If Terry Seiver, Trim Administrator at Hunter Water had one wish for document management, it would be to have a platform thatwould facilitate better integration with other corporate systems.

“I would also like the solution to be more intuitive for users who aren’t trained in records management.”

“We are looking forward to implementing SharePoint integration with TRIM which will facilitate improved records capture while offering seamless Office integration and collaboration amongst staff,” he said.

The Hunter Water Corporation is a State-owned Corporation providing water and wastewater services for over half a million people in NSW’s lower Hunter region. An organisation wide roll-out of TRIM at the state-owned corporation was completed in 2006. There are currently around 670 users on V6.1, including 400 office workers, 200 field staff and a number of contractors.

The Standard Operating Environment is currently Windows XP, Office 2003 and Exchange 2003.

Some of the main priorities for the TRIM rollout included improved governance, better records management, improved business efficiency, regulatory compliance and better risk management.

At present all final documents are saved into TRIM and/or scanned to a TRIM container. Hunter Water has not yet commenced incoming mail scanning, although this expected within a 2 year time frame.

All staff are individually responsible for scanning their records into TRIM, and internal collaboration is assisted in TRIM by people being able to email TRIM references to each other, with multiple people able to view a document at the same time. All approvals are managed through TRIM. This includes financial, functional and project approvals.

Siever said "We are at the planning stage for TRIM to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint, which will be used as our Intranet platform. We integrate TRIM with our SCADA system and are looking to integrate with our ERP system which is currently Ellipse.”

"Emails are saved into the relevant TRIM containers but titling is an issue. A Document Naming Convention has been put in place, but again, since it’s up to each staff member, the quality of titling varies greatly,” said Seiver.

Hunter Water still maintains its repository of plans and photographs in hard copy form, around 30,000 items to be scanned. It has begun to assay the task of digitally archiving/backscanning old photographs in the future once they have been indexed.

TRIM was chosen by Hunter Water owing to its compliance with requirements of the NSW State Records Act (1998).

"Metadata is critical to a successful document management system, and audit mechanisms are essential. While we typically take an open access approach to information, the ability to have security access controls is important so confidentiality of information can be protected when necessary,” said Seiver.

One of the main challenges of implementing an EDRMS is always user uptake. “Staff were accustomed to using legacy processes which include paper-based files and network drives, so getting them to adopt the new system was, and still is, a challenge,” said Seiver.

“Pockets of staff still like to avoid using TRIM. Building TRIM into business processes and training in small groups helps to break down barriers.”
"We have also had a lot of Freedom of Information applications and “order for papers” from NSW Parliament, and this demonstrates the importance of good recordkeeping in TRIM."