Document & Records Management Archives | Page 23 of 24

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), based in Austin, helps develop the state’s higher education plans, approves degree programs and provides advice on education activities to the State Legislature and Governor’s Office.

Central to achieving THECB’s mission of promoting access to quality higher education is its Loan Program Operations (LPO), which disburses state financial aid funds to Texas universities and assists with student loan collections and litigation for the State Attorney General’s Office. As the gatekeeper for state-appropriated financial aid, LPO handles more than 1.5 million documents each year—a number that’s grown steadily as cuts to state scholarship funds have driven more loan applications to the department’s College Access Loan and B-On-Time incentive programs. In 2011 alone, the agency disbursed over $143 million worth of funds to students.

“For cases that go on to become loans, it’s a very paper-intensive process,” explains Debbie Whitis, Manager of LPO Operational Support Services. “Every single piece of information related to a student loan, from electronic applications, paper sources and screenshots, must be documented and archived according to state retention guidelines.”

Although LPO had a document management system in place, the legacy system couldn’t handle the high-volume processing needed to handle the growing volume of loan applications. As a result, it needed rebooting at least eight times a day.

On average, the agency was losing 19 cumulative hours of staff time across its departments every day—wasted effort that cost the LPO $76,000 each year and generated customer dissatisfaction.

“If a debtor called to inquire about their loan status and the system was down, we couldn’t give them a real-time answer,” explains Whitis. “Staff still had to manually fill in field classifications, and our process wasn’t very transparent.”

Stretching the IT Investment

LPO began searching for a new enterprise content management (ECM) system that would cut out inefficiencies and save staff time. When reseller MCCi showed the organization Laserfiche Avante’s flexible, customizable administration and workflow tools, the agency was convinced that Laserfiche could easily reduce its bottlenecks, track documents throughout the loan record lifecycle and make information readily accessible to many different users at once.

Whitis was impressed that so many of Laserfiche’s key functionalities aligned with LPO’s checklist of requirements, including Laserfiche’s ability to:

Monitor activities occurring within the department in real-time.
Support a complicated routing structure for LPO and provide transparency at each step of the loan process lifecycle.
Generate performance quotas and productivity statistics.
Offer snapshot printing, scanning and conversion of diverse content formats.

Even with this wide range of features, Laserfiche still offered an affordable price point. “Laserfiche was the most cost-effective solution and best value we found,” says Whitis. “When you’re paying with tax dollars, value is important.”

Furthermore, Laserfiche’s ease-of-use ensured a smooth implementation when turnover in LPO’s IT department reduced the project’s technical support. Using Laserfiche’s free user education materials along with her knowledge of ECM system implementation, Whitis was able to teach herself the ins and outs of the entire Laserfiche system.

“I was able to learn the system simply by using the white papers, customer presentations and everything else that is available on the Laserfiche Support Site,” explains Whitis. “The information really is readable and digestible for Laserfiche users.”

Eliminating Redundancies and Building Transparency

Armed with these education materials, Whitis started the implementation by sketching her ideas for improving the loan process out on paper. She then brought those ideas to life using the Laserfiche Workflow Designer, a business process configuration tool, to build complex, automated document routing and archiving procedures and data queries to third-party systems.

In total, Whitis created 29 different workflows that process and route the diverse types of content the department receives, streamlining many steps in daily activities, especially for the agency’s Operational Support Services (OSS) department.

Some of the benefits realized include:

Enhance information capture. Using Laserfiche Snapshot, a multi-functional document capture tool, the department can capture and record all loan documents like IVR (interactive voice response) payments, call sheets and loan changes directly from third-party systems, such as the agency’s Loan Management System, in a central repository.
Streamlined payment processing. For captured documents like checks, Laserfiche Workflow uses information on the check to query client data like social security numbers from the agency’s other databases and links that information to the check. Workflow then routes the document among the necessary departments at each step of payment review and processing.
Transparent records management. To archive a document according to litigation requirements, Workflow extracts information such as the borrower’s last name from the document, and automatically creates the proper retention folders for the document.
Centralized control. In the Laserfiche Workflow Administration Console, an advanced performance and reporting interface, Whitis can now monitor all system activity in real-time and research bottlenecks affecting the productivity of the team.

By automating and centralizing information access with Laserfiche, the agency can now process documents within a matter of milliseconds versus hours. Laserfiche Snapshot alone has helped the OSS department reduce its document processing times by up to 24 hours and eliminate 66% of its staffing expenses, a total of $15,000 in savings.

With Laserfiche Workflow, LPO can ultimately ensure that every step of the loan record cycle is transparent and that documents are saved in a searchable format, even as multiple users interact with the document.

“Changes to the document remain consistent no matter where the document goes,” says Whitis. “I love the fact that I can go into the Workflow Designer and find exactly where a document is. We can resolve an issue in a matter of minutes or within a couple of hours. Before, it was just a shot in the dark.”

Gaining Enterprise-Wide Buy-In

LPO managers and directors also love Laserfiche’s time-saving reporting tools. Prior to Laserfiche, managers could spend two full days compiling statistics about their teams’ productivity and quotas for the Assistant Commissioner of Business and Support Services. Using Laserfiche Audit Trail, an enterprise risk management tool that tracks user activity, managers can now generate performance reports on their staff with the click of a button.

To bring managers and staff up to speed on Laserfiche, Whitis committed to several onsite demos and trainings on searching, reporting and data capture.

“People here had been married to our old system for the duration of their careers,” notes Whitis. “But when they saw Laserfiche’s capabilities compared to our old system, they were impressed. They really took ownership of the software in their daily processes when we gave them a voice in how it works.”

This ownership translated into greatly increased staff productivity, especially during peak processing seasons. Even though the number of loan applications has increased by 12% since LPO started using Laserfiche, the agency has decreased its error rate to a mere two percent with the system. In just the first year of using Laserfiche, LPO estimates that it has reduced about 30% of its overall operating expenses.

