The Municipality completed a Service Delivery and Modernization Review in 2020. One of the recommendations in this report was to digitize records management. The Municipality successfully applied and received Municipal Modernization Funding through the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing for a Digital Records Management Project. The successful proponent will be responsible for the delivery of a cloud-based software solution and services for an Electronic Document and Records Management System that will meet the Municipality’s records management program requirements. This includes supporting all aspects of managing records through its lifecycle from creation/receipt to destruction or transfer to archives and ensuring that the Municipality can effectively administer services and comply with its legislative obligations. 

The successful proponent shall be expected to lead the Municipality in the requirements gathering, prioritization, scanning, installation, configuration and testing of the EDRMS solution, integration and roll out of the Central Filing System, Property Files, and other identified critical applications. The approved solution should provide for paperless workflows as the Municipality aims to reduce for physical records and paper driven work processes. 

The Municipality is seeking to modernize the management of all types of records – physical and digital, which requires the implementation of an enterprise-wide solution. Emails are currently stored by each employee and not classified by the Central Filing System, nor is the Retention By-law applied. It is our goal to obtain a records management system to efficiently store emails. It is required that the system will apply Municipally approved retention periods on electronic documents as per Retention By-law 2018-13, as amended. The system should also allow staff to suspend retention if the records meet specific criteria (e.g., Legal holds, pending FOI, etc.). 

It is expected that the system will restrict which staff are authorized to dispose of official records, and that the system will generate a record of the destruction. The destruction process will consist of disposing of the records permanently or obliterating records so that the information can no longer be electronically recovered or reconstructed. Destruction decisions must be formally approved before any action is taken. The selected EDRMS will provide the Municipality with the ability to manage the creation, profiling, indexing, distribution, storage, retrieval, archiving and destruction of all documents and records. 

The EDRMS needs are: 

1. System to manage records in paper format including paper files/folders with end-tab, record drawings, ArcGIS files, electronic records, using the Central File classification system throughout the lifecycle of the record – beginning with creation, including active use, and into inactive use and disposition with a view towards creating efficiencies in the search and retrieval of documents and files; 

2. Provide ability to enter and retrieve data quickly, thus reducing retrieval times; 

3. Ability to search for a document/file; 

4. Automatically apply the records retention schedule to all records and storage folders/boxes; 

5. Ability to assign a security access classification to either individual records or a series; 

6. Provide a search engine to enable staff to easily find a record; 

7. Create reports necessary to maintain a database or records and track records for destruction, or records that have been destroyed; 

8. Provide user-friendly tutorials or “help” to assist users with error messaging and to provide training support; 

9. Provide the ability to customize software to meet specific needs without sacrificing benefits of a standard package, recognizing the need to allow for over-riding destruction dates to extend the period (hold), for example. While it is a requirement that the solution selected will have the capacity to capture scanned copies of physical records, this process of scanning records will only be considered as a provisional item. References to these services (off-site scanning) will be appreciated but not part of the evaluation