Our client ATU local 583 is a long-established, member-based labour organization representing frontline transportation workers. The organization supports a sizeable membership base and plays an active role in collective bargaining, member advocacy, and workplace representation. Their day-to-day operations require managing high volumes of member records, historical documentation, and case-related files tied to grievances, negotiations, benefits, seniority, training, and other member services.
ATU operates with a small administrative team supporting both ongoing member needs and long-term records management. Their records include decades of legacy paper files and archived materials that must remain accessible for operational continuity, compliance, and historical reference. Because staff often need to retrieve member information quickly to support time-sensitive inquiries, the organization depends on a practical document system that enables fast lookup, consistent organization, and clear separation between active and archived records.
ATU’s file structure had two very different needs: current member files that are actively updated and referenced and archived files that are rarely accessed but still need to remain available. Current files required consistent structure and fast retrieval by member details. Archived files were already organized in a box-year range model that staff understood, so the priority was to preserve that structure rather than redesign it and create change management issues for records that are infrequently used.
Scanning introduced a second operational problem: once documents were digitized, the organization still had to ingest thousands of files into SharePoint in a consistent way. Without automation, staff would be stuck doing manual uploading, renaming, filing, and metadata entry. That work is slow, error-prone, and difficult to sustain. It also risks creating a digital library that feels just as messy as paper files exist, but staff can’t reliably find what they need when they need it.
West X delivered a SharePoint digitization solution designed around how the organization already works with member files, while creating a repeatable ingestion process that could scale with ongoing scanning.
We created a purpose-built SharePoint site and library structure with two clearly separated areas: one optimized for active member files, and one simplified for archived records. For active files, we implemented a structured library model that supports consistent categorization, standardized naming, and fast retrieval. For archived records, we mirrored the existing box-year range structure so staff could access historical files without having to learn a new organization method for content they rarely touch.
The core capability was the ingestion workflow. The scanning vendor produced files using a predefined naming convention, and the client maintained an Excel file containing the metadata required to classify each record. Power Automate was used to ingest scanned files into SharePoint, apply naming standards, and attach the correct metadata during import. This replaced manual upload and sorting with a repeatable process that can be run each time a new scanning batch is delivered.
ATU moved from paper-heavy storage and manual file handling to a structured digital document system that staff can actually use. Current member files became easier to access, search, and maintain. Archived files became digitally accessible without disrupting existing practices. Most importantly, bulk scanning imports no longer required high-effort manual uploading and sorting ingestion became a repeatable process that keeps the library organized as more records are scanned and added over time.
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