Successes - City of Ogden, Utah
City Uses Fortis to Come to Terms with Contract and Records Management

Ogden, Utah is located at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains with views of the Great Salt Lake to the West. The city has a population of 82,702 people and is the center for business and government for much of northern Utah.

“Document management is a crucial function of government. In the age of transparency, the need to have documents available at our fingertips is even more pressing,” explained Cindi Mansell, city recorder for the City of Ogden. “Efficient management of records enables citywide collaboration. Having all city documents available in one repository provides a daily benefit, particularly to respond to Government Records Access and Management requests, and e-discovery.”

Ogden had experience with two other document management systems, so city officials and staff understood its value. However, these systems were complex and required significant IT support. When there was staff turnover in the city’s IT department, a significant knowledge gap occurred and no one had the expertise to accommodate the software to changing needs. “We wanted a user-friendly, efficient, economical system, and Fortis fit the bill,” explained Mansell.

The City of Ogden worked with Ricoh® to implement Fortis. “With Fortis, I serve as the system administrator. It’s simple enough to allow a non-computer expert to do so,” she said. “I add new users and change user permissions as well as tweak document types or index fields.”

Ogden uses Fortis Webflow to automate contract management. The Recorder’s Office staff enters the name of the contract originator, the contractor, and which account pays for it. They also record the time span of the project and what it is for. Reminders to ensure that a project is in compliance with contractual terms are set up when the document is indexed into Fortis.

Eliminating contract management headaches
“Let’s say that the requirement on a contract is to be completed in six months, but we notice that the insurance policy lapses in three months. We’ll set up a reminder for the contract originator to let them know that their insurance policy is expiring, so they remember to renew it,” said Mansell. Everyone in city government who implements, oversees or has signature authority over contracts is part of the workflow. Some contracts have defined steps that require certain phases of the project to be completed within a specified number of days. The City Recorder’s Office sets up reminders to staff who need to monitor the progress of the work.

Fortis Webflow is flexible enough to accommodate the change orders and extensions that may be associated with a contract. “We administer approximately 700 contracts per year,” Mansell said. “My group enters the index fields on the contracts and set up the reminders. These automatic notifications generated by the workflow system are wonderful because I’m finished with the contract after I index it. I don’t have to follow up, and I don’t have to track it. That was one of our main purposes in implementing Fortis Webflow. Things were falling through the cracks. There was the possibility of operating under an expired contract or that work was paid for but not completed. Also bonds weren’t always getting released back to contractors in a timely manner.”

The City of Ogden implementation started in the Recorder‘s Office. It then expanded to include Building Permits, Business Licensing, and Purchasing. Documents can be accessed by citywide staff searching for contracts, purchasing checks or purchase orders. The Recorder's Office alone captures 15,000 documents monthly. The system contains over 220,000 documents. Approximately 200,000 of these documents were migrated from the document management system Ogden formerly used into Fortis. The Fortis mass export/import process accomplished the migration with minimal difficulty.

“From the Recorder’s perspective, having documents available from the desktop is much easier. Before Fortis, we would have to go to our inactive records storage located in the basement or to our active records storage on the 10th floor. Now our records are immediately available, searchable and accessible from one repository,” Mansell said.

Using Fortis allows the City of Ogden to comply with Utah’s statewide retention schedule. Previous systems did not have a mechanism to purge documents. Now the recorders office can match up paper records to the electronic copies and delete both copies according to the state mandated retention schedule. Using the Fortis Audit Log and versioning generates a record of the date a document was created, any subsequent changes that are made, and who made them. “The Fortis system is helping Ogden to become compliant, function compliant and remain compliant,” Mansell said.

Ogden receives approximately 100 records requests per month; some are inter-departmental and some from citizens. Having citywide documents available in one repository enables staff to search across all document types and respond to these requests in a timely manner.

“Searches that used to take days and weeks can be performed via keyword or index field search in a matter of minutes,” Mansell said. “I feel confident when responding to requests for information that I am actually providing pertinent documents.”

“In government, you often don’t have the luxury of mapping out the needs of the entire city at once,” Mansell said. “Because of financial constraints, we have to start small and grow incrementally. We appreciate the ability to add Fortis modules and additional users as we need them.”

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