Shared Community
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Credit union outsources its imaging and document management
New South Wales based credit union Community First didn't just move into electronic documents; it outsourced document management to another company - Recall Information Management.
The Web is helping Community First to grow. Currently the organisation has 50,000 members predominantly in the Sydney area of New South Wales (NSW), but membership is growing across the state and from across the country, which the company puts down to its Web site.
"We had a basement full of documents, the floor space had 800 square metres covered with documents from the floor to the ceiling," said Warren Andrews the general manager of corporate services at Community First. The credit union has the enviable position of being a rapidly growing business, but the cost was to the document management as the company's archives "swelled" and Mr Andrews said the company faced storage costs that could dent their revenues. As well as paper documents, Community First was imaging vouchers to microfilm, but Mr Andrews said that microfilm was becoming expensive to print.
As a result, Community First decided to look for a new document management solution that would alleviate the archives, provide customer facing workers with Web access to documents, and reduce Community First's spending on document management.
NOT SCARED
Recall Information Management in Sydney was selected to provide a full document management service to Community First. From its massive Australian headquarters in Alexandria, Recall provides Community First with document imaging, Web based document access and management, document storage and even document destruction. Christophe Gizardin, the business development manager at Recall said that Community First represented a typical customer for their new outsourced total document lifecycle service.
"Accounts departments, the financial services market, insurance companies and credit unions are not scared about outsourcing," he said.
Once Community First had decided to place its document management in an outsourced pair of hands, it began the process of imaging its archives. Imaging began with the loan files and has since extended to membership application forms and all other membership related documents. Mr Andrews said that corporate forms will also be handed over to Recall for imaging "in time".
Loan files were the first to be scanned and placed online as Mr Andrews wanted to improve the productivity of Community First.
"I wanted to get a more productive way for our staff to get to the documents and Recall gave us the ability to have them Web hosted so that staff can access images of the documents. It also gave us an opportunity to move away from microfilm. It gives us a much better control of the documents.
Up to 130 staff at Community First have access to the documents. Recall uses a Hyland Software document management solution to manage the imaged files. Hyland Software is a company that Recall's parent company Brambles Industries has made a major investment in and is the largest shareholder.
SIGNATURE CHECKS
Since adopting the system, Community First reports that access to documents is faster and easier - the organisation is also able to attach and share knowledge.
"We access the files from a link on our corporate intranet and then keyword access to the documents. We can attach notes to the documents, which adds to the corporate knowledge management and that is something I will get to as a project," Mr Andrews said.
Customers have also felt the improvements, according to Mr Andrews. Signature checking is now down to "less than a minute". Mr Gizardin of Recall added that Community First was a very centralised organisation as every time a branch office needed a record it would have to go through the records manager, now as long as the end user has the correct access rights, they can view the documents.
The Community First records manager has seen her job change and Mr Andrews is confident it is for the better. "It was a hand's on job, managing the movement of paper, now she can move the paper out to Recall, making her job a more attractive one and making her more productive. It really is improving the efficiency of the place," he said. Community First has a long term strategic view of its relationship with Recall and has not completed imaging and placing all the documents online that it plans to.
"I think it has enormous potential that we haven't even tapped yet, with workflow and that will take us towards a paperless office, not in the sense of no paper, but less paper. I see it impacting the entire organisation," Mr Andrews said.
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