In the future, the department plans to expand its Laserfiche system to handle the litigation documents it files with the state court. Using Laserfiche Quick Fields, a high-volume indexing tool, LPO will automate the costly, time-consuming manual indexing of legal files.

Whitis says that what makes Laserfiche so attractive to state agencies—and other organizations—is its flexible architecture. From document capture to automated workflows to reporting, Whitis praises how easily Laserfiche has accommodated LPO’s evolving business needs.

Computerized Management Services

For Computerized Management Services, a medical management company that focuses on meeting the needs of radiologists, technology paves the path to a profitable future.

“Because we’ve never lost a customer and have extremely low employee turnover as well as strong long-term relationships with all of our key suppliers, we have the means to invest in the technology necessary to build a world-class infrastructure to meet the future needs of our clients,” says President Tom Brajkovich.

This forward-thinking approach led the company to implement Laserfiche enterprise content management back in 2006. “There’s a lot of miscellaneous paper associated with medical billing, a lot of non-standardized communications coming from patients, payers and providers,” Brajkovich explains. “We knew that digitizing the paper and automating associated processes would make us more efficient.”

Prior to implementing Laserfiche, Computerized Management Services housed its paper archives in bankers boxes at offsite storage lockers, making it difficult for staff to find older documents. Files that had yet to be reviewed for coding and billing purposes were kept in filing cabinets, creating bottlenecks when documents were misplaced and limiting the management team’s visibility into the company’s overall workflow.

To facilitate access and improve productivity, the company now uses Laserfiche to process, manage and store four main document types:

Reports and face sheets from providers.
Explanation of benefits forms (both paper and electronic) from payers.
Credentialing documents from providers.
Internal training documents.

“We’re constantly scanning, uploading and processing information,” Brajkovich says.

Documents are processed and stored using Laserfiche Quick Fields 8, a high-volume capture and processing tool, and Laserfiche Workflow 8, a business process management tool. These tools eliminate the need for manual data entry and filing by:

Automatically extracting metadata from documents.
Auto-populating index fields.
Creating new folders.
Auto-filing documents.

For a company that receives thousands of documents a day from more than 100 locations in California and Arizona, this automation results in a big productivity boost. It also makes it easy for employees to retrieve documents by conducting simple field and text searches.

Processing EOBs with Laserfiche

Further enhancing productivity, Computerized Management Services uses Laserfiche to manage the explanation of benefits (EOB) forms that most insurers still send in paper format.

“We use Laserfiche Quick Fields to convert paper EOBs into usable data, and Laserfiche Workflow to facilitate EOB processing,” explains Denise Van, Vice President of Operations.

Via document shortcuts, the company uses Laserfiche Workflow to route EOBs to the appropriate client teams for processing. Client team personnel work with dual screens, so they’re able to view a document on one screen while performing data entry into the company’s CPU billing software on the other.

Although CPU and Laserfiche aren’t yet integrated, the Laserfiche Entry ID for each document is logged in each patient’s record in CPU so that it is easily retrievable. After the EOBs have been processed, Laserfiche Workflow removes the EOB shortcuts from the client team folders. Laserfiche Workflow then archives the EOBs by date of service.

Laserfiche Workflow Automation Accelerates Coding

Computerized Management Services also uses Laserfiche in conjunction with A-Life, its computer-assisted coding system.

When the company receives new information from a client site, it imports it into Laserfiche using either Laserfiche Import Agent, which captures electronic faxes, or Laserfiche Snapshot, which converts electronic documents into TIFF images. Documents are then processed by Laserfiche Quick Fields and exported to A-Life. Once documents have been coded in A-Life, Laserfiche Workflow archives the documents.

The biggest benefits of Laserfiche, however, are felt when the company can’t use A-Life. “If a facility changes the format of its reports or face sheets, it takes time to reprogram A-Life,” says Brajkovich. “When that happens, Laserfiche takes over.”

According to Van, employees need a mere 24 hours to complete the coding process in A-Life. When done on paper, the process takes 5-10 days. When used as the company’s “coding back up,” Laserfiche enables staff to complete the coding process in 48-72 hours.

“Laserfiche helps us solve problems,” says Van. “If we had to code on paper every time a facility changed its format, we’d lose a lot of time.”

The coding process in Laserfiche works as follows:

Documents are imported into Laserfiche using Import Agent or Snapshot.
Documents are processed by Laserfiche Quick Fields, metadata is applied and Laserfiche Workflow moves document shortcuts to the Coder folder for processing.
The coding manager assigns work and Laserfiche Workflow moves the folder to the assigned coder.
The assigned coder codes the document using the preview pane in Laserfiche, adding coding metadata to the Laserfiche template.
Laserfiche Workflow then moves the document to the billing team, which exports it to CPU for processing.
Once the completion criteria have been met, Laserfiche Workflow archives the documents.

“Laserfiche Workflow is a wonderful tool,” says Van. “We rely heavily on it.”

The Key to Going Digital

Brajkovich and Van stress that Computerized Management Services’ success with Laserfiche is the result of a phased approach to implementation and training. They first worked with Laserfiche reseller JPI Data Resource to configure the system to their specifications, and then they trained their staff.

“We didn’t roll out everything at once,” says Brajkovich. “Implementing the capabilities of Laserfiche slowly allowed us to make sure that adjusting to the new system didn’t slow us down.”

Initially, staff learned how to use Laserfiche to search and retrieve digital documents. Once the company rolled out Laserfiche Workflow, Brajkovich and Van took a train-the-trainer approach, working with key staff from the data processing and client teams to ensure that they were comfortable with the system and able to show their team members how to perform their various tasks.

Today, as always, the company is in the process of improving its workflows. “Continuous improvement is important to us,” says Brajkovich. “In order to ensure that we offer truly exceptional service to clients in the heavily nuanced field of radiology, we constantly look for ways to fine tune our processes and our use of technology.”

