CASE STUDY: OKLAHOMA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
OVERVIEW
Oklahoma has 83,500 farms and ranches and is one of the great agricultural states of the Great Plains. About 73 percent of the state's 45 million acres of land is used for farming and ranching.
The Plant Industry and Consumer Services division of the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry consists of approximately 25 employees in the office and 25 employees in the field. The division's primary responsibility is consumer protection, and their goal is to provide consumers and the Oklahoma agricultural and urban communities with the highest level of service possible, including ensuring and enforcing quality standards for agricultural products; regulating pesticide use; and providing information and technical assistance.
CHALLENGE
The Plant Industry and Consumer Services division at the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture deals with a lot of paperwork - licenses, forms, checks, etc. - and most of it contains handwritten information. They continually have to reference documents and oftentimes provide copies for companies, consumers and attorneys. Some records are stored onsite for three years, and then stored offsite in the state's records office for several additional years. Some state statutes require the Department of Agriculture to keep records on file permanently.
The Department of Agriculture had a difficult time tying together different documentation from the same company. For example, some companies hold up to seven different types of licenses - pesticides, co-op, etc. They remit payment for each license separately, and the different licenses were scattered throughout numerous file cabinets and storage boxes.
The division is also responsible for investigating complaints, which are typically pesticide complaints made by consumers. Each complaint file could contain several hundred pieces of paper that needed to be easily accessible. The documentation may include the original complaint, inspector's report, laboratory reports, photographs, and much more. For complaints that end up in court, attorneys may request all supporting documentation. Upon request, the Department of Agriculture was spending an estimated $400 to $500 on each boxful of copies.
When the Department of Agriculture needed to locate a document, they would have to manually search through hundreds of storage boxes and file cabinets in the basement file room. On average, it would take one or two people half a day to physically move, stack and restack boxes, and dig through them in order to find the needed documentation.
According to Sancho Dickinson, director of the Plant Industry and Consumer Services division, two or three people could search for "days and days" to find a document and "sometimes we never found the document we were looking for."
SOLUTION
Dickinson says an advanced imaging solution was needed because "we had run out of file cabinets and places to store file cabinets, and we had run out of boxes and places to store boxes."
The solution was designed and implemented by Business Imaging Systems, Inc. (BIS), an Oklahoma-based document and content management VAR. The solution has been rolled out in two phases - with the primary content management system implemented during the first phase, followed by distributed scanning in the second phase. As part of this solution, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry is using the following products:
- Seven Scanners - One Canon DR-3080C and Six Canon DR-2080C Scanners
- EMC Documentum ApplicationXtender
- Kofax Ascent Capture
- BIS MasterScan
- BIS MasterScan Media Distribution
- Kelly Registration Systems Interface
- Professional Services Provided by BIS
The Department of Agriculture began scanning documents on July 1, 2004, and all documents from that date forward have been imaged. The images and data are captured on the Canon scanners using Ascent Capture and sent into ApplicationXtender, where they are indexed and archived for easy processing and future retrieval in real time. Certain licenses contain barcodes that perform auto-populating and auto-indexing functions when scanned.
The system flags duplicative records and groups together disparate records related to the same company, complaint, etc. The completion of the relational database in the final phase will ultimately enable companies to renew all (up to seven total) licenses at the same time, using one form or group of forms, and allowing them to remit one payment in lieu of individual payments for each renewed license.
Inspectors in the field use ViewSonic tablet PCs and digital cameras to input information and photographs directly into the system, thereby keeping all information and supporting documentation organized in the all-inclusive document management solution.
In lieu of copying boxes full of paperwork for attorneys and others external parties, the Department of Agriculture now uses MasterScan Media Distribution to burn self-executable CDs containing the specific documents requested.
The new system is also interfaced with Kelly Registration Systems, a company that specializes in converting disparate data (i.e., fertilizer labels) from multiple states and putting it into their web-based application, enabling regulated businesses to complete a variety of compliance activities with one or more states simultaneously. Images of specific labels and other documents are uploaded and available for viewing through the Kelly application.
RESULTS
The Oklahoma Department of Agriculture is achieving a variety of benefits from the new system. The primary benefits include:
- Paper elimination
- Disaster recovery readiness
- Automated business processes
- Internet application accessibility (Kelly)
- Improved customer service
Because the Department of Agriculture is proud of their role in helping Oklahoma farmers and ranchers; feed, seed and fertilizer producers; and consumers, much of the driving force behind the new system was their desire to make it easier for companies to work with them by simplifying their processes, while cutting out some of the bureaucracy. In making it easier for businesses and consumers to work with them, they have achieved the added benefit of making it easier on their own personnel as well.
Customer service has improved dramatically because they can call up documents in real time. According to Dickinson, "any time you can save even a few minutes of an employee's time, you're helping to increase the bottom line." Furthermore, because companies are having an easier time working with the Department of Agriculture, they are also saving substantial amounts of time. Dickinson claims the new system is saving the entire industry money, and that's exactly what he hoped to accomplish.
Personnel can easily retrieve information, and as a result, they have significantly reduced the amount of time it takes to look for information - from upwards of 48 hours down to less than 60 seconds in most cases. They have also been able to reduce staff, although they haven't voluntarily downsized; instead, since the implementation, two people have left the agency and those positions were not refilled.
Using a reporting interface designed and developed by BIS, the Department of Agriculture is able to quickly and easily call up information needed for the reports they are required to file with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Now, instead of making hard copies of paperwork requested by external parties, they use MasterScan Media Distribution to burn self-executable CDs containing the documents, for easy printing at the requestor's location. Dickinson estimates that this saves, on average, $400 to $500 per boxful of copies.
