Online Document Submission: A stepping stone to Electronic Plan Review

How is it different from Electronic Plan/Document Review?

Online or Electronic Plan/Document Submission is excellent for those situations where once the application forms and documents are received, there is no marking-up or red-lining of these documents that needs to be done by agency staff. An example of this would be when a Homeowner submits a Building Permit Application to a City or County. The City or County then reviews the information entered on the application form, collects a fee and Issues the permit. Here the jurisdiction does not need to mark-up the Building Permit Application form and return it to the customer for resubmittal.

However, with Electronic Plan/Document Review the drawing files that are submitted are reviewed and feedback is given through mark-ups on the drawings. The drawing files are often routed to and reviewed by multiple reviewers belonging to different trades / departments. Electronic Review therefore involves some way through which the mark-ups and feedback given by different reviewers is consolidated and made available to the customer and other agency staff. After a Review Cycle is disapproved, the customer is allowed the opportunity to address the issues based on the red-lining and resubmit the plans for the next cycle of reviews.

Thus, a jurisdiction can choose to implement Electronic Submission without implementing Electronic Plan/Document Review. For many government agencies, Electronic Submission is often a great first step towards implementing full fledged Electronic Plan Review at some point in the future. It allows the jurisdiction to put in place the technology and process changes required one step at a time.

Why should my agency consider Online Submission?

Electronic Submission allows your agency to drive efficiencies, allows you to provide a much higher level of service to your customers, and saves you and your customers time and money.

Being able to submit the information online means that your customers:

• Save money spent on Gas, Parking and Transportation
• Eliminate the cost relating to printing the application form and related documents on paper
• Be able to submit the documents from the convenience of their office or home at any time of their choosing
• Prepares your agency to start receiving documents online as a stepping stone to Electronic Plan Review

Allowing your customers to submit the information online allows your agency to:

• Reduce the number of staff resources required for counter related duties
• Provide a much higher level of customer service through better tracking of applications received and their current status
• Align your agency with the efforts to be more green and save paper

What should I consider while putting an Online Submission system in place?

Government agencies would need to take the following things into consideration when deciding to put your Electronic Submission software in place:

a. Choose the appropriate business processes at your agency as candidates for Electronic Submission. This step is important because only those processes where no red-lining or markup of submitted documents is required are good candidates for Electronic Submission. If you do intend on marking up the submitted documents and giving feedback to your customers then going only with Electronic Submission without Electronic Plan/Document Review would be inefficient. This is because your agency would be responsible for printing the submitted plans on paper so that they can be reviewed.

b. Choose the right technology to receive and manage Application Forms taking into account the various trade-offs for each. In this step your agency will need to consider various factors such as whether your staff will:

• Need to perform any Data-entry to transfer information from the submitted forms into your Permitting, Inspections & Licensing Software.
• Be able to design and maintain the application forms themselves without relying on a Software development / IT Team.
• Need to perform any validations on the information entered into your form by your customers
• Be able to find all of the forms and documents in one centralized location (such as in your Permitting, Inspections & Licensing Software or in a shared storage location)
• Be able to use the information received in these forms for downstream Decision Making and Reporting activities

c. Consider Training Staff to transition to doing things in a digital environment. Electronic Plan/Document Submission might be an ideal first step for staff in your agency to transition to operating in an electronic world. The leap from paper to receiving documents electronically is not large and can be seen as an incremental yet significant step towards allowing your staff to become more comfortable using latest technology.