Liverpool declares war on paper to free up buildings
by Will Hadfield
Tuesday 30 May 2006

Liverpool City Council is to extend its document management system to social workers in an effort to cut costs by streamlining administration and freeing up buildings used to store paper records.

Social workers and the council’s legal and procurement officers will begin using the document management system on 1 September.

If a three-month evaluation shows that it has cut costs and improved efficiency, the system will be rolled out to all 450 social workers.

The council plans to increase the number of people using the electronic document management system from software supplier Comino, until every council officer handling paperwork – about 3,000 people – is using the application.

The system is being deployed through the council’s joint venture with BT, called Liverpool Direct. David McElhinney, chief executive of Liverpool Direct and board director of the council, said, “This has been 18 months in the planning.”

Liverpool Direct has already cut costs by deploying the system across the council’s revenue and benefits department.

By ridding the department of paper records, the council was able to sell its former records facility for £4.5m, and the £700,000 a year cost of running the facility has been saved.

In addition, the time taken to process benefits queries has fallen from 136 days to 14 days over the past three years, and the council aims to get it down to seven days this year.

Source: ComputerWeekly.com (http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2006/05/30/216179/Liverpool%20declares%20war%20on%20paper%20to%20fre e%20up%20buildings.htm)

Mersey mission saves council from backlogs

James Brown reports on the IT that brought efficiency to Liverpool’s benefits system

James Brown, Computing, 01 Jun 2006

Liverpool Direct, the company established to improve public services for Liverpool City Council, has used IT systems to clear a backlog of 50,000 cases in its revenues and benefits service.

Jointly owned by the council and BT, Liverpool Direct has installed a document scanning and storage system to manage 200,000 council tax accounts and 78,000 benefit cases.

David McElhinney, Liverpool Direct’s chief executive, says that before the organisation started work in 2001, the city council revenue and benefits service was one of the poorest performers in the country and had one of the highest tax rates.

‘It was essential to the cash flow of the city council that revenues and benefits be managed effectively. At the time, they weren’t,’ said McElhinney.

‘People would be queueing up for two or three hours just to pay their council tax.’

Inefficiencies were such that benefit determinations were running at 143 days.

Part of the reason for the delay was that all Liverpool’s revenues and benefits records were stored on paper, in files that took up three full floors of a large city centre office, says McElhinney.

‘Even with big changes to infrastructure we couldn’t affect the level of delay very much, and we realised we needed an IT system with document imaging and a workflow that would deal with case management,’ he said.

A single central mail room was created to feed documents to a scanning room, where the paper was copied into Liverpool Direct’s computer system.

At peak level, the Kodak scanners were handling up to five million documents a year, says Martin Jungnitz, Liverpool Direct’s development manager.

‘As we have got more on top of dealing with these documents, that has gone down to about 3.5 million,’ he said.

The scanned documents feed into Liverpool Direct’s case management system, where they are sorted using barcodes printed on the forms. This has completely eliminated the time taken up in searching for paper files.

‘The case backlog is now completely cleared, and waiting times for processing benefits applications are down to 33 days, which has taken Liverpool from the bottom quarter of councils to the top for revenues and benefits work. We aim to reduce that processing time next year to just 26 days,’ said McElhinney.

‘Liverpool Direct now plans to take the lessons learned from its revenues and benefits project to areas where the council deals with high volumes of paper.

‘Social care in Liverpool has enormous problems with file management, integrity of paper and integrity of information, as do council procurement and legal services,’ said McElhinney.

‘We can go to those departments and take the IT systems and workflow we have established, and really help them to be much more efficient.’

Source: Computing (http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2157266/mersey-mission-saves-council)