The Challenge

Agriculture Financial Services Corporation (AFSC) is a provincial crown corporation with a private sector Board of Directors that provides farmers, agribusinesses and other small businesses with loans, insurance and other business services. AFSC has provided Alberta farmers with hail insurance for over 60 years, and has grown into a diverse Corporation with several core businesses: crop insurance, farm loans, commercial loans and farm income disaster assistance.

The expansion of business resulted in accumulation of paper records at AFSC. Due to strict records management policies, AFSC had archived paper records that consumed nearly 5000 square feet of office space. Storing such large amounts of paper created not only a space issue for the growing team, but it also made searching for documents more difficult. AFSC required a more efficient system for dealing with the intake, organization and destruction of records.

Working closely with AFSC, it was decided that the best solution would include a combination of Kofax (for scanning, faxing and document input capabilities) and Microsoft SharePoint. Since SharePoint offers document collaboration and organizational capabilities, it would be able to meet the AFSC requirements for retention policies on all documents. Through building a specialized SharePoint environment, AFSC would be able to maintain records more efficiently thus saving time, paper and office space.

The Solution

Working closely with AFSC’s Record Management group to define and refine the business requirements, DevFacto provided a solution that utilized the Microsoft SharePoint platform. The new SharePoint environment assisted in the creation of document policies that allowed for the engagement of business rules pertinent to the various business lines’ document retention and destruction policies.

Employees could now scan documents via Kofax into a central library in SharePoint. These documents would then be routed to the appropriate destination portal based on the metadata contained within each document. Once the document arrived at its destination, business rules were engaged for the creation of tasks relevant to the type of document (required review, destruction dates, etc.). By the end of the project, document filing had been automated and become paperless at AFSC.

Additionally, full search and filter capabilities were provided on over 6 Terabytes of data with the ability to filter result sets whilst still adhering to AFSC’s strict security requirements and policies regarding the viewing of client documents and personal information.

Shorten file retrieval times for documents through SharePoint search capabilities
Easily convert paper documents to digital documents
Migrate and maintain strict physical file compliance and privacy models to an electronic digital file format
Migrate and maintain strict physical file compliance and privacy models to an electronic digital file format

6 Terabytes

of data converted

50%

employee time saved

5000

5000sq feet of relinquished office space

“Right from the start, DevFacto impressed us with their efficient, professional manner–an approach that not only inspired confidence, but generated the results we were looking for. We needed an effective solution and DevFacto delivered even more”
– Leanda Huseby, IT Program Manager, AFSC