PERI Scaffolding Speeds Invoice Processing With Laserfiche

PERI Formwork Scaffolding Engineering Ltd, based in South Africa, is a global manufacturer of formwork and scaffolding and provides consultant, project and engineering services for the construction industry. With wide-reaching operations across 60 global subsidiaries, the firm manages complex payment streams that require efficient processes and quick response times.

“As technology changes, there’s a need to communicate and distribute to customers more efficiently,” says Jacques Lotriet, Business Analyst for PERI’s Financial Efficiency Projects.

The organization previously relied on paper mail to sort, distribute and pay invoices. Collecting payments from customers often took up to two weeks with no guarantees that documents and payments would be returned on time.

With Laserfiche, the company built a web portal that provides customers and staff with web-based access to monthly statements and invoices. The accounting portal significantly decreased the time it takes staff to process invoices, improved the customer experience and helped the company provide more transparent operations for regulatory compliance.

“Feedback from our customers and our staff internally has been extremely positive, especially with the way to quickly and easily access and distribute documents,” says Lotriet.

Benefits:
  • Reduced accounts receivable and payable processing times from weeks to one day
  • Enabled customers to view invoices, see reminders and complete online payments entirely online
  • Saved $75,000 a year in printing and paper costs, creating a return on investment in the first year of Laserfiche use

The ability to quickly model and execute digital business processes helps PERI Scaffolding continually improve its customer experience and remain competitive in its industry.

“It is very versatile,” says Lotriet. “I like to describe it also as a blank canvas. If you can think it up, you can build it. The electronic flow and distribution is also very efficient, and saves a lot of time and money.”

Click here to learn more about using Laserfiche to streamline the accounts payable process.

Hurunui District Council

New Zealand’s Hurunui District, with a population of approximately 11,000 spread across 18 towns, offers a rural lifestyle filled with rich culture. Its local government authority excels at developing a sense of community, partnership and well-being.

Hurunui District Council knew that building a strong IT infrastructure was essential to providing the best customer service. The Council began searching for a new solution to replace its legacy document management system (DMS) when the requirements for records management at government organisations changed. The growing amount of information generated proved too much to efficiently handle, control and retain.

According to Scott Linton, the Council’s Information and Technology Services Manager, the Council focused on finding a system with:
  • The ability to easily integrate with its existing financial and business system, Napier Computer Systems.
  • Test servers and multiple repositories, versioning capability and records management functionality.
  • The right price.

Laserfiche provided a versatile enterprise-wide solution. “Being New Zealand’s seventh-largest district by land size, we needed a system with the capability to connect our multiple offices,” explains Linton. “We were really impressed at how easy it was to implement Laserfiche and connect our main office with five satellite locations. It was up and running in no time!”

Using Laserfiche Quick Fields to conserve staff time and IT resources

Three months before the Hurunui District Council put Laserfiche in place, its legacy DMS broke down. “We were worried about what to do with all of our information, but Laserfiche Quick Fields allowed us to quickly migrate the contents of the legacy system into Laserfiche,” says Linton.

The Council used Laserfiche Quick Fields to back scan its records. More than half a million documents were imported directly into Laserfiche from their legacy system using Laserfiche Import Agent and Laserfiche Workflow. “Laserfiche Quick Fields helped to accelerate the process, prevent manual errors, save staff time and produce greater productivity,” Linton says. “In fact, we wouldn’t have been able to do the conversion manually. It would have overwhelmed us.”

The Council is now preparing to transfer approximately 800,000 files from its group drives to the Laserfiche repository.

Managing Council documents and records

Laserfiche’s versioning functionality was an important selection criterion for the Council. “We use versioning to improve service delivery and regulate our information management,” explains Linton. “We use versioning with our Consents documents and it prevents information from getting lost, tracks changes and maintains different versions for different purposes.”

The Council actively uses versioning to manage Resource Consents documents, adding, revising and replacing throughout the year. “It was difficult to organise when we didn’t have a centralised storage location. We didn’t know which document was the newest one, staff members constantly worked on wrong versions and the name of the documents kept changing. It’s been really useful to our staff so we will move forward and implement it with Building Consents documents as well,” Linton says.

