Faced with a bad economy and shrinking tax base, the city of Kennewick, Wash., (with a population of some 66,000), came to the conclusion that it needed a new business process that would enable it to do more with its current resources and improve efficiencies throughout city government. Kennewick decided that implementing a core ECM system would go far in helping it meet this goal.

Anatomy of a Cumbersome Manual System
The system would be first implemented in the city clerk’s office to automate the payroll process and other services. The reasoning behind this decision was that “The city clerk’s office is the record keeper for all records in the city – anything that’s a permanent public record we are responsible for,” says Christina Palmer, assistant director of support services. It also interacts with the other city departments, so starting there made sense.

Prior to implementation, the city was hobbled with an entirely manual way of creating, editing and finalizing agendas for city council meetings. The agenda process generates more documents than any other city process and involves the most departments. The city council meets every Tuesday, says Palmer, so agenda preparers have to create a document hundreds of pages long comprised of contributions from many city departments on an accelerated schedule.

Documents were stored in multiple locations including minutes books, filing cabinets and an old imaging system. Agenda items were physically routed for review and approval to multiple staff members, resulting in serious challenges in tracking item locations.

“Marooned” Documents
Each department also had a different procedure for processing agenda items and often paper copies got marooned on approvers’ desks in any one of the city’s buildings. Changes to the manually collated agenda meant that the numbering process for the entire agenda was affected. Cover sheets had to be resent through the approval process, reapproved, recopied and, finally, resubmitted.

Pieces of the document come from many different offices and each item that’s coming before the city council has a cover sheet and its own set of documents associated with it. And they can be numerous. “Because of the way things are structured … each “item” is [actually] made up of a lot of smaller documents within it,” says Palmer.

The payroll process was also laborintensive. Employees completed time cards in Excel and printed and signed them. On occasion, employees accidently miscoded their hours, account numbers, or project numbers. This caused either payroll delays or necessitated future payroll adjustments. Once submitted to the payroll department, workers had to manually re-key this data. The process was time-consuming, errorprone and redundant. Locating missing timecards was also an issue.

The Dream at City Hall
Thus Kennewick hired ImageSource, a value-added reseller (VAR) to automate the city clerk’s manual processes. It wanted to eliminate duplication of documents, significantly reduce physical storage space and expedite the time and effort needed to create the agendas, improve the process of storing and retrieving documents and reduce staff time spent on ineffective processes. Essentially, Kennewick sought to streamline their agenda process by creating electronic workflows for the many approvers and reviewers.

In payroll the city wanted an automated system that improved the accuracy of the repetitive and time-eating manual system. It needed an automated system for submitting timecards, validating coding against the financial system database, expediting approvals by supervisors, processing and storage that required fewer employees, faster turn-around times and improved accuracy.

A VAR-Integrated solution with four Different Products
ImageSource first met with selected city departments and made recommendations on how to improve efficiencies through ECM implementations. The city then produced a five-year plan to implement the solution in phases enterprise-wide. Over the next three months, ImageSource then designed and installed a comprehensive system that provides an enterprise repository for storage and electronic workflow. The solution is comprised of several products – Oracle IPM, Cardiff LiquidOffice, ILINKS technologies and Kofax Ascent Capture.

Oracle IPM integrates transaction documents and information into common business processes and third-party applications. It’s a scalable solution focused on process-oriented imaging applications and image-enabling business applications. It enables annotation and image mark-ups, automates routing and approvals, and supports high-volume applications for millions of items.

Basically, says Palmer, it’s a search and retrieval repository. “We have a ton of [standard] searches people can access, so they can go in there with an ordinance, for example, and search all the ordinances that are related to, say, building changes and view those images [associated] with it.” Further, she says, “if it was saved in its data format, they can launch out to Word or Excel – whatever it was in – and make modifications.”

She adds, “There are a lot of things in government that are repetitive and you don’t want to have to retype them every time. So staff can export them, make whatever updates needed, and then resubmit them as new documents back into the system.”

Kofax Ascent Capture automates information captured from scanned paper or imported electronic documents. Based on criteria the user defines, the entire document or extracted data is digitized and then routed to an archive, database or the next step in the business’ workflow. Signed documents are reentered into the system after the council meetings using Kofax.

Cardiff LiquidOffice is a forms-processing product that lets Kennewick use workflows to route, review, approve and distribute city-council agenda documentation. When initiating an agenda item, a department submits a LiquidOffice form, attaching all associated documents in their native format. Items are electronically routed for approval to required managers, department heads, the city manager, and, finally, the city clerk’s office for agenda preparation. This flexible workflow allows for adding approvers, editing and resubmission, as well as change approvers in the event the normal approver is not available.