Shareholders Service Group

Shareholders Service Group (SSG) was co-founded in 2002 by Peter Mangan and Bob Reed, financial services executives with over 60 collective years of experience in the brokerage services and financial advisor industry. Their goal was to provide high-quality, dedicated services for independent registered investment advisors.

From the beginning, Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) software has provided a technological foundation to help SSG provide that high-quality, dedicated service. “Based on our business experience, how paper-intensive our business would be and the necessary controls around that, we knew it was incredibly important to have a well-known, well-respected document management system,” says Dan Skiles, executive vice president of SSG. “Laserfiche certainly knew FINRA and understood the importance of the documents that we use to run our business.”

Over the past decade, the firm has expanded—as has its use of Laserfiche to manage its content. The firm has worked with Laserfiche solution provider CDI to meet changing needs. “Our business is growing dramatically, and so the scalability and reliability of Laserfiche has been critical to that success for us,” Skiles says.

“When we started, we had zero advisors, and today we’re pushing almost 1,000. Keep in mind those advisors have accounts—from as little as four or five to several hundred. Laserfiche has been there with us the whole time,” he adds.

Content management that improves customer relationships

Key to its usefulness, Skiles says, has been Laserfiche’s customizable folder structures, which makes it easy to use in different business units. “We have multiple departments—trading, new accounts, operations, cash management—all using Laserfiche for their various business processes. And the fact that it’s flexible enough to meet their needs, even though their roles and responsibilities are different, has helped us to have a cohesive group responding appropriately to clients as we use their documents.”

Skiles also lauds Laserfiche’s ability to manage documents of all types and ages, using various metadata and comprehensive search capabilities. “We’re a heavily regulated business, so yesterday’s documents are just as important as today’s,” he says. “The fact that Laserfiche has grown with us, and is scalable and reliable as we grow our staff, has been critical in our overall success.”

It’s this best-of-breed ease-of-use, he says, that has been especially practical when it comes to getting everyone on the same (paperless) page. “Certainly one of the things we’ve noticed with Laserfiche is how user-friendly it is, so that our staff—from someone who’s been on staff for eight to ten years to someone we just hired as an intern last year—can immediately be productive,” he says. “Because everyone in the firm is responding to clients, a short learning curve is critical.”

The result, according to Skiles, is a foundation for not only managing content, but also relationships. “When you run a broker-dealer, your documents are critical. They represent agreements. They represent authority,” he says. “With Laserfiche, with the way we’re able to work within the system, we have control of our clients’ information. They’re impressed by our ability to retrieve a document while we’re on the phone with them, which ultimately strengthens that personal relationship.”

Smoother audits

Regulators, too, have been impressed, as they were earlier this year. “We had FINRA come in to our office for their regular audit. Laserfiche was such a critical component of that because everything that FINRA wanted related to our documents,” Skiles recalls. “Everything they asked for—new account applications, authorizations to do this for a client, this agreement that was established with this client, transfer instructions from other financial services firms—was in Laserfiche, so we were able to provide it to them electronically.

The cost of compliance has nearly doubled in the past three years, reaching an estimated annual cost of more than $25 billion, according to the Securities Industry Association’s Report on the Costs of Compliance in the U.S. Securities Industry. As Skiles points out, in an increasingly demanding regulatory environment, deploying an ECM solution not only improves the bottom line, but also helps simplify audits.

“It’s a big deal,” he continues. “Let me tell you, when you’re sitting there with FINRA and you want to respond efficiently and effectively to their requests, removing some of that anxiety is worth a lot to both your sanity and your sleeping at night.

“That’s why we have rules that if it’s not scanned, it doesn’t exist. It’s so critical with our growing staff that we all have access to the same information. Now with nearly 1,000 advisors, we all have access to information at the click of a button.”

The competitive value of “technology strength”

The 2011 InvestmentNews Technology Study showed that, in the financial services industry, increased productivity was by far the most common consideration in technology spending. Automating routine, rules-based tasks allows staff at top-performing firms to spend more time serving clients.

When it comes to ROI, Skiles highlights the availability of information as one of Laserfiche’s defining factors—something that moves beyond getting rid of paper and filing cabinets. “Certainly the immediate ROI that comes to mind is not having documents and filing cabinets all over the place. But with a growing firm, the ROI I most appreciate is how quickly we can make an employee efficient. I can hire someone and have them up and running with Laserfiche in less than a day.”

The result, he says, is that SSG has kept operations optimal and compliance concerns to a minimum while also maintaining its competitive edge. “There’s been, obviously, competitive pressure on trading, and then of course the regulations have increased dramatically. What’s helped us a lot is technology,” he says.

“We took more trades over five days in August this past year than we did the first month that I was at the firm more than three years ago. And what’s exciting about that is that our trading desk was able to accommodate those trades just because of technology. Bottom line is that it does show you the technology strength that you have in this business.”

Loudoun County

For Loudoun County, VA, keeping up with the demands of a rapidly expanding population is a challenge, even with a healthy economy. In fact, residents of Loudoun County enjoy the nation’s highest median household income at well over $100,000 a year. In addition, Loudoun County ranked in the top 3% of all counties nationwide for per capita income.

The rapid growth of the population—coupled with the high expectations of high-income residents—has led to an increasingly high demand for public services. As a result, the county must constantly look for new and innovative ways to support high priority initiatives.

Turning to Technology

Loudoun County’s IT department is in charge of the efficient implementation of technology to improve county services to its citizens. Comprised of more than 90 IT professionals serving over 3,000 government employees across 32 departments, the IT department determines information system needs and provides equipment, software, maintenance, repair, training and other services for the entire enterprise.

Bill McIntyre, Division Manager of Enterprise IT, leads the team responsible for the software and systems that serve employees across the county, including the internet and intranet, e-mail, Webcasting and customer relationship management (CRM). “We take care of the technology that every user can take advantage of,” McIntyre says. “Our Laserfiche content management system definitely falls into that category.”

