The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) has selected Objective ECM 8 as the winning tender for its next generation enterprise content management (ECM) platform. 

Objective ECM 8 will manage the large amounts of scientific and product information that all APVMA staff rely on to make sound regulatory decisions. These decisions impact the registration and on-going management of over 10,200 pesticides and veterinary medicines that are approved to enter the Australian marketplace.  

Tony Walls, CEO, Objective Corporation said, “Objective has a proven ability to deliver strategic solutions that meet the requirements of Australian public sector organisations. We are pleased that after an extensive process, the APVMA selected Objective ECM 8 to consolidate their information and manage their processes that support their regulatory decision making.”

The APVMA was seeking a solution to manage existing digital documents stored in separate repositories and existing physical records. The organisation wishes to move progressively toward the minimisation of paper records and documents in favour of fully managed electronic documents. The APVMA also wants a greater capacity to share information and to support collaboration, both internally and externally, through electronic channels.

According to tender documents, “The solution should have strong digital and physical records management and hybrid records management functionality to manage both digital and non-digital records elements, and strong Workflow or business process functionality.

The APVMA has approximately 172,000 paper records. Of these about 110,000 are located offsite, either with our offsite storage provider, or with the National Archives of Australia.

The current records management system is RecFind, which manages all administrative records and scientific data in paper from creation, and product related files when they are archived to offsite storage. Product related files are tracked via an internal system called iEARS.

The complex IT environment at APVMA includes in excess of 94 separate repositories, and multiple in-house systems built on various platforms including Ingres RDBMS, SQL Server and Access db. The current environment also has a number of disparate record repositories, such as shared directories and specialised third party business systems.

The APVMA is in the process of developing and implementing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment, consequently, the APVMA’s IT environment is in transition.