Kensington Mortgages Automates Core Business Processes to Elevate Customer Experience

Kensington Mortgage Company implemented Laserfiche organization-wide and integrated it with multiple line-of-business applications.

My name is Farid Amin. I am a Solutions Architect at Kensington Mortgages. In my role I design, develop and implement to automate business processes across the operational areas using enterprise-level robotic and business process automation software tools.

Now in our 25th year, Kensington Mortgages is UK’s leading non-bank specialist mortgage provider and We manage over 11 billion pounds in assets. We have over 500 employees throughout the country, predominantly at our head office in Maidenhead.

In 2012, we needed to replace our aging document management system. It was becoming slow and unreliable. The core weakness of the system was that the historical documents were stored in a huge jukebox of some 250 optical discs run by a robotic arm and a subset of DVD drives.

As we grew, we had more documents to manage. We also had changing regulations, which meant we Needed access to those documents very, very quickly while we had customers on the phone. Therefore, we had to replace our system that would cater for our business needs.

Laserfiche fulfilled these requirements and we had foresight that its rich functionality of its various components could be utilized in other use cases and could be expanded across the business in later years. Today, we have over 56 million documents spanning over 7 terabytes of network storage.

We have 300 users that utilize Laserfiche day-in-day-out to serve and manage our accounts. The users’ feedback has been very positive. Laserfiche just runs in the background, unassumingly, and therefore as far as they’re concerned, it’s a system available all the time for them to carry out their work.

In 2016, we expanded the use of Laserfiche to business process automation and it has been a resounding success. Today we have business processes automated not just in servicing, but in finance and sales.

In 2019, we implemented our document online project. This has allowed our customers to view their documents online. We developed, in-house, a microservice using the Laserfiche SDK, which allows those customers to view their documents directly from the repository.

So here’s a system that has a use, but has got a whole lot of other tools that could benefit any organization. So Laserfiche has been in production for over 7 years and has provided service to us with stability and integrity.

Michael Hill Jeweler

By automating import and export documentation processes with Laserfiche, the jeweler more efficiently manages compliance with customs requirements.

My name is Joseph Colville. I work at Michael Hill International. We’re a middle market jeweler so we sell anything between nine-dollar studs and half a million-dollar pieces. The department I work for is the I.T. Department we deliver the Solutions for the whole business. My particular focus is on the distribution center and import export of all of our goods.

It was about two years ago that we decided that we needed to go down the automation route the bottlenecks and challenges that we had were especially around the mass handling of paper. There’s massive customs requirements and we needed a way to manage those in a more efficient manner. The process before Laserfiche was very manual. It involved building up files on your desk so goods come in. They would have the documents you’d have e-mails coming in you would print out those documents you would stick them in a file you would wait to that file has the correct amount of documents and then that would be archived and then the recall process of those documents , you would have to go to the right box find the right month, the right supplier and then pull out those documents and flick.

The expectations and goals that we had for Laserfiche was basically process automation, clear audit trail and fast document recall. So, these were absolutely essential dealing with. There’s very strict legislation to how we have to keep the documents. It varies between Jurisdictions and we needed to make sure we followed those to the letter. Now we’re not printing out every email that comes in. So, we’ve gone from printing two reams of paper a day to one ream a fortnight. We’ve also dropped the amount of time it takes to recall documents for customs. We have to recall a certain amount of lines go and find the physical documents and do checks. That process could take five minutes to find a doc. Now we can just do a simple search on it. So, there’s massive time saving there and we re-put that time saving into doing more checks to greater increase our compliance.

The most useful piece of advice I could give to future Laserfiche users would be lining up all the pieces, making sure right people are involved at the right time to ensure the project runs smoothly making sure they have access to get into your systems. And also ensuring that the business is heavily involved. So, you have your SMEs coming up and actually using the software. Well before you go live and feeding back the entire time. I’ve attended Laserfiche conferences, I’ve shared my story at those Laserfiche conferences and I’ve also heard stories of other people and being involved in training sessions and continuous improvement of the product. So that’s been really important and really key to our business.

Standard Bank Group

The South Africa bank’s fleet management division nearly eliminated manual tasks, more efficiently utilizing existing resources and exponentially growing its business.

My name is Justin Thomas. I work for Standard Bank Group it’s bank in Africa. I head up strategic alliances for Standard Bank fleet management as well as product development. Our bank is 150 years old so it’s got legacy platforms, legacy systems, it comes with a history that the journey we went on was essentially to look for systems that could support our growth and being able to support our customers in a manner that they expect.

Essentially what we did with Laserfiche was digitize the start to the end process. So, on receipt of a quotation all the way to sourcing a vehicle, providing a customer a quotation, to then disbursing the vehicle to the client. That entire process was Laserfiche essentially. We made sure that the whole distribution of work became a lot more structured. It was a lot more planned in terms of staff workforce capability and we saw immediate benefit in that particular spec, so we were losing mails and customers were complaining and that was no longer the case. Every mail was captured, every email was tracked, we could determine when it came in and when it was executed which gave us a lot of comfort in terms of the service we are offering to our customer.

