The City of Niles is using DocuWare to store utility bills and utility applications, police incident reports and financial documents.

Work Process 
The City of Niles is unique in that it supplies its residents with not only wa­ter and sewer services, but electricity as well. Electrical billing is very complex and the Utilities department struggled to fulfill customer inquires and perform internal audits. Due to the nature of their billing software and electrical rates based on complex equations, the de­partment was unable to view or recre­ate old bills. Unfortunately, the only in­formation they had access to was the dollar amount of the bill. All of the de­tailed information contained on the bill such as the rate, meter number, service location and address was essentially lost. Additionally, when electrical rates changed, the software was repro­grammed with a new rate structure, making adjusting the rate or recreating an old bill impossible.

Solution

Information & Records Associates, an Authorized DocuWare Partner, expanded the system to the Utilities department. Since implementing DocuWare, the Util­ities department is now easily able to store an electronic copy of every elec­trical bill they generate. DocuWare’s TIFFMAKER print driver is used to im­port a copy of each bill into DocuWare. Because the name, date and account number are printed in the same place on each bill, the images are able to be automatically indexed using OCR tech­nology. The staff can also do a full-text search on all the information contained on the bill such as the meter number, service locations and billing address. Looking up old bills and other informa­tion is now a very simple process, in­stead of a series of “best guesses.“

Solution Requirements
The Utilities department wanted to im­plement a flexible document manage­ment system backed up by strong tech­nical and user support that could grow and change with the department’s changing needs. They wanted the ability to access a detailed copy of each state­ment. Three years earlier, the City’s Po­lice department had begun using Docu-Ware. The IT department liked the pro­gram, knew that DocuWare kept up with technology through upgrades, so wanting to standardize the city on one package, chose to expand the system to the Utilities department.

Benefits in Detail

The use of DocuWare by the Utilities de­partment has empowered the staff with a tool that helps them accomplish their jobs easier and faster, reducing work­place stress and lowering employee turnover costs.

The full-text search feature allows the staff to easily rectify complaints. The staff can quickly search for all bills at­tached to a specific meter and look for discrepancies such as a broken meter or meter reading that is unusually high. The staff uses the system to search for information associated with a particular location address, such as an apartment that has had various tenants, and re­solve any issues. Customer service has improved as access to information re­garding past bills is now instantly avail­able. The department is also able to eas­ily audit individual accounts or all the accounts in order to produce a report for a rate study.

“The department can pull up and re­print old bills, something they could never do before. Having all of this infor­mation at their fingertips has improved customer service,“ said James Stump, IT Coordinator for the City of Niles.

Additionally, DocuWare is also used to store a permanent record of change of service request forms. The system is also helping reduce fraud. When an individ­ual comes in to set up their electric service their application and a form of ID such as a driver’s license or green card are stored in DocuWare. The de­partment can search across previous applications against name, date of birth, and social security number for out­standing bills. Before the system was in­stalled, applications were stored in pa­per folders by SSN and were very diffi­cult to check. Fighting fraud was ineffi­cient as the department relied more on their employees’ memories than the hard to use paper system.

For the City, the expansion of DocuWare to the Utilities department brings them one step closer to having a city wide records management system. It all be­gan when the Police department star­ted using DocuWare to store old inci­dent reports, eliminating the need to store the records in a heated garage away from the main building, reducing document retrieval time and improving access to information, which helps the department solve cases faster. The sys­tem then expanded to the Utilities de­partment and they have seen a substan­tial increase in productivity and custo­mer service. Now the Finance depart­ment is using the system to store Ac­counts Payable checks and supporting documentation such as purchase orders, invoices and packing slips, reducing fi­ling time by one third and showing the real time savings on the retrieval side, with only seconds to access informa­tion.“In the past, it was easier for our em­ployees to use their memory to fight fraud, than to use our paper system. When an employee left, knowledge was lost. Fraud isn’t a big problem, but a recurring problem that we are now successfully managing with DocuWare,“ said James.

“In the future we would like to use DocuWare’s workflow capabilities, we are only just touching the tip of the iceberg regarding the information DocuWare can help us manage,“ said James.

In conclusion, DocuWare is helping the City of Niles maintain fiscal responsibil­ity to the tax payers by better serving its residents while keeping costs low.

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