Speed Times Two

Apr 2008 , Sponsored by OnBase - Hyland Software, Inc.

The speed of work is rapidly increasing in Horry (pronounced OH-ree) County, S.C. The quickly growing county has been dealing with a triple challenge in recent years. An expanding population means more paperwork for county staffers. It also means less space for storing that paper. And sharing documents among departments was painfully slow at times.

That's all changing as the county adopts ECM software, OnBase, by Hyland Software. Though still being deployed, OnBase already is dramatically improving county processes. Paper documents that formerly were handled manually are now routed electronically after being scanned into the system, and less storage space is required for paper documents.

Now documents of all kinds are easier to find. Before, with approximately 57 departments in offices scattered throughout 1,200 square miles, it could take two to three days via interoffice mail for an employee to receive a requested document from another department. Now the employee can quickly and easily find that same document - within minutes - from his or her own desktop.

Horry County is so impressed with the initial results that it plans to deploy OnBase in all of its departments over three years.

A key factor in the OnBase deployment is its integration with the county's award-winning GIS. By combining OnBase with ESRI GIS, Horry County has amplified the benefits that come with better ECM - the ability to capture, store, manage and distribute all types of documents across an enterprise and beyond.

Good ECM cuts costs, increases efficiency and helps satisfy document retention requirements - something that's specially important for government. And working from maps makes it fast and easy for Horry County employees - and citizens - to find all kinds of documents.

For its integration of ECM and GIS, Horry County won a 2008 Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award, presented by AIIM, The Enterprise Content Management Association.

GIS Drives All
At the heart of Horry County's new system is the GIS foundation it laid down earlier this decade. Employees are used to going to the map to get the documents they need. Everything is driven from the GIS. "It's the key that ties all of the applications and all of the departments together," said Tim Oliver, assistant director of IT/GIS for the county.

By clicking on an Internet-based map - on a parcel, for example - an employee can bring up all documents associated with the location, including permits, plans, deeds, applications and much more. Or an employee can start in a document. Withan address or parcel number, he or she can be taken from that document to the map, where more information is found. With OnBase connected to GIS, documents can be retrieved and viewed very quickly, and they can be easily shared across departments.

Putting ECM and GIS together is a basic strategy the county is using to maximize data access for all. "In Horry County, all of the applications that we've deployed have to be GIS-centric, which means they have to be able to read from our GIS databases," said Oliver. "So we wanted to make sure we found a document management system where there wasn't some middleware that had to exist."

The county found what it was looking for with OnBase.

The county started with a pilot project in the Stormwater and Public Works departments, then put OnBase in at the Court Case Management and Magistrates department. Next are Parks and Recreation, Maintenance, Fleet Maintenance, Planning and Zoning, Assessor, Code Enforcement and Engineering.

The initial phases have gone well, and cost savings are already adding up. In the first year and a half, the county estimates it saved around $300,000 through better use of time and not needing to expand storage space to accommodate more paper.