City of Wuppertal transforms citizen service with transition to compliant digital records

Vision

Known for its unique Schwebebahn suspension monorail Wuppertal is the seventh largest city in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Key to making it an even more attractive and livable location is a digitization strategy offering 355,000 citizens quick, simple access to public services. An approach that includes implementing paperless processing and digital records in order to improve efficiency and support futureproof, sustainable urban development.

“With the consistent digitalization of our administration, we are not only creating efficient processes, but are also shaping Wuppertal as a sustainable and livable city for all citizens,” says Dr. Sandra Zeh, Head of HR, Digitalization and Economy, City of Wuppertal. “By digitizing processes, we not only wanted to increase transparency and traceability, but also improve and accelerate citizen services,” said Frank Hufschmidt, Project Leader, Office for IT and Digitization at the City of Wuppertal. “An additional goal of eliminating paper was to reduce environmental impact.”

Digital accelerators

Previously, staff at the City of Wuppertal had to physically visit onsite archives to hunt down documents such as building permits and social welfare information. A labor-intensive process that took around 15 minutes on average to complete. Likewise, tracking down older files like resident registrations and traffic records meant using readers to trawl through reams of microfilm.

Another big driver for the scanning project was the planned move of the city’s Social Welfare and Immigration departments to a new paperless office. In response a detailed tender was launched to find a digital partner by KDN, an umbrella association of municipal IT service providers. Legally compliant records digitization was a crucial mandatory requirement.

“Along with our appointed partner, we needed to prove that an assessment had been conducted to determine whether it made sense to digitize a file in a legally and audit-proof manner in accordance with TR-RESISCAN guidelines,” added Hufschmidt. “That also involved attaching an electronic signature to the digital document during scanning to prove its authenticity.”

Seeing is believing

After a rigorous tender adjudication KDN selected Iron Mountain® as its digital scanning partner. To be on the safe side, the City of Wuppertal project team wanted to be certain that a transfer note would always be attached to every document, confirming that the digital copy corresponded exactly to the paper original.

“We saw with our own eyes how TR-RESISCAN compliance was fulfilled during a visit to Iron Mountain’s Scanning Center in Radom in Poland,” Hufschmidt recalled. 

“We also observed their strict access and employee security controls which were enforced using RFID (radio frequency identification) chips. Shortly after, Iron Mountain experts in Rosbach explained their recommended best practice for converting microfilm files into PDFs.” 

Full control

The scanning service is simplicity itself. City of Wuppertal staff prepare boxed files and assign labels with QR codes. Iron Mountain collects the records from site, logs them, and creates a second unique barcode for tracking purposes. 

The records are then transported to the Radom Center where they are scanned and uploaded as digital images to a secure FTP server. Iron Mountain holds onto the paper originals for three months, before securely destroying them.

“It works wonderfully,” added Hufschmidt. “From the labels we can tell exactly which records are held, in which format. Last week, we requested two digital copies of files that had not yet been scanned and received them within two working days. 

More efficient home working and collaboration

So far, Iron Mountain has digitized around 27,000 files, with more to come.  “Iron Mountain works very quickly and reliably,” says Hufschmidt. “At short notice, they stepped in for another service provider and transported 30,000 files from Berlin to Radom. They processed everything at an incredible pace and created a complete inventory in just two weeks.”

Since embarking on its digital project, the City of Wuppertal has experienced significantly less downtime plus productivity gains from faster searches, especially for files relating to building permits. Also, employees are processing citizen requests much quicker because there is no travel or waiting time to access records. 

All of which is a far cry from when staff used to have to fetch and dispatch paper documents, preventing further work until the originals were returned. Or, in situations where they had to create duplicate files by photocopying and stapling together multiple pages of paper, which was hugely time consuming. 

“Digitization not only makes our home workers more efficient, but also all our service units where several people may need to review records, for example, if a case must go to court,” said Hufschmidt. “Now, they can get everything in just a few mouse clicks.” 

Legal and audit-proof digital records

In addition, the City of Wuppertal has the assurance of legal and audit-proof document management. Before, if a page of paper was removed from a case file, the person would need to add a deletion note. A step that was easy to miss. With digital records, this process is taken care of automatically within the document management system, simplifying and improving regulatory compliance.

Other advantages include savings on storage space, reducing the number of rooms that will need to be rented in the imminent office move. “We are very satisfied and would like to continue the collaboration,” concluded Hufschmidt. “We also plan to work with Iron Mountain in other areas, for example with the building authority.