Tarpon Springs Affordable Housing Authority Online Document Management Compliance
The mission of the Tarpon Springs Housing Authority (THSA) is to enhance the Tarpon Springs community by developing and professionally managing housing that is affordable for low to moderate income individuals and families. We seek to nurture our neighborhood and residents by creating and supporting services that promote stability and self-sufficiency for the people we serve. We are committed to operating in an efficient, ethical and professional manner while forming partnerships with our residents and appropriate agencies which help us carry out our mission. It’s our policy to serve our customers without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, age, sex, sexual orientation, having AIDS, physical handicap, or disability.
Challenge
THSA is tasked with developing and managing affordable housing but with little money allocated to administration costs. The team must work as efficiently as possible. Once of the largest challenges to their efficiency is the amount of paper records that they receive that must be processed and then maintained for compliance. File cabinets are full, boxes are full and there is nowhere to store the paper. Some of the files are electronic but they were stored on the network shared folder. Even though they were as organized as possible, it was still difficult to quickly search and retrieve the documents when needed. Email records were kept in Outlook or were printed to meet the affordable housing retention requirements. There were just too many places to look for documents.
Solution
What they needed was a secure, centralized location where all types of documents and records could be captured and indexed for fast, easy document storage, retrieval. Their files consists of scanned images of the original paper documents, Word files, PDF files, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint files, emails, and other types of documents. Without full time IT support, they didn’t want the expense and hassle of adding another server and database for their document management needs. They also wanted to be better prepared for disaster recovery and the solution had to be secure. They determined that a Software as a Service (SaaS) document management solution would be the best fit for their needs. They looked to the Federal General Services Administration (GSA) for solutions and recognized that they could reduce their acquisition costs by selecting from pre-approved vendors on Schedule 70.
The DocuVantage OnDemand® solution was determined to be a very good fit for their needs. We assisted them in streamlining their filing structure to be comprehensive for everyone involved. With the file structure in place, we used our import tool in import 25 GB of existing electronic files and folders. Now, their documents and records are organized, and they are searchable by various index data and the content of the files. We also provided our Email Archival module to automatically import email messages for archival and records retention purposes. Using scanners allows the quick capture of their existing paper documents and allows more efficient capture of new incoming housing applications and supporting documents.
