Whether it’s at the state, local or federal level, government departments and agencies swim in paper.
These agencies rely on paper forms, applications, reports, records and numerous government documents.
Let’s face it, we’ve all experienced filling out extensive paperwork when we’ve renewed our driver’s license, filed a claim or enrolled our kids for school. Sometimes you can find PDFs online, but often if you print out the document, then you’ll have to scan, fax or mail it back.
But the public sector can no longer operate this way. Government agencies are under extreme scrutiny to reduce costs, streamline operations and improve customer service. Reducing paper government documents is part of that process.
Why Is Reducing Paper Government Documents Important?
The Paper Reduction Act of 1995 in the United States resulted from public complaints about the amount of government paperwork. It requires that agencies obtain Office of Management and Budget approval before requesting most types of information from the public.
Many departments and agencies are adopting solutions like CRM platform Salesforce to manage their records and data. However, that data still comes in via paper documents, which require manual distribution, manual collection and, worse yet, manual transcribing of unstructured data.
The process is slow and cumbersome, prone to errors and a huge compliance and regulatory risk. Paper government documents are also a security nightmare just waiting to happen. They often contain critical and confidential data that government agencies need to store and protect behind firewalls.
The solution is to marry automated document generation with Salesforce. Automated document generation doesn’t change your existing processes – it just makes them exponentially better. The same documents used today are simply converted into document templates that sit in Salesforce, ready for a person to seamlessly customize.
What Government Documents Can Agencies Automate?
Here are three examples of types of government documents that departments and agencies can automate with document generation, transforming how internal employees and citizens interact with their documents.
1. Applications
When submitting applications to government agencies, citizens typically complete an extensive amount of compliance and application papers manually. Multiple agencies may need to review and approve the application.
With document generation and Salesforce, an agency sends the entire packet of documents to be filled out electronically. Citizens then complete the government documents online, sign and submit.
Once the documents are received, they’re routed to the other agencies for approval; the information is automatically uploaded into Salesforce; and the completed documents are attached to the citizen record for reference and storage. This significantly reduces the amount of time it takes agencies to process applications and creates operational efficiencies both internally and externally.
The Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH), which manages New South Wales’ (NSW) national parks and recreational areas, automated its park pass process.
The parks are available for anyone to use but many require that visitors first obtain a park pass. Before deploying a Nintex Drawloop® Document Generation solution with Salesforce, OEH manually created each pass and mailed them to the people who’d requested them. But the manual process bogged down their office and visitors sometimes had to wait two to three weeks to receive their pass in the mail.
Since adopting a document generation solution, the OEH has gone from generating 50 passes a day to 250 a day, with passes arriving in less than a week. The new solution has not only streamlined that process. It also eliminated the manual work and processes involved.
2. Case or Claim Management
Those who work in social services are buried under a mountain of casework papers. Most manually collect client information, and then internally submit the written paperwork to various agencies and departments for benefits, claims and other case management needs.
With document generation and Salesforce, a caseworker only needs a mobile device to accomplish all of the above. On-site with the client, you can electronically fill out any application, claim or other document and automatically route and submit the form to your partner agencies.
The caseworker and the agency avoid paper chases and can easily track claims from open to closed cases electronically. And because the data is now structured, you can easily access, pull and compile data for budget approvals.
The result? Accuracy, speed to submission and most importantly, increased client service. A win/win for everyone involved.
3. Compliance Documents
For many departments, paperwork is a no-win situation. Complete required paperwork and lose hours that could be spent on projects that benefit the citizens you serve. Don’t complete it and risk losing funding. A great example of this is education.
Superintendents are required to file compliance documents for their districts. Today, they have to go into their systems, manually review and extract the data, and then either fax or email the paperwork to the state.
Electronically accessing these forms would not only save tremendous time, but also provide a structured means to reference the data for funding initiatives – a critical piece to operating any school district.
VIF International Education deployed a Salesforce and document generation solution to streamline the process of generating recruitment, visa, insurance, benefits and related paperwork required for international teacher relocation. In the end, the solution saved VIF 40 hours a week of manual work merging and updating documents.
This just brushes the surface. Check out the box in this blog post for more government documents you can automatically create with document generation.
Nintex Drawloop® Document Generation and Salesforce are transforming how state, local and federal public agencies and departments capture data on a digital platform and disseminate it for approval, electronic signature and storage. Most importantly, with document generation, you now have immediate access to important data you need for funding and other needs.
Click here to try Nintex Drawloop® free for 30 days!
