Fluid Document Processes Rule at Water Company

As a public utility, the Santa Margarita Water District (SMWD) must satisfy the voluminous record-keeping requirements and mandated disaster recovery
requirements of their four key departments. The District provides water and wastewater treatment services to some 150,000 customers in South Orange County, California.

They discovered and implemented ACOM’s EZContentManager and now project savings of as much as $250,000 over five years.

Management determined several years ago that their administrative, engineering, finance and human resources documentation should be consolidated into a single, easy-to-manage document repository.

To satisfy this need, they installed an expensive FileNexus system that proved to be prohibitively hard to use. Ultimately, they abandoned it and returned to the paper-based document storage and retrieval process. However, they were still saddled with an expensive five-year support contract.

Second chance
Impetus to revive the electronic document management initiative stemmed from the district’s 2006 acquisition of two ACOM productivity solutions that enabled the district to begin implementing electronic document processes: EZeDocs/400, an electronic document solution, and EZPayManager/400, for generating MICR laser checks. With the elimination of many paper-dependent processes, IT management began considering how to revive the electronic document management and retention program.

A long-time user of ACOM’s payment and document productivity solutions, they evaluated the company’s new standard’s-based EZContentManager system. Their research revealed that EZContentManager offered several distinct advantages over its competitors:

• Secure, remote document access via the Web
• Fast, easy implementation
• Direct integration with ACOM’s document output and payment solutions
• Superior price-performance

“Our fundamental criteria were that any new solution be easy to use, easy to install, easy to learn, easy on our iSeries resources, and easy to migrate documents to the content management system,” says Gloria Geisert, SMWD Network Administrator. “Further, we wanted all storage and processing to take place on a dedicated Windows server with high level security.”

“Implementation and integration of the ACOM solutions for checks and forms had been seamless and pleasant, so adding another ‘module’ of their integrated document solutions suite was intriguing.”

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