A new application turns hard-to-manage physical documentation into a searchable cloud and mobile-enabled database to save time spent searching for operational and achieved facility management documents.

The app, by ARC Document Solutions' SKYSITE, is called InfoLink, and was recently adopted by the city of Palo Alto.

John Montenero, the chief procurement officer for the city of Palo Alto, says he wanted to create a digital city—one that stored all the data from the physical city and allowed his team to better manage that data.

Montenero says he knew his staff was spending too much time searching for documentation, so he tried to find a solution.  

“We shared stats from Gartner that say the average knowledge worker spends 30 minutes a day related to document retrieval,” says Kumar Wiratunga, Corporate VP of Technology Solutions at SKYSITE. “But Montenero wanted to do his own study. He found out it wasn’t 30 minutes a day, but that 30% of staff time was spent on document related activities.”

Wiratunga says 25% of Montenero’s floor space was occupied by physical documents such as large architectural and engineering drawings and smaller business management papers and DVD’s. “It was not only aesthetically unpleasing, it was functionally impossible to manage,” says Wiratnga. “And many of those docs were from past jobs.”

So Montenero started to implement InfoLink.

“We sent our experts out to his offices and they helped him create a method for managing the documents,” says Wiratunga. Then, to implement the pragmatic part of scanning thousands of pieces of paper of varying sizes, SKYSITE hooked up Montenero with a Palo Alto-based professional service that converts physical to digital.

InfoLink made all that data searchable with a pinch and pull, mobile-enabled dashboard, and now Montenero has 25% more floor space than before.

“The workers’ morale is higher than before. They said their once-cluttered building looks like a Google office,” says Wiratunga.