Victoria’s Western Water: compliant and paperless

May/June Edition, 2007: As part of a compliance and knowledge management initiative, Victoria’s Western Water has recently overhauled its document management system and converted over one million documents to digital format. It faced an interesting challenge in removing its paper archives. While VERS permits the destruction of paper archives when using a “Specification 2” certified EDMS, Western Water needed to demonstrate its recovery and back up processes met the Public Records Office of Victoria (PROV) standards.

Western Water is one of fifteen non-metropolitan water and sewerage authorities in Victoria and is fully owned by the Victorian Government. The company provides water and waste-water services to an area of approximately 3,000 square kilometres, extending from Lancefield in the north to Melton and Rockbank in the south, Myrniong in the west and Bulla in the east.

To maintain compliance with industry regulators such as the Department of Sustainability and Environment, the Essential Services Commission and the Environment Protection Authority, Western Water is obligated to manage electronic document capture and storage systems for new and archived records.

Its document management system in 2005 fell short of Western Water’s requirements. Greg Brown, Acting Business Innovation Manager, said the company decided on a wholesale upgrade of its EDMS and selected Avand’s Data Works as the foundations for its knowledge management and information sharing strategy. The goal was to achieve a complete transition to digital within three years.

DataWorks was initially put to use in back-scanning 50 per cent – more than one million documents – of Western Water’s archives, capturing information related to billings, activities and correspondence on property records.

In specifying the project, Robyn Collins, Project Manager for Western Water says, “We decided not to over-engineer our preparation for, and implementation of, the new system, mainly because we already had a document management product in place so our users knew more or less what to expect.

What they did want was for their 70 staff to be productive in minimal time, both at head office and at its various depots. “Our strategy was to push it out as quickly as possible to every corner of the organisation,” says Collins.

As a knowledge management project, Brown says, “The implementation of DataWorks was largely to centralise and ensure a central repository of data could be accessed without users having to know the ins and outs of documents. We found it was a case of centralising as much as we could and providing as many links into that data by key words.”

The battle to de-institutionalise paper

A major benefit of the system identified by Brown was the removal of paper. From a storage perspective, it has saved Western Water about 150 shelf metres or two storage rooms. But it hasn’t been easy to remove paper, particularly since paper has been institutionalised by best practice and ingrained in work culture.

“It’s not just the space but also the time saved by removing the inclination of some staff to look for paper documents when an electronic record is so easily available. It comes back to the culture of teaching people how to use the new system to the full, and once you’ve done that, the real benefits kick in.”

Changing work practices and how staff use the system has also presented the biggest challenge, says Brown.

“I know it’s not unique to us, but culture change is not something that happens quickly,” he said. “Where before staff could simply file a paper document away for future retrieval, they now have to actively capture their correspondence and changes to a document. It’s a subtle change in responsibility but makes a big difference to the way people work.

We’re still working with people to ensure they understand the importance of saving and scanning information to DataWorks. Overall, the take up has been successful and we’re finding people are storing and finding documents to the degree we would have hoped. We’ve certainly saved time chasing paper files and people have a one-stop shop when it comes to retrieving information from their computers – they know it’s in there and there’s no risk of it being lost.”

Brown says training has included administrator training, setting up new users and workshops on how to save and retrieve documents. Part of the induction program now includes training on the knowledge management system.

Wester Water’s system administrator has driven the change and has coordinated numerous training, information and general overview sessions for staff. Training has been segmented according to departmental needs. As such the records team training has been more intensive than for the customer service team but the process is ongoing and communication is maintained via regular reminders, emails and team meetings.

Another challenge was dealing with the Public Records Office Victoria (PROV). Brown says PROV is progressive in terms of technology, but there was an assumption that as a government organisation it needed to retain paper for recovery. So while DataWorks is certified against Specification 2 of the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS), Western Water had to demonstrate to PROV its backup and recovery processes were sufficient to destroy paper archives of scanned documents.

Brown says, “We were able to demonstrate that DataWorks not only captures every element of a paper document accurately and to spec, but also – because of our backup and disaster recovery procedures – gives us a failsafe recovery option for 100 per cent of all captured documents, something that is not possible to achieve with paper documents.”

Delivering a complete picture

As a knowledge management project, it is critical that Western Water’s Fujitsu based ERP and in-house developed CRM systems are integrated with Data Works. Western Water wants its core systems to provide a seamless workflow for staff, and a general repository for all electronic information regardless of the application used to access it.

“We also wanted the system to be flexible, quick to deploy, easy to manage, and to integrate with our core ERP and CRM systems to deliver company-wide benefits while appearing seamless to the end-user,” says Brown.

With the implementation of DataWorks now complete, Brown says, “It gives us the flexibility to share any type of document irrespective of file format, so there’s no restriction on what can be stored. For example, we’re currently in the testing stages of a project that allows us to send information – drawings and plans – to field workers doing maintenance work on site.”

The integration project is expected to be complete by 2008 and Brown says Western Water is still working closely with Avand and its other software suppliers to link the various systems together into a cohesive whole that our staff can use productively.

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