Case Study: 5S and Digital Archive Project for a Not For Profit Organisation

• The Problem
  
  Our client is a not for profit organisation supplying home modifications for the less abled and the elderly. The organisation worked with case managers who interacted with many different agencies, local authorities, building companies and suppliers. Due to the nature of the type of work that was carried out, all documents in case files were stringently kept and filed for up to 7 years (with the possibility of longer for audit and governance purposes).
  
  Traditionally, all the documentation was stored in physical case files contained in filing cabinets. Over a number of years not only had the filing cabinets become fully utilised, but the office storage space was soon fit to burst leading to archive file boxes being temporarily stored in the meeting room - which was not the secure, safe lockable space for documents - therefore this had to be remedied immediately.
  
  Not only that, searching for archived documents was a struggle, despite an accurate naming convention within the box archive system, it was still a significant manual process to find documentation quickly and safely.
  
  With resources already stretched it was difficult to assign the task to a member of staff to solve, and also would distract from the important case work that needed to be carried out on behalf of their customers.
  
  The Solution
  
  Finding the solution was a no brainer, the business stakeholders already knew that the solution should be an electronic document archive - the challenge was finding the right solution for their requirements, as well as bringing it within budget and setting out a forecasted cost of maintaining a system, that inevitably was going to grow and grow as the years went on - how would the costs be kept to a minimum? Also who would spend time scanning a whole room of archived documents, and how would this extra archiving step fold into the daily routine of the case workers going forward?
  
  Scoping the solution - In order to get an accurate picture of what was required, it was necessary to hold a scoping meeting/ lean workshop, who attended this meeting was very important, due to the nature of the change it was fundamental that representatives from all areas of the business had a say in how and what was to be implemented, therefore a scoping team was set up which was made up of case workers, technical consultants, administrators and top management.
  
  The scoping session successfully captured the following high level requirements and needs of these stakeholders:
  
  The solution must be easy to use
  The solution must fold into the processes with minimal impact to the workload of the parties who were to use it
  The solution must be secure
  The solution must be able to archive large technical drawings
  The solution must make information readily available across the business
  The solution must be on budget for the initial project and be subsequently able to forecast ongoing cost of storage of an ever increasing document archive.
  
  What came out of the scoping session was three clear objectives
  
  To identify the document archive solution (i.e the supplier)
  To implement ongoing archive processes into the business
  To clear the backlog of physical archived materials as soon as possible
  
  It was identified that we should proceed with identifying how long the backlog of archiving would take as soon as possible, and begin to undertake the scanning of the documents with a temporary resource. As there was a case management system in place we were able to identify an estimated number of cases that had been physically archived over the previous 7 years which amounted to approximately 60 cases completed a year, therefore an estimated total of 420 cases had been physically archived and were taking up space on shopfloor.
  
  A short and preliminary time and motion study of how long it would take to scan in a case (from a mean average of 5 cases) deemed it could potentially take 3.2 hours to scan a single case which meant that a total time of 1344 hours (192 working days) would be required to complete all document scanning for the cases (including inputting of document record naming conventions etc). What became apparent was that there were many superflous documents that were contained in the case files that would not be needed in future, therefore upon further consult with the the 5S team/scoping group we created a list of mandatory documents that must be scanned and anything else outside of this could be removed from the process and shredded (in 5S this would the equivalent of the red tagging exercise).
  
  Implementing the solution - It was necessary to recruit a support administrator directly into the business on a 6 month contract to complete the task. This saved money on getting an outside company to image and name the documents, and would get the project underway within the next 8 weeks, while the software solution was being sought.
  
  Selecting the software and hardware - adequate scanning facilities were already in place within the business in terms of having a document feeder for both A4 and A3 size documents, therefore no further investment was required in this area.
  Alongside the software solution an easy touch screen was provided where document reviews and sharing and printing functionality could be carried out. This was password protected for each user and information security controls were in place to protect accessibility to the system.
  In terms of the ongoing “sustain” piece of the business process, the scanning task was built into the case work process that case workers would scan in the documents as and when they were received, as this would maintain a the permanent archive of documents and minimise the risk of any documents being lost, it would also reduce the impact of significant time being spent at “case closed” status scanning in documents (remember that process took 3.2 hours??), as a final check and balance, once a case had been completed and closed the physical file would be passed to an administrator who would then check that all the mandatory files had been digitally archived. Before filing the physical document in the dedicated lockable storage space preserved for temporary physical file storage (which was held for 3 years until shredding).
  
  This process was further enforced by the creation of a new policy for record retention to ensure that the ongoing process was maintained.
  
  The Result
  
  By clearly applying a derivation of the 5 S principles of Sort, Straighten, Sweep. Standardise, Sustain to this particular business challenge, we were able to solve a business problem, create a safer working environment as well as create an ongoing process for a sustained organised approach and move towards the first steps of a digital transformation.
  
  Despite this project being very labour intensive, it firmly delivered the intended result. The risk of documents being stored incorrectly, insecurely and safely had been significantly mitigated. The time wastage of searching for archive documents had now been lessened from an hour log job searching through boxes and folders to a task that now takes practically minutes.