The Stationary Office Case Study

Digital Audio Transcription and Workflow System

Company Profile

The Stationery Office has been the official publisher of statutory, Parliamentary and government information for over 200 years and publishes around 11,000 books and CD-ROMs a year, making it the UK's largest publisher by volume. The Stationery Office is relied upon by government departments and agencies to publish information across a variety of business sectors including driving and transport, the environment, pharmaceutical, health and social issues, home affairs, agriculture, defence, foreign affairs and diplomacy. They support clients large and small, public and private sector, UK-based, European and international.

Business Requirements

One of the projects carried out by The Stationary Office was to transcribe audio tapes recorded during parliamentary debates and publish these transcriptions as documents available for the public. They had a requirement for a digital audio transcription and workflow system which could be used by all staff involved in the project such as the transcribers, co-ordinators, editors and sub-editors, and which could also log key stages in the process automatically. The input to the process was an audio tape and the output was a fully edited and approved electronic document ready for publishing. The Stationary Office required this system to work on their existing Microsoft Exchange Server. Stages which needed to be managed by the workflow system included receipt of the audio tape, transcription, checking and editing, and final approval prior to publishing.

Our Solution

The workflow system was implemented using Microsoft Outlook forms and Exchange Server with public folders for each specific task involved in the process. At the start of the job, a form was created which updated automatically as the job progressed through the various stages. The form contained a text area for the transcription and fields such as date, start time, subject of the debate, the parliamentary committee name, chairperson and clerk, and digital recording information. We also built in an MP3 audio player into the Outlook forms. The workflow system we developed tracked the movement of documents from one process stage to another. The software also catered for certain business rules such as approval or rejection of the transcription.