The major challenge faced by the Department of Finance & Administration was processing, tracking and dealing with the large volume of information related to ministerial operations, including the Ministerial Briefing, Question Time briefing, Parliamentary questions and cabinet meetings, as well as all ministerial correspondence.

The department’s previous system provided limited means for searching, tracking and storing information and limited reporting capabilities for management. It required a Business Process Management (BPM) solution that could closely integrate with a Document Management System in order to improve efficiency and provide agility to cope with increasing standards of service and changing business conditions.

The vision was to create a single point for initiating requests related to these areas inside the business: The Parliamentary Workflow System (PaWS). By implementing a methodology for the flow of work in the Department of Finance, the administration levels would be reduced and an effective audit trail could be developed for senior management.

Metastorm partner, IceFire, examined the ministerial brief process in consultation with the department then refined it and converted it into an intuitive program using Metastorm BPM™.

With Metastorm BPM in place, a user fills in the registration details for the Ministerial Briefing; this includes details such as the Minister for whom it was prepared for, signatory and the Minister’s Office Adviser. The intuitive Metastorm BPM system asks questions depending on the options selected, and the registration details are sent to the corresponding Action Officer. Once the folder is received by the Action Officer, they can perform the necessary action. These actions automatically generate a Word template with all the registration details merged into them, saving time and effort.

Once the template is generated, the user can save it into PaWS using the PaWS save icon on the toolbar. This validates if the user is authorized to save the document and automatically saves it into the PaWS Document Management System. This icon has cut out at least eight clicks that the user had to previously perform manually to save each document into PaWS. Users may edit the documents and create new versions of it until they are happy with the final copy. Once the final copy of the document is created, the user then forwards the folder to their corresponding Branch Manager for Approval, and further up the chain for approval as appropriate. At any stage the folder can be rejected and sent back to the Action Officer for amendments.

Using the new system, The Department of Finance & Administration is seeing benefits in a number of areas. All paper-intensive, error-prone tasks are now automated, providing a more effective information flow through the department, and reducing human error. An integrated Document Management system allows ministers to search and locate documents and information more quickly, enabling them to respond to questions in a shorter time frame, thus providing a more effective service to the citizen.

In addition to this, internal benefits have been realized. The new system promotes better staff collaboration with process consistency, as the BPM technology reduces the time spent on trying to track and find information, and more time is spent in more profitable endeavors, thus reducing the drain on resources. The administration screens developed by IceFire also allow the PaWS administrators to perform help desk query tasks themselves thus reducing support calls and saving costs. Reporting tools like Cognos have been integrated to provide an audit trail in order for management to review the performance of the Department.