However, content management wasn’t always viewed as an enterprise system. Before implementing Laserfiche Enterprise Content Management in 2007, Loudoun County had three departments using different document imaging systems.

Going Enterprise

When the Controller’s Office started looking for a replacement for its old document imaging system, the IT department realized that implementing a true enterprise content management (ECM) system—one that could be used in all county departments—would cut down on the need for support and enable employees across the county to benefit from the ability to digitize their content and automate their business processes.

“In the past, there were a lot of overlapping systems. From a support, maintenance and cost perspective, we knew that standardizing on one ECM system was our best move,” explains McIntyre. “With only one system to oversee, we could develop the deep expertise that would enable the county to make the most out of its investment in ECM.”

After working with Unity Business Systems, a Laserfiche reseller, to implement Laserfiche in the Controller’s Office as well as Building & Development, Loudoun County’s IT department realized that it needed someone in-house to run point on the Laserfiche project. The department hired Gopal Kanneganti, Senior Imaging Systems Analyst, to join McIntyre’s enterprise team.

“It was important to us to ensure that we had someone on our team who would be responsible for Laserfiche. If you tried to add that task to people’s existing responsibilities, it could be easily pushed to the side,” McIntyre says.

Managing Change

McIntyre and Kanneganti then set out to educate their colleagues across different departments about the value of Laserfiche ECM. Although McIntyre claims that he and his team “are just a bunch of geeks and nerds who don’t know anything about marketing,” they took a picture-perfect approach to promoting the value of the new system across Loudoun County.

He explains, “We started by attending leadership meetings and presenting the capabilities of Laserfiche to department leaders. In particular, we targeted departments that were very paper-based and that would see the benefits of digitizing the paper right away.”

Two departments that sprang immediately to mind included Environmental Health and Family Services, both of which had records rooms that were so full of paper the floors were buckling.

“The need for ECM was there,” says McIntyre. “After we attended their staff meetings and they heard about what Laserfiche could do, they knew that this system would give them a way out of their predicament.”

The Enterprise Team’s strategy was to get Laserfiche into these departments quickly, so they’d see immediate value. This approach paid off, and today McIntyre says the team no longer needs to “sell Laserfiche internally. Everyone wants it.”

In fact, Loudoun County is looking to bring on a second Laserfiche administrator to assist Kanneganti and accelerate deployment across the enterprise. “When we looked at a reasonable pace for one person to roll out Laserfiche to the rest of the county, we realized that it would take 24 years!” McIntyre says. “We’re getting funding for the second position starting in fiscal 2013, and the new systems analyst will be coming on board in July.”

McIntyre notes that the IT department will be busy rolling out three new systems over the next year:

Enterprise-wide: An Oracle ERP system.
Assessor’s Office: iasWorld appraisal software from Tyler Technologies.
Tax: A new tax software system from PCI Systems.

“When we were searching for these new systems, we made it a mandatory requirement that they would all be able to integrate with Laserfiche,” says McIntyre. “Laserfiche is our enterprise solution for content management. We’re not going to move forward with any system that is incompatible with it.”

To date, Loudoun County has implemented Laserfiche in ten departments, including:

Assessor’s Office
Building & Development
Management & Financial Services (Controller’s Office)
Environmental Health
Family Services

“There are 30 departments across Loudoun County, so we’re just getting started,” McIntyre says.

Red River Regional Dispatch Center

Located in Cass County, ND, the Red River Regional Dispatch Center (RRRDC) was the first 911 center in the country to consolidate services across state lines (North Dakota/Minnesota). While there are many multi-jurisdictional dispatch centers throughout the US, only RRRDC works with all of the fire, police and emergency response units in two counties in two different states.

Serving the metropolitan community of Fargo-Moorhead, RRRDC handles more than 121,000 emergency calls a year, dispatching responders from:

Two sheriff’s departments.
Seven police departments.
Three city fire departments.
28 rural fire departments.
15 rural emergency medical service providers.
One ambulance service.

According to Renee Lura, Professional IT Services Manager for the City of Fargo and an IT liaison/lead for RRRDC, “In the realm of public safety, sharing resources across agencies allows everyone involved to get more bang for their buck. Multi-jurisdictional agencies allow participants to pool their funding so that they can invest in more sophisticated technology and provide better, faster service to their communities.”

Integration with CAD/RMS/CMS Is Key

Lura notes that in 2009, during the transition from RRRDC’s legacy AS400 CAD/RMS system to the CAD/RMS/CMS from New World Systems, the team looked for an enterprise content management (ECM) system that could integrate with New World to make it easy for staff to access and share reports, photos, warrants and a variety of other scanned or electronic documents.

“Three of the agencies in our consortium were already using Laserfiche independently,” Lura explains, “so the opportunity to benefit from all that internal expertise was a major factor in our purchase decision.” Working with Laserfiche reseller CDI, she notes, was another. “The City of Moorhead and Cass County had worked with CDI for years, and everyone was comfortable with them from the start.”

Ultimately, though, it was CDI’s ability to build a seamless integration with New World that sold RRRDC on Laserfiche. “By integrating Laserfiche with New World, we can share documents across departments and jurisdictions. Anyone with security rights to a certain document can open it by clicking a button in the New World record. It’s easy and intuitive.”

The Laserfiche/New World integration works as follows:

When users look under the Documents tab in New World, they find a Laserfiche button that indicates whether or not there is a corresponding Laserfiche folder.
By clicking on the button, the Laserfiche client launches to the appropriate folder location and users are taken directly to the file associated with the record.
Documents can also be scanned or uploaded into Laserfiche directly from the New World interface.

“Officers, detectives, dispatch and other authorized users all access pertinent information from one integrated interface,” says Lura.

