Document Management & Business Process Automation

About Company

Client is the leading provider of integrated technology solutions, enterprise management solutions and multi-disciplinary professional services to municipalities, provincial government, public and private entities, and has been for over 40 years.

Client has taken the lead in supplying local government with enterprise management solutions, while providing revenue management and meter reading solutions to local government and the utility industry.
The client extends its services to many local government institutions, public utilities and the private sector in the region, with major centers in South Africa, Namibia and Lesotho.

Industry

Public Service (For the citizens of the small and big towns)

Location

South Africa

Problem statement

• Citizen services resolution (Ex. Water, Drainage, Electricity …issues) workflow was not in place.
• Paper base operations were time consuming, costly and impact the citizens’ service quality.
• Growth of documents was high. Storage becomes costly.
• Retrieval of document at real time was painful.
• Lots of possibilities of human errors during the paper management.
• Maintaining the document as per the government law was painful.
• Government law was there to implement the Electronic document management system.
• Mere conversion of papers to digital documents was not enough. Because it was just dumping on computer hard drive.
• Maintaining of versions of document was a big pain.
• Real time search of document and its information was painful.
• Duplication, misplacing, damaging of papers were there.

Challenges

• Solution should suffice the need of all sizes of municipality & its document operations.
• Licensing cost needed to be kept at its lowest, so that smallest municipality can afford the software.
• All possible EDMS features needed to be built upon technology solution.
• Major DMS features: Check-in/Check Out, version control, access control, File system as per government law, Folder structure, Scanning, Search, Workflows, Notifications…etc. were needed.
• Scalable architecture was needed to enable adaptability of all municipalities.
• To limit the size of the database by RBS (remote BLOB).

Goal

• To digitally enable the manual maintenance of papers and reduce the time consumed, reduce human errors during the paper management.
• Streamline the document management and its storage.
• Create search engines that enable easy document retrieval with document versioning.
• Develop an electronic document management system that is compliant of government laws and statutory.
• Enable digital transformation and digital functioning of government document management practises.

Scope of work

• Document Management for departments
• Contracts Management
• Event Management
• Tenders Management
• Help Desk
• Meeting Minutes
• Projects Management
• Internal Audit & Risk Management
• Reports

Solution

• EDMS with storage, search, access, collaborate, share, control, track, monitor, Scanning, Archiving.
• EDMS was developed specifically for the South African municipal landscape, a holistic, integrated and efficient system for storage, search, access, collaboration, control, track, scanning, archiving, record-keeping, filing, retrieving, routing documents with the utmost security within general administration.
• It allows users to effectively manage electronic and hard copy documents efficiently and timeously with customer care management.
• EDMS was aligned with the latest national archive requirements to achieve sustainable improvement in document management.
• It was designed utilizing the latest web-based technology, ensuring it has an intuitive, easy-to-use web interface.
• Service request resolution workflow with different stages, commenting, approval.
• Form based authentication.
• Data security and privacy.
• Store document out of database: RBS (Remote BLOB storage)

Features

• Single/Multiple document upload.
• Drag & Drop document.
• Sync doc to Local computer drive.
• Document Versioning.
• Check in / Check Out.
• Add/Edit Document Property (Meta Data).
• MS Office Integration.
• Document Workflows
• Document Archival
• Document Disposal
• Inform Sender Via Email
• Receive Comments (Documents)
• Users can view documents, approve them if necessary, using an electronic signature, or decline them and provide comments.

Resolution Workflow Module

• Resolution Approval
• Resolution Archival

Complaint Workflow Module

• Manage Complaints
• Completion Acknowledgement Mail

Add On Features Module

• Calendar
• Contacts
• Announcements
• Links
• Email
• SMS
• Tasks
• User Authentication, Authorisation through the Windows Active Directory and SharePoint.
• Available anytime, anywhere and is synced among all municipal departments.

Tasks

• Identification of Document Management System needs: Document Categorisation, Document meta data, Size, Volume, Velocity, Compliance, Search, Security, Privacy.
• Designing of workflow for better resolution of citizens complains.
• Architecture design
• Technology evaluation and feasibility study
• Building electronic document management solution.