PDF editing and workflow digitisation from Nitro is assisting local government in Australia and the UK to manage documentation securely and cost-effectively with an eye to sustainability, according to the vendor.
“In the IT department for a local council, you’re juggling significant challenges every day,” the Nitro team said via its website. “You need to get the most out of every dollar for technology and find ways to do more with less.”
Local government bodies, like other organisations, are being more or less forced to digitise their workflows, “keeping up with the times” while targeting sustainability and security on a shoestring as well.
The vendor quoted Dane Hamilton, CIO of Shoalhaven City Council in the Australian state of New South Wales, as saying: “We anticipated that it would be challenging to get our staff on board, particularly because much of the senior administrative work involved combinations of PDFs for agendas, minute taking, et cetera. But we were really happy with the support provided by Nitro.”
With the Nitro Pro Business platform, users can create, edit, convert, combine and sign PDFs in one place, easing management of high volumes of internal documents and policies as well as contracts with external parties, the vendor noted.
“Our eSigning solution enables anyone in a document workflow to securely sign digital files with legally binding and compliant signatures, and send documents to multiple parties for signature,” the Nitro team explained.
Security and compliance features include strong encryption capabilities, audit trails and the software meets industry standards and regulations. Additionally, document analytics can help bodies make better decisions, with data-based insights and reporting including ROI and sustainability tracking, they said.
Since switching to Nitro from Adobe, Shoalhaven City Council achieved a 364% increase in productivity because teams had better digital document tools for their needs, Nitro said.
“Our transition to Nitro has been a success. Nitro assisted us with implementation and a communications plan. Ongoing training and support for user adoption really enabled us to deliver,” Dan Jones, Shoalhaven’s IT infrastructure and service delivery manager, was quoted as saying.
“Nitro also provided a self-service learning portal with how-to guides that makes it easy to improve adoption.”
The City of Vincent in Perth, Western Australia, moved to Nitro after discovering that their Adobe Acrobat Pro PDF offering had complicated licensing and was becoming expensive. With Nitro Pro Business, the council now offers document productivity tooling to five times the previous number of employees, the Nitro team said.
Peter Ferguson, executive manager ICT for the City of Vincent, was quoted as saying: “I’m satisfied and confident we’ve made the right choice. Thanks to Nitro, we now have a common platform that gives us all the functionality we need.”
The UK’s public-sector shared services centre for some 25,000 civil servants, UKSBS, has also moved to Nitro. About a third of their 750 staffers use a PDF editing tool as part of their day-to-day work – but licensing was looking increasingly expensive.
Andy McKinna, senior software asset manager at UKSBS, was quoted as finding Nitro “simple and easy to use, with a good user interface and all the capabilities you would expect”.
“The Nitro team members have been fantastic to work with. They provided us with personalised help and training and kept in touch throughout the year,” McKinna said via Nitro’s blog.
( Photo by Ofspace LLC on Unsplash )