The Laserfiche check in/check out process has helped to ensure that:
  • Only one person can make changes to the report at a time.
  • The most up-to-date version of each document is stored in the Laserfiche repository.

Automating business processes and accelerating service delivery

The Building Consents Department issues permits to ensure that any building work within the district is lawful, safe and sustainable. Documents about each property, including applications and details, need to be well-maintained and organised so that staff can provide excellent customer service.

“We are currently automating 120,000 Building Consents, Resource Consents and License’s documents using Laserfiche Workflow, which is pulling metadata from the old database and transferring it into the Laserfiche database,” says Linton. “Doing a manual transfer would have been a nightmare.”

Using Laserfiche’s abilities, the Council organised its metadata information as fields and then determined which fields to apply to the documents to enable the most efficient search for users. Laserfiche Workflow then assigns a template of predetermined fields to the documents, automatically pulls the information from the old database and fills out the metadata for each document.

“Each property has its own folder that contains an average of 40-50 pages on the details. Overall, we have around 10,000 folders, so we have tens of thousands of documents that need to be identified and placed with the correct property,” Linton explains. “We applied a Laserfiche template with metadata information such as the building type, number, property ID, evaluation number and address. Laserfiche Workflow then automatically identifies, filters and files the documents in their correct folders.”

According to Linton, “We want to continue expanding Laserfiche as an enterprise-wide, back-end control centre. We want our staff to experience a faster and easier search for documents — it shouldn’t be time-consuming to gather information about a property. With Laserfiche, they will be able to search for a property name or the ID and get the results in seconds.”

Future plans

The Hurunui District Council is looking forward to expanding and extending its Laserfiche implementation. “We are looking to bring in Laserfiche Mobile for building inspectors and compliance officers when they are at on-site visits. We’re also considering implementing Laserfiche Forms to further streamline workflows,” Linton says. “The capabilities of Laserfiche are endless. We haven’t found anything we can’t do with Laserfiche!”

Paperless Office Transformation — What Are the Benefits?

What is a Paperless Office?

A paperless office, also called a paper-free office, is a work environment which uses minimal physical paper and instead uses primarily digital documents. A paperless employee is a worker who has eliminated or greatly reduced the use of paper in the workplace. The process of converting paper files into electronic files is known as digitization.

The idea of an entirely paperless office has existed since personal computers became the basis of the modern workplace. Despite the prevalence of electronic documents and email, most organizations still rely on paper documents. There are many benefits to going paperless, from saving resources to boosting security. Yet from handouts at meetings and HR onboarding documents to receipts, many business processes still revolve around paper.

Benefits of Going Paperless

Saves Time

Time spent filing, organizing, and searching for paper documents is time that could be spent on more productive tasks. Digitized documents are stored in a central repository, which is basically a well-organized digital filing cabinet where all of your documents live.

Using a digital document management system, you’ll get to harness the same powerful search abilities that you’re used to using on Google. This means employees can find files at the click of a button, much more quickly than the laborious, manual process of searching for a specific file in a buried folder. Employees are able to use this extra time on revenue-generating projects.

Saves Space

Paper takes up a lot of space – as do filing cabinets and space to store those filing cabinets. Books and bookshelves are bulky, too. What’s worse, paper keeps piling up, oftentimes accumulating more quickly than it can be sorted and organized. This is particularly true of industries that have long mandatory retention periods for paperwork like the financial industry.

Digitizing files allows you to store all documents either on an on-premises server or in the cloud. Digital file folders in a repository require much less space than a physical records archive.

Saves Money

Going digital improves process efficiency, saving you money. Paperless offices can process a much larger volume of paperwork compared to traditional offices in the same amount of time.

Further, digitization reduces money spent on paper, printers, ink, postage, office space for files and employee time to manage paperwork. The savings on employee time become especially valuable in regards to regulatory audits and repetitive, high-volume tasks like expense reimbursements.

Eases Transfer of Information

Document management software offers a simple process for saving documents. The software easily compiles digital documents using scanners, mobile capture using a camera on a phone or tablet or importing any file type (.docx, .pdf, image files). Many commonly used applications, like Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, integrate with document management systems and have native plugins which allow you to file your document into your content management system with just one click.

