WA Shared Services Makes Healthy Work of Unstructured Documents
WA Shared Services Makes Healthy Work of Unstructured Documents
Month Date, 2008: In Western Australia, the move to shared services centres is taking the finance, payroll and human resources functions of government departments and centralising their document management needs. However with the Auditor-General at their backs, the health arm of the shared initiative - the Health Corporate Network, has recently taken a change of direction in a bid to streamline processes on the 6000 transactions it’s already receiving daily.
A shared services paradigm
After estimating corporate services cost taxpayers approximately $315 million annually, the Government of Western Australia moved to reform the delivery of ‘back office’ corporate services in the public sector through the Shared Corporate Services Project. By developing three shared services centres, the goal was to transfer financial and human resource transactional functions to those centres from individual agencies across the state.
The business case was endorsed in late 2003, but in 2007 the project is still considered a ‘work in progress’ and has faced its fair share of challenges during the course of its implementation. A recent performance report from the Auditor General for WA found the implementation to be two years behind schedule, with only two of the three components of the integrated corporate services system actually established.
The WA Government’s original ambition was to implement three shares services centres across the state: One for the education portfolio, another known as the Office of Shared Services, servicing around 90 general agencies and a health specific centre, known as the Health Corporate Network (HCN.)
Centralising health processing
For the health departments in WA, centralising all processing for finance, HR and supply into the HCN become the function of 600 people in the one building. According to Simon Watts, project manager for HCN systems project, making that function work required an effective means to processing the inbound documents they received. “These documents are in the order of around 6000 transactions a day and include a combination of paper, email and fax,” he says.
Finding an appropriate solution at the right price hasn’t been easy for the HCN. Already one attempt at an enterprise content management system (ECM) implementation has failed due to what the progress report labelled as weaknesses in project management, complex software development requirements and a shortage of skills within agencies.
However HCN has recently announced a new direction; they have scraped their original plans for an enterprise, document and records management (EDRMs) solution and have instead taken up shop with an Objective solution to delivery business process management and EDRMs to the organisation. Meanwhile Sigma Data Solutions will continue to provide the Ascent Capture and Indicius solutions to capture, automate, sort and separate all incoming emails, faxes and incoming mail coming through to the office.
Endless document types
The health system in WA employs 32,000 people who all continuously produce a large amount of documentation, which will make steady daily work for both Sigma and Objective. In general with its 650 staff, HCN is dealing with 16,000 documents a day including large complex unstructured mail, structured forms, faxes and emails. HCN not only needed the management mechanisms, but also the imaging, ICR and OCR capabilities to speed ups processes and performance and deal with the approximate 6000 images a day from faxes alone.
“The types of documents we receive are both unstructured and structured, things like leave applications, which might be computer printed or hand completed, as well as invoices, general correspondence, letters and emails,” says Watts.
“We needed a solution to be able to properly capture and distribute to various teams within the organisation,” continues Watts. “So it’s Sigma supplying the Kofax Ascent capture, to provide the means for scanning the documents and selectively processing these based on the data we extract from them, we then release these documents as images into an the EDRMs supplied by Objective.”
Putting the management in EDRMS
Objective was selected to automate the shared services for WA Health under the WA Government’s preferred supplier panel for Electronic Document Management systems. In the five year contract worth a minimum of $2 million, Objective will replace existing and disparate systems with a centralised solution for workflow, document and records management.
As a shared services provider, the need for strength in its automated systems is vital for the success of the HCN. The results will ultimately run through to HCN’s primary customers, the WA health system – also filtering through to not just the delivery but also the quality and consistency of health services across the state.
Rolling it out
The rollout has started with payroll, a process intensive function given the approximately 32,000 people employed in the WA health system. In preparation for the incoming EDRMs, HCN are in the process of scanning a large sum of documents to be stored on their network drive with the appropriate metadata before migrating them to the EDRMs. “The reason we need to do this is because we have 500,000 payroll documents,” says Watts. “The idea of scanning them right now, even before the EDRMS, is to make it immediately searchable to support the database and create an image file.”
Both hardware and software is hard at work at HCN as the centre is required to have the accounts payable fully functioning by August 2007. On top of this, they’re planning to have the HR function in place by the beginning of November. “The intention was to be completed by March 2007, including the EDRMs,” says Watts. “But this could all be a shining light; we would like to think we would be considered a good showcase in non-medical records management.”
Even though the project is far from completed, Watts believes the scanning of some invoices has already dramatically improved transparency in the health system. “From a reporting process, being able to look at the workload of individual staff, process rate and also find further information required about an invoice, will all be able to be tracked,” he says. “This will occur within the EDRMs, but Ascent forms a critical stage to this process and we get a good success rate on the scanning of invoices.”
All up the Ascent Capture solution from Kofax alongside their Indicius software is dealing with a heavy workload of over 150 different types of forms. Supplier and integrator Sigma Data Solutions says the combined package of Indicius and Ascent provides a powerful package able to cope with and identify the different form types, resize documents and intelligently separate faxes which can often contain more than just the one page.
By using Indicius, Stephen Fox, business consultant at Sigma says with its key smarts it will provide HCN with clever automated abilities to be able to identify form types individually and automate, classify, sort and separate paper and electronic forms. “Going through 150 different form types can be a time consuming process,” he says. “But Indicius has a very powerful recognition engine; it using three different engines then compares all three and offers the best results.”
On the hardware front, HCN is using two Kodak i280 scanners able to handle 7000 documents a day. “Most of the documents come in the form of faxes, so these machines are picking up an estimated 6000 images a day from faxes,” says Fox.
A significant challenge in making the project work is the 20 different fax numbers as well as the 20 different email accounts all receiving information from different health department, in need of capture. “What we do is poll these every hour, check what’s in there and bring it through the right department,” says Fox. “We also initially capture the title and date and basic fields.”
But given the nature of the organisation, Watts admits there are still plenty of challenges ahead. For one, the sheer volume of constant daily correspondence filtering through in all shapes and sizes is something the organisation needs to get on top of. The content might be hand-written, typed, faxed, emailed or a combination of both structured and unstructured data and much of the success of the overall project looks set to rest on the scan and recognition abilities of the system they choose.
Given the initial setbacks, HCN accepts there are still plenty of hurdles to conquer before they can operate as a prominent shared services centre. With some challenges now left in their wake and the WA Auditor-General demanding these shared service centres get on top of their objectives, Watts is hoping for a quick win on having the accounts payable in operation as well as all invoices scanned stored and ready to be worked with by August. “That’s extremely critical and would be a great demonstration of the complete system,” he says,