Smarter Communications
Hackney saves millions
The London Borough of Hackney
is saving millions of pounds by
replacing physical document
storage with an electronic document
management system. It has already
freed up £7 million of floor space
and expects to make additional
savings of £200,000 per annum.
The Council Document
Management (CDM) system has
reduced the amount of space taken
up by document storage; improved
access to paper-based and electronic
information previously kept in
disparate information silos across
multiple sites; and speeded up the
production of outbound mail.
The Council approached Neopost
when it became clear that hard-copy
storage was uneconomic, due to the
high cost of real estate, and inefficient,
with slow retrieval times and complex
management requirements.
The CDM solution overcomes
these problems by keeping
electronic files and scans of hard
copy documents in the same
database, indexed for quick and easy
retrieval.
The system has enabled the
Council to deliver better customer
service with fewer resources. It
has increased the proportion of
Freedom of Information requests
that are dealt with on time from 75%
to 95% and is saving approximately
two minutes for each mail piece
produced.
Drop and click
Physical mail is helping drive the boom in e-commerce.
n
60% of people go online to make a purchase within a week of receiving
a printed catalogue, with more than half spending over £40 on their first
purchase.
n
Catalogue users look at more than twice as many online pages and spend
twice as long on a website as the average.
n
Over 70% of consumers keep catalogues for over a month and 34% for as
long as a year.
n
Seven in ten people spend between five and 30 minutes reading catalogues
compared to just 11 minutes browsing the average retail website.
(source: MarketReach, 2013, from a
ComScore survey of 2,562 UK residents)
5
