The management of a city is becoming more complex as each day passes. Not only must a city council juggle the often conflicting demands of its own citizenry, it must also compete with other jurisdictions to attract businesses to locate within its borders, and tourists to visit and spend their time and money.

One city that is successfully balancing these different, but not necessarily incompatible, demands is Upper Hutt City, the second largest city by area in New Zealand, covering just over 208 square miles (some 53,962 hectares), and home to a population of 36,600. Whether implementing its “Main Street Vision”, celebrating the opening of the new Expressions Art and Entertainment Centre . . . coordinating new business clusters to encourage current businesses to stay and new businesses to locate . . . attracting foreign students . . . or enhancing the Visitors Information Center . . . there is one common thread running through these diverse activities – the need for fast access to accurate, detailed, up-to-date engineering drawings.

Business Issue - Effective Management of Drawings
When Upper Hutt City first decided to implement a document management system across the entire 125-employee organization, it quickly identified that in order to effectively manage drawings and images, special tools would be required. Tools over and above the standard search and retrieve functions of the usual document management system. In order to meet the growing needs of an evolving city, the council required software that would allow onscreen measurement, scaling, annotation, copy and paste sections of drawings, and the ability to print drawings at original size or reduced scale.

Solution
According to Warrick Field, Engineering Asset Manager, Upper Hutt City Council, “when the council started its search for appropriate software, Trapeze Vault was more or less recommended by every vendor we spoke to regarding document management as being the best software available for managing engineering type drawings, and it could be interfaced with most corporate document management systems”.

“Trapeze essentially fulfilled all of council’s functionality requirements, and the vendor demonstrated commitment to the product, good support, and a willingness to consider our suggested enhancements to the product to even further improve its functionality and user-friendliness”, he continued.

Ease of use and ease of setup were very important to Upper Hutt City. The council has found that most people have been able to use it with little or no training. This has meant they have not had to contend with attempting to encourage employees to use a product that they perceive as too complicated or taking more time to use than the old system. As a result staff support and feedback has been excellent.

Setup was a very simple process. “Data,” Mr. Field explained, “is stored in a standard MS Access database that can be user customized/built by each individual organization. Using a basic drawing database that was setup several years ago, but not maintained, we were able to import and catalogue about 75% of the 10,500 engineering drawings with only a few days work, and the missing metadata for the remaining 25% took under 6 weeks for a student to populate.”

Trapeze allows staff to search for information more accurately and proficiently. “I am literally surprised by the information Trapeze retrieves each time I do a search”, said Warrick Field, “and the information it can find that I never knew existed!”

Upper Hutt is finding that using the Trapeze system is more economic. Drawings can easily be reproduced at reduced size, viewed from the user’s desk, and printed on the existing printer or plotter, thus eliminating the need to replace and maintain the existing microfilm viewers and printing equipment.

“By implementing a document management system for council’s drawings (both engineering and building consents)”, Mr. Field said, “the council aimed to reduce the considerable amount of space occupied by paper records, improve the security of documents (against loss by fire, flood etc.), and with respect to the engineering drawings, improve the organization/recording and cataloguing of drawings.”

But the advantages offered by Trapeze Vault are not confined to the engineering drawings. Upper Hutt is scanning the building packet information to be used primarily by operations, building consents and planning divisions.

Ultimately, it is proposed that Trapeze Vault will be integrated with the council’s full document management system when that is implemented, and to integrate the two systems with Council’s GIS system so that all information and drawings relevant to a particular property can be readily accessed through iMAP, at a click of a mouse.

For Mr. Field the ability to roll out Trapeze in a single step was important as it eliminated the frustration of using two separate systems to search and retrieve drawings until the implementation is complete.

But it is “the growing number of councils that have purchased the software and our discussions with Onstream Systems in regard to what improvements and enhancements they are in the process of developing, that has endorsed my confidence that Trapeze is the right choice of software for Upper Hutt City,” concluded the Engineering Asset Manager.

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