Melton far from meltdown after fire
When disaster strikes an organisation, the key focus is to get it back on its feet as quickly and smoothly as possible. Such was the challenge that faced Melton Borough Council after a fire destroyed most of the Council’s working office space at their headquarters in May 2008. Thus began the UK’s largest public sector disaster recovery exercise in over 60 years.
As the fire destroyed all the Council’s communications technology, coordinating efforts to maintain the Council’s core essential functions was severely hampered. The 200 staff had to be relocated to eight remote sites across the region and many employees having to work from home. Fortunately a wing containing vital documents was left intact and, to make them available to remote workers in a coordinated workflow, it was essential that they were digitised as quickly as possible. In addition, they needed to be accessed, processed and updated in a temporary system that could be intuitively used by the displaced staff.
As is often the case, speed was an absolute priority and Preview certainly rose to the challenge. From first sight of the 3,900 documents – some 500,000 scanned images - to final upload of the last image into a newly designed secure online hosted system took just 10 working days. Just as importantly, on only the third day after collecting the documents, up to 30 Council staff were able to view and process an ever-increasing volume of documents online in a safe, structured and intuitive way that resembled, as closely as possible, the environment they had been used to working in before the fire.
Although initiated by an event which had obviously had a very serious impact on the Council, the subsequent success of the document scanning and the speed of turnaround prompted several other departments to follow suit and scan their own documents. Each had their own individual requirements, but in all cases, it was essential that the data could be accessed remotely by staff through a secure online system. Preview’s own eView+ system was able to deliver this facility and, at the same time, provide secure hierarchical access preventing the staff from accessing wrong areas within the system.
To date, over a million pages are now accessed on a daily basis by up to 170 staff concurrently and the Council now has the ability to continually add indexed images to eView+ using multi-function devices installed at several sites across Leicestershire. In addition, they continue to add relevant bulk archives as departments sift through boxes in the cool light of the day having turned a potential disaster to their advantage.
More information on Melton Borough Council can be found on their website here