Case Study: Suffolk County Clerk's Office

Ricoh overhauls a document management system and turns a challenge into a revenue stream.

About the Suffolk County Clerk’s Office

The Suffolk County Clerk’s Office in Long Island, New York, provides a wide range of services for local constituents. One of its most important services is managing several centuries’ worth of real estate transaction documents.

"Ricoh was involved from the get-go helping us get the solution up and running."
Suffolk County Clerk’s Office

Challenge

Suffolk County Clerk’s Office is required by law to record and file a large volume of public records, including mortgages, deeds, judgments, liens and other business-related documents. These files consist of paper documents, microfilm and digital files, and are accessed by an equally wide range of people — all of whom need to use these documents, make copies and send them via fax and email.

In an effort to make convenient document access and duplication easier, several “power users” rented office space in the county building, which generated a very small revenue stream for the clerk’s office. Despite this arrangement, the high volume of requests made it difficult for the office’s staff to process documents or retrieve the original, physical files efficiently.

Solution

The Director of Optical Imaging for the Suffolk County Clerk’s Office enlisted our help to devise a comprehensive solution that included
copying, printing, faxing and email.

“We also needed card swipers and a software solution that allowed us to establish hard cost limits, so that if you purchase a $10 debit card, you can only transact $10 worth of documents,” said the director.

From the catalog of Ricoh printing solutions, we went with Pharos Uniprint — a software originally designed for schools, where overcharges were deducted from student accounts. Other components of the solution included a freestanding debit card kiosk, an all-in-one multiunction printer (MFP) equipped for card-based payment, plus integration with the office’s back-end systems.

Results

The end solution, called the Unified Land Record Retrieval Kiosk, continues to be a great success for the high-volume clerk's office.

Users can locate the document they need, make a copy, distribute it by fax or email and pay for their transactions — all from a single, easy-to-use system that generated $780,000 in its first year. The office achieved complete ROI in a matter of months, and just completed their third full year with a revenue close to $1 million.

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