The Challenge

Trafford Metropolitan Council were reviewing how information could be redacted. The manual techniques that they were using were holding them up in terms of publishing their Planning Application documents on the Authority website.

Currently Trafford’s redaction process relied upon taking copies of Planning Applications and using Tippex to permanently remove any sensitive or confidential information before sending the files off to an external scanning bureau.

Due to human error they frequently found that once they had received the scanned output back from the bureau that they had missed 25% of the key redaction areas. This caused significant delays to publishing application information online and increased the cost of processing the files.

The Strategy

Trafford Council had already identified a requirement to complete redaction using an electronic tool that could be integrated to their EDRM solution…

A competitor solution had proved cumbersome in redacting their Planning files and didn’t fit well within existing business processes. They were looking for a solution that was quick and easy to use.

They took the free 14-day trial of e-Redact and couldn’t believe just how simple it was to use. They quickly decided to buy e-Redact and to integrate it into the processes used to redact confidential information from scanned Planning Application files.

As well as e-Redacts impressive ease of use, Trafford Council have yet to find a source file format that the e-Redact isn’t able to cope with, and thats with 5 years of use!

The Result

  • Redaction time reduced from 4 hours per day to just 40 minutes!
  • Dedicated redaction tool means that it is fast, simple and effective
  • Works with ALL file formats
  • Very cost effective and much faster to use than their previous solution.
  • Environmentally friendly
  • 100% FoI, DPA & EIR compliant
  • Generated automatically
  • Irreversible
  • Repaid investment quickly

What Trafford Council has to say about Footprint

I couldn’t have anticipated how much time would be saved using e-Redact, it is environmentally sound and does what it says on the tin… e-Redact is just superb,it is a tool that was designed specifically for redaction and it does exactly that, quickly, easily and at a much cheaper price than the competitor solution that we were using!
It is an excellent solution that paid for itself very quickly given the time savings that we achieved and I would have no hesitation in recommending e-Redact to other people looking for a complete online redaction tool.
Paul Maybury, Planning Services Team

ROI for Trafford Council

84% Time Savings

100% FOI, DPA & EIR Compliant