Industry Transport/ government Company Established in 1995 after four public entities were merged into one, the Land Transport Authority manages more than 500 contracts totaling S$8 billion (US$5 billion) at any one time. Employees 3,500 IT staff 73 Annual IT Budget S$50 million (US$31.3 million)

When four public entities were merged in 1995 to form the LTA, the government agency inherited disparate systems that supported various interlocking business processes. The Authority also increased its staff strength from 1,000 to the current 3,500-plus to meet the country's accelerated rail and road construction works.

As a result of the rapid expansion, a multitude of knowledge became embedded in documents and data repositories, and the organization's work processes, policies and practices.

As Singapore's developer of mass rapid transit systems and facilities, the LTA manages more than 500 contracts totaling S$8 billion (US$5 billion) at any one time. Each month, it handles more than 200,000 pages of building plans submitted by private developers for approval.

To better manage this complex mesh of data and work processes, the LTA put in place Orbit--an infrastructure to organize, manage and store all documents into a central repository.

The system enables an accurate and efficient search-and-retrieve information process, allowing data to be easily accessed anywhere and anytime across the organization.

Because LTA's offices are located in different parts of the island-state, corporate documents were previously indexed, photocopied and dispatched from one office to another in order for LTA employees to input their comments.

This resulted in numerous copies of documents that had to be filed and archived multiple times. Documents had to be searched and retrieved manually, time-consuming and and were prone to inaccuracy.

With the Orbit system, documents only needed to be captured once, where subsequent editing can be monitored and automatically logged according to the different versions. Also, only authorized officers are given access to search and retrieve files, and they are able to do so accurately and efficiently from their workstation.

The LTA has been able to achieve savings of about S$1.7 million (US$1.1 million) annually in document handling costs, including storage, copying, delivery and time savings.