Case Study: City of Niles achieves faster bill retrieval and reduced fraud with DocuWare

Small City Leverages the Power of Technology

The City of Niles, a small Michigan municipality serving about 33,000 residents, struggled with complex electrical billing that its legacy systems could not recreate or detail — staff could only see dollar amounts, making audits, customer inquiries and fraud checks difficult. The Utilities department needed a flexible document management solution that could grow with the city and provide access to complete historical billing and application records.

Niles expanded its existing DocuWare deployment to the Utilities department, using TIFFMAKER and OCR to capture and automatically index every bill and application for full-text search and rapid retrieval. The change let staff reprint old bills, resolve customer complaints faster, perform thorough audits, reduce fraud, cut filing time (Finance reported a one-third reduction), lower employee stress and turnover, and move closer to a citywide records management system.

City of Niles

James Stump

IT Coordinator