“We have gained long-term document preservation and saved on
storage space requirements.”
|
Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants
The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA), together with the
provincial, territorial and Bermuda Institutes/Ordre of Chartered Accountants,
represents a membership of approximately 71,000 CAs and 9,500 students in
Canada and Bermuda. The CICA conducts research into current business issues
and supports the setting of accounting, auditing and assurance standards for
business, not-for-profit organizations and government. It issues guidance on
control and governance, publishes professional literature, develops continuing
education programs and represents the CA profession nationally and internationally.
As an organization concerned with the secure and efficient management of
information, and acknowledging that an enormous portion of their information
was contained in decentralized, unstructured documents, the CICA contacted
IKON Office Solutions to discuss document management alternatives. The CICA
Standards department manages approximately 120 committees that set financial
reporting standards for all economic activity in Canada, including standards
for corporations, not-for-profit entities and governments. The formal nature
of the committee meetings necessitates the careful management of large amounts
of information in the form of research, reasoning, conclusions and decisions,
which were kept in hard copy binders and filing cabinets or in shared drives
and email archives. However, at any given time and for any particular document,
there was no way of knowing if the latest version was on file or even if all
the information pertaining to a case or project was actually in the file.
Consequently, hours were spent looking for information or double-checking
that files were complete.
After meeting with the CICA and collecting their requirements, IKON
proposed an electronic document management solution. The solution included
three Fujitsu scanners to capture the documents
“The solution was implemented easily and was up and running quickly.
Now we can instantly find the information we need for a meeting or
discussion. All the information we need is right there in the system
when we need it.”
George Greer,
CICA Director of Information Technology
for fast retrieval.
Another component was the Laserfiche Advanced Audit Trail, which tracks
activity and provides a detailed report of everything that happens to every
document from creation to disposition. “The solution was implemented easily
and was up and running quickly,” said George Greer, CICA Director of Information
Technology.
“The benefits of the solution have been manifold,” said Greer. “With the digital
archive, we have a single centralized repository, instead of a fragmented
environment with some documents in a storage room, some in a warehouse and
others on someone else’s desk. We have also gained long-term document
preservation and saved on storage space requirements both in the office and
at the warehouse.”
Another plus was the high degree of staff acceptance of the new electronic
system. “We could emulate our paper filing structure in the electronic system
using customizable folders and index fields, so once we had a critical mass of
valid information in the system, the move away from paper was quite painless,”
said Ron Salole, CICA Vice President of Standards. “Now we can manage our
document repositories right from our workstations. The solution has increased
the effectiveness of the professional staff accessing volumes of documents to
find the information they need,” he said.
The CICA is so pleased with the performance of the document solution in the
Standards department, they have expanded its use to manage contracts, lease
agreements and royalties as well as for Human Resources performance reviews
and job descriptions. They have also brought their Educational Services group
on line for archiving confidential documents, and had IKON manage the back
file conversion of past years’ documents into electronic format for storage in the
new system. In the near future, the Finance department and Member Services
will be looking to add workflow capabilities to help manage business processes
by integrating it into a new ERP system. “The beauty of a solution like this is, once
you have the basic scanning and storage infrastructure in place, it can be utilized
for any part of the organization to further increase productivity and improve
customer service,” said Greer.
|
