Venturing into ECM

The slow, unreliable and costly process of updating paper-based files has been curtailed for Ventura County in California through enterprise content management. The new system handles property tax assessments for the county, which is responsible for more than $60 billion in appraised property, including boats and airplanes as well as commercial, agricultural and residential real estate.

"It took a lot of staff hours during the year to maintain paper-based files," says Jan McKinney, office systems coordinator for the Ventura County assessor's office. "Staff had to manually update files by replacing old information with new forms filed by residents. In addition, attempting to locate documents while we had someone on the telephone with a question was a very time-consuming process that involved manually reviewing individual files to locate the requested information."

The initial application of software from Kofax and FileNet manages the homeowner tax exemption process. It includes Kofax VirtualRescan (VRS) document image perfecting technology; Kofax Adrenaline scanner controller; FileNet Capture Professional, which manages the document capture process; and FileNet Image Services software for content storage, search and retrieval.

"Our situation was the perfect candidate to benefit from content management," McKinney says. "Implementing the system has fundamentally improved the way we do business."

"Kofax's VRS and Adrenaline have boosted the efficiency and effectiveness of the FileNet components by maximizing readability of captured content as well as the speed and accuracy of automated indexing via barcode recognition," says Dianne Jolly, FileNet product marketing manager.