Bridging the Gap Between ePlan & Records Management Software for County Government
Thursday, June 15, 2017Counties around the country struggle to manage drawings and other files in their Electronic Plan Review (ePlan) software when access to them is needed by other departments, along with access to all of their other records and documents.
Without something to bridge ePlan software with records management, also referred to as document management or enterprise content management (ECM), users have to find which silo holds the information they seek – not to mention being able make these documents publicly available on the county website.
How to Bridge Document Gaps
FileBridge from Image One is a middleware solution that automates the capture and delivery of files originating from ePlan software like ProjectDox and e-PlanCheck, as well as office fax servers or multifunction devices that scan to network shares and FTP sites.
As project documents are created in ePlan software and faxes and files are created and written to a server share, FileBridge will watch these directories for new files, convert them to the required image format, and then release them into ApplicationXtender (AX) or other supported capture, document management or enterprise content management (ECM) solutions.
Once they have been processed, the files are released into your content management system for indexing. Intelligent Capture Xcel, or ICX, by Image One can allow you to index using zonal optical character recognition (OCR), barcode recognition or other automated processes. This indexing and easy file transfer would allow your business to save time and effort and make the process smoother for all involved.
Polk County Florida Implementation
We implemented FileBridge for Polk County to automate the ingesting and indexing of project documents used for land development within ApplicationXtender document management software. This saves the county 2.5 hours per project, which amounts to 650 hours of additional productivity every year.
Polk County simply exports project documents from ProjectDox software from Avolve into a zip file with XML data to a folder on their network. FileBridge sweeps the folder every 10 minutes, ingests the documents and indexes each PDF with indexing values from the XML data. This eliminates the need for Polk County to open the zip file, find each PDF for 10-20 documents, drag each PDF into AX, manually index each PDF, and check to ensure no mistakes were made in the process. The manual process used to take 2-3 hours per day, every day, and it now takes less than one minute.
Start Bridging Your Gaps
To get started, Image One will conduct a complimentary review of your ePlan software and all document ingestion points, as well as what indexing is needed and where these documents need to reside. As with ePlan, records management and ECM software, the only way to get more done with less resources is to rely on technology like FileBridge.
