Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group uses Laserfiche Forms to make the customer experience as seamless as possible.
A Johannesburg-based engineering company digitally transformed occupational health and safety incident reports, helping with compliance, communication and changing how the mining industry does business.
The school district used Laserfiche to process payroll without any delays during Hurricane Harvey, when employees needed it most.
Dedicated to the care of children with autism, Learning ARTS shares data about patients with their parents and behavior specialists in real-time to enhance care and programming, thanks to Laserfiche.
Offering Laserfiche records management as a shared service increased efficiency and enhanced countywide collaboration.
A leading manufacturer and supplier of formwork and scaffolding systems, PERI streamlined operations and enhanced the customer experience through an online portal.
The Los Angeles County Development Authority (LACDA) digitally transformed its records management program, incorporating Laserfiche to digitize, centralize and manage the lifecycle of records. Since deploying Laserfiche, the agency has reclaimed significant time for its case workers while boosting its ranking with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to the designation of “high performer”—an improvement that helps secure funding and enables the LACDA to provide more services and programs to more people.
The LACDA is a public agency responsible for providing LA County residents essential programs related to subsidized housing, community development, and affordable housing development and preservation. Serving the most populous county in the United States requires the LACDA to house decades’ worth of records related to hundreds of thousands of cases. These span a wide range, from groups applying for Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) that provide resources to underserved areas, to people in need of Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers and residents of all ages applying for education and training in an effort to build better lives and better neighborhoods.
The LACDA previously stored records in filing cabinets and across various servers and systems. As the number of records grew, the agency identified the need to digitize and centralize them using a Laserfiche electronic records management solution. Laserfiche was also integrated with the LACDA’s property management software, Yardi, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, PeopleSoft, to eliminate the risk of duplicating information or work.
“Case managers don’t need to switch between applications to look up or copy information, they can view all the documents in one place,” says Rosa Chevarin, supervisor for Yardi/Laserfiche support. “They like the one-stop shop feel, and everything is streamlined in their natural workflow.”
Through this digital transformation, the agency made information more available, accessible and usable to authorized users.
“In an agency that manages more than 3,000 public and affordable housing units and assists more than 24,000 residents through a housing choice voucher program within the county, being able to pull up submitted information at a moment’s notice is vital,” says Doug Van Gelder, Manager of Information Technology at the LACDA.
This also enables the agency to:
The LACDA’s new solution exceeds the basic expectations of records management and incorporates automation. Laserfiche automatically files documents with standardized naming and folder structure. Additionally, when a record’s retention period has ended, relevant employees are notified to handle disposition.
“The need for services is always going to be great, and everyone is always going to be busy doing their jobs,” Van Gelder says. “Finding and pulling documents, and making sure records are taken care of in accordance to regulations is time consuming. The new system takes that tedious work away from the case managers, so they can focus on the people they serve.”
Since transforming its records management, the LACDA has gained the ability to automate additional business processes. Agency staff has automated the new employee onboarding process, which previously required a new associate to spend about half of their first day on the job filling out paperwork. The new Laserfiche solution enables the agency to send the new employee a link to all the necessary forms that can be completed before their start date.
“I want to be as digital as possible,” says Van Gelder, adding that there are also plans to rebuild the LACDA’s housing portal to allow people to apply for programs online. The workflow for processing those applications would also be automated using Laserfiche to facilitate quicker response times, better transparency into the process for both the staff and applicant, and less risk for error.
The agency’s newfound efficiencies have proven essential in a time when the LACDA’s programs and services are needed more than ever. The waiting list to receive Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers has about 44,000 people on it, while the agency’s staff is down to about half of what it was a decade ago due to the economic downturn and attrition. “The only way we’ve been able to provide the same level of service with half the staffing is through technology,” Van Gelder explains.
Additionally, over 70 percent of the LACDA’s funding comes from HUD, which regularly audits housing authorities to ensure funding is going toward serving people who need these critical programs and services.
“If a housing authority does not rank well, HUD could potentially take funding back and give it to another housing authority that proves it is helping more people and running more efficiently,” Van Gelder says.
Since the LACDA deployed its Laserfiche records management initiative, it has boosted its ranking and maintained its status as a high performer.
“The need is always going to be greater than the funding, but IT is one of the units within the organization that has the ability to provide productivity enhancements while bringing cost down,” Van Gelder says. “We’ve been able to serve more people with quality services and programming with half the staffing we used to have through these technology solutions.”
