How Ramblers Worldwide Holidays Uses Laserfiche Forms and Laserfiche Workflow

Laserfiche Solution Contributed by: Richard Clowser, IT & Business Systems Manager, Ramblers Worldwide Holidays

Based out of the United Kingdom, Ramblers Worldwide Holidays has been organizing guided walking tours and holidays around the world for over 60 years. Most of their business processes are centered on documents. Here is how Laserfiche Forms and Laserfiche Workflow transformed its day-to-day operations.

Laserfiche Forms

Ramblers uses Laserfiche Forms to:
  • Coordinate a meeting time with the tour and clients who will not be travelling on the same flight as the group
  • Register tour leaders around the world for the annual Ramblers conference

Laserfiche Forms also drives Ramblers’ private group sale cycle from the conception phone call to providing a quote. This process works as follows:

1.  The private group manager captures the client’s requirements in a form
Information about private group tours is entered into a Laserfiche form

2.  Once the requirements are submitted, information must be obtained regarding travel, itinerary and available trip leaders to see if this trip is logistically feasible and generate trip costs. All of this information is entered into a different form by representatives from various departments. They can either indicate that they require more time to find pricing or information or supply the final information.
  • Each price quotation has to have a “Valid Until” date specified in the form. Laserfiche Workflow monitors this field and sends reminders when a quotation is about to expire.
  • A private group prospect can request an extension on any price quotes. The private group manager can approve or reject the extension.
Extensions are rejected or approved by filling out another Laserfiche form

3.  The final form is sent to the sales manager, who generates a final price quotation

Laserfiche Workflow generates reminder emails at each step to ensure that any completion or cancellations of the prospects will notify any departments and people involved. These include:
  • Sales and reservations
  • Product planning
  • Travel department
  • Tour leaders
  • Overseas departments

Laserfiche Workflow

Laserfiche Workflow is also used to automate 15 key business processes, which include:
  • Extending support to disaster recovery processes by replicating the critical documents to the Laserfiche cloud server when changes are made
  • Assisting departments in filing documents
  • Performing nightly statistical report runs that would otherwise exhaust system resources during working hours

Marketing research indicated that customers who booked a second holiday with us in the first six months after their first were more likely to become regular customers.

Laserfiche Workflow monitors the reservation database and identifies first-time clients who have just returned from a holiday. It then sends them a voucher for a second holiday, which is redeemable within six months. Laserfiche Workflow:
  • Runs a defined SQL query every night to identify returning clients
  • Checks that the tour they have just taken is not on any exception list (such as a private group tour)
  • Gathers data about the client from the database such as their current loyalty bonus points earned and points redeemed (if any)
  • Calculates a date six months from the day of return and stores it in a token
  • Identifies the parent company of the tour that the client has returned from
  • Checks to see if the client is a first time booker by counting the number of tours the customer signed up for in the database
  • Inserts the booking reference number into the database. This acts as the unique voucher number and is used when the customer redeems the voucher in the future
  • Creates a new document in the “Welcome Home Letter Voucher” folder and attaches a PDF form template to this document
  • Fills out this PDF form with the data collected in the first part of the process and also uses it to populate the document’s template
An example of a voucher with associated metadata

Here is what this workflow looks like:

Laserfiche Workflow moves the completed voucher into a special folder, where it awaits review by operations management. The supervisors check the voucher for accuracy and confirm that the client is new and is not found in the old reservations system. Once verified, they change the status field to “Approved,” which triggers a second workflow that sends an email to the client with the voucher included in the text as well as a PDF attachment. The final document is then stored in the processed folder.

When the client wants to redeem the voucher for £50 off their next holiday, the sales assistant checks that they have a valid voucher stored for future use, and moves it to the Redeemed folder.
Vouchers are saved in a special section of the repository

Benefits

Implementing Laserfiche at Ramblers Worldwide Holidays has resulted in the following benefits:
  • Laserfiche Forms makes it possible to directly populate external database systems without having to export a csv file or import the data manually
  • Projects can go live sooner than standard application development because Laserfiche Forms enables a fast response to changing requirements
  • Laserfiche Workflow has made Ramblers more efficient in handling day-to-day manual tasks related to data checking
  • The Laserfiche Workflow designer is so intuitive that an external business process analyst was able to create five workflows that managed the entire online sales support process after just half a day of training
  • Instead of hiring four additional employees to drive the secondary sales voucher initiative, Ramblers was able to automate the process with Laserfiche and have only one staff member handle approvals

Would you like to see how Laserfiche Forms and Laserfiche Workflow can automate processes within your organization? Get a free demo today.