Our business is also growing exponentially and one of the factors we’ve always been concerned about is the more we put scale on the more we have to resource accordingly. What the Laserfiche implementation has done is it has given us comfort that we can comfortably put more business on without having to increase resourcing commensurately. We are able to now use our existing resourcing in a much more efficient manner.

The advice I would give to a future Laserfiche users would be to have a purpose in mind in terms of what they want to achieve. Make sure you get the right people involved in your projects get people that that are open to a different approach and let them guide the process.

One of the things we realized is that the closer we could bring the Laserfiche guys to our particular business decision makers, the easier the sell, the easier the value was seen and then make sure that everybody has the vision, where this business is going to or where your business is going to.

I think the journey we are on with Laserfiche is something that is really going to transform our business.  It’s one element of what we’re busy with but it’s a big element. We are appreciative of that.

Intertrust Enhances Digital Collaboration and Document Management

Thanks to Laserfiche, global trust company Intertrust provides easy and secure access to documents for clients and has saved on real-estate costs by digitizing documents, even with a growing workforce.

My name is David Humphrey. I work for Intertrust Group. My main responsibilities are looking after Laserfiche globally. Intertrust is a trust company. They’re global, they supply accountings or legal or depending on what the company is looking for, it may be payroll.

We were so full of paper, it was just paper everywhere and they wanted a solution that basically would allow us to scan everything and have it stored in one place. Intertrust was introduced to Laserfiche way back in 2007 in Guernsey and then we started to look for one globally, they looked at a few but then decided to go with Laserfiche and that started in 2010.

Intertrust picked Laserfiche because they were looking for something reliable and they were also looking for something it was a forefront of the market at the time. We started a pilot in the Netherlands for a small team, it was 25 people. We rolled out Laserfiche to them and then it went global after that. And they’re using it to scan documents, to retrieve documents, to make sure everything is there for the accountants so they can do the annual accounts. But it’s basically every kind of document you can think of emails, any loan agreements, any kind of documents in relation to like chartered accounts or anything like that. They’re all stored in those repositories and we even have support teams in Laserfiche as well. So, we have finance, we have H.R., we have compliance, all stored in Laserfiche.

We do have some savings that we’ve definitely made. I can give you one example; Real estate in Hong Kong is really expensive and we had an entire floor that was used for our business in Hong Kong. But then we launched Laserfiche and they did a job of back scanning all the documents into Laserfiche. And when I first went to the Hong Kong office as well it Was like many little caves of people surrounded by paper. I went back two years later to do an upgrade of Laserfiche for them and it was gone, all the paper was gone. Everything was inside Laserfiche and half of the floor had been sold back to another company but yet there was more people working for Intertrust in Hong Kong than before. So, it just shows you how much was saved due to that.

I think the searches are great. I think you can find anything at any point at anytime, I certainly can. The second one is the forums. I think Laserfiche forums is a really good way now of being able to actually get documents, whatever was in excel sheets before can now be put into a form and they don’t have to sign it. You don’t have to trek round looking for people to sign the documents or sign the forms, they can do it automatically. We’ve actually just started to put a client portal together. That’s going to be for all our clients and Laserfiche is going to be the forefront of that. So, all the documents are going to be stored into Laserfiche then pushed out into this client portal. So, then all our clients, doesn’t matter what jurisdiction they’re in, be it Luxembourg or Amsterdam we’ll be able to log into one place and find all their documents.

Laserfiche is an enterprise content management system not just a DMS, I think that’s what people need to recognize. The fact that we as a company, Intertrust, is pushing forward to make everything digital and I think with Laserfiche we are going to achieve that.

Sky Telecommunications Digitally Manages Employee Files and HR Processes

Serving 25,000 employees across the UK and Ireland, the telecommunications company’s HR department has sped up its processes and easily maintains its employee files.

My name is Nicola Doherty. I am the head of HR Administration at SKY. SKY are a media organization based in the UK and Ireland that provide direct home TV services for our customers. We have in the region of twenty-five thousand employees across the UK and Ireland and over 10 million customers. So, the HR admin function is responsible for, what it says on the tin really, HR administration for all of SKY’s employees.

We were taking back in-house some HR administration work that was previously delivered by a third party. For us to be able to do that. we had to look at, you know, how efficient we are in terms of our resources and our ability to deliver the service. So, it was at that point that we made the decision that we were going to upgrade the Laserfiche product that we had in place to Laserfiche Rio. We had a long-standing relationship with them with Laserfiche and through the conversations that we’d had with our sort-of partners we knew that there was more that we could get to enhance the product and its kind of ticked the boxes off of what we needed at that point in time of what we will need in the future. So, all of our employee files at Sky are held on the Laserfiche Rio product We use it to maintain, update employee files and to apply any rules that we need to arrange deletion for example.