ECM Enhances Security, Mobility and Compliance

Furthermore, because RRRDC uses Laserfiche Records Management Edition, a DoD 5015.2-certified solution that simplifies compliance with records management mandates, new records entering the system are automatically classified and filed into the proper records series.

“We use Laserfiche to manage everything from Wants and Warrants to animal tracking documentation to case notes from officers in the field, and different laws apply to different types of records,” says Lura. “Depending on a document’s metadata, Laserfiche automatically calculates and assigns cutoff and eligibility dates, making it easy for us to manage our records and comply with regulations.”

Lura notes that there are hundreds of users across the 58 agencies the dispatch center serves. “The thin-client solution, Laserfiche Web Access, is great for us because we have so many users spread out over so many different locations,” she says. “In the future, we look to give officers access to Laserfiche from their patrol cars, and Web Access is how other agencies are making this happen.”

Making sure that all the users have the right security permissions to see only the information that pertains to them, Lura says, has been relatively easy. “We’re a Microsoft shop, so it’s great that Laserfiche allows us to use Active Directory-driven security. We came up with a dynamic, matrixed approach that’s easy to administer and update as new staff is hired.”

Workflow Makes Work Easier Across Agencies

The consortium has also benefitted from Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management (BPM) tool that enables agencies to automate document-driven processes. “Different agencies maintain their own workflows, explains Lura. “The system is flexible enough to accommodate the needs of both RRRDC and the various agencies it serves.”

She notes that “automated approval workflows are particularly popular, as are case notification workflows that automatically notify records management staff after an officer has added information into the system.”

For example, the Moorhead Police Department implemented a series of workflow projects to minimize the amount of work involved in finding, completing and approving the paperwork associated with cases.

According to Troy Weber, Information Technology Specialist for the City of Moorhead, “Before we implemented Laserfiche Workflow, our permanent case files resided in a separate set of folders alongside our regular cases. This caused a lot of duplicate searches and errors as users needed to work with two paths because of the different permissions. Workflow now automatically sets permissions when any of the permanent case types are chosen, and the files are stored in the standard folder layout.”

He explains that case files are stored in a series of folders that match up with New World. “Because we needed the layout in Laserfiche to match up with the way New World is structured, our Laserfiche folder arrangement is not as user-friendly as it could be. In the past, our users spent a lot of time browsing to various subfolders when scanning documents,” Weber says. “We resolved this with a simple routing workflow that moves files from the new scans folder to the appropriate case folder based on metadata that was already being entered. This small change has saved a significant amount of staff time.”

In terms of approvals, Weber says, “We wanted an easy, paperless way for supervisors to ‘sign off’ on reports. Since this was only for internal purposes, we did not need an actual signature, but we did want to know which supervisor approved the document and when. Further, we wanted the documents to retain the original owner and created dates. Workflow provided an elegant solution.”

He explains, “We added a couple of fields to our template, but did not give users modify rights to them. One of the new fields is an approved field that only supervisors can modify. When populated, the workflow enters the logged in user’s name into the ‘supervisor’ field, along with the current date and time.” He further notes that this solution has given users the ability to search for documents based on a given supervisor’s approval.

Weber says that the Moorhead Police Department has found the software to be flexible and easy to configure. “Laserfiche Workflow has enabled us to transform useful digital document storage software into a full business automation solution,” he says.

From Lura’s perspective within RRRDC, “With everything it offers, from the New World integration to the business process automation and records management, Laserfiche allows the agencies in our consortium to save money each week on clerical tasks like filing. We find more and more ways to use the software every day.”

Stewart Enterprises: Using ECM Software for Disaster Recovery

Mitigating Documents During Disaster Recovery

“With cemetery records, record-keeping is literally eternal,” says Brian Pellegrin, IS Business Support Manager at Stewart Enterprises, Inc.

In the past, when people passed away, contracts from funeral homes and cemeteries were permanently added to the millions of pages of records in each of the company’s regional storage centers.

Although Stewart Enterprises initially considered implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) solution in 2005, it failed to anticipate that its documents might incur damage. Unfortunately, when Hurricane Katrina struck later that year, the company’s New Orleans Records Management Center was hit and tens of thousands of documents were submerged for over a week.

“The hypothetical doomsday scenario became a reality for our organization,” says Pellegrin. “Unfortunately, we were not as forward-thinking at that time as we are now. Rather than accepting an initial ECM proposal for $175,000, we spent $1.5 million recovering and restoring our documents.”

Setting a Document Standard

Despite the loss, the disaster gave the organization the forward velocity it needed to go digital with Laserfiche ECM. “When implementing a new functional area, as soon as I put the Katrina pictures up, everyone is on board,” says Pellegrin. “When you talk about buy-in, it isn’t a hard sell.”

As a direct result of Hurricane Katrina, the company first digitized the records in its New Orleans Records Management Center. Before implementing ECM enterprise-wide, Pellegrin started discovery by physically walking through various company facilities and taking stock of employee processes, paper piles and organization structure—a preliminary step he recommends for anyone beginning a Laserfiche project.

“The sheer volume of documents involved in digitizing a record center astonished me,” he says. “Walk through a variety of departments and ask yourself, would it would be beneficial to management to see the documents and to have real-time tracking for every step in this process?”

These discoveries allowed Pellegrin to seize the opportunity to standardize records management across the company by upgrading to Laserfiche Rio. He rolled out digital archiving to the company’s other records centers in Miami, Dallas and Orlando, as well as individual facilities and corporate offices in 25 states and Puerto Rico.

Configuring Laserfiche Rio across multiple departments and integrating Laserfiche Quick Fields with the company’s contract number system and reporting systems transformed Stewart Enterprises’ Laserfiche ECM system from a simple disaster recovery plan to a flexible, yet central, point of control.

“We’re not looking at an individual person or process, we’re thinking enterprise-wide,” he says of the company’s IT strategy. “What we have noticed as a result of implementing Laserfiche is not only a more efficient process, but a structured workflow that can be implemented nationwide.”