How Breckenridge Grand Vacations Automated HR Onboarding with Laserfiche Forms

Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Irina Garner, HR Technician, Breckenridge Grand Vacations

Breckenridge Grand Vacations manages three timeshare resorts in Breckenridge, CO and is currently building a fourth one. With 400 employees and a 50% turnover rate, the hiring process used to involve a great deal of paper. Here is how Laserfiche Forms made onboarding new hires a quick and painless process.

Legacy process

After a prospective employee accepted a job offer at Breckenridge Grand Vacations, the hiring manager had to:
  • Fill out a lengthy new hire form in Microsoft Excel with all of the new hire’s personal data and salary information.
  • Submit a new helpdesk ticket to set the new employee up with all appropriate hardware and software, such as computer login and phone number.
  • Register the employee for new employee orientation.

Hiring managers generally performed these steps at different times, so the people who needed the information frequently didn’t receive it in a timely matter. The new hire form in particular had to be printed and driven around the organization’s eight different locations through interoffice mail to be signed. It was then delivered to HR, where an employee manually entered all of the new hire’s information into the HR system, only to find out that required information was missing or the form was not filled out correctly.

Here is what the old, cumbersome new hire form looked like:
breckenridge1

Current process

With the new process, the hiring manager simply fills out one Laserfiche form to perform all of the tasks listed above. Here is what this form looks like:
Improved HR onboarding form using Laserfiche Forms

This form is created to be as user-friendly as possible so that the hiring manager only enters a minimal amount of information. Some of the most useful features of this form include:
  • Drop-down fields that ensure the manager selects an answer that is appropriate to the question. For example, the Location field has a list of all of the available locations. The manager does not have to remember the proper spelling or name of a location.
  • Field rules that guarantee the manager only fills out information that is pertinent to the particular new hire. For example, the compensation structure fields only appear if the manager selects the commission pay type.
    Setting field rules for HR onboarding flow with Laserfiche forms
  • Database lookups that allow some of the information, such as the name of the hiring manager’s supervisor, to be prepopulated directly from the employee database. This ensures that the form is routed to the correct people for review.
  • Custom JavaScript applied to the Start Day field that ensures that the new employee starts work on the day of a new hire orientation (every Monday for English speakers and every Friday for Spanish-speakers). This eliminates the problem of a new hire starting on a Tuesday, and not attending the new hire orientation until the following Monday. Here is what this JavaScript looks like:
    Custom javascript for HR onboarding form
  • Read-only fields that ensure that some of the prepopulated data cannot be changed. For example, the three different approvers who need to review the form are automatically populated based on the employee ID of the submitter. Those fields are set as read-only so that the submitter cannot alter the chain of review.

Once the form is submitted, it goes through three different levels of approval (unless the first approver is one of the company’s executives, in which case the other two approval levels are bypassed.) The reviewer is notified by email of a new hire form to review and can view and approve/reject this form directly in Laserfiche Forms. Alternatively, the reviewer can reply directly to the email with either “approve” or “reject” in the email body. Either action will move the form along in the process. Here is what a sample email looks like:
Sample HR onboarding approval e-mail from Laserfiche Forms

If the reviewer doesn’t approve or reject the form in three days, he/she receives a reminder email. If at any point the form is rejected, an email is sent to the hiring manager and the process is terminated.

Once the form has been approved by all reviewers, the HR assistant is notified by email. Another email is sent to the IT helpdesk. The IT email notification contains all of the information the IT employee needs to set up the user in all systems.

Here is what the entire Laserfiche Forms business process looks like:
breckenridge6
Click image to view larger in new window.

Benefits of Laserfiche Forms

Automating the new hire process with Laserfiche Forms has resulted in the following benefits for Breckenridge Grand Vacations:
  • The HR and IT departments receive information that is always correct, complete and timely so that everything is ready before the new hire’s first day.
  • The forms can be built by an HR technician, who can also make changes without having to wait for assistance from the IT department.
  • Direct approval allows managers who travel between locations to approve new hire forms quickly from their email inbox without having to log into Laserfiche Forms.
  • Employee information is more secure—there is no longer the possibility of a form being lost on the way to another location or accidentally viewed by an unauthorized person.

You can learn more about paperless processes in HR by downloading the free guide to HR automation.