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“Easy, Easy, Easy!”

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 6 - September 2007

the beautiful game is given a Helping Hand as the Premier League standardises on Document Management from EASY SOFTWARE

About the Premier League
The Premier League is widely regarded as the elite club competition in world football. It is owned by 20 shareholders - the member clubs, whose membership in the league is dependent on the performance of their football teams in the Barclays Premiership.

The roles and objectives of the Premier League are extensive and include:

• To manage, continually improve and be regarded as the world's best league football competition - on and off the field.
• To use their resources to develop playing talent that will provide for international success with the England team at all levels - with the status of world champions being the realistic goal.

Kick off with Document Management
Keeping a watchful eye on technology, and with a pending office move looming, Simon Thunder, head of IT at the Premier League, took the decision to recommend electronic document management technology to his finance director.

“The impetus for change was initially driven by our office move", Thunder explains. "We were aware of the benefits of reducing paper storage not only because of the physical space that it takes up and the costs per square foot, but also the implication of loss through fire or flood, or some other disaster. The finance department was an obvious starting point, as we were storing thousands of supplier invoices, sales invoices, expenses sheets, and these were predominantly on paper.

Simply storing these electronically and linking them to our finance and expense management system would make for significant cost and efficiency savings."

A clean sheet
The FAPL sought the advice of Touchstone Group, a supplier of integrated solutions for business and financial management, who had supplied its Microsoft Great Plains accounts system and expense management solution.

Work began to scan the backlog and create links between the electronic documents and their records in both the finance and expense management systems. Physical records were then removed to off-site storage.

"We had achieved our initial goal, with all records electronically stored and safe from loss, and were already beginning to realise the workflow efficiencies that could be achieved by being able to simply access all related documents from one finance system," adds Thunder.

Getting the ball rolling
The football department of the FAPL stores a wealth of documents and historical records on the league, its members and players. As one of most significant current and historical FAPL document stores, the football department was next on Thunder's list to be automated with EASY's electronic document management system.

EASY SOFTWARE worked closely with him and his team to integrate EASY ENTERPRISE into the player contract system - FAS. The sensitive nature of these documents is such that all scanning is being done internally

Kicking some ideas around
Under Thunder's stewardship, the Premier League’s long-term ambition is for an electronic document future where each department over time converts to storing and retrieving its documents electronically and archiving off-site documents for long-term retention.