Document delivery in seconds, not days

Playing a proud part of Australia's electoral process for more than 20 years, SEMA has helped the AEC with an instant digital document management system.

The Australian Electoral Commission is responsible for conducting federal elections and referendums and maintaining the Commonwealth electoral roll, and has offices in each state and territory. Their challenge was to establish an efficient and flexible electronic system for document management.

The Commission's legacy system for the archiving of enrolment forms could only be accessed at the AEC head office. This meant that if a divisional returning officer needed to access a file, they had to put in a request to head office and wait for the document to be faxed or emailed through. This process could take up to two days, and in peak periods prior to elections could take weeks.

The AEC also needed to consolidate file storage and archiving. This included converting over 20 million Canofile and older microfiche images to TIFF format and scanning and archiving over 2.5 million enrolment forms annually.

The solution

SEMA implemented a SecurDOCS® solution enabling all Australian Electoral Commission staff to seamlessly access documents from an electronic archive in seconds rather than days. SEMA also converted and indexed AEC's enrolment documents from varying formats and made them available for viewing via the internet within a secure network.

The solutions architect and project management team leveraged the power of SEMA's integrated service offering to deliver on the promises of this quality solution.

The SEMA solution included the following features:

• Ability to access over 35 million enrolment documents within seconds, rather than days
• Conversion process from proprietary formats to Group IV TIFF images, opening the system to all AEC users throughout Australia and overseas
• 24/7 multi-user access to all enrolment documents at any given time
• User access from anywhere within the AEC network – no geographical boundaries
• Tailored search keys as per AEC specifications
• Improved workflow process end-to-end

The outcome

• AEC has moved away from the proprietary software solution – all images are stored in industry standard formats
• Minimal capital expenditure as no hardware and infrastructure was required
• SecurDOCS has reduced hardware and software maintenance and licensing costs
• The speed of access and enquiry is far superior, as all authorised personnel can access an image immediately online

SEMA and AEC

SEMA has provided services to the Australian Electoral Commission for over 20 years.

SEMA is the AEC's imaging provider for the certified list imaging contract since the 2004 Federal election. In 2004, SEMA managed the scanning of approximately 13 million pages across five state locations within a three week turnaround, and made these available for access by AEC personnel via the same image viewing system that hosts the enrolment forms. SEMA has project managers for the AEC in every branch, under the national guidance and direction of the national team based in Brisbane. The SecurDOCS system is also used as the repository for the certified list scanned images, which is a major contract managed out of the Sydney branch.

Since 2007, the AEC has awarded SEMA the contract for federal election postal voting. The AEC have stated that it was the quality of SEMA people, the innovation of SEMA solutions, and SEMA's depth of understanding of their business needs that were the decisive factors in awarding this contract.