Tampa-Hillsborough County Fleet Management

Tampa-Hillsborough County Fleet Management is responsible for purchasing and maintaining the vehicles and equipment for all of the Departments within Tampa-Hillsborough County, Florida. The county has over 5,000 vehicles that they manage. The major business functions involved are Acquisition and Maintenance.

Problem 

Acquisition documentation was kept manually and information could not be easily shared among purchasing agents. Tracking of purchase status was maintained in cumbersome spreadsheets.

Solution

All documentation is now scanned and indexed, and any document can be instantly retrieved from one's desktop. Workflow processes keep track of purchase status, and forms are completed and signed electronically. This new EDM system reduced expenses for Fleet Management by $80,000 per year.

Old Process

During the acquisition process for vehicles and equipment, up to fifteen staff members were involved. This staff shared information via email and hardcopy documents. The hardcopy documents were passed from desk to desk in manila folders. Emails would occasionally be printed and inserted into the folders. A master copy of the acquisition package was stored in a file cabinet in the purchasing agent's office. Whenever a question arose regarding an acquisition, the person involved would have to go to that file cabinet to find the information.

During the life of the equipment or vehicle, the county performs maintenance and repairs, requiring the county to purchase parts and services from local vendors. Fleet Management performs the initial processing of the invoices from these vendors. The bookkeeping personnel entered the data from the invoices into the accounting system and tracked information about the invoices in a dozen or so spreadsheets. Each invoice was then copied so that the originals could be sent to the Clerk's office for payment.

New Process

DocuVantage™ put an Electronic Document Management System in place. Now, when equipment is purchased, a workflow package is created that will contain all of the information relating to that purchase. The package is automatically routed to the person responsible for performing the particular step.

All documentation related to the acquisition process is scanned and indexed or in the case of computer-generated files, they are simply dragged and dropped into the workflow package. Once indexed, they are also added to the package to provide a single place to access everything about that purchase.

The forms that Fleet Management uses internally are now both completed and signed electronically, then converted into image files and automatically stored in the system. Any time someone needs to know the status of a purchase, they can easily find who has it and at what stage of the process it is in. This access to the status allows management to stay informed of the process and keep bottlenecks and delays to a minimum.

All invoices for parts and services are scanned and indexed. The indexing data that is captured allows management to run regular reports instead of tracking data in spreadsheets. They have instant access to the data instead of referencing spreadsheets on shared network drives.

Futhermore, managment discovered an additional use of the system; they now have access to personnel records files whenever needed.