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The Department of Home Affairs has recently awarded a R42 million contract for the acquisition and implementation of the first phase of an online Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) to the Black empowerment company, Choice Technologies. Once in place, the EDMS will to a large extent replace paper records and will simplify application procedures.

This is another step in the Department's efforts to render the best possible service to its clients.

The largest contributing factor to the Department's service impact and business process cost is the current, largely manual Records and Archiving environment, which is utilised by all components of the Department for verification, validation and information processing. High level calculations indicate that the budget impact caused by the largely manual records environment can be between R200 million and R400 million per annum. Since the Records environment is the foundation platform for the National Population Register (NPR) and all additional Home Affairs systems and processes, it was decided that a document management system should be addressed first, before the rewrite of the NPR is considered.

Once fully implemented this transversal, online records system of the Department will provide the following:

* Replacement of the current microfilm and paper records environment, which is utilising excessive floor space within all the Home Affairs offices throughout the country;
* A large reduction in the cost of business transactions to the Department;
* Expansive fraud and corruption reduction relating to al systems and business processes of the Department;
* Effective front-desk client service, thus improving the responsiveness and public image of the Department;
* Effective movement of the greater portion of the Department's workload to the front-desk, which will relieve Head Office staff members of the current backlog and workload and effectively improve transaction turnaround times;
* Effective and fast queries and verifications, due to greatly improved system response times;
* Greatly reduced workload for all Home Affairs staff members, permitting these staff members to attend to other important work;
* Information accuracy and integrity, due to the visual nature of the system;
* Simplification of all business processes, e.g. the issuing of unabridged birth, death and marriage certificates, as well as citizen and permanent residence verification and authentication.
* A centralised and standardised records system, which will remove the need for the numerous costly point solutions currently utilised. This will reduce the overall cost impact to the Department of Home Affairs for these systems.

Although it is essential to implement the system as soon as possible, implementation will be phased in, in view of the cost implications. The first phase, currently being undertaken, will be completed by May 2002.

The Department of Home Affairs is committed to contributing towards improving the lives of the people of South Africa, inter alia, through constantly improving access to and the quality of services that it renders.

Enquiries: Leslie Mashokwe, 082 809 6547

Issued by the Department of Home Affairs, 27 November 2001