BY: RHEN DE GUZMAN

It used to take hours or even half a day.

In unfortunate cases, people were asked to come back the next day.

This has been the typical scenario in processing documents at government agencies and LGUs, especially during peak hours.

Despite the efforts of office staff, such as those at the City Buildings and Architecture Office, manual document searches have often proven challenging.

But now, thanks to the Modula Slim Storage, a few button presses are all it takes for documents to be made immediately available to those who need them.

The machine itself finds and delivers the documents, which staff can then easily retrieve.

According to Alessandro Duca, Managing Director of Modula Southeast, “The main advantage of the technology is to save space. As we can see here, it can deliver the product to the operator. The concept is not the man going to the goods but the goods coming to the man.”

By simply using codes, the machine knows where the document is stored and retrieves it automatically.

After use, the machine also returns the document to its proper place in the storage.

This product was donated to Baguio by the company El Flash in support of the city’s digitization initiatives.

Engr. Paul Parungao, President & CEO of El Flash Construction Corp., stated, “If you look at the filing systems in our government agencies here in the Philippines, they’re generally organized but mostly manual. What we’re delivering here in Baguio City is something that allows you to quickly retrieve the documents you need. For CBAO, it’s now in the system.”

Baguio is the first city to use an intelligent vertical storage system for government hard copy files.

“Baguio is a smart city, so we want to bring the best technology to Baguio and eventually to the whole country,” Parungao added

Mayor Benjamin Magalong expressed, “We are very fortunate to be chosen as the recipient of this system. With traditional filing systems, files get lost, misplaced, or disorganized, which makes it difficult to serve clients properly. Sometimes, you’re forced to tell them, ‘Sorry, we can’t find your file.’ Here, you just type the name or the title of the file, and it’s instantly retrieved.”

The city government plans to observe how this system impacts CBAO’s services to evaluate whether other city offices might also benefit from this technology for faster and more efficient public service.