Revealed: the high-tech mousetrap

NEWS Manchester City Council is hoping to give the area's rodents a run for their money by installing a new data capture system from Formic and Xerox. The system has been designed to reduce back-office admin delays that prevent staff from identifying locations being overrun by vermin. Customer visits by the council's pest control technicians generate hundreds of job sheets a day. The council hopes the new system will improve the way data from these job sheets is processed and input into a central database and geographical information system, where it can then be analysed to improve service delivery. Previously, each job sheet took up to five minutes to process by hand, amounting to over seven man-hours of manual data entry in a typical day. This led to a growing backlog for already busy office staff, with up to two month's worth of unprocessed job sheets in peak season. Trevor Court, customer services manager at Manchester's environmental health department, said: "The backlog of paperwork was really starting to impact our ability to respond to pest control demands. Keeping our records up-to-date was an uphill battle. Without up-to-date data, it's virtually impossible to accurately pinpoint geographic hotspots or plan resources effectively." He added: "Many types of pests, rodents for example, require up to three visits by our technicians. The technicians therefore need to be able to quickly access information about previous visits so they can arrange follow-up appointments without delay. Previously, this process was taking far too long, but with the new technology the information is available instantly, so we can respond to incident reports much more quickly." The new system consists of multi-function scanning, faxing, printing and copying devices from Xerox, combined with software and services from UK data capture specialist, Formic.