Case Study: Illinois Environmental Protection Agency achieves centralized access, improved file integrity and FOIA compliance with DocuWare

Illinois Environmental Protection Agency - Customer Case Study

The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) protects Illinois’ land, air and water and employs about 1,200 people across headquarters, nine field offices and three labs, serving 13 remote locations. The Bureau of Land faced mounting records-management problems: 1.5 linear miles of paper and microfilm, costly large-format copying, degraded file integrity from shipping duplicates, and time-consuming responses to heavy Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

IEPA implemented DocuWare (with a Contex large-format scanner and off‑site scanning/indexing workflows) so staff index records in-house and move images into a central electronic file cabinet. The agency has digitized roughly 575,000 documents (over 9.2 million images), archives 140,000+ photos (adding ~25,000/year), eliminated duplicate archives, cut storage and retrieval costs, restored file integrity, and now fulfills FOIA requests easily (distributing PDFs on CD); the system is used daily and averages about two hits per minute.

Illinois Environmental Protection Agency

Tom Reuter

Bureau of Land Records Manager