Sonoma County is wrapping up its pilot year on five separate projects, based on ThinkSmart’s TAP. In the five months since the projects started, most are around 90 percent crossed over.
The county had been working toward paperless business processes. Before adopting TAP, county representatives were uploading documents, creating digital forms, and looking for electronic signature programs. Staff reimbursements could take more than two weeks. The county chose TAP to try to unite all those functions. The auditor’s office predicts the transition to TAP will cut the business process timeline in half.
Adobe Sign and ThinkSmart approached the county to sell the Adobe Sign product, but “ThinkSmart with Adobe Sign layered into it and the ThinkSmart product, TAP, with the automated workflow was really the big hit at the meeting and so we decided to adopt that technology at the end of last calendar year,” Carolyn Staats, records manager for Sonoma County, told Techwire.
The .NET software creates a form based on department needs, a workflow it passes through and a dashboard where the form and associated data can be viewed. Forms can be sent to multiple users and be updated live across the platform.
ThinkSmart’s forms designer has helped build the forms used by the county. Sonoma County also has two designers who will further train department representatives to automate more forms. They design the forms currently needed in one-hour meetings. The forms and the dashboards associated with each work flow are discussed and built during in those weekly meetings.
Instead of automating the Adobe fillable forms that all agencies were using, “we actually decided to make this a pilot year and to target specific demographics within the county,” Staats said. "The pilots ... really are to hit every segment of the population so that they will know what to do when they receive one of these forms."
The document signature and workflow management program is the basis for the county’s new:
Litigation Hold Process
“We’re using the TAP platform to completely revise how county counsel enacts a litigation hold,” Staats said.
The county’s lawyers can send out documents to each person involved in the litigation along with instructions to follow up. Up to 20 people could be involved in a litigation hold, and their documents are updated as they respond to the counsel’s instructions. Those updates are reflected across the platform.
Staff Development Funds
“This one is targeting a use case that would hit every single employee in the county,” Staats said. “We are revising the whole business process for how employees request reimbursement.”
Working with human resources and payroll, employees are allowed access to funds for professional development or health expenses, but have to request them through both departments. Staff members also have to obtain supervisors' signatures for the request.
Travel Request Forms
“Every department handles travel requests differently, but the form is actually owned by the auditor for the county, so the travel approval form is the auditor’s form, and they will be the recipient after the form has been routed,” Staats said.
A single document was designed in TAP to streamline and add consistency to the process. The data captured on the form is also added into a database that the auditor can present to the Board of Supervisors.
“The auditor for the county, on their phone or iPad during a board meeting, can come up with at-the-moment statistics,” Staats said.
Advertising Fund
Small-business owners can apply for funds to advertise at county events. The current system requires filling out and coding in the information by hand. Standardizing the data entered into the forms will cut down the processing time and increase the data transparency. This form will be externally facing and filled out by county residents.
County supervisors can access the spending database on a mobile device.
Service Collaboration and Delivery
The final project unifies the efforts of the Human Services Department, the Health Department, the Community Development Commission, Child Support Department and the Probation Department by creating referrals that cross department silos.
“When people are at risk and could utilize multiple services across these departments that all have their own line of business applications, TAP product can actually pull together where services can be useful for the person sitting in front of any one of these departments' intake coordinators,” Staats said.