Centralizing Contracts

Because Stewart Enterprises juggles different regulations on its contracts and facilities for every state in which it operates, Pellegrin sought a standard workflow that could track and store documents in compliance with these regulations while still offering fluid access to documentation when adjusting a client’s file.

Laserfiche Rio allowed the company to greatly restructure the contracts workflow. Using the Laserfiche SDK, Pellegrin configured Laserfiche Quick Fields to draw information between the company’s .NET point-of-sale applications and Laserfiche. This integration, along with standardized scanning methods and better quality control, led to much faster processing:
750 field employees now image documentation as .TIFF files onto a national network drive using Canon scanners.

Laserfiche Import Agent then transfers those documents from the drive into the Laserfiche repository automatically, day and night.

Laserfiche Quick Fields runs a real-time SQL search against the company’s account receivable contract system based on individual contract number. Laserfiche Quick Fields then indexes each document by geographic location, sorts and routes it to separate workflows depending on values identified in the SQL lookup.

Users across the regional centers and corporate headquarters can route, process and update contracts using Laserfiche Workflow and Laserfiche Snapshot.

Prior to Laserfiche, these records centers contained vaults full of filing cabinets and shelves of manila folders that a contract research team mined during contract retrieval requests. With this system in place across all facilities, the company has already scanned more than 30 million pages from its document centers into Laserfiche’s digital repositories, repurposing filing cabinets into valuable real estate and saving thousands in paper costs. Now the company can scan, monitor and check the quality of its financial transactions, such as deposits, to better ensure compliance with each state’s regulations.

Enterprise-Sized Gains

Unlocking critical contract information from paper forms brought an unprecedented level of enterprise visibility to the company, which Pellegrin lauds as Laserfiche’s main asset. When Laserfiche Workflow creates a permanent record for storage, it also makes the contracts available for real-time access to over 1,000 employees nationwide via a Laserfiche WebLink Web portal.

Now, users ranging from executive vice presidents to customer service representatives can research the contracts and their indexes and status information with the click of the Laserfiche icon on their desktop. “Giving real-time, simultaneous access to a variety of functional areas and hierarchies brought immediate value and efficiency to our organization,” explains Pellegrin.

For example, read-only access to contracts for the company’s audit department has eliminated travel costs during audits. The audit group may perform a facility audit without the facility knowing about it, right from their own computers.

“Laserfiche has allowed us to not only standardize our processes, but to easily monitor them as well. We now have access to empirical data about employees indicating efficiency, accuracy and completeness on a real-time basis,” notes Pellegrin.

Stewart Enterprises truly leverages the full scale of Laserfiche Rio, using it for everything from conversion and storage of microfilm records to streamlining and enhancing internal audit processes across the entire company.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche, I was virtually in the dark with respect to ECM. I didn’t have the slightest idea of the impact this one system could have throughout the organization. We’re changing the culture of our company in a span of three to six months at each record facility.”

Schools Turn to Technology to Save Money

Related to lower revenues from what has been called the Great Recession, many states have cut funding to both K-12 and higher education, and even as the economy recovers and some of that funding is restored, education funding is still behind where it was before the recession. Consequently, schools are turning to technology to help them save money.

For example, 48 states—all except Alaska and North Dakota—are spending less per student on higher education than they did before the recession, with the average state is spending 23 percent less per student than before the recession, according to the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities, a Washington-based think tank focused on state and federal budget priorities.

In this cost-cutting environment, here are seven ways that schools are turning to technology to save money.

Reducing printing and paper use: A number of the “101 Smart Revenue Generators (and Money-saving Ideas)” from University Business involve eliminating paper processes for finance tasks such as employee reimbursements and refund processing, and introducing paperless alternatives such as electronic billing for tuition and online class registration. Document management can also help reduce paper use in accounts payable, as well as limiting printing in general. “If all entities that did business with the University of Houston System (UH) were paid via ACH, the university could save $100,000 per year,” notes UH president Renu Khator. Not only does this save money on printing supplies, postage, and paper, but it also can lead to the next item on our list…

Streamlining business processes: Some schools are hiring business process specialists to look for ways to make procedures more efficient. “The savings realized through the work of an analyst can more than pay for themselves,” reports eSchool News, especially when combined with a switch to electronic processes. Examples of processes that could be streamlined include purchase orders, payroll, and maintenance requests.

Special-purpose applications: Some schools are finding that they can save money through the use of applications intended to help them better manage food services, room use, utilities such as heating/cooling and electricity, textbooks, and school buses.

Everybody into the pool: Some districts save money by implementing shared services, pooling resources and having a single source for cloud technology, other IT services, and even administrative services such as secretarial.

Reducing the cost of communications: Schools can save money over the traditional phone-on-every-desk system. They can do this using technologies such as unified communications, voice over internet protocol (VOIP), and Skype, and business processes such as centralizing the purchasing and setup of communication technologies, According to eSchool News, 54 percent of school IT executives said the top benefit of unified communications was reducing operating costs, followed by increased productivity (50 percent) and more reliable communication (44 percent). In addition, some schools are finding that these technologies mean they can put a phone in every teacher’s room, which improves security.

Saving on computers: In some cases, schools are replacing computers because they were using Windows XP and were concerned about security risks now that Microsoft has stopped supporting that operating system. Some schools, such as St. James Catholic School in Gulfport, Miss., are taking the opportunity to move to Chromebooks, which are no-frills notebook computers that cost $200, as compared to a traditional desktop running Microsoft Windows, which generally cost about $1,000. Other school districts are saving money by buying refurbished computers instead of new ones. Refurbished computers can cost as little as one-third of new computers, eSchool News reports.

It’s true that investing in technology can result in some upfront expense, but in the long run, it can save on operational costs. Best of all, it can result in better educated students—and that’s the best investment of all.

