Land Registry automates document management

The government agency responsible for maintaining the Land Register for England and Wales is streamlining its paper-based processes by implementing new document management and imaging systems.

The new systems, which will be made available to up to 100 authorised Land Registry staff across 26 different sites, will be integrated with the department's Oracle E-Business Suite of applications to enable the paperless storage and retrieval of purchase invoices and related documents.

The new systems, provided by specialist vendor Version One, will allow the authorised users to view scanned documents either by drilling down through its Oracle E-Business Suite or via Version One's web browser DbWebQuery.

Debbie Wilkinson, the Land Registry's head of financial accounting, explained that the new document management systems needed to be integrated with the Oracle finance applications to speed up the processing of purchase invoices and help the agency move towards paperless processes.

"Version One's systems used alongside a Kodak i260 scanner will enable us to centralise accounts payable, improve our payment performance [and] cut costs whilst both supporting our green agenda and aiding us in our ultimate aim of being a world class accounts payable department," she said.

The land and property registry will also use the document management vendor's electronic storage system in conjunction with Oracle workflows to electronically authorise purchase invoices. And optical character recognition (OCR) technology will enable the data on scanned invoices to be automatically captured and verified before being uploaded - significantly reducing any reliance on manual data entry.

Wilkinson added: "By having central receipt of all invoices, the accounts payable team will be able to instantly know where an invoice is in the approval chain. This will improve our relationships with suppliers and further improve our payment performance. In addition, Version One's OCR will significantly reduce manual data entry minimising the associated risk of human error."

She also said the integration of the document management systems with the Oracle suite would play a key role in helping the registry become a more efficient accounts payable department, so that it will be able to act as a shared services centre for other government departments and agencies in future.

The new document management deployment is expected to go live by the end of 2008. And it comes only a fortnight after the department signed a a 50-million IT outsourcing deal with Steria to manage its distributed IT infrastructure (DITI) and extranet resources.