Building a Business Case for Imaging/Document Management at the University of Miami Copyright 1993 CAUSE. From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 1993. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: jrudy@CAUSE.colorado.edu BUILDING A BUSINESS CASE FOR IMAGING/DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI by Freddie L. Robinson ABSTRACT: The Information Resources department at the University of Miami recently garnered executive approval to implement a centralized imaging/document management project that will enable electronic document storage, retrieval, and work-flow management in fifteen University units, to achieve cost savings and improve traditional ways of doing business. This article describes the benefits of imaging/document management, the rationale for choosing a centralized solution, and the project's three-phase plan for departmental implementations. On Monday, August 24, 1992, at 5:00 a.m., the South Florida area felt the first blows of what was to become the worst natural disaster in the history of this country. Hurricane Andrew, with sustained winds of 160 mph, caught South Florida by surprise and devastated the entire area, indiscriminately destroying homes and businesses. When residents finally left the safety of their homes and shelters, they were faced with the problems of rebuilding not only their houses, but their lives. Yet what happened to many of the businesses in the community was even more devastating. Upon returning to their offices, many business owners found that their life-blood, their business documentation, was gone, either blown away or water-soaked beyond recognition. The University of Miami fared better than most businesses, but was not immune to some minor loss of business documents. A few departments were affected by water intrusion as a direct result of physical building damage. This comparatively minor inconvenience brought us to the realization that we were unprepared for a major disaster. Suddenly, everyone was thinking about disaster and business recovery and how to protect our business documents and files. Fortunately, the Information Resources department, which is primarily responsible for computing at the University, was in the final stages of evaluating imaging/document management systems. This project had been started three years earlier, with the recognition that paper was an extremely costly means of communicating ideas and storing information. We had also realized that paper was everywhere around us--file drawers and storage rooms filled to capacity, with more on the way. Faced with a scarcity of floor space, increasing labor costs, and requirements for faster, more reliable dissemination and sharing of information, we had decided to investigate alternative methods of storage, retrieval, and transmission of documents--in an image of their original form. Background The University of Miami's main campus is located in a residential neighborhood in Coral Gables. The campus, which is bordered on three sides by homes and on the fourth side by a major thoroughfare, has very little room for expansion within its boundaries. Many departments, who wish to expand and provide additional services, find it difficult to provide sufficient office space for new staff due to the storage of what amounts to warehouses full of documents, correspondence, and business papers, and no apparent hope of curtailing the proliferation of paper. Thus the need to reclaim office space is paramount. Through the course of a year, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and correspondence are generated and received. And because of sheer volume, many departments store older files off site, keeping only the most current documents at their immediate disposal. This is expensive and causes delays in information gathering. Filing is naturally time-consuming and prone to error, even in the best of manual file systems. Documents can be misfiled, misplaced, lost, damaged, and/or unavailable. This contributes to increased retrieval time, incomplete information, and frustration. While computerization of information has made the task of retrieving data much easier, much of the information is in coded form, not original image. Yet many times the original business documents or correspondence are needed to "fill the gaps" or to clarify information. Additionally, departments often need to share documents. This only exacerbates the problem. We found many departments filing duplicate copies of purchase orders, contracts, invoices, personnel records, and related correspondence; in some cases, even entire files are copied. This proliferation of paper and the requirement to share documents only reinforces the need to centralize the storage of the original documents and make them available, through secured electronic means, for retrieval and viewing. What is imaging/document management? Imaging/document management is a process through which a document is recorded or scanned electronically, indexed, and stored as a digital image of its original form. Once digitized, it can be routed, archived, and/or retrieved using existing workstations that have been image-enabled. Imaging/document management may be implemented as a replacement for traditional manual filing techniques. Through the "document storage and retrieval" process, documents are captured by scanning, then indexed and archived for retrieval at a later date. This reduces file space, eliminates errors and misfiling, and improves productivity. A second level of implementation is "document work-flow management." In conjunction with document storage and retrieval, documents are automatically routed throughout the department to the electronic in-baskets of the appropriate