Promotes the Environment

Manufacturing paper products produce greenhouse gases, causing deforestation and global warming. Recycling can offset some of the environmental impact, but not by much. Most paper eventually ends up in a landfill. Further, ink and toners contain volatile compounds and non-renewable substances which are damaging to the environment. It is much more sustainable to simply reduce paper use altogether by switching to a paperless office.

Boosts Security

Physical documents are hard to track – reams of paper can get lost, misfiled or destroyed without anyone noticing. It can also be difficult to monitor the access, printing and copying of sensitive files. Document management software has advanced security capabilities that can tackle these challenges. System administrators can set-up granular access rights, which assign permissions at the document level (e.g. settings based on the type of document), user level (e.g. settings based on person’s job function), or system level (e.g. overarching security for all data in the system).

The security benefits of a paperless workplace go beyond access rights. Implementing document management software also allows organizations to leverage electronic signatures, redact confidential information, create audit trails and more.

Digitizing Paper-Based Processes

Technology has so seamlessly replaced paper processes that it’s difficult to remember how things used to be done. In nearly all cases, the evolution from paper-based items to their electronic counterparts is profoundly more efficient.
ThenNow
 

 

Paper Documents

  • Tediously shuffle paper between individuals and departments
  • Difficult to track changes when collaborating on a document
 

 

Digital Documents

  • Seamless electronic transfer between individuals and departments
  • Easy to track changes and records comments using “Track Changes” feature
 

 

Mail & Faxes

  • Constant maintenance required to organize and find documents, especially really old ones
  • Access based on location of documents
  • Easily misplaced or damaged
 

 

Email

  • Easily searchable based on content and metadata
  • Access from phone or browser
  • Archived forever. Even in the event of a deletion, can potentially be recovered
 

 

Encyclopedias & Dictionaries

  • Slow process to look up words and topics one by one
  • All data remains inside volumes of book
  • Access from wherever the book is at the time
 

 

Internet

  • Instantaneous access to information using search
  • Ability to save, copy and bookmark data to reference
  • Access from anywhere with Internet
Newspapers, Books & Magazines

 

  • News quickly becomes outdated
  • Message constrained by word space and page count
  • Slow redaction time and news cycle
  • Each new book takes up more space
 

 

Media Websites & eBooks

  • Immediate access to content
  • Message not constrained by space
  • Real-time updates and amendments and 24-hour news cycle
  • Compact e-reader holds multiple books and magazines

 

 

 

Printed Maps

  • No way to factor in traffic, road closures and other barriers
  • Gets worn out, cumbersome to use while driving
  • Becomes out-of-date

 

Waze, Google Maps & Navigation Devices

 

  • Reacts to traffic to maximize route efficiency and gives an accurate estimate of arrival time
  • Lives within a mobile device
  • Updated regularly to ensure accurate navigation
Business Cards & Rolodexes

 

  • Business cards pile up and get lost
  • Rolodex must be manually updated
 

 

Contacts Synced

  • Contacts live within email program and mobile phone app
  • Updates to contact information automatically synced across devices

The Path to Digital Transformation

Deciding to make the move from paper to paperless is part of a larger process called digital transformation.

Laserfiche has identified five key steps to completely digitize your workplace:
  1. Digitize: convert all documents from paper to digital
  2. Organize: categorize documents in a central electronic filing cabinet
  3. Automate: digitize business processes using forms and workflow
  4. Streamline: take a high-level view of business processes to identify bottlenecks and opportunities for more efficiency
  5. Transform: use advanced analytics to turn data into insights on how to make your company even more efficient

Document management software is a crucial tool to this road to digital transformation. Beyond the immediate benefits of going paperless, digitizing is the first step to transforming your workplace and ultimately driving business forward.

If you choose to deploy a Laserfiche solution as part of your paperless transformation, be sure to check out the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace, with pre-built workflows for processing contracts, permits and more!

For even more info about the benefits of going paperless, download the Ultimate Guide to Document Scanning:
Get the eBook: How to Improve Document Storage and Imaging Across Your Organization.