Electronic Records Management 101: How to Reduce Risk and Restore Control

Physical records management isn’t practical for organizations with limited storage space or a wide variety of information formats.

Yet after working with numerous clients, especially government organizations, that want to move from paper archives to electronic formats or maintain a hybrid of both, I know the transition brings its own set of questions and business needs.

Any records manager worth her salt asks: How do we recreate years of records? How do we maintain control once records are living in a new software system? How do we show regulators that we’re still compliant? How do we get everyone on board with retrieving documents in a software system instead of a file cabinet?

In these video clips, I’ve covered five things to consider when you’re tackling big-picture questions about your organization’s records.

Why Electronic Records Management (ERM)?

Managing records in an electronic format is the most secure way to ensure that every document in your archive is maintained in both a compliant and easily retrieved format (just ask anyone who has had to pull paper records during an audit or discovery for a lawsuit).

This short video clip includes additional reasons that organizations have chosen an electronic format.

Webinar Clip: Why Electronic Records Management (ERM)?

What is ERM Technology?

ERM technology is different from imaging or document management systems that specialize in paper capture and document management. ERM technology goes a step further by automatically enforcing consistent, organization-wide records policies and having controls in place that protect records from loss and tampering.

Webinar Clip: What is ERM Technology?

Baseline Functionality of ERM Software

When moving to a digital format, it’s especially important to not only maintain but improve control of your records at every stage of the record life cycle. An ERM system should offer multiple ways to track every single interaction with a record from the moment it is created to the day it’s destroyed.

This video clip outlines the five features that are the mark of a fully controlled electronic records management system.

Webinar Clip: Baseline Functionality of ERM Software

Importance of Certifications

There are two important archival certifications to consider: The Department of Defense (DoD) 5015.2 certification and the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS).

This clip outlines the operational, legislative and legal guidelines of these certifications.

Webinar Clip: Importance of Certifications

Transparent Records Management

It’s common—and not incorrect—to create a record system structured entirely on retention schedules. However, those repositories can be difficult to navigate when someone wants to reference, say, a case file from ten years ago and doesn’t know that document’s exact creation or destruction date.

Transparent records management, a unique feature to Laserfiche’s records management system, enables general users to create a record layout of their choice without interfering with the overall records management structure.

This clip shows you how it works.

Webinar Clip: Transparent Records Management

Take the next step to implement electronic records management within your organization and get your copy of “The Ultimate Guide to Records Management” eBook.

14 Acronyms You Need to Know Before Researching ECM

Enterprise content management (ECM) companies love their acronyms, especially in online conversations (perhaps because they eat up less characters when drafting tweets). while these acronyms can succinctly express technology and industry-specific concepts, they may also intimidate the uninformed.

To help ECM newcomers make sense of all this jargon, here’s a quick guide to 14 ECM-related acronyms you’re sure to encounter.

Industry

Before we dive into this industry of information management, what does the industry call itself? It’s important to note that some terms are fitting for specific solutions, while others can be labeled as all of the above.

CMS: Content Management System

This term seems like it could refer to anything from closet organization to email filtering. It actually refers to applications that allow users to store, edit, search for and control content, especially (but not exclusively) web content. CMSs range widely in functionality and application—ECM is one of the more feature-rich and powerful examples of a CMS.

ECM: Electronic Content Management & Enterprise Content Management

“Enterprise” ECM and “electronic” ECM are both established abbreviations in the industry. However, enterprise content management refers to solutions for enterprise organizations while electronic content management is a broader term that can include consumer products.

Enterprise content management is an umbrella term that encompasses nearly every other acronym on this list. Go here to learn the basics of ECM.

DMS: Document Management System

DMS refers to the management of physical and/or digital documents. Most companies in the ECM industry, including Laserfiche, came into being by developing document management software. Today, DMS is considered a subset of ECM, as organizations have to manage far more data formats than text documents alone.

Check out our complete guide to document management here.

EDMS: Electronic Document Management System

While DMS can refer to both physical and digital documents, EDMS implies—you guessed it—only digital documents. Well, that was an easy one. Moving on!

DI: Document Imaging

DI is the process of turning a paper document into a digital document. DI tools come in many forms, from printers to scanners to the camera on your smartphone. Any technology that can digitize a paper document can be considered a document imaging tool.

Here’s how documents can be captured and stored in Laserfiche.

CSP: Content Services Platform

While this is still a newcomer in the field, it’s important to note. This term came about with a re-categorization of ECM, initiated by research firm Gartner. Learn more about this change here.

Processes

In the ECM industry, processes make the work go ‘round.

BPA: Business Process Automation

As it relates to ECM, business process automation is a powerful feature that reduces the time and resources required to move documents from A to B. For example, instead of dragging electronic documents into different folders and emailing them to coworkers, employees can use BPA software to handle these tasks automatically.

BPM: Business Process Management

BPM is a strategic approach that concentrates on reshaping an organization’s existing business processes to achieve optimal efficiency and productivity. It encompasses, but does not necessarily indicate, the automation of business processes.

RPA: Robotic Process Automation

Cousin to BPA and BPM, though distinctive in its use of AI. Robotic Process Automation is a software technology that enables employees to better focus on high priority tasks by pushing routine, monotonous tasks to software “robots” to complete.

TCM: Transactional Content Management

This term is easy to confuse with BPM as it also refers to organizing, automating and tracking content. However, TCM refers specifically to transactional content such as invoices, receipts and contracts. This focus on transactional content means invoices get paid on time and business vendors stay happy.

Records

ECM handles both live and archived documents. Understanding the terms used to describe digital versus paper will make it easier to research solutions, if you’re planning a Digital Transformation.

RM: Records Management

Many documents used and produced by businesses eventually become records. Some have to be destroyed after five years, some after ten—and others are kept indefinitely. RM establishes rules and practices for maintaining diverse types of records in accordance with internal policies and legal mandates. Basically, RM helps organizations stay out of trouble.

