Document Management Case Study.
Document Management for Virginia State Police
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Document Logistix gets document management under control for the Virginia State Police Serving the citizens of Virginia for 75 years, the Virginia State Police strive to improve the quality of life for those living, working and visiting in Virginia.
The force’s IT and Planning Division support all operational functions. These range from an automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS), computer-aided dispatch, incident reporting, and stolen vehicle recovery to firearms registry, vehicle inspection, sex offender registry, criminal history and wanted persons - plus a host of other functions covering every aspect of police work.
Staff were being buried under mounds of paper.
Incident document volumes are very high. Last year, more than 213,000 arrest fingerprints were electronically transmitted to the State Police from local agencies. Currently, there are over one and a half million fingerprint records on file, and more than 75,000 unidentified latent prints. In one year, more than half a million crimes were recorded, and the Virginia Criminal Information Network (VCIN) processed over 273 million individual transactions.
"We take around 18,000 fingerprints a month," says Lt Thomas Turner, Assistant Divisional Commander, Criminal Justice Information Services Division. "Previously this was handled by a manual microfiche system. What bugged us was retrieval. With microfiche you have to page through each reel to find what you are looking for. You could spend half a day looking for a particular fingerprint file. Some images could be dark or hard to read. Major issues were quality and speed of retrieval. Essentially, it was a matter of quality control".
Choosing Document Manager
"We looked at several prospective systems and solutions," says Lt. Turner, "and spoke to a number of archiving solution suppliers. We weren’t necessarily going to go with the highest or lowest bidder. We just wanted something that met our needs".
"Key reasons for which we selected Document Manager included the ease with which we could retrieve documents and the product’s indexing and search capabilities. It looked like a quality system. We liked its industrial strength and scalability that would enable us to expand our use of it throughout the force".
"Now, we have instant access to finger print cards", says Lt. Turner. "Before, using microfilm, it could have taken, typically, 20 minutes - often longer. Now, it’s just 20 seconds. We also have a complete audit trail that maintains a full record of all access to the prints. We keep a better record of what comes in and what material is sent to other agencies."
Benefits of Document Manager
- Scalability and flexibility to modify work processes quickly and easily
- Significant savings in ongoing software maintenance cost
- Elimination of paper from the premises, freeing up valuable floor space
- Improved staff efficiency and productivity
- Central management and storage of documents
- Greater security for information storage and compliance with state statutes and law enforcement practices
- Reliable high quality of stored digital images
The Document Manager Solution
The Virginia State Police process a tremendous amount of queries; in excess of 375,000 a year. Each of these requires careful and detailed access of files and dissemination of accurate information to the requesting party. School districts, relying on this information to make hiring decisions, make over 100,000 requests a year.
The use of Document Manager is being extended to other areas as well. For example, in Archiving where in excess of 5,000 a week accident reports, are captured. The Sex Offenders’ Registry agency tracks records on over 13,000 offenders, with, typically, up to 100 document pages for each file.
Document Manager's powerful modules have provided crucial information capture and access throughout the Virginia State Police organization. Data is captured securely and at a level of quality that meets the legally required standards.
Because of the success in implementing it for digitizing fingerprints, Document Manager is now being implemented in other areas of the organization.
The Document Manager solution is a robust, stable and reliable system that supports the department's increasingly complex and demanding applications within tough legislative requirements. With an added advantage of significant savings in on-going maintenance costs, without sacrificing functionality or scalability, Document Manager was the clear choice.
