s still current, the
documents have been scanned. Certain original loan documents are maintained
in a secure, off-site location where they can be easily retrieved. Other
supporting documents are scanned and then they are destroyed.”
Greater Efficiencies
In the
first 11 months, more than 2.5 million pages had been scanned. “We’ve
completed the digital imaging of all commercial loans and consumer loans,”
says Dennis, “and we’re now about 10 to 15 percent through the second phase
of the project—scanning approximately one million pages of mortgage loan
documents.”
Mr. Yaeger says the main benefits to the new system are obvious—instant
accessibility to a broader number of critical users, yet enhanced security
and control. WesBanco also has substantially reduced the amount of office
space dedicated to storing paper documents, he said, and employees are
spending less time sifting through paper and ore time delivering
personalized customer service.
Says
Dennis, “With this new system, we’ve realized greater efficiencies
throughout our loan business, including under-writing, collections and
record keeping, and we’re now able to respond more quickly to our
customers.”
The process has gone so smoothly that WesBanco has begun scanning signature
cards for its consumer and business checking and savings accounts as well as
applications for its trust business and even corporate human
resources.
“Overall, it’s been a very positive experience for us. And we received
tremendous advice and support from COMPUCOM,” Dennis says.