Get a quick overview of RM here.

ERM: Electronic Records Management

Because records management can be as low-tech as boxes of paper in a storage closet, ERM has emerged as a distinct industry term. ERM systems greatly improve the management of records through features such as retention and disposition scheduling and activity monitoring.

Learn more about the benefits of ERM in this guide.

Business Continuity

ECM aims to protect information on good days and bad days.

DRP: Disaster Recovery Plan

IT departments use DRPs to plan for system and infrastructure failures. The goal of a DRP is to recover from a disaster—man-made or natural—as quickly as possible and with as little data loss as possible.

An ECM system plays a vital role in disaster recovery by keeping company information in electronic repositories rather than flammable, flood-able file cabinets.

BCP: Business Continuity Plan

BCP is the more comprehensive version of DRP. Rather than focusing on systems failures, business continuity aims to minimize interruptions and downtime across the entire organization in the event of a disaster.

With ECM, organizations can back up and recover documents and records because information is digitally stored off-site. Data remains safe from harm and, with the ability to remotely access information, employees can keep working even if they can’t access the company building.

Now you’re ready dive into the great big world of Enterprise Content Management! Get started with 2023 Gartner® Peer Insights™ ‘Voice of the Customer’: Content Services Platforms to help inform your research.

What Exactly Is Records Management?

What is a record?

A record is “information created, received and maintained as evidence and as an asset by an organization or person, in pursuit of legal obligations or in the transaction of business”, according to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

This quote brings up an important distinction. While records are often considered synonymous with documents, they include one important characteristic that makes them unique: records, whether physical or digital, include evidence of a particular business activity, requiring them to be stored and retained over an extended period.

What types of records are there?

Records include any tangible object or digital information which have value to the organization.

Common types of records are:

Documents created in the course of business (correspondence, agreements, studies).
Items that require organizational action (FOIA requests, controlled correspondence).
Documented organizational activities and actions (calendars, meeting minutes, project reports).
Items mandated by statute or regulation (administrative records, legal/financial records, dockets).
Items supporting financial obligations or legal claims (contracts, grants, litigation case files).
Items needed to communicate organizational requirements (guidance documents, policies, procedures).
Items posted on social media sites (when required by a specific industry.)

Why is records management important?

The U.S. alone has more than ten federal records management laws and regulations that must be followed when managing government records. In addition, regulatory bodies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may outline specific requirements for financial records. There are also laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) that have their own set of rules that apply to specific industries.

How are electronic records maintained?

Storing files on an organization’s shared drive is not enough to meet industry compliance standards. Beyond the legal mandates, a records management strategy is vital to the lifecycle of your organization’s information.

*The record lifecycle encompasses the following phases: the creation, distribution, active storage, inactive storage and retention, disposition and archiving of an organization’s records.*

An organization-wide strategy should govern how information is created, stored, shared, tracked and protected.

This ensures your organization’s information will never be in the wrong hands or the wrong place and can still be accessed by those who need it.

Is your organization compliant with GDPR?

The General Data Protection Regulation, known as GDPR, is a regulation on the processing and movement of personal data, implemented by the EU in 2018. Although GDPR was passed in the EU, its implications are global — any organization keeping or transferring data pertaining to individuals within the EU is subject to this regulation. In addition, other countries and even some individual states in the U.S. have created their own regulations in line with the requirements of GDPR.

Organizations need to remain steadfast in their dedication to proper records management if they want to comply. Reynold Leming, Chair of the Information and Records Management Society, encourages firms to establish an “information pedigree,” which combines a record of information assets held with proper information governance and audit trails of business events. This “information pedigree” then results in a traceable and accountable “ancestral line” for any piece of information your company works with over time. Here’s a few additional considerations for records management that you might not think of right away:

A records request can come from anywhere. Besides routine audits, requests may come from lawyers in a court case, insurers, law enforcement, the public or even the media. Having established best practices for storing and moving records can help make sure your organization’s time, or its reputation, isn’t squandered.
Business processes are a part of records management. Make sure your processes are consistent and can handle any records or personal information in compliance with any industry or government regulations. A process automation platform can help mitigate process inconsistencies and thus bolster your efforts to stay in compliance.
You can keep audit trails of paper documents. Although paper documents are largely a thing of the past in terms of day-to-day processes, records management involves, and in many ways necessitates, looking back in the past. You should maintain digital audit trails and inventories of any paper documents held in archives.
When you exchange data with a third party, make sure they take your compliance needs seriously. Make sure vendors are aware of any necessary records management or data privacy regulations, and that they intend to follow them. Keep a record of any contracts signed with vendors of software, equipment and the like, as well as third parties who process personal data on your behalf. In addition, you’ll want to know their best practices and policies when it comes to records retention and information management.
Maintain records of how you handle information. Policies, best practices and even laws evolve — you need to take note of when changes happen so you can show regulators, the public or whoever else asks, that you followed the rules when handling information.

What are the benefits of an electronic records management system?

Electronic (or digital) records management is the modern standard for how organizations control their information and records.

A quality records management system should provide:

Improved efficiency in the storage, retention and disposition of records and records series.
Detailed reports of which records are eligible for transfer, accession or destruction.
Audit trails to track all system activity and the entire lifecycle of records.
Customizable and flexible capabilities — tailored to the needs of the organization.

A dependable, efficient records management system can help meet these challenges without drastically altering business operations. In the words of Justin Pava, Principal Technical Product Manager at Laserfiche, “The best records management solution is one you don’t need to think about.”

In summary, building a records management strategy should be a top priority for any organization that values efficiency, security and compliance with regulatory recordkeeping requirements.

Customer Spotlight: City of Ithaca/Tompkins County

Learn how one county in New York reduced the time to furnish records in response to FOIA requests by more than half.

Browse customer reviews of Laserfiche on G2

Get insights from real customers on why Laserfiche is a top choice for organizations looking to encourage better recordkeeping.

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