| CASE STUDIES | September 2006 |
Anacomp scans over 1.8 million pension documents
for Nottinghamshire County Council
NOTTINGHAMSHIRE County Council has embarked on the conversion of 1.8 million pension documents from microfilm jackets to electronic format in order to improve customer service and drive internal efficiency in its Employee Services Centre. The Council has outsourced the project to Anacomp, the document capture, conversion and indexing specialist, harnessing Anacomp’s secure technology and records management skills to scan their archive of 47,500 microfilm jackets—containing around 1.8 million separate filmed images – into their pensions administration system.
In a carefully staggered project to minimise operational impact for the Council, Anacomp have already scanned nearly a million images and the remaining 800,000 will be completed over the coming months. Nottinghamshire joins the vanguard of public sector pension fund administrators who have updated their records management strategy and procedures as part of wider digitisation programmes and as a foundation for shared services.
Nottinghamshire CC is certainly not alone in having used microfilm jackets as the sole storage format for pension records. Most Councils did so in the past, as microfilm is one of the most cost-effective ways of securely storing large volumes of data over many years. But the drive towards better customer service means that those records need to be accessed rapidly by Council staff on an increasingly frequent basis. There is therefore an urgent need to digitise the records for ‘active’ use, whilst retaining the fiche archive for disaster recovery and legislative purposes.
Nigel Dowey, Head of Employee Services at Nottinghamshire County Council, explains, “Using jacketed fiche, it would take our staff much time and effort to locate details of a particular fund member when we received a query through the Pensions Helpline. Clearly this procedure needed to be updated to reduce their time spent on manual administration, and also to meet the needs of today’s rapid-response customer service environment. We urgently needed all records to be instantly accessible through our central system, the Heywood AXIS Pension Administration System.
“We considered acquiring specialist scanners to undertake the conversion in-house, but decided it would be much more cost effective and secure to find an outsource partner for the project. Anacomp was identified through the County Council’s tendering process as best able to handle the task, providing robust technology, tight security over the confidential records, and overall offered the best value solution. In order to safeguard the structure of the records, Anacomp went the extra mile to specially tailor the indexing software so that the scanned images could be smoothly integrated into Heywood AXIS. Also, the project is being completed in carefully defined stages so as to minimise operational disruption.”
All images from a batch of jackets were converted, then manually indexed using each fund contributor’s National Insurance number as a unique identifier. Using the specially developed software, other key personal data fields such as name, title, date of birth, could then be automatically populated into the record. This speeded up the whole process, removed the need for unnecessary manual data entry, and eliminated the risk of human error. A file of indexed images was then sent to the Council ready for upload straight into the pension administration system.
Nigel Dowey continues, “We certainly made the right decision to outsource. Anacomp were able to handle the technology side and manage the whole project, as well as giving us the benefit of their knowledge of records retention legislation. For instance, they advised us that we should not get rid of the jacketed fiche archive, but that it should be kept as a disaster recovery back-up and also to meet our legal requirements for long-term records retention.
“The electronic records have created huge value in our department—our staff now have records immediately to hand, allowing them to answer customer queries more efficiently, and also freeing them up to focus on value-added tasks rather than administration. Furthermore, the transition to electronically shared documents is a fundamental step towards delivering the efficiency promised by shared services. Having our pension records online opens up the potential to centralise and integrate other employee services. “
Chris Haden, Managing Director of Anacomp, comments, “Efficiency and customer service demands are making 
most fund administrators reassess how they keep their pensions records and weigh up the options available to them, and increasingly they are turning to the outsourcing option, like Nottinghamshire. Early adopters of the digital archive often chose to convert all records and dispense with microfilm altogether. But we would always recommend that risk is spread by retaining at least two storage media—electronic systems for the distribution of ‘active’ documents, and an analogue format (such as microfilm) for the long-term, low-cost archiving. The ‘old’ jacketed microfilm archive can even be held offsite to free up space at the Council and as an added disaster recovery measure.
“Nottinghamshire CC is a shining example of this multi-media approach and we will continue to advise them on records management as their needs evolve, particularly as shared services initiatives are rolled out.”
Anacomp Ltd, Tel: +44 (0)118 9361600; www.anacomp.co.uk
Nottinghamshire County Council. www.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/