We are a large organization that’s sort of diverse in terms of our structure and so that the Laserfiche product helps us to keep our sales organized. We use it for things like subject access requests that we get from employees. So, the new product has actually helped us with that process as well. For me, from an HR operations perspective, we never stand still so we’re always looking at better ways to do things. Whether that’s through automation or whether it’s just be more efficient at what we do. And, so I think Laserfiche as an organization it fits in with that.

The return that I see that we get from the Laserfiche product, the enhanced product, is that we are able to deliver our processes and quicker than we could before and that’s in relation to things such as subject access requests through new processes such as bar coding and in naming convention of files. There’s less human intervention in our processes so that the HR admin teams are able to file more and do it quickly and which is better than what we could do before.

The advice I would give to future Laserfiche users is and to keep things simple to give yourself enough time and to use the expertise that’s on offer. I think that the place it would end I was as always you know looking towards the future to see what other enhancements there might be further down the road. But we’ve got a really robust product in place now which is great.

Jabal Omar Development Co.

By automating its processes and implementing e-forms, the real estate developer has simplified project documentation and approvals, saving both time and money.

Ghana National Petroleum Corporation

Leveraging process automation and an organized repository, Ghana National Petroleum Corporation reduced the time it takes to access content from one month to less than a minute.

What Is Federated Search?

Federated search is “a technique for searching multiple text collections simultaneously.” Think of it as a tool that searches a collection of sites, drives or other databases that the creator of the system chooses.

With a customizable scope, federated searches can provide a unique combination of sources for a particular user, community or organization.

Below are four key benefits of using federated search:

Convenience

Federated search is a convenient way to browse a variety of sources at the same time. With one search, users can see results from:
  • Network drives
  • Intranets
  • Repositories
  • Websites

Figure 1: Use Federated search to gather results from multiple sources simultaneously.

Users can search these sources all at once and see the results in a consistent, centralized interface.

This is especially useful for opening up siloed resources across different departments. For example, imagine you’re a city clerk and the public works department has its own set of databases, repositories and websites. Federated search would allow you to search those resources in addition to your own, while staying in your familiar search portal.

Security

Another key benefit of federated search is that it can query secure, gated sources. In addition to sending search queries to each source, a federated search can also send user credentials,2 allowing users to see results that wouldn’t otherwise appear in, say, a typical web search.

For instance, colleges and other academic institutions can use federated search to provide students easier access to academic journals and other subscription-based resources. Instead of having to log into each system and search separately, students can view results from a variety of authoritative sources as a combined list.

In addition, if the user of the federated search engine doesn’t have access to a particular source, those results simply won’t appear. This means that two users can search using the same interface, while having different results depending on their levels of access.

Figure 2: Federated search can pass user credentials, allowing for collected results from subscription-based resources.

Flexibility

Have you ever done a web search and felt you could have prioritized the results better than the search engine did? If you’re an expert in a field and find that a web search isn’t quite hitting the mark, it can be frustrating.

Federated search addresses this issue by giving you the ability to weigh sources depending on how relevant or visible you want them to be in your searches. This ability to tweak results gives the flexibility to prioritize searchable information in a way that works best for your organization or a particular user’s needs.

Figure 3: Users can weigh results as they see fit using federated search.

Many wealth management firms have compliance policies that employees need to know about. To keep important compliance information and documents accessible, a federated search could be set up to weigh the location of these materials above others. Users could then always see these documents prominently in searches, encouraging further awareness of the policies and procedures essential to business operations.

Reach

A versatile tool, federated search can be used to extend the reach of your searches and explore the depths of the web. It provides a reasonable solution for users who have difficulty searching the deep web, or parts of the internet ignored by search engines.

Not truly as scary as it sounds, the deep web is mostly comprised of content that a standard web crawler (a tool to scour pages and gather their information) either can’t or doesn’t find it worth the time to explore. This content includes:
  • Pages running on a slow server
  • Sites that request a user login or particular credentials
  • Areas of websites prohibited by the robot exclusion protocol
  • Documents that are not linked to from anywhere else
  • Dynamic pages that update too frequently

The deep web includes many useful public resources, such as the US National Library of Medicine’s PubMed service—which harbors a wide array of scientific and biomedical articles dating back to the 1950s, as well as the US Census Bureau’s insights and population statistics. This part of the internet also includes sites for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the US Copyright Office, whose core contents are not listed without the use of their own interfaces.

Research organizations, science labs, attorney’s offices or government agencies that want to view information from these resources (or a collection of services like them) can use federated search to find the information they are looking for and further their goals.

Want to learn about more document management features that can help your organization excel? Click here to download the Document Management Buyer’s Guide.

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