The Challenge

As the largest sanitation department in the world, the NYC Department of Sanitation (DSNY) deals with millions of medical records – all of which must be retained for the lifetime of its 10,000 employees. Before implementing Alfresco, these records were primarily paper, which were difficult to navigate and very expensive to maintain.

In 2012, in an effort to simplify its operations and move its medical records from a paper-based environment to an electronic environment, DSNY implemented Alfresco to streamline business processes and improve document retention and compliance.

Using Alfresco, DSNY was able to create an electronic medical record (EMR) system to manage the health records of thousands of current and former employees, moving millions of paper records online and enabling users to quickly and easily access critical information.

Years later, DSNY still needed a way to create a standard look and feel across all of its sites that would allow users across all systems – not just its medical information management system – to quickly and easily pull information from paper documents and generate management reports.

The Solution

After evaluating several solutions, DSNY chose to implement Alfresco across all of its paper-based agencies, digitizing the paper records they already had and eliminating paper as much as possible moving forward. Working with Alfresco partner Xenit, DSNY was able to create an Alfresco interface – Alfred Desktop – that is user-friendly and emulates a Windows Explorer-type of environment.

“Alfresco really streamlines the user experience and Xenit has been a wonder for us,” said Marc Nash, DSNY’s computer systems manager. “The configurations were easy and information is automatically pulled and populated into Alfresco. Alfred Desktop is all very easy to use and is very much like Windows Explorer, which is one of the main reasons our users are so happy.”

DSNY’s contract group, a subsidiary of its legal group that manages its city contracts, has also been pleased with how Alfresco has improved its ability to search for documents. Before Alfresco, when a request was made for a contract, it could take as long as two weeks to find it because users had to physically search boxes of paper archives.

“Now, they can simply go into Alfresco and retrieve the contract in minutes,” said Nash. “They can locate it and e-mail it through the application in real time while they are on the phone with the user. This was unprecedented.”

The Results

Today, DSNY’s medical information management system is completely integrated with Alfresco and it has integrated 20 additional subsites within the Alfresco platform, enabling over 175 users across all business units to easily search, access and collaborate on documents.

“Now many different business units can access Alfresco and search all of their documents and they can collaborate with one another without having to rely so much on paper,” said Nash. “Our medical information management system is now 97% paper free and is on its way to becoming 100% paper free.”

As documents are uploaded into Alfresco, users can easily access them based on certain content and web scripts can also be used to extract data and populate documents with searchable meta data. Each DSNY group manages its own site and can easily grant access to other groups and users.

The next step is to upgrade to Alfresco Content Services 6.2 for its additional features, functions and upgraded version of records management and eventually move everything to Alfresco Cloud, Nash said.

“With Alfresco, the contract group and all of the other groups that collaborate with them – engineering audit, finance and purchasing, and capital budget – have access to each other’s sites,” said Nash. “Before, they were doing everything by paper, sending things to each other through a courier, which took days. Now, once the document is entered into Alfresco, everyone can access it in minutes.”