Case Study: Camden Council avoids £11 million in building costs and boosts staff efficiency with OpenText Content Manager

Camden Council avoids £11 million in building costs, and lifts efficiency with Micro Focus Content Manager

Camden Council, a London borough serving 235,000 residents, faced an overwhelming paper-archive problem: some 22,000 meters of records spread across eight sites and multiple off‑site suppliers, inconsistent retention practices, and legacy systems that made documents hard to find. With a planned move to new premises, the council risked spending roughly £11 million to add two floors of storage unless it rationalized and digitized its records.

The council implemented Micro Focus Content Manager as a single EDMS, migrated day‑to‑day data to SharePoint, and ran an 18‑month "Bin Scan Store" campaign that scanned ~550,000 commonly used items and indexed millions of records. The program reduced paper holdings by about 80–85% (keeping 4,000m), avoided the £11M building cost, boosted staff efficiency by ~20%, now tracks 6.15 million records with ~820 active users, and improved search, security, auditability and legal retention.

Camden Council

Richard O'Brien

Paper Reduction Project Leader