City of Clearwater
Lifecycle Records Management
The City of Clearwater, Florida, required software to comply with statutes governing the lifecycle management of records. Florida provides statutory regulation and guidance within Florida Statute PS 119. Clearwater needed to replace a legacy system called Advantage. The city discontinued Advantage, terminated support for the software, and used an RFP to procure a new system.
The project consisted of replicating existing record fields and tables from the Foxpro DB application, Advantage, and migrating 20 years of metadata and history into Simplicity RMS. The requirements for the software included conformity to existing data models and statutory compliance for records management. The city’s records management staff worked directly with us to configure the application, migrate and verify the data, and train their staff on the software. They required several automated processes and compliance with Florida records title schedules, which include:
- Record Series Titles
- Record Series Descriptions
- Retention Term
- Retention Calculation Method (Annual, Calendar, Fiscal Year, and PERM retention)
- Destruction Method
- Legal Holds
- Deviations to Destruction Method or Retention Term
For origination, the city required push-button calculation of box and record retention, which consisted of the following:
- Adding the proper record series title
- Auto calculation of the destruction date
- Auto application of the destruction method
- Ability to batch or bulk update these as the State modified requirements and recursively recalculate the changes on each box or record in the system.
For the annual destruction sequence, the city required:
- A push-button report of destruction notices (by department) of eligible boxes for destruction with configurable headers and signature blocks for distribution to department directors for review, approval, or amendment
- A push-button sequence of pull notifications (by department) showing the eligible boxes after reviewing in order by location and destruction method.
- A push-button closing sequence that listed the boxes destroyed, the destruction method, date of destruction, and then issued certificates of destruction.
The city required a method to insert new boxes into their existing shelving system for archive maintenance and long-term space management. At the point of box origination, they determined the box type. They used that information to shelve the new box. Box types included:
- Standard Bankers Box
- Check Box
- Microfilm Storage
The software configured the 3-dimensional space as a matrix. The box type would determine the next available section and shelf for new records. On origination, we also queued a new box label for print.
Additional Features
- Check-in/check-out and assignment to people or departments as locations
- Optional folder-level indexing to records in boxes
- Number of folders in a box
- Add folders to a box
- Remove and check out folders
- Adhoc reporting
- Contact information for records issues and department heads
- Audit trails or records history by the box or folder (and reporting)
- User-level usage auditing and reporting