The City of Kennewick, population 65,000, is located in southeastern Washington in the heart of the award winning wine producing region. On the banks of the mighty Columbia River, Kennewick is also famous for its annual summer hydroplane races. 

Changing economic conditions and a shrinking tax base required that Kennewick’s business processes enable them to do more with their current resources. One of Washington’s most progressive cities, Kennewick recognized that implementing a core Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system would help them meet this goal.

The City enlisted ImageSource® to provide a thorough discovery and analysis of the cities operations. ImageSource met with most departments in the city and produced a five-year plan for the City to improve efficiencies through ECM implementations.

City Clerk a Sensible Starting Point
Dedicated to preserving the City’s official records, the City Clerk was selected as an ideal place to launch the ECM technology. The benefits of automating the Clerk’s processes would be far-reaching.

With paper-intensive processes and workflows spanning across many departments, immediate efficiencies gains were possible. By familiarizing other departments to the new system through interaction with the City Clerk, future adoption of the expanded system would be fluid.

Manual Processes & Duplication a Problem
The City Clerk produces or assumes responsibility for 750-1,000 new pages of documents every month. Prior to the implementation, documents were stored in multiple locations including Minutes Books, filing cabinets and an old Laserfiche system.

The City Council Meeting Agenda process had been completely manual. Each agenda item was physically routed for review and approval to multiple staff members, resulting in serious challenges in tracking the location of the items once they were released. Contributing factors included varying departmental procedures and paper copies of items getting buried on approver’s desks in any one of the City’s buildings.

Any changes to the manually collated agenda—typically 100-210 pages—meant the numbering process for the entire agenda was affected. Cover sheets had to be resent through the approval process, reapproved, recopied and resubmitted. 

“The old process was time consuming. It took a lot of physical space and file space on servers.” said Christina Palmer, Assistant Director, Support Services. “But the biggest problem was with wide-spread duplication. Our records inventory found that about half of the files we handled were duplicates. Version control was non-existent. Employees were working off their own copy, which in many cases was not the most current."

ECM Infrastructure Streamlines Processes
To resolve Kennewick’s agenda management needs, and serve as infrastructure for technology initiatives city-wide, ImageSource’s Professional Services Team specializing in government designed and installed a comprehensive system that provides an enterprise repository for storage and electronic workflow. The solution utilizes ILINX technologies, Cardiff LiquidOffice, Oracle IPM and Kofax Ascent Capture. 

In a new, streamlined process, Cardiff LiquidOffice enables Kennewick the integral use of workflows for the routing, review, approval and distribution of City Council agenda documentation. When initiating an agenda item, a department submits a LiquidOffice form, attaching all associated documents in their native format. Items are electronically routed for approval to required managers, department heads, the City Manager, and finally, the City Clerk’s office for agenda preparation. The flexible workflow allows for adding approvers, editing and resubmission.

"With the electronic workflow, I can now locate agenda items anywhere in the approval process without ever leaving my desk. Changes in the agenda are handled with a simple click of a button."

– Valerie Loffler, City Clerk City of Kennewick

ILINX Technology Enables ePackets, Public Consumption & Simplified Indexing
Once through the approval process, the City Clerk utilizes the ILINX Public Disclosure Tool to build the Council Meeting Agenda. She now exports the results into a local folder, combines them and creates a relevant cover sheet. The resulting ePacket can be printed for council members and posted to the City web site for public viewing. 

At the close of City Council meetings, the status of each agenda item is updated to reflect the action taken on that particular item and processed through a back-end Oracle IPM workflow. For quick, easy contribution to IPM, Kennewick utilizes the ILINX Manual Indexing Tool, which provides intuitive indexing fields, index validation and requires minimal training. ILINX provides an efficient, cost-effective way to ensure that data is entered accurately and completely without requiring expensive capture software.

Technology Leveraged to Save Time & Improve Accuracy in Payroll Process
After the core infrastructure was put in place for the City Clerk, ImageSource expanded the solution to streamline Payroll.

Previously, time cards were completed in Excel by employees, printed and signed. Once the paper version was submitted to the Payroll department, workers manually re-keyed the data. The process was labor intensive and prone to error. 

“The process was extremely inefficient,” said Ms. Palmer. “Employees would key their time and project numbers into Excel, print it out, just to have us enter it again.” 

To enable employees to submit hours electronically, ImageSource designed electronic LiquidOffice time cards. By integrating with Kennewick’s financial system, Eden, data entered by employees is validated to ensure accuracy. Time cards are then electronically routed to managers for approval and imported into Eden for processing, dramatically streamlining the payroll procedure. 

“The manual payroll process took four to five people two full days to complete. Automation has reduced that to a couple of hours,” reveals Palmer.

Comprehensive Services Accelerate Success
The successful implementation of these enterprise changes was due in a large part to the focused training Kennewick employees received through ImageSource. 

“It was a great decision to bring ImageSource on site to train on our system,” concludes Palmer. “Our work with the entire team is a partnership, in the best sense.” 

From analysis and records inventory to the implementation of the right mix of complementary technology, ImageSource has enabled Kennewick to do business more efficiently. Once their Oracle IPM system is state-certified, physical storage space can be reduced by up to 80%. Most importantly, the City can now productively manage new development without super-sizing its staff.