Optical Image Technology Benefits Arun District Council

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To manage the mammoth amount of paperwork generated by its Revenues and Benefits Department, Arun District Council, the largest district Authority within West Sussex sought the assistance of Optical Image Technology UK (OITUK). All Revenues & Benefits staff now uses OIT’s DocFinity® Electronic Document Management (EDM) system for managing both electronic and paper-based documents and for Workflow.

Arun District Council covers an area of 22,811 hectares (85 square miles) and is situated either side of the River Arun. Its population of 147,000 is contained in the main towns of Littlehampton, Bognor Regis and Arundel and a number of small villages.

The district has a high population of elderly within the area and a third of all properties attract single resident discount. There is also a high level of movement within the district with 24,500 households either moving into, out of, or within the district. There are high levels of affluence within the area, with over 2,500 second homes. Conversely, there are some areas of high deprivation attracting high levels of benefit take up and collection problems.

Although the council has a Customer Information Point and “One-Stop Shop” facility at Bognor Regis Town Hall, Arun District Council’s main service for Revenues and Benefits, including Sundry Debts is run from the Civic Centre in Littlehampton. The department issues 65,500 Council Tax bills, 4,000 Business Rate bills and has a benefits caseload of 10,000.

Arun’s scanning team scans and indexes all Revenues and Benefits documents into the OIT system. All indexing criteria are verified using information downloaded from Arun’s LoGoS Revenues & Benefits system. This prevents indexing errors and invalid data being entered to categorise and file the electronic documents. The extensive use of Barcodes printed on system-generated forms has dramatically speeded up the indexing process, with a high level of accuracy.

Two-way integration with LoGoS system has been developed to enable users to view document images via the LoGoS screens This saves the users time, as there is no need to manually input the document attributes in order to look up the records held on the EDM system.

Furthermore, when a Council Tax or Benefit Review Form is indexed into the OIT system, the data is validated and required index keys are exported to a text file, which is then used to automatically update the LoGoS system to confirm the Review Form has been returned.

Lotus WordPro templates have been created and used within OIT’s DocFinity Workflow. The OIT system sends related property and tenant information into the WordPro template, saving users considerable time, as there is no need to manually type in the contact details.

Additional features newly developed at Arun, include a 'Grab' feature which links all documents for a case in workflow and allows them all to be worked on at once.

Future developments proposed include the ability to Capture electronic data directly from the Department of Social Services and process it automatically in the OIT System, and exploration of OCR. There are also proposals to roll out view-only access to the OIT system for staff at the customer service point in Bognor Regis.

Arun District Council’s Head of Revenues & Benefits, Paul Askew sees the rolling out of the document management system to other departments as an important part of its IEG document. “The merits of the system within Revenues and Benefits have been noted elsewhere in the council and work will be carried out this year to look at using EDM within other departments.”

Tina McKeown Senior Revenues & Benefits Manager adds, “OIT’s EDM system has encouraged effective working arrangements and vastly improved accuracy on performance management, as well as the reduction of filing and storing years of paperwork.”