Minimization of paper-based files at the City of Zurich’s Department of Education and Sport

The introduction of the new act about the funding of childcare in Zurich had raised the question how to efficiently handle contracts in an enterprise content management environment. Regulations require all households, which receive support from the city of Zurich, to communicate changes in their household and financial situation on a yearly basis.

The census forms (12’000 applications per year) reach the households by sending them through the post. For the coordination of holiday support another 60’000 holiday support applications must be processed and managed annually. Thus far these documents had be processed, mailed and archived in paper form. The entire handling was considerably simplified by means of the comprehensive solution implemented by Advellence.

The solution includes the “Information Manager” ELOenterprise, an SAP interface as well as the 3-Heights® Document Converter Service.

Today, employees at the Department of Education and Sport can access the documents at any time. Long search times and a lack of overview belong firmly in the past thanks to minimized paper-based records, resulting in a significant increase in administrative efficiency.

The ISO Standard PDF/A is specifically geared towards archiving requirements and guarantees that documents remain legible in the long term. The service is meanwhile used for other projects of the Department of Education and Sport as well as by other departments of the City of Zurich due to the simplicity of its web service connection.

A background process loads survey forms and holiday supervision applications in the form of MS-Word templates and fills them with data; these documents are then converted to PDF/A format by a 3-Heights® Document Converter incorporated in a custom-built web service application from Advellence. An external service provider then prints and delivers the PDF/A documents to each household by post. The documents are simultaneously imported directly into the ELOenterprise where they are automatically archived in the corresponding electronic file and indexed.