Migrating to a New Content Management System: What Documents Should You Keep?

How do you make a smart decision on what content stays and what goes when you transition to a new content management system?

Whether you are implementing a content management system for the first time or changing from one system to another, you will be making many decisions about which documents and files to move.

As part of the overall document management system implementation project, keep in mind the project’s goals and records retention requirements when deciding what to move and what not to move. Be sure that you and your project team understand the project’s desired outcome before deciding what content to move.

Defining Project Goals

Why is the new system for content management being implemented? What problems will this new system solve within your organization?

Possible goals may include things like:

  • Easier access to documents and simplified searching
  • Improved organization efficiency
  • Reduced cycle time for business processes
  • Enhanced protection of information, including compliance with laws and regulations

Decisions about how the new system is implemented should support these project goals.

New Systems Provide New Opportunities

Most organizations want to do things in smarter, more efficient ways. But, people and organizations are resistant to change, therefore unlikely to make the effort without some kind of catalyst. Implementing a new content management system is a golden opportunity to take a long, hard look at how things are being done, question the value of doing things the same way and investigate how business processes can be improved.

Most people within your organization probably have ideas about ways to improve your processes. The need to roll out a new system is a perfect time to ask for their input. Offer employees a structured arena, such as a facilitated team brainstorming session, in which to share ideas. Take the best ideas and develop them further.

Reviewing business processes, and deciding how a new system can support those changes, will make your project more meaningful, useful and – in the long run – successful. Your organization is devoting a lot of resources – time, work hours, budgets – to this project. After all, if you simply copy over your existing way of doing business into your new system, all of those resources will not be providing good value.

For example, in many organizations, there are no requirements for wet-ink signatures. Electronic signature technology is fully developed and can be easily incorporated into new system requirements. Use of electronic signatures enables the use of automated workflows, which can automate business processes, significantly reducing cycle time and making staff more efficient.

Build the New System to Support Go-Forward Processes

Why focus effort and resources on old ways of doing things? When you know how you want to operate, you should incorporate those goals into the system requirements, and build the new system to enable what you want to do from now on.

Evaluating what to do with existing files and documents should not begin until your desired way of operating has been defined and set up in the new system.

Identify Repositories and Sources of Documents

Before making decisions about what to move, make sure you have identified where the existing files and documents are located.

Typical locations may include:

  • Shared drives
  • Personal drives
  • Workstation desktops
  • Old imaging systems
  • Enterprise systems that will be retired (regardless of whether internal or external)

It is also important to understand where new content will come from in the future, and set up your system to appropriately deal with these. This may include evaluating which system should hold a document and how other systems that need access to it can link to that single document.

Why Not Move Everything into the New System?

You may be tempted to simply move everything over to the new system and defer evaluating the information until later.

Why isn’t that a good approach?

First, because if you don’t do it now, it probably won’t happen.

More importantly, all documents do not have equal value. Systems – and documents – consume an organization’s resources, including:

  • Storage space
  • Staff time
  • Search time
  • Backup services

Low-value information interferes with the efficiency of business activities because it can quickly accumulate into a mass of excess data. That irrelevant information must be combed to find pertinent information, which bogs down routine processes. Additionally, keeping documents that have already met their retention requirements can create additional risks. Your goal should be to make it easier to find the right information when it is needed.

Deciding What to Move

Who should make decisions about what is high-value information and what should move to the new system? It should be a team decision. Assigning this decision solely to the department that owns the documents risks an inadequate review. Despite the fact that the department probably has the best understanding of what is in those documents, they are not fully informed on other factors such as risk and impact to resources or the enterprise as a whole.

The review team typically consists of representatives from:

  • Information Technology
  • Records Management
  • Risk Management
  • Legal
  • Subject Matter Expert

Factors to consider during the review and evaluation should include:

  • Is the document needed for business decisions?
  • Do multiple departments need the information?
  • Can it be found elsewhere?
  • Is it a duplicate?
  • Is it a “record” (i.e., does it document a position or activity of the organization)?
  • Have retention requirements already been met?
  • Is the information necessary to support current and ongoing activities?
  • Is the file type appropriate (e.g., .docx, .xlsx) or is it a file type that should not be there (e.g., .exe, .gif)?
  • Is it relevant to or part of an investigation, audit or litigation?

