.: Case Studies :.

Tasman District Council (TDC)

Tasman District is a large area - it covers 9,786 square kilometres and is bounded to the west by the Matiri Ranges, Tasman Mountains and the Tasman Sea. To the north Tasman and Golden Bays form its seaward edge, and the eastern boundary reaches the Spencer Mountains and the St Arnaud and Richmond Ranges. Tasman is home to three national parks. Abel Tasman (NZ's smallest at 22,541 hectares), Nelson Lakes (101,753 hectares) and Kahurangi (452,000 hectares).

The latest statistical information shows Tasman has a resident population of 44,000, being 1.1 percent of the country's total population.

Business Objective

TDC identified a need to implement an image management system able to safely store, easily retrieve, print and share the images and associated documents relating to plans, specifications and consents for properties and infrastructure found within the Tasman District. The scanning of these images (approx 70,000) to a TIFF format was performed by Datamail.

Tasman District Council had an existing Intranet that was viewable by its entire staff; this includes those at outlying Service Centres and working from home. In addition it is also available to Council's Consultants and Contractors. It was a requirement that the Intranet was the method used to view the plans and documents held by this File Management project.

File management of these plans and documents covers the following processes:
• Bulk import and storage of plans and associated metadata
• Editing/creating additional metadata
• Manual addition of plans and documents
• Updating of existing plans and documents
• Locate and view plans or documents using text search
• Locate and view plans or documents using GIS and NCS system
• Locate and view plans or documents using the Confirm system

After an evaluation of several systems, TDC chose Silent One Ltd to implement the SilentOne Electronic Document Management system to manage the documents and images.

Tasman District Council Technical Environment

TDC has an extensive network across 1 main site, with remote offices and Contractors connecting to the network via a Citrix Metaframe XP interface. The system will be accessed on the Intranet via Internet Explorer. TDC network environment is Windows 2000 with Active Directory.

Implementation

The installation of SilentOne at TDC was a straightforward one - but what makes this site interesting is the bulk loading of 70,000 images files and their associated metadata.
Silent One Ltd wrote a customised script that imported the scanned image files from a directory in the file system, and the associated metadata for that image from a database table. Tasman District Council is also able to modify the script for future image imports.

A classification workshop was held to define the filing structure for the two sorts of documents that TDC wanted to manage - Property Images and Engineering Images. Each image has a valuation number that can be used as a unique search identifier in the system.

Each item in the SilentOne library can be referenced via a unique hyperlink (URL). These hyperlinks can be embedded on TDC's intranet page, and a query to show images for a particular property can be generated dynamically out of many of the Council's browser-based systems. These include GIS, NCS the councils Rating and consent system, and the newly implemented Confirm Asset management system.

Quotes

Colin Moffat (Asset Management System Implementation Manager, TDC)

"We identified early on in the implementation of the Asset Management System that all users needed simple and speedy access to the As-built plans, Engineering plans and Property consents. Many of these were only available on microfiche or microfilm which was kept in one central location; they were deteriorating in quality, time consuming to find and view, and identified as a risk in terms of disaster recovery."
"We now have immediate access for all staff regardless of location, linked dynamically from within our major systems and easy to maintain. Access being via the browser has made the roll out and training very simple."

Jeremy Scrivener (Implementation Consultant, Silent One Ltd)

"The Tasman District Council implementation highlights the ease of integrating SilentOne with other web-based applications. Queries may be 'passed' to SilentOne from another application or a link to a specific item(s) may be embedded in the web-browser interface of that application. The end-user simply clicks on a link to access the document out of the EDMS, SilentOne checks that the user has the required access level for the item, and then serves up the current version of the document to the user."

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