Once through the approval process, the city clerk uses the ILINX Public Disclosure Tool to build the council meeting agenda. This tool provides an easy way to find groups of documents in the IPM repository and then output the documents to the local drive. City employees then combine them to create an electronic agenda packet. The resulting epacket can then be printed for council members and posted to the city website for public viewing.

Once city council meetings are concluded, the action taken on each item is recorded and processed through an Oracle IPM workflow. Departments can then see the action that was taken on their items during the council meeting. For quick, easy contribution to IPM, Kennewick uses the ILINX Manual Indexing Tool, which provides user-friendly indexing fields, index validation, use of sticky fields, and the ability to require that certain fields be entered.

ILINX provides an efficient, costeffective way to ensure that data is entered accurately and completely. The tool also helps reduce the issue of having multiple copies of documents by allowing the option to delete the local copy of the document once it’s been stored in the imaging system. The tool requires minimal training and allows users across the city to contribute documents directly into IPM.

ImageSource streamlined payroll with LiquidOffice. Employees now submit hours electronically using LiquidOffice time cards, which are forms with built-in routing intelligence. The forms are ideal for creating, deploying and automatically managing the routing, tracking and approval processes for electronic forms. Time cards are electronically routed to managers for approval, data is imported into Eden, the city’s financial system (for processing), and a copy of the completed form is stored in IPM, thereby dramatically streamlining the payroll procedure.

As Palmer puts it, “staff log onto Liquid Office to access their timecards. They fill out their hours. We have a lot of different coding that goes into payroll – a lot of different account numbers go to project numbers and so forth. They fill in their hours and the system tracks [all details].

“They can write comments there too,” she continues. “They can fill it out as they go and when the end of the pay period comes, they’ll submit it to their supervisor who approves it. Once approved, it [triggers] two things – a copy of the timecard goes into the Oracle IPM system. Once there, all the data is extracted out of the form and into a SQL database that we then use to create an export file that goes into our native Eden financial system. That’s where the timecards are eventually processed.”

Integration of All Products and Processes
Despite the various products, the macro process is integrated smoothly and works efficiently. According to Palmer, “When somebody has something for the council to review, they’ll go online into Liquid Office and fill out a council agenda cover sheet. It’ll list whatever index values we’re going to be using – the date, what the item number is and so on – it’ll have a recommendation of motion and then a project summary.

“Then,” she says, “they’ll go to wherever they have their supporting documentation, go to the network, attach that documentation to the cover sheet, and then submit that.” They can also select where to submit it as well, e.g. to their administrative staff to look it over for approval. It’ll then go to the department head for approval, then to the city manager, then to the city clerk.

“Once everything’s approved, the employee marks it as complete and then it exports everything into the Oracle IPM system. And it stays there until our cut-off time, which is Thursday evening,” Palmer says. “So everything gets dropped in there throughout that week. Then we use the ILINKS Public Disclosure tool once Friday comes to export everything with that date to a folder, and then we combine it into one big agenda packet,” she explains.

Savings of Nearly $1 Million in Paper Storage Alone
The system is now in production in 11 departments, including Building Safety, Budget, and Risk Management, which means their data can be collected, managed and stored in the master process. Three more departments are in test mode.

The initial cost for the system, which was started in 2007 and took three months to complete, was $620,000. The city spent another $100,000 bringing the other departments online. But the return on investment has been significant. The system paid for itself in 14.7 months and the savings per year to the city include $25,423 for staff time for agenda item processing, $166,000 for storage and maintenance of filing cabinets, and $50,000 for payroll processing. The system has also enabled the Clerk’s Office to redeploy seven fulltime employees and will save Kennewick nearly $1 million over the next five years in paper storage costs.

Soft benefits are also impressive. According to Palmer, “the biggest savings came from reducing the time people were spending on document filing and retrieval.” Staff no longer have to spend time manually locating documents and always are working with the current copy – and they no longer have to manually edit and resubmit agenda items for approval – they now run them through the electronic workflow, which saves inestimable time.

Additionally, the latest version of documents is readily available at all times in all departments, and the risk of inaccurate or duplicate information has significantly declined. The agenda process, therefore, can be completed in a fraction of the time it took the old system, which frees employees to concentrate on other value-added tasks. Payroll has also been greatly simplified, saving time as well as eliminating errors and redundancies. A process that occurs twice a month and used to take three-tofive employees one or two days to complete now takes only minutes a day.

A Total Transformation
The upshot of this transformation is that a city with shrinking revenues that was mired in paper records and antiquated work processes can now offer its citizens better services with fewer resources. Because of a resourceful VAR that essentially built an imaging/workflow/capture/ forms processing system from disparate products, Palmer says, “We were able to put everybody on the same form, following the same process, with an automated system that works for all.”

John Harney is a freelance writer who’s edited three document management magazines and written about all things content management for the last 15 years. He can be reached at johnharney2@netzero.com or 240-603-6448.