RADIX Case Studies
City of Marshalltown, Iowa - Accounts Payable and Clerk
The City of Marshalltown located in Central Iowa, is a dynamic, fast-paced and growing city with a population of over 26,000. The city prides itself on being a technology leader among the cities in the State of Iowa and RADIX is another initiative that has placed the city on the leading edge. Cindy Kendall, the Finance Director for the City of Marshalltown, has been a critical part of leading technology initiatives, including the RADIX project.
Cindy and the rest of the staff at the City of Marshalltown determined that it would be necessary to start managing the content that the city deals with on a daily basis including the volumes of paperwork and electronic data in the form of Word, Excel, PDF and emails. In addition, the city desired to publish and make the appropriate data available in a transparent and easily searchable fashion to other departments, the public and ultimately other governmental agencies.
To accomplish this vision, the City of Marshalltown opted to use Imagetek Inc. as their partner for implementing the RADIX Content Management Solution. Cindy comments on their choice of Imagetek, “The City of Marshalltown chose Imagetek and RADIX because of its ease of use, flexibility, powerful indexing and affordability.”
In conjunction with Imagetek’s professional service team, the City of Marshalltown decided to tackle the paperwork encountered in Accounts Payable and the City Clerk’s office.
Within Accounts Payable, it was necessary for the staff to store multiple copies of department-issued purchase orders, invoices and other documentation to create a tracking system that allowed for the matching of invoices to an ongoing purchase order and tracking of invoices that were submitted to the department managers for approval and coding. The City of Marshalltown utilizes JDEdwards/PeopleSoft as their accounting and finance software.
It was decided that the accounting department would start out by scanning all unused and ongoing purchase orders and all invoices received and paid from the beginning of the fiscal year. This would insure a clean break between the paper and documents within RADIX available to the departments. The purchase orders were captured on an existing multi-function device and submitted to the system automatically. The basic index information of the purchase order number, department information, vendor name, vendor id and date were entered to allow for quick retrieval from RADIX instead of the paper filing system. Also, paid invoices were captured using an automated indexing method which included the indexer keying in the voucher number and all the other information automatically populating all the remaining index data including basic invoice detail and vendor information insuring that searching was dynamic and easy to use for outlying departmental managers.
Going forward, the City of Marshalltown will be scanning purchase orders as they are generated. The PO’s will be scanned by the department managers on the multi-function devices located throughout the city. The purchase orders will then be added to RADIX and available for retrieval and matching when the invoice is submitted by the vendor. In addition, all invoices will be scanned as they are received by the AP department or department manager. As the scanned invoices are indexed, they are assigned to a department manager for review, approval and coding. The department manager queries RADIX for their invoices waiting for approval. They review the list of invoices, place the coding information on the invoice through markup features within the Radix software and submit back to the AP department for further processing. Once the invoice is paid, the check files are scanned and uploaded and linked back to the original PO and invoice.
Typical to any city clerk’s office, the City Clerk at the City of Marshalltown has a tremendous task of receiving, handling and managing the majority of the paperwork and files related to the administration of the city. Documents will include city project related information, city council minutes, city contracts, resolutions and ordinances passed by the council, and other information that is made available to the public.
The RADIX content management service was perfectly suited for the variety of content received into the clerk’s office regardless of the format, filing and accessibility requirements.
Initially, the Marshalltown’s City Clerk decided to start capturing documents that resided both in electronic and paper format. The information included the electronic versions of meeting agendas, meeting minutes, resolutions and ordinances and the corresponding signed paper copies.
The majority of the electronic documentation existed primarily in WORD and PDF. Through the use of an upload process within RADIX , the electronic files on the network were submitted in their original format and were automatically filed and indexed into RADIX based upon the directory and file names. No additional indexing or filing within RADIX was required by the Clerk’s office. Once the information was uploaded, both basic index searching and full-text keyword searching were available for all users with access to the documents.
Next, the City Clerk will capture all the signed official paper documentation including meeting minutes, resolutions and contracts to fulfill permanent retention requirements. The signed and associated electronic files become available through a single search within RADIX.
The City Clerks plans on capturing all the information being collected into the office and making it easily available and accessible to internal and external users in a seamless and easy manner in the near future.
As a result the project has been a big success largely attributable to Imagetek’s Automate. Integrate. Accelerate. process.
The City of Marshalltown and Cindy Kendall is pleased with the results, “Imagetek has taken the City of Marshalltown through design and best practice recommendations. Their experience with other cities has been very valuable as we implemented our record archiving database and move forward to improve other business processes.”