individuals. This automatic routing process follows the path a document normally takes until it has completed its working cycle. At the end of the working cycle, the document is either discarded or archived electronically. The Information Resources department plans to incorporate both implementations as an integral part of the institution-wide business environment of the University of Miami. We anticipate achieving many improvements and cost savings over the traditional ways of doing business. What are the benefits? The largest single benefit of imaging/document management is the conversion from file cabinets to electronic storage. Typically, the standard file cabinet occupies between 7.0 and 8.5 square feet of floor space, including working area. With increasing requirements for more office space, the elimination of file cabinets offers better utilization of current areas without expending funds to expand the office environments. Also, many departments store infrequently accessed or archived documents in rented off-site storage facilities. This rental expense can be eliminated by converting these infrequently accessed documents. As time passes, the growth of paper documents within the work area continues. This growth can be managed within the imaging/document management environment with minimal expansion costs compared to the cost of providing additional space, either in the office area or off site. The cost of future filing is virtually eliminated. With the elimination of traditional manual filing systems, the high cost of staffing to maintain and administer traditional filing techniques is reduced. Future staff expansion requirements can be avoided by reassigning and training current clerical staff without affecting basic business needs. This approach offers continuity within the workplace and maintains a high level of morale, while offering opportunities for internal advancement. Inherent in manual filing systems is the need to make numerous copies of documents to satisfy various business requirements. The responsibility of office managers today is to keep office expenses under control. But with rising copy costs and increased numbers of photocopies, the responsibility becomes a challenge. An imaging/document management system significantly reduces photocopy requirements by allowing documents to be shared without the need to create additional copies. No benefits discussion is complete without including those intangible benefits that add to the overall justification of an imaging/document management system. Though, in most cases, no direct dollar value can be associated with these intangible benefits, many areas achieve significant improvements in the ability to provide a business service. Primary among these benefits is the ability to provide immediate response to customer inquiries or to retrieve relevant documentation while directly servicing the customer. This directly enhances efforts to improve overall customer satisfaction. At the University of Miami, the customer--parents, students, other internal business units, or external business entities--is entitled to the best possible service. Improvements in customer satisfaction equate directly with improvements in our ability to maintain or enhance our competitive edge. The use of an imaging/document management system offers opportunities to achieve these improvements by providing immediate and direct accessibility to required documentation at the servicing workstation. The time delays traditionally associated with document retrievals are virtually eliminated or at least significantly reduced. As mentioned earlier, we recently experienced the effects of catastrophic loss due to Hurricane Andrew. This event brought to the forefront the need to seriously consider the effect that a catastrophic loss can have on our business units. Many areas within the University experienced loss due to wind and water damage, particularly to documents stored either in filing cabinets or off-site in cardboard boxes. This type of loss effectively cripples the business unit. By storing documents centrally on optical media and making periodic backups for off-site storage, we can ensure against such disasters. The cost of preparing and storing these backups is minor compared to the high cost of a catastrophic loss. Staff productivity in any business is the key to success. Productivity improvements gained by utilizing imaging/document management systems include improved document search and retrieval; reduced filing requirements; elimination of misfiled, lost, and/or damaged documents; and automatic document/file routing. Selecting a platform for the University of Miami To ensure the success of this project, the most important commitment had to come from upper management. A thorough understanding of the benefits, the costs, and the intensity of the implementation plans had to be achieved. In addition, each department had to be ready to commit, particularly by dedicating staff to the effort. Fifteen University organizational units have committed to the project and are planning to participate. Each of these units had already been planning to implement decentralized image/document management solutions for its areas; as we reviewed their plans, it became apparent that a centralized solution should be investigated as well. In attempting to choose the most viable imaging/document management platform for the University, we reviewed and evaluated many vendor solutions, both centralized and decentralized. These solutions ranged in scope from single unit stand-alone systems costing $45,000 - $60,000, through local area network solutions costing $50,000 - $400,000 per LAN, to mid-range and large-scale mainframe systems costing $1,200,000 - $5,000,000. As part of the evaluation process, we considered such factors as equipment requirements, functionality, ease of incorporation into the current environment, protection of current hardware and software investments, ease of use, flexibility and customizing capabilities, implementation and ongoing support, vendor strength in this arena, and cost. Though many available centralized and decentralized solutions satisfy known requirements and provide the same functionality, cost was the final determining factor. The centralized solution, including central-site hardware/software and estimated departmental workstation upgrades, was approximately $622,000 less than the decentralized solution. This does not include file conversion costs, which will be borne by each unit and are equivalent for the two solutions. Figure 1 summarizes the alternative costs. ************************************************************************ Figure 1: Comparison of Centralized and Decentralized Costs (in thousands of dollars) Recurring One Time Annual Decentralized $2,014 $206 Centralized $608 $86 User Areas $784 $49 ---- ---- $1,392 $135 ----- ---- Net Savings $622 $71 ************************************************************************ Our analysis of the relative merits of centralized versus decentralized solutions determined that a centralized solution offered material cost savings to the University without functional loss. Based on the requirements obtained from the participating departments, and anticipating the requirements of those remaining, we chose IBM Corporation's AS/400 image solution, known as SAA ImagePlus Workfolder Application Facility/400 (WAF). This solution offers a centralized facility that when incorporated within our current operating environment will offer University-wide access to an imaging/document management platform from an expected initial population of approximately 200 image-enabled workstations and a wide variety of network technologies. This solution includes work-flow management and storage and retrieval, as well as both incoming and outgoing faxing capabilities. The AS/400, located at the central computing facility, will act as the central repository for all documents. These documents will be stored on optical jukeboxes attached to the AS/400. An important prerequisite for this acquisition is the introduction of the campus-wide, fiber-optic backbone network and FDDI token-ring communication facilities. This transmission method is designed to handle large amounts of data at very rapid speeds. Traditional data transmissions are in small packets, but image data transmissions are significantly larger. Therefore, we expect to exploit the fiber-optic network and the token-ring communication facilities to achieve the best possible response times for user image requests. The installation and implementation of this transmission and communications medium is currently in progress. Another important consideration is staffing. Image-enabling the workplace is a complex undertaking. The more areas of the business that are included in this process, the more complicated it becomes, particularly with a centralized solution. Because this is a relatively new technology, finding staff who are already familiar with imaging is a challenge. One solution is to hire a consulting firm. This carries with it a very high price tag, however, especially if the project spans a long period of time. Another approach is to train qualified individuals who have some background in computing and workstations. Although we have not ruled out the possibility of using some outside consulting services for pieces of the project, we did decide to hire two permanent staff members as image analysts, who could be trained to support this endeavor. These staff members are already on board, and training is under way with the help of IBM. Also, within the next two months we will add to the staff a qualified AS/400 specialist, who will support the central imaging facility while the imaging analysts proceed with image-enabling the individual departments. Fundamental to the project was our decision that this project would be self-supporting and self-funding. As each user department workstation is assimilated into the AS/400 imaging environment, a $3,000 one-time charge will be assessed. This one-time assessment per workstation will fund the central site hardware/software, other one- time, project-related costs, and departmental analysis. Annual recurring expenses will be funded by charging user departments an annual $500 access/support fee for each image workstation. In September of 1993, having received commitment from fifteen user departments, evaluated vendor alternatives, chosen a centralized imaging/document management solution, selected the vendor, developed project costs, and put together a high-level project plan, we successfully presented our proposal to the Board of Trustees for project approval and funding. To date, we have installed the central facility hardware and software and embarked on our first departmental implementation. Implementation plans The first step in our image/document management implementation plan is to perform a work-flow and document-management analysis within each participating department. This analysis will be done in three phases. Phase One will be a "kick-off" meeting where the following questions are answered: * What is imaging/document management? * What is the purpose of the project? * What level of commitment is required? * What do we hope to achieve? Phase Two includes making appointments with key personnel in the department to gain a detailed understanding of their documents and work-flow requirements. In the final phase, the group will meet