Vote For Efficient Data Capture
Excerpts from Integrated Solutions July 2008 Issue
The Controller's office of Allegheny County shaves 800 labor hours from its election worker payment process with a document automation and data capture solution.
As the second largest County in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Allegheny County processes approximately $1 billion in annual expenditures including payments to poll workers. Like most government entities, the County was constantly looking to cut costs. One area targeted was the amount of time spent managing the payments made to the County's election poll workers. To generate efficiency and realize cost savings, the Controller's office replaced what was once a painstakingly manual method of processing these payments with a document automation and data capture solution that is already saving the County more than 800 labor hours each year.
Manual Forms Handling Hinders Labor Efficiency
Regardless of whether an election was as significant as the presidential race or as mundane as a local school board seat, Allegheny County faced the challenge of processing election poll worker and constable payment forms for more than 11,000 workers within 72 hours. Processing the paperwork for these workers began with cumbersome hand sorting of the incoming forms.
The impact to the overall productivity of the County Controller's office was significant. The office is responsible for processing all payments for County expenditures (an average of 600 of these vouchers are received each day). During elections, all 30 Accounting and Operations division employees from the Controller's office were pulled away from their every day duties for up to three days in order to meet the tight timeline for processing poll worker payments.
Modernize With Data Capture
Allegheny County started looking for ways to improve the poll worker payment process in October 2006. The objectives established by the Controller's office included modernizing its existing paper based processes. To meet this objective, an automated document and data capture solution was desired. County Controller, Mark Patrick Flaherty, selected a handful of document management vendors and issued a challenge to each of them. Vendors had to be willing to prove their confidence in their solution by providing a live test run. This meant the vendor had to take the gamble of designing, implementing, and using the solution in a live implementation before the County would sign any purchase agreement. The County received only one acceptance to this challenge. It came from AnyDoc Software with the support of document management reseller IMR.
As a result of implementing the AnyDoc solution, processing the payment forms has turned from a deadline driven, manual, labor intensive rush into an efficient and smooth process. "During the critical election period, the time required to process the poll worker and constable payment forms was reduced by more than 75% - a time savings of approximately 400 hours in each election, and there are two each year," says Pisciottano. Pisciottano estimates that over the course of five years, the County will save at least 4,000 hours. At the cost of labor per County employee per hour, even if the County used the solution for nothing but the elections, the solution would easily achieve payback.
"The elections were the biggest pain point at the time and offered the quickest opportunity to review solution success," he says. "But we're already intending to use the software just about everywhere else." The Controller's office plans to implement document automation and OCR enabled data capture to process purchase order invoices and anticipates that process alone will save thousands of labor hours during the course of a year.
