In Bakersfield, CA, a town known for its agriculture, manufacturing and petroleum extraction and refining is now known for something different: its innovative technology.

As the fastest-growing city in the United States with a population of over 250,000, Bakersfield was experiencing an explosion of records. “We wanted a document management system to store public documents in a secure, easily searchable manner,” says IT Director Bob Trammell. “We chose Laserfiche because of its pricing and how easy it was to search for and retrieve documents.”

“I had already installed Laserfiche in a city where I was previously employed, so I was very familiar with it,” Trammell adds. “That was eleven years ago, and today all 19 departments in the city, as well as thousands of citizens, use Laserfiche.”

With staff in 38 offices across the city’s 148 square miles, Bakersfield achieves a broad range of benefits.

“There’s no reason to limit Laserfiche to a single department or use,” he adds. “Using Laserfiche in all departments means we really achieve results.

“For example, our human resources department puts performance evaluations into Laserfiche. Our fire department has a HazMat folder that only department personnel have access to, so the locations of hazardous material won’t become public knowledge. But it’s available in Laserfiche to the fire crew 24/7, so they can know any potential danger at a fire site.”

According to Trammell, the city was recently asked to cooperate with the California Attorney General’s office, which was conducting a major probe into price fixing. Staff had to collect all purchase records that met certain pre-determined criteria. “This would have required a lot of city resources,” he says. “Instead, we set up the Attorney General’s office with a Laserfiche account so they could access and search the necessary records themselves—which saved a great deal of time for us.”

But besides using Laserfiche to eliminate paper and simplify information retrieval, Bakersfield has also expanded Laserfiche enterprise-wide by integrating it with the city’s ERP system, Sungard NaviLine, and their GIS system, ESRI ArcGIS.

Bakersfield uses Laserfiche as the foundation of an innovative program to combat graffiti, which Trammell believes wouldn’t be practical—or possible—without integrating Laserfiche and Sungard.

When a citizen reports graffiti, the city’s goal is to remove it within 24 hours. The graffiti removal crew uses the Sungard NaviLine Work Order module to record how much paint and time was required to remove the graffiti. Photographs of the graffiti are stored as JPEGs in Laserfiche and attached to the work order, so retrieving a work order also brings up photographs stored in Laserfiche.

Next, the Bakersfield Police Department analyzes the photographs stored in Laserfiche, recording repeated patterns as Laserfiche template field values. When police arrest a suspect, officers retrieve all recorded examples of their “work” from Laserfiche and use the Work Order module to calculate the cost of the graffiti removal. Then, the city files a civil lawsuit against the parents to recover cleanup costs.

“That’s a pretty good deterrent when you consider that the bill could add up to six figures,” says Trammell.

Prior to implementing this program, Bakersfield found itself in the situation of most cities—they would arrest a tagger and overcrowded courts would let the perpetrator out on probation until they were arrested again. “Civil suits are a much better deterrent,” Trammell says.

Given the success of the anti-graffiti program, Trammell and his staff plan to continue the city’s integration with Sungard. “We just finished bringing code enforcement online so that the department can store pictures of code violations in the system,” he says. “Our finance department is looking forward to storing invoices in the accounts payable section by next fiscal year. They already ‘cold-load’ auditing reports, storing them in Laserfiche instead of printing them out on paper, which means they’re searchable, so people can find them easily.”

But Bakersfield’s Sungard integration is just the start. The city has also fully integrated Laserfiche with their GIS system, ArcGIS from ESRI.

“About 12 years ago, around the same time that we purchased Sungard and Laserfiche, we also purchased an ESRI system,” Trammell remembers. “We needed a good tool to provide GIS services to various city departments. Almost all the work the City does is related to GIS. It’s one of the cornerstones of our IT infrastructure.”

According to Trammell, almost every city department has used the ESRI GIS system, and, in fact, GIS was one of his main goals for building Bakersfield’s IT infrastructure. “I really felt that there needed to be three main components—ERP, document management and GIS. Once we selected Sungard, Laserfiche and ESRI, we began to look for ways to integrate them. With our ESRI system, we store documents in Laserfiche and, through integration, retrieve them spatially,” he says.

In the city’s ESRI system, users can select a parcel or area of the city and search Laserfiche for documents relating to that particular area. “They can retrieve documents ranging from AutoCAD drawings to planning documents to fire HazMat information to photographs, whatever we have in the system,” Trammell says.

The ESRI integration took only about two months to complete, with city IT staff performing all of the work themselves. Currently, Public Works is using the ESRI/Laserfiche integration, with the Fire Department, Police Department and Building Department all planning to use it in the near future. “It’s very useful, because staff can quickly find the information they need,” Trammell says.

With Laserfiche fully integrated into the city’s IT infrastructure, Bakersfield’s IT staff is striving to live up to the city’s motto, “Life as it should be,” both for city staff and residents. “Our residents like the ability to quickly search for documents without having to go to the City Clerk’s office,” Trammell says. “And our staff appreciates the ability to store their own documents for quick retrieval. For our IT staff, we find that Laserfiche requires very little support—which is very important to us.”

Trammell believes that all cities can find benefits in Laserfiche, so he does not hesitate to recommend it to colleagues. “With Laserfiche, you get more bang for the buck than with other imaging systems,” he says. “And when you make it available to all your city departments, not just the City Clerk, that’s when you really begin to realize the benefits.

“You really should look at integrating Laserfiche with your ERP and GIS systems, because once you’ve done an integration, you really find that there’s nothing to it,” he adds. “We’ve realized enormous benefits from integrating other applications with Laserfiche, and that’s why we anticipate even more success in the future.”

Tags: GIS, integration, State and Local Government, WebLink

Posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 8:07 am under Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Municipal Government, Newsletters, State and Local Government. You can comment on this post.