to go over the findings of the detailed analysis and review the departmental work-flow schematic. Once Phase Two is completed, a phased implementation and conversion plan will be developed for each department. The results of the work-flow and document analysis will be used to develop this plan. Departmental implementations will occur individually, since it is virtually impossible to implement all departments simultaneously. The order of implementation will be consistent with interdepartmental work flows. Departmental implementations must be scheduled and a timetable established. This timetable will provide a guideline and reflect the estimated time to perform each task in each department. We estimate that it will take approximately ten to twelve weeks to complete the work in each department, including analyzing document requirements, ordering and installing equipment/software upgrades, and training. In some instances, departmental implementations will occur serially, with overlap towards the later part of the phase. Some ancillary implementations will take place for departments where image applications and needs require minimal conversion and can be accomplished without affecting the major departmental implementations. The final implementation timetable will be determined based on the complexity of departmental imaging requirements, but we expect to complete the entire project within thirty months, by the spring of 1996. Workstation hardware upgrades and software installations will take place according to the predetermined departmental implementation timetable. Every effort will be made to protect the original investments in equipment and network configurations. Additionally, functions currently being performed in the departments, such as word processing, spreadsheets, and host access, will be retained. While participating departments will need to purchase imaging/communication- related workstation software, only a few will need new hardware. Some will be able to upgrade their current workstation hardware to enhance the potential for better performance, and some will need no additional hardware. The costs associated with image-enabling workstations will depend on the existing workstation configurations. Equipment installation plans will be determined based on existing department workstation hardware and network configurations. Hardware installations in individual user departments will occur as part of the specific department's overall implementation and conversion plan. After the equipment and software are installed, user training, the most important part of a successful image implementation, will begin. The key will be to provide this training in a timely manner and to as many users as possible. The image application for many user departments will be customized for their specific requirements. Others will be involved in interdepartmental work-flow management environments. Therefore, training will be customized for the users' needs and the type of image application. With a project of this magnitude, post-implementation reviews will be essential. This will ensure that user requirements are satisfied and that all components function according to expectations. We plan to conduct these reviews approximately four to six weeks after the initial departmental implementation. At that time the users and the implementation team will meet to determine the progress of the project and what (if any) adjustments are required. On the road to success in radical directions It has taken a long time to get to where we are today. We have spent many years studying the technology and watching it mature and become more cost-effective; now the time is right. We are excited to be moving into a new era and generation of business applications. We have an opportunity to bring to our workplace a new technology and, more importantly, a new way of thinking. We expect the way we do business will be radically changed for the better. To position the University of Miami to accept the business and academic challenges of the next century, we must be willing to accept moves in radical directions in the 90s. We have accepted this challenge, made the commitment, and launched the effort. We trust we will have a successful implementation to relate in a future article. ************************************************************************ Departments Participating in the Imaging Project Accounts Payable Accounts Receivable Admissions Office of the Provost Employee Benefits Enrollment Services Financial Assistance Human Resources Information Resources Medical Finance Office of Business and Finance Payroll Physical Plant Purchasing University Advancement ************************************************************************ Benefits of Imaging/Document Management * Office Floor Space Savings * Off-site Storage Space Savings * Reduced Future Filing Costs * Reduced Labor Costs * Reduced Photocopy Charges * Protection Against Catastrophic Loss * Improved Customer Service * Improved Overall Productivity ************************************************************************ Freddie L. Robinson has been with the University of Miami for almost seven years, bringing to the current organization over twenty-four years of varied data and information processing experience in both the public and private sectors. Among his responsibilities is the leadership of the Image/Document Management Project. As an active member of SHARE (an IBM users group) and a board member of the local AIIM (Association for Image and Information Management) chapter, he is committed to imaging/document management as the technology of the future in the workplace. ************************************************************************