SALT LAKE COUNTY RECORDER'S OFFICE
Over the past few years, the Salt Lake County (Utah) Recorder’s office has emerged as one of the most technologically advanced in the nation. Gary Ott, the County Recorder, streamlined his office in such a way to save taxpayers $1 million every year.
“The Salt Lake County Recorder’s office is responsible for about 13 million records,” Ott said. “That equates to pretty much every land record in the county since Utah became a state.”
In recent years, Salt Lake County has experienced unprecedented growth thus increasing the number of documents that needed to be filed. As a result of the growth, the Recorder’s office fell further and further behind in their workload. Archaic processes involving hand copying and manual record searches only exacerbated the situation. These processes physically limited the number of documents the office could record in a given day.
The Challenge:
The Recorder’s office was faced with three pressing challenges. Ott, who became Recorder in 2000, needed to find a way to help his staff to be more productive and substantially increase their capacity for recording documents. Like most government entities, the Recorder’s office was under pressure to meet growing demands with a diminishing budget.
At the time, the Recorder’s office had 80 employees recording only 1,000 documents per day. With the influx of documents, the department was falling behind to what amounted as a two-month backlog. As such, the first challenge was to find an economical solution that would enable the office to accurately record documents at a pace sufficient to keep up with current and future demand.
The second challenge stems from the paper-based system, which made it extremely time-consuming to find and retrieve requested documents by hand. The growing number of documents being filed and requested intensified this problem. The office needed to find a solution to more quickly and easily find, retrieve and print documents.
The third and most recent challenge was to find a way to protect the documents under the care of the Recorder as mandated by state statute in the event of a natural or manmade disaster. Moreover, the records must be readily accessible by the public almost immediately after a disaster.
These challenges were faced head-on by utilizing technology based on document management solutions. In this case, the solution was SIRE from AlphaCorp, Inc.
The Solution:
The Recorder’s office partnered with AlphaCorp in order to find a workable solution to the three challenges. AlphaCorp first used its eCashPro as the system’s front end to allow the Recorder to accept e-Recordings from title companies. This system handled the entire recordation process (including cashiering needs) and coordinated the “Race to Record” issues between walk-in business and e-Recordings. From there, the system fed the electronic documents into SIRE’s central image repository. Additionally, printed materials (including plat maps, deeds, trusts, etc) were scanned into SIRE using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which allowed for “Google” type full text searches from the body of the document.
SIRE’s open architecture allows the Recorder to integrate SIRE with their existing systems to further streamline work processes, which saves both time and money. SIRE’s Workflow is configured to automatically route specific document types to the County Assessor—thus eliminating the need to manually distribute documents to other departments. To meet County protocols, SIRE is configured to automatically send data to the County’s mainframe computer. The Recorder uses SIRE’s Retention Manager to comply with state archival statutes by tracking the document life cycle and automatically feeding the appropriate materials to an Archive Writer.
SIRE’s Web Center allows the Recorder to provide public access to recorded documents thereby reducing the number of people who visit the office in person. In order to accommodate the growing volume of e-Recordings and demands on the Recorder’s Website, a robust co-locate facility now hosts the Recorder’s system. This requires asynchronous replication stored at a “hotsite” or co-locate facility to replicate not only the records, but also servers, databases, configurations, applications and integrations. Therefore, in the event of man-made or natural disaster, the records in the possession of the Recorder would not only be safe, but also immediately and securely accessible from any location using the Web.
The Outcome:
Improved Productivity: Prior to the installation of SIRE, the Recorder’s office could record a maximum of approximately 1,000 documents per day with a staff of 80 people. Today, their capacity has increased to 3,000 documents per day with a staff of only 60 people. Ott met the first challenge of increasing staff productivity and overall recordation capacity by implementing SIRE’s batch scanning and validation process, which allows the Recorder to dramatically increase the number of documents that are scanned and entered into the system as part of the recordation process. Using Workflow eliminates much of the paper shuffling that consumes staff members’ time.
The Recorder’s office has caught up on its two-month backlog, and today, the Recorder has a consistent 24-hour turnaround time on all of its recordation.
Elevated productivity led to a startling outcome. As a direct result of the implementation of SIRE, now only 60 employees handle the workload once thought too much for 80 people, the Recorder’s office saves taxpayers $1.0 million annually.
Improved Access: SIRE’s Web Center reduces the number of people who come into the office by providing a convenient, online mechanism to look up documents from any computer. For those clients who still come into the office to access records, Recorder employees now find and print documents with just a few keystrokes while never leaving their workstation.
To build upon SIRE’s Web Center, a subscription system allows people and organizations to securely access documents via the Web. According to statute, the Recorder can charge people to access documents online; Ott charges one penny per page. This brings revenue into the county to the tune of about $500,000 annually thereby further reducing taxpayer burden.
Protected Records: Lastly, the Recorder’s office now protects the 13 million land records from natural and manmade disasters through the use of SIRE. The secure hotsite system not only provides a robust system to accommodate the growing use of e-Recordings, but it also protects the records, applications, servers, databases, and other system components from potential destruction.
In the event of a disaster, the public can immediately access documents to prove property ownership – even if they were filed the day of the disaster. Furthermore, the redundant system allows the Recorder to continue many of its business operations, including the filing of e-Recordings.
With the ability to configure and integrate SIRE to the Recorder’s specifications, SIRE is the mission critical backbone allowing the Recorder to economically and successfully meet the challenges presented by a growing population.
Perhaps just as important, Ott said, “This program helps the community to have faith in its government by our new found ability to remain in the ‘business of government’ even when tragedy befalls our state.”
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