Accelerating EDD’s Document Modernization with Smart Automation

Published: October 20, 2025

The Employment Development Department (EDD) continues to make progress on one of its key modernization efforts, a new Document Management System (DMS) that’s transforming how we process and manage millions of customer documents every year.

This initiative lays the groundwork for smarter, faster, and more accurate document handling — helping us deliver benefits and services more efficiently for Californians.

Reimagining Workflows with Automation

EDD’s legacy DMS was implemented in 1999, and at that time it was state-of-the-art technology for scanning and processing the documents mailed to us. Since then, not only has technology changed, but so have our customers’ needs. The legacy DMS included too many document-related tasks that had to be handled manually. These legacy processes have made it difficult to scale, especially during times of high demand.

The new DMS changes that story. It introduces modern automation tools that dramatically reduce manual effort. The system’s architecture also lays the foundation for more flexible and scalable workflows that help us to enhance claims processing.

How It’s Going and What’s Next

The first phase of our DMS project successfully went live at the end of August 2025. This release covered unemployment benefits forms. By the end of its first month, the DMS:

  • Routed over 228,000 documents.
  • Processed 97% of all documents on the same day as we got them.
  • Began automatically reviewing some documents without any need for manual review.

Future phases will cover the Disability Insurance, Paid Family Leave, and Tax programs. Depending on demand, the new DMS will support anywhere between 10 to 50 million documents each year, accelerating benefit payments, and establishing a technology foundation to serve Californians better.

Accelerating EDD’s Document Modernization with Smart Automation image

Empowering Efficiency Goals

When the new DMS reaches its full potential, document processing at the EDD will be even more efficient. We’re implementing powerful tools that leverage advanced technology to automatically and accurately extract data from millions of forms and documents in all of the State’s most-commonly-spoken languages.

Going beyond traditional optical character recognition (OCR), modern technology can more accurately recognize text, tables, checkboxes, and even handwriting. It can process documents in various formats and layouts — from printed forms to handwritten notes — with remarkable accuracy.

Building the Foundation for the Future

The new DMS represents a major step forward in EDD’s broader modernization journey. By automating document intake and integrating smart data capture, we’re empowering staff to focus on serving customers faster, with greater accuracy, and with less manual effort.

As this system continues to evolve, it will enable even more advanced use cases — from predictive analytics to next-generation workflow automation. The result: a smarter, more agile EDD ready to meet the needs of Californians today and in the future.

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