Leading public sector organizations use an electronic records management solution to increase efficiency and improve citizen services. To learn more, download the free white paper: “Streamlining the Business of Government.”
As one of the most populous cities in New York state (after New York City and Buffalo), the City of Rochester relies on its IT department to increase efficiency between city departments and enable more effective public services. Servicing over 14 departments including Public Safety, Police and Fire, the city’s IT teams need systems that can power the city’s many interconnected processes.
After a thorough study of how to redesign and modernize multiple city processes together, the city saw Laserfiche’s strength in business process automation, workflow and document retention and management as an opportunity to use one platform to improve many functional areas.
The city’s initial improvements came from using Laserfiche to build a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) portal that enables citizens to submit public records requests online.
Previously, it would take staff up to five days to start processing new records requests using paper request forms. With the new portal, citizens can now file new requests via a simple online form and inquiries are immediately sent to the relevant city department for review and approval. Throughout the process, citizens can check the status of their request at any time in the FOIL portal.
An internal Laserfiche progress dashboard also shows department managers the status of open requests and how long it takes each staff member to fulfill them, providing critical data about the city’s efficiency.
“We have gotten really positive feedback from users about the system,” says Harriet Fisher, Senior Business Analyst at the City of Rochester. “One user, in particular, said, ‘This is the best thing since sliced bread!’”
In addition to reducing processing time for FOIL requests, the city’s police department is currently using Laserfiche for five internal processes, and the accounting department relies on Laserfiche as the backbone of invoice processing. Laserfiche’s user-friendly interface ultimately allows the city to see a quick return on its investment for automation projects and open new avenues for shared services across departments.
“It allows us to easily manage the creation of forms, the development of workflow and security in a way that you do not need to be an application developer,” says Greg Luna, Enterprise Process and Systems Manager at the City of Rochester. “It really is a nice departure from the in-house developed applications—to think out of the box about how we can re-engineer processes, and Laserfiche makes it easy for us to do that.”
SITUATION
• Citizens making public record requests encountered red tape and long wait times
• The county was at capacity for paper records and preparing to construct a new building to store them
RESULTS
• $5.5 million saved from not having to build a new records facility
• Transparent and easy to use records request solution increased efficiency in the process by over 100%
• Strengthened information governance, data security and disaster recovery
Tompkins County, NY, is a leader in the government shared services space, with a county-wide task force dedicated to strengthening and sharing local government practices.
“My top priorities are to establish relationships with other governments and to spread Laserfiche and our user group among them,” says Maureen Reynolds, Tompkins County Clerk. Reynolds notes that the county’s primary goal is to help constituents easily access public records without encountering red tape and long waiting times.
“Our demographic expects Amazon-type service,” she adds. “They want it right there, immediately, 24/7.”
Although the county was committed to improving its records management practices, it had been using an old building to store millions of archived records and was set construct a new building to the tune of $5.5 million—until it discovered Laserfiche’s records management and digital workflow capabilities.
“The Tompkins County team saw an opportunity to modernize the way it manages information while creating cost- savings and new efficiencies,” said Sandy Hess, sales operations manager at ICC Community Development Solutions, a Laserfiche solution provider. “Laserfiche’s intuitive interface and powerful compliance tools made it an ideal fit.”
The county began its Laserfiche implementation by digitizing documents in the county seat of Ithaca, and then quickly brought the county other municipalities on the system. The county created public records portals for each town, enabling citizens to submit records requests forms online, 24/7 without having to travel to their city hall or to Ithaca. Laserfiche’s workflow system automates the intake of requests and routes them to the appropriate clerk or department for processing.
“Any truly public record is there and accessible for people to find themselves,” says Reynolds, adding that having one records system that can be used as a shared service across the county is crucial for quick user adoption and building more transparent governance standards.
“The feedback has been great,” she says. “We go out to the smaller municipalities and they’ve never seen software like this. We’re not here to take over; we’re here to show them what’s possible.”
Benefits:
Laserfiche’s flexible automation platform makes it a valuable long-term solution for Tompkins County and other governments that need to respond quickly to changing public demands.
“You get a customizable solution with off-the-shelf software, which is very unique in the software world,” says Alan Karasin, Senior Network Administrator. “We can design exactly what we need, but we have full supportability and are not redesigning the wheel every time we want to do something. We can change our processes up and change them over time as we find what our results are.”
