Alchemy Case Study - Hurunui District Council

Executive Summary
The Hurunui District Council turned what appeared to be an unaffordable dream into low-cost reality with an in-house project that converted about 850,000 property-related documents into easily accessed electronic files in just three months.

Faced with contract scanning costs of up to $250,000 and the need to remove the precious files from its premises in Amberley, North Canterbury, the council decided to go it alone. With the entire project costing just $39,000 plus the $25,000 price tag for a specialised scanner, the cost savings were immense and jobs were provided for local people.

In a region where property transactions and new construction are booming, the council has eliminated the time consuming process of retrieving bulky paper files dating back more than 40 years whenever members of the public or property professionals want to access records. Staff time preparing LIMs (Land Information Memoranda) and PIMs (Property Information Memoranda) for prospective property purchasers has also been drastically reduced.

All documents relating to a property can be displayed on staff computers using the council’s intranet and this will shortly be extended to enable public access on terminals provided in the reception area. Links from the archive to the council’s GIS (geographic information system) mean all records relating to a particular property can be called up with one mouse click on the appropriate map.

The council now wants to make all its newly-digitized property records available for public access over the Internet, and is again looking for a low-cost, effective solution built on its existing archiving software.

Introduction
With records storage space at a premium, Hurunui District Council began looking for an electronic document archiving system in 2000 and settled on the Windows-based Alchemy platform. Working up to its ultimate goal of digital storage and online access to all property records, the council’s first implementation of Alchemy was an advanced mail and document management and distribution system that delivers correspondence and documents to the desktops of relevant staff.

The experience gained on that project showed it was feasible, using Alchemy, to tackle the electronic archiving of more than 800,000 paper pages of records stored in individual property files up to several millimeters thick. With the software and much of the hardware already in place, and staff experienced in its use, little more than an additional 8 gigabytes of additional hard disc storage was needed.

However, the project was thrown into doubt when quotes received for contract scanning of the records proved to be well beyond the council’s budget and the idea was put aside while consideration was given to a do-it-yourself approach.

The nature of the files meant a large proportion of man-hours required for the project would be spent preparing them for scanning. The file for each property comprised multiple odd-sized pieces of paper ranging from handwritten notes on slips of paper to A1-sized plans. They had to have staples removed and be separated and flattened before scanning. Any small bits of paper were stuck to A4 sheets to make handling easier.

The bulky paper files remain available to those averse to using the electronic system, but staff and the public have been quick to appreciate the speed and efficiency of calling images straight to their desktop, and only printing copies of those they need to take away.

For staff, the transition to the digital system was made easier by their prior experience with the Alchemy-based mail and document management system they have been using for more than a year.

A more detailed data tagging system has been developed for archiving and retrieving new property-related documents generated since the retrospective scanning process ended early this year. The number of documents relating to a single property through its lifetime has increased substantially in the last couple of decades with the introduction of resource consent processes, LIMs and PIMs.

About 400-500 new property files are created each year and they will be retrievable by individual pages thanks to more sophisticated keyword tagging. Council staff preparing land and property reports for prospective purchasers will be able to call up only the pages they need, rather than the entire file related to that title.

The next step is to make all property records available over the Internet and the council is again looking for a low-cost delivery system, starting with assessment and costing of the Alchemy Web Server product.

Objectives

• To eliminate time spent searching for and retrieving property-related files from the archives
• To reduce the demand for on-site archiving storage
• To reduce degradation of the paper files caused by repeated handling
• To build on staff’s existing experience of system development using the Alchemy archiving system
• To provide temporary work for local residents, especially targeting students expected to be seeking work over the university summer vacation period
• To improve service to members of the public and property professionals requiring rapid access to records
• To ensure the system is easy to use for all users, including staff engaged in building and maintaining archives, those using the system to retrieve data, and non-staff users.
• To build a system that can be further developed, at low cost, to be made available over the Internet

Management recognized that continuing to use paper files was unsustainable with pressures on storage space increasing, continuing degradation of the files, and excessive demands on staff time as requests for access to property records and council-generated reports increases.

