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Singapore’s labour dept cuts office visits by 75%
Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower has reduced the number of daily visitors to its offices to submit documents by 75 per cent through the introduction an electronic document submission system.
The iSubmit platform, which took three months to implement at a cost of S$37,000 (US$27,000) in February this year, enables customers to submit supporting documents for work pass applications and appeals online, and provides them with receipts and notifications of the estimated processing time. MOM staff can retrieve uploaded documents using enterprise search technologies.
The idea for iSubmit followed research into how customers go about submitting requests and documents. “One important insight,” explained Aubeck Kam, Deputy Secretary, MOM, “was that the work of our customer does not stop at submitting a document at MOM. It continues into accounting to the stakeholders involved and filing these requests.”
“We were able to incorporate simple but useful features in our solution, such as an optional additional email address to keep their clients, bosses and colleagues informed, and an email summary of their request for ease of filing.”
Coming up with an intuitive portal that was easy to use was a big challenge, admitted Aubeck Kam. “The original prototype had over 40 options for the customer to choose from. During prototyping, we found that this caused confusion. So we restructured some of our work processes, and reduced the number of options to nine.”
As a result of iSubmit, the number of daily visits to submit documents to MOM has fallen from 400 to 100. For the remaining customers who need help submitting their documents online, they can visit MOM’s eService lobby to use eScan.
Introduced in May 2010, the Fuji Xerox multi-function device allows customers to have a similar experience as online. They can scan their documents and use the same applications as on iSubmit.
EScan cost S$80,000 (US$58,000) and took 4 months to implement, including two and a half months developing an application interface that enabled scanned documents to be uploaded directly into MOM’s electronic registry. To date, an average of 30-40 per cent of the 100 Singaporean residents who visit MOM daily use eScan.
“We went through extensive prototyping with customers and vendors during the development phase to seek opinions and ideas to improve the prototypes before we settled for the final workflow and designs,” Kam told FutureGov.
“It was a good learning experience and we were able to fine-tune to service to meet our customers’ needs. Building the new interface was a challenge, and there were some minor integration issues. But these were resolved and we were able to automatically route and categorise the scanned documents.”
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