The Chesapeake Police Department has decided to go green after years of backlog from documents.
Recently, the Chesapeake Police Department adopted Laserfiche software to help manage the vast amount of records and documents being stored at its’ headquarters. These documents included: arrest records, investigation files, training records and microfiche cards. With the help of the department’s Central Records Supervisor, Cena Taylor, they dumped their inadequate original version of document management.
Seeing how Norfolk Police had profited from Laserfiche products, Taylor contacted ScansAmerica and UnityECM in the joint effort to help manage the departments’ records and make them more accessible.
UnityECM helped incorporate Laserfiche into Chesapeake’s system and develop an easier means of retrieving their files. In January 2013, Chesapeake Police decided to go paperless. Now when new files are created, they are directly imported into the Laserfiche Repository where they are infinitely stored in the correct location and can be easily recovered by anyone. This was the easiest part of the entire process.
The biggest struggle of the project was scanning and storing the old, back-dated records and making them user-friendly and easy to access. ScansAmerica was initially given nearly 70,000 files to scan and upload. Many of the documents were the single, only copy, which made the value of digitizing the files even more imperative. Many of the documents had suffered water damage and other forms of destruction. After the records were cleaned, they were sent to ScansAmerica where they were recovered and scanned.
The department purchased their own scanning devices and have continued the project themselves with the assistance of UnityECM, ScansAmerica, and Laserfiche. The project was completed with great satisfaction from Chesapeake Police. Now they have an efficient setup to scan and manage all of their records with ease.