2005 C.I.P.A. Winners

(back to 2005 C.I.P.A. Winners)

British Columbia Ministry of Forests

Electronic Forest Management (e-FM)

With an annual budget of $648 million, about 3,200 employees and more than 75 offices province-wide, the British Columbia Ministry of Forests oversees 1,200 forest licences, which generate about $1.3 billion every year. The licensees range from small operators to the industry giants. As well as fees, their obligations include managing 175,000 reforestation sites, with 7,500 new applications a year.

Until recently, there was yet another obligation: The industry also had to provide the ministry with 74,000 pages of reports every year.

Challenge

A large number of those 74,000 pages were semi-annual reports, which the operators would crank out and send to the ministry's district offices. There, the data would be reviewed by resource officers and then sent to Victoria, where it would be manually entered into the ministry's system.

"Speaking optimistically, if everyone in the chain was 100-per-cent efficient, it would take five days," says Nelson Lah, director and CIO of the ministry's Information Management Group.

For generations, there had been no other way to do it, but technology had now made the system a huge waste of money and time. The Information Management Group was instructed to create the alternative.

Objectives

From the beginning, Lah says, "Our intent was to bring the industry into the new electronic order." The new reporting system needed to:

• Improve industry profits;
• Reduce government costs;
• Adapt to government and industry staff cuts;
• Eliminate obsolete technology;
• Streamline submissions, work flow and records management;
• Improve staff and clients' access to information;
• Implement forest policy and legislative changes more quickly;
• Deliver training to an audience spread across a vast province.

Solution

The new Web-based system is called e-FM: The Electronic Forest Management System.

An indication of how well the IM Group succeeded in updating its processes can be found at www.for.gov.bc.ca/his/esd. There are no fancy graphics, just a simple menu. Industry and government users can find all the data they might need and, in seconds, perform tasks that used to take hours, if not days.

e-MF comprises 10 Web-based solutions:

With the Electronic Submission Framework, licensees now submit data electronically in one consistent format. Approval times are significantly cut, and the status of submissions can be checked via the Web.

The Tenure Mapping Service validates and displays a graphical map of electronic submissions. Users can go to this portion of the site and upload files for processing.

The Seed Planting and Registry System provides online access to a registry of forest tree seeds and a comprehensive seedling ordering system.

The Harvest Billing System is a Web portal for invoicing, collecting scale data, processing samples and providing audits for the ministry, industry and the public. There are 1,000 scale sites, where thin, utility-pole type logs are weighed in bundles and larger logs are individually measured, with all data immediately going into the system.

The Corporate Reporting System permits licensees to view and produce reports based on information submitted via the Electronic Submission Framework.

RESULTS receives detailed silviculture reports, maps and land status data from licensees' sites. It also processes and tracks stocking standard proposals, provides silviculture compliance/inspection milestones and monitors silviculture accomplishments. Licensees can view, produce and update a variety of reports.

MapView is a source of maps and many other graphic representations of, among other things, topography, vegetation and uses of every corner of the lands under licence.

e-Records replaces most of the ministry's paper-based filing methods.

e-Learning includes both a learning management system and a real-time online classroom for geographically separated students.

Nelson Lah likes to describe the benefits of e-FM by saying that, where it used to take five days to crank out, submit and process those semi-annual reports, it now takes five seconds. "Just press the button. Five seconds at the most."

The 74,000 pages are just a bad memory. Data-handling staff has been reduced to between 50 and 100 people, from 400 to 500. The number of ministry approvals has dropped to 400 a year from 6,500. The annual mainframe computer cost has been cut by $3 million.

Lah says, with amusement, that the e-FM system was also a big help to the federal government during a process called administrative review, which is part of softwood lumber talks with the US.

"The Americans came to us with some very probing questions, some of which they may have believed we would not be able to answer. For example, they asked us, 'What is the average size of a Canadian log?'

"Obviously many logs on the coast of BC are very large but the majority of our logs come from the interior, which are relatively small in size. Our electronic forest management systems were able to quickly generate a report based on 16 million examples, including length, top diameter, bottom diameter and species. I think they were shocked by how fast the answer came back.

"To tell the truth, we even surprised ourselves at how well the systems responded to the challenge."

Innovative Use of Technology

To accomplish its goals, the ministry needed to break some new ground. The Information Management Group developed a new XML standard to enable all of its partners to have one, easy-to-implement data input format.

The group also integrated several different spatial databases within the ministry into one central data warehouse to enable better access to all spatial data output for everyone. All of the e-FM project successes were founded on new Web-based application development standards.

A 2005 CIPA Winner!

For exceptional and innovative application of information technology to solve real-world business problems and bring greater benefit to all stakeholders, the British Columbia Ministry of Forests has been awarded a Silver Award of Excellence from the 2005 Canadian Information Productivity Awards in the Organizational Transformation Not For Profit category.

(back to top)