Mobile Fieldwork in San Diego

San Diego County prides itself on providing superb, cost-effective services and making every citizen interaction convenient, including offering timely access to services through digital and mobile channels. To help achieve its goals for public engagement and efficiency, the county chose deployments of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and AEM Forms on-premise, which are part of Adobe Experience Cloud.

“With more than 3 million county residents and limited budgets, we must continually improve customer satisfaction while reducing costs and enhancing efficiency,” said Susan Green, the county’s Assistant Chief Information Officer. “To modernize our infrastructure for citizen communications and service delivery, and streamline many of our internal processes, we adopted Adobe solutions.”

Among the first agencies to adopt AEM Forms was the Department of Environmental Health. Previously, department workers had to download information for every restaurant licensed to do business in the county and fill in multi-page forms by hand — a process that could result in delays and backlogs. Auditors used paper forms and photos to conduct inspections in the field, and then scanned the inspection reports into the computer system.

Today, instead of using clipboards and paper to conduct restaurant inspections, auditors use tablets and electronic forms. The e-forms come pre-filled with relevant information on each restaurant to save time. Inspectors access the forms on tablets while they are in the field, simply checking boxes and taking digital photos. They can enter the digital inspection reports into Documentum, Open Text’s enterprise content management platform, without scanning or rekeying data for easy search, accurate tracking and reference. Today this has increased efficiencies, and the department’s backlog is shrinking, benefiting restaurant owners and the county.

“Adobe Experience Manager forms is enabling digitization and automation of business processes by eliminating the need to print, sign, and scan paper forms,” said Michael Proctor, the county’s Chief Technical Architect. “Eliminating manual, paper- based processes with Adobe Experience Manager forms is a big enabler of business change for the county and a major benefit to the public.”

The San Diego Health and Human Services Department is also automating the process of determining citizens’ eligibility for services using AEM Forms. The eligibility case management process is elaborate and complex, requiring hundreds of forms to be filled out at intake centers nationwide. Today, the eligibility process is fully automated using e-forms with prepopulated information automatically entered into backend systems. Citizens can now receive faster answers to their questions about eligibility and access services sooner.