OpenGov Customers Go Fully Digital with Cloud-Based Document Management

Intro

From the outset, OpenGov's mission has been to enable transparency, open communication and accountability between government and citizens. What started out as a transparency portal to inform citizens and strengthen public trust, quickly grew into the leading cloud-based software provider for government. Today it is a full ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system with solutions for budgeting and planning, procurement, asset management, financials, permits and tax.

Challenge

OpenGov's primary goal was to enable government agencies to fully digitize their documents and store everything in the cloud. Additionally, they wanted to create a unified document management system across all the application modules including procurement, permits and licensing and asset management. The objective was not only to reduce the sheer volume of paperwork, but also make documents more readily accessible by both government staff and citizens.

A typical scenario is in procurement, where an RFP is published and vendors submit packets of company information, many of which are still paper based. For every RFP there may be 10-15 vendor packets, which must all be stored in a file cabinet and sorted for easy retrieval.

Open records requests were taking 2-3 days to fulfil. Now we can respond in 30 minutes."

– Chris Barber, Director of Product Management, OpenGov

After vendor selection, all vendor submissions must be kept for archive purposes. As the project proceeds, a paper trail must be created from the original packet through all planning, design, build, invoicing and payment transactions.

This information is not only crucial for internal operations but also needs to be available to anyone submitting an open records request or FOI (Freedom of Information). Citizens may ask which vendors originally bid on the RFP, what was proposed and what was ultimately delivered. A package of information is put together and sent in response to any records request.

Responding to each FOI request was a laborious process. Retrieving every proposal, design, build and invoicing document for each vendor packet took several days. City staff were overwhelmed with the sheer volume of paperwork and could not respond to citizen requests quickly.

We've had no major issues in over a decade using Dynamic Web TWAIN.”

– Chris Barber, Director of Product Management, OpenGov

Solution

OpenGov needed to digitize the document workflow with a fully web-based solution. City secretaries were going through a laborious multi step process, scanning with local software and manually uploading, attaching and renaming documents for hundreds of accounts each day. The goal was to automate those steps and save time.

The team also wanted flexibility to customize the scanning workflow, not only setting resolution and colour mode, but also adding and subtracting pages, resizing and cropping pages and saving to PDF and JPEG.

Testing with the trial version was complete in a couple of days. Developing the interface took just a month and from there it was a repeatable interface that could be used for other financial functions. Now, scanning is a seamless part of the workflow. For instance, in accounts payable, when an invoice is being set up, it will simply prompt the user to scan the invoice, then continue to payment. From the initial success in financial, Dynamic Web TWAIN has digitized workflows in the OpenGov procurement, permits and licensing and asset management modules too.

Digitizing document workflows with Dynamic Web TWAIN has meant that government agencies can be far more responsive and more transparent."

– Chris Barber, Director of Product Management, OpenGov

Impact

OpenGov now has over 1,900 customers across 49 states. All paperwork is now in the cloud and workflows are fully digitized. A FOI request would have taken 2-3 days to fulfil. Now it only takes 30 minutes. Not only are city staff more efficient, but government is able to be far more responsive to open records requests. Citizens can now pick up a thumb drive or a zip file rather than collecting thousands of sheets of paper. From the government's point of view, they are able to increase transparency and strengthen public trust.

Document retention has also become far more manageable. Typically, all documents are kept for 5 years. If disaster strikes, everything is now safe in the cloud. Purging physical documents after the retention period previously meant manually searching and physically shredding. Now, staff can simply search by date and delete the files.

Automated document management is a strong selling feature for OpenGov. Customers no longer need to budget for separate third-party document management software, since it is now seamlessly built in.

Looking to the future, other areas of government operations such as budgeting and parks and recreation management are ready for digitized document management. Looking further ahead, a centralized universal platform on a new tech stack, with scanning built-in, could be the foundation for all new functional modules.

Dynamic Web TWAIN is very easy to implement and customize, and the support team are always quick to respond."

– Chris Barber, Director of Product Management, OpenGov