Councilors were impressed by the project’s low cost and likely high return in terms of improved efficiency. Senior management buy-in was made easier by the successful implementation of the phase one document and mail system, and staff required minimal training because of their familiarity with the basic operation of the Alchemy system.

The Process
Electronic archiving of the council’s property records was a key objective when the council began investigating options for electronic management and archiving of documents in 2000. The Alchemy archiving system, developed in the United States by Information Management Research and distributed and supported in New Zealand by Canon NZ, was implemented in mid-2000.

Key staff realised that given the scale and complexity of the property records project, they should begin with something less ambitious. Financial Controller Grant Elliott and IT Support Manager Jolanda Simon explored the possibilities of producing custom Alchemy applications for electronic management and selective distribution of mail and council documents such as creditors records.

With the initial project up and running by the start of 2001, with a satisfying level of staff acceptance, attention turned back to the property records. Based on their experiences with the earlier project, key staff were confident development of the records project was do-able at relatively low cost, using Alchemy. However, the need to scan more than 800,000 document pages of varying sizes and quality, threatened costs well beyond the resources of the Hurunui District Council.

Quotes from commercial digitizing operators ranged from $150,000 to $250,000 and involved removing records from the council’s Amberley offices for scanning. It was clear that such an expensive project could not be included in the budget that year and idea was shelved for about six months.

Various options were considered and a method of developing barcodes to identify each file was developed using Microsoft Excel. Alchemy software could read each barcode and populate the data fields to enable computer-based searching. By developing links to the council’s GIS (geographic information system) it became possible to call up files by mouse-clicking on the relevant property displayed on desktop screens.

To test the feasibility of doing the scanning in-house, the Financial Controller organized a Friday afternoon test run with council staff acting as guinea pigs. They worked through a pile of files, removing staples and separating and flattening pages before scanning on them an existing A3 scanner. Potential bottlenecks were identified and suggestions made on how the system could be improved.

Rapidly falling costs of hard disc storage enabled eight gigabytes of capacity to be added at minimal expense and a fast PC costing about $1500 was added to speed up the scanning process.

Mr Elliot costed the exercise based on speeds attained during the trial and found huge savings could be achieved compared with the quotes the council had received for contracting out the scanning process. Budget approval was given in June 2001, Grant Elliot scheduled the scanning project for the university summer vacation period, expecting students to fill the seven vacancies for temporary workers. Students were not interested, but the jobs were snapped up by local people looking for work.

A production-line style file retrieval and scanning process began on 1 December 2001 using a new $25,000 A1 scanner for about 35,000 sheets of property and house plans, and an existing A3 scanner bought by the council for the earlier archiving project. Both continue to be well-used assets.

Experiments with OCR (optical character recognition) to convert scanned documents into editable text showed that it put the brakes on the scanning process and could not deliver the quality and accuracy required. Additionally, many pages were simply handwritten notes often barely legible. All pages, whether text or plans, were stored as images with some tweaking done to improve the quality of the worst examples without slowing the project excessively.

Implementation and Evaluation
The scanning process took slightly more than three months, just one week longer than initially estimated. Costs were well within budget and cheaper by a huge order of magnitude than a typical contracting out arrangement.

The new system has been seamlessly integrated into the council’s operations as another step in the evolution of appropriate technologies that enable staff to work more efficiently and provide continuous improvement in the level of customer service. Training in the use of the system has focused on two streams of staff, users and those concerned with maintaining and adding property records.

The key to its successful use lies in the words coded into the barcodes attached to each file, via the Excel program. This development guaranteed a low level of data entry error and few records have been reported untraceable in the archive system because of coding errors.

Costs
Prior to the implementation of this project the Hurunui District Council was already well placed with large electronic storage systems and high speed PCs able to deliver GIS maps and graphics to large, high resolution computer monitors. An A3 scanner bought for the earlier mail and document archiving system was available. The major new hardware cost was $25,000 for a high-speed A1 scanner to digitise plans, and the main items in the remaining $39,000 were labour, 8 gigabytes of hard disc storage, and additional software licences.