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Hastings District Council comprises an area of 5229 square kilometers (2028 square miles) and 69,600 people. It is located in the Heretaunga Plain, in the heart of Hawke’s Bay which, as New Zealand’s largest producer of apples, pears and peaches and the second largest producer of grapes and wine, is dubbed the “Fruit Bowl of New Zealand”.
Hastings, in common with district councils around the globe, must balance competing demands from many different groups. The district has rural roots and a healthy agricultural industry, and its attractive countryside and magnificent coastline make it highly desirable for residential development. Hastings has put in place an urban development strategy to help protect the district’s rural areas, while permitting planned residential development. But it is not only human needs that the Council must consider.
The district is home to the world’s only mainland gannet colony – Cape Kidnappers, which draws bird-watching tourists from around the world. A current proposal to construct a lodge with 24 guest chalets near Cape Kidnappers is just one of many projects where the council has to consider different, competing, yet equally valid, viewpoints.
Business Issue - Information Access Impeded by Multiple Formats and Locations
District Councils have to deal with a wide array of complex documents from general business correspondence, through permits, plans and engineering drawings. Historically the more complex documents such as maps, plans and engineering drawings have had to be kept as paper documents in order to retain their utility. This meant that anyone needing information from them had to go to the paper, a time-honored albeit a time consuming and inefficient way of doing business.
As Robyn O’Connor, Hastings District Council’s DMS Project Manager, explained, “The information generated and stored by the Council is one of its key assets and needs to be managed accordingly, and the risk factors, associated with the inability to access accurate information in a timely manner, reduced.”
Solution
A local software vendor was looking to build a strong and ongoing relationship with Hastings District Council, rather than just to install and service equipment. "The vendor also took the time to understand our business and information management and system integration vision for the future”, said Ms O’Connor. The new system is an integration of Onstream Systems’ Trapeze Desktop with TOWER Software’s award winning TRIM Context® EDRM solution.
“Trapeze was recommended as the product to meet our needs in terms of document back-capture and also image management going into the future,” Robyn observed. She feels that a major benefit the council will obtain from the package will be in the centralization of council information into TRIM. “That will be the big bonus,” she said, “Staff will be able to access complete sets of information from the one central data store.”
The Council is using the Trapeze scanning utility to complete the document back-capture process and it will also be used throughout the 250 staff organization for the scanning of inwards correspondence.
TRIM will be used to manage the distribution of the scanned correspondence and reply process to and from staff. The only staff not going onto the TRIM system initially are Parks Management and Library staff.
An especially important functionality of Trapeze is that it allows for accurate to-scale measurements and allows engineers to view and annotate as if they were handling the paper.
“We are looking to significantly reduce the amount of time currently spent by staff looking for information,” said Ms O’Connor. “The Trapeze measure and print product also will allow staff to complete their work in an electronic environment i.e. the annotation, measuring and printing of building plans and maps will be done electronically. This has historically always been done on large hard-copy plans.”
These added functionalities will be used by about 80 staff who are predominantly building consent officers, planners and engineers. The exceptionally fast downloads that Trapeze provides over the Internet will be much appreciated by those staff members in the field.
The Ratepayer Property Files illustrate how the integrated system has changed the way Hastings District Council now works. The Property files were a mixture of hardcopy, electronic, and microfiche files and accessing them meant going to the department, locating, and viewing them. Now they are in electronic format, accessible by any staff member through their own PC.
More: Streamlining the workload and improving turn around times for building applications 
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