UKPlanning scanning service

Many people think of e-Planning as online submission of planning applications but displaying the information submitted offline is an essential part of electronic service delivery.

With years of experience in planning departments, IDOX knows and understands the issues involved in undertaking scanning within a Council.

First, there is the significant investment in hardware and software. Secondly, how do you resource a new post or manage the process whilst many other day-to-day tasks mount up?

Finding resources, and training them, can be risky when attempting to meet performance targets - staff may be off sick or the submission of a large application could double any backlog.

UKPlanning will remove the administrative burden by scanning, indexing and publishing all documents within the Statutory Register to a guaranteed service level of three working days. And you can be assured of a quality service as we either conduct the process in-house or utilise a bureau on our selected panel. We remove the need to manage the process which means you can divert resource into more interesting tasks.

The process is simple:-

The Council registers the application in the normal way, allocating it an application number.
The case files are bundled together, allocated a batch number and posted each day to UKPlanning.
The documents are prepared (removing staples, paper clips etc) and then scanned.
Each case file is indexed with an Application Number and Address, and each individual document is then indexed by the Document Type with a description eg Application Form, Drawing (Section Plan, Floor Plan, etc), OS Extract.
Quality control procedures are in place throughout the process, including an independent final review.
All documents which are deemed to be 'public' are then published to the website immediately whilst the entire workload is transferred to the Council's UKPlanning Server in an overnight synchronisation of databases. This means both members of the public and officers have information available on their desktops.
Finally UKPlanning returns all hard copy documents at the end of each week.

All documents are scanned in as black and white at 200dpi as experience has shown that this quality is sufficient. If the Council feels strongly about colour scanning however, then additional charges are incurred.

Documents over the internet are displayed in PDF format since this package is the most widely available free tool.