Case Study: London Borough of Tower Hamlets achieves borough-wide digitisation and faster geo-spatial searches with Laserfiche

London Borough of Tower Hamlets Optimising Operations to Deliver Flexible Government Services

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets’ Development & Renewal service faced mounting operational strain from vast paper archives and a legacy DMS that couldn’t integrate with its Acolaid land management and ESRI GIS systems. Land Charges relied on 15,000 manually indexed files (typewriter cards) with searches routinely exceeding the 10-day target, Planning had some 400,000 unindexed files dating back to 1948, and Building Control left 50,000 files (three million pages) unscanned — all creating slow, error-prone workflows and limited public access.

LBTH deployed a phased enterprise Laserfiche Rio solution integrated with Acolaid and ESRI, scanning and indexing the backlog and automating workflows. Geo-spatial searches that once took days now run in hours, metadata entry and admin tasks were automated, 40 sq m of storage reclaimed, and procurement overcharges of ~£50k were uncovered. The rollout improved service turnaround, enabled mobile and remote access, boosted staff productivity and transparency, and delivered measurable cost and efficiency gains across the council.

London Borough of Tower Hamlets

Louis Du Preez

IT Project Manager