Washington State Dept. of Ecology Makes Water Use Permitting Air Tight With ActiveDocs Opus Document Automation Software

KANSAS CITY, Mo., Jan. 11, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The agency responsible for allocating the State of Washington's water rights is using the ActiveDocs Opus document automation system to reduce permitting errors and bring greater efficiency and consistency to its permitting process, ActiveDocs announced today.

Washington State's Department of Ecology Water Resources Program is responsible for allocating all of the state's publicly controlled surface and ground water. The department issues permits to cities, farms, industries and others that define when and how much water can be withdrawn. Employees at the Water Resources Program are implementing ActiveDocs to replace a manual permit creation system that forced users to search through multiple systems for site information, and then transcribe that data into permits and e-mails. Errors were easy to make and hard to catch with the old system, according to Environmental Planner Jeff Marti of the State's Water Resources Program.

"When you're keying in combinations of letters and numbers that define locations and other details, mistakes don't jump out at you," Marti said. "The ramifications of errors are serious. We have had cases where documents have not clearly described the permit conditions and the permit holder thought they were allocated more water than they actually were. That can end up in court. With ActiveDocs Opus, we can now add legal language, site descriptions, permit conditions, etc. without leaving the document creation environment."

"Because our permits are issued by regional offices located in different areas of the state, it is essential that we have a way to engineer that each office is using the same language and content in the documents we create. The ActiveDocs content manager makes that possible," Marti said.

ActiveDocs Opus enables the Water Resource Program's 43 users to import information directly into permit templates and e-mails without having to exit documents. Easy-to-follow wizards lead users through the document creation process, displaying query windows for bringing in information without requiring the user to search for it manually.  

"There is no logic in forcing skilled professionals to do low-value work like searching for basic information manually," said Faine Mende, president, ActiveDocs North America. "The Washington State Water Resources Program has increased accuracy while virtually eliminating low-skill work. Risks have decreased and now their staff can concentrate on the value-added tasks that are worthy of their skills and training."

About ActiveDocs

ActiveDocs (www.activedocs.com) develops template management and document automation software that reduces the time and expense of creating documents, while mitigating the potential risk caused by inaccurate information. The company's solutions lower the possibility of complaints, legal issues and financial losses caused by manual document creation. ActiveDocs has more than 60,000 users at 450 companies, including 122 of the U.S. Fortune 500. For more information please contact ActiveDocs at [email protected].

SOURCE ActiveDocs