Some decisions will be easy, such as eliminating file types that should not be retained. Other decisions will need deeper analysis. The expertise to do this analysis may only be there during the short time that this new system project is going on, so make good use of it while it’s available.

Get Rid of What Isn’t Being Moved

Holding on to documents, files and information whose useful life has passed can become a liability to the organization. Once you have determined that a document isn’t useful or needed in the new system, steps should be taken to properly dispose of it.

  • Retire (decommission) old systems, including whatever is left in their repositories
  • Delete duplicate files
  • Eliminate out-of-date reference materials
  • Purge temporary or trivial information
  • Eliminate personal files – photos, music, videos – that consume large amounts of storage space

Building a document management solution that meets the organization’s current and future needs is a difficult but worthwhile endeavor. Ensuring that the documents and files moved to that system are of value will help to streamline operations and meet the goals of the organization. Put in the time to do it right the first time!

To learn more about how a content management system can help you automate key processes, save time spent locating documents and be better prepared to meet compliance requirements, check out our enterprise content management software buyer’s guide.

What Are Content Services?

In 2017, the analyst firm Gartner redefined what enterprise content management could be by coining a new term: content services.

Fundamentally, content services are a collection of platforms, applications, and components intended to solve a variety of unique business challenges.

Providers of content services platforms may use the term “enterprise content management” to describe their offerings, given its familiarity with customers. Still, most modern offerings are considered “content services”, even if a particular vendor chooses a different term.

What’s the Difference Between Content Services and ECM?

The fundamental difference between what was traditionally known as ECM and what is now content services is based on the concept of “composition.”

This concept formed out of the need for different, specialized user experiences based on roles. For example, the HR department has different demands on their enterprise software than the IT department – or to put it another way, help desk tickets and job applications aren’t necessarily processed the same way.

Even with a robust process automation platform, you may want a specialized solution for that last mile towards an end-to-end user experience. Although traditional ECM could create unique views for different job roles, it was a separate destination. These solutions thus largely relied on importing content from external applications, rather than exchanging information with them dynamically.

With cloud solutions for specialized software offering low operating costs, and the increased popularity of integrations and APIs, a content services approach with the goal of including specialized content experiences becomes more attractive.

Composition, essentially, is the creation of a unique user experience through a combination of platforms, services and tools connected through APIs and other integrations. These unique experiences are thus a sum of the parts that compose them.

According to Gartner, these parts come in three main categories:
  • Content services platforms (CSPs): These platforms provide basic services, such as content storage, and can also act as a central hub that integrates and sends information between the other parts of a composition.
  • Content services applications (CSAs): These applications provide specialized services for a particular role, such as recruiting or IT.
  • Content services components (CSCs): These components provide a specific functionality, such as digital signatures or document imaging and are primarily designed to be integrated.
To learn more about composing experiences, we recommend reading the following report from Gartner: Future of Applications: Delivering the Composable Enterprise.

How Can Organizations Benefit from Content Services?

Organizations like yours can put content services into action by taking a proactive approach to integrating content with enterprise solutions you already have. Exploring opportunities to connect applications through APIs and other integration tools can save time and money while producing lasting operational benefits.
Integrating CSPs, applications and components is key to composing specialized experiences for different roles or departments.

Here are three examples of how software integrations can increase efficiency:

Contract management: Easily extract contact information from a CRM system into a CSP using workflow automation software, populate the information into a contract, and gather client signatures using a digital signature tool.

HR management: Quickly access all employee information from a single interface by integrating an ECM system or CSP with HR automation software.

Accounting and finance: Easily generate invoices by using process automation software to pull information from emails, PDFs or paper documents and send it to an accounting application.
Platforms like Laserfiche can play a key role in composing your HR department’s experience, by routing employment applications for review and approval.

Combining different CSPs, applications and components allows organizations to take advantage of what each solution does best.

For example, while an ECM system or CSP can excel for reviewing, marking up and protecting content, a CSA such as a student information system is already specialized to manage and process student data. Combining the advantages of both can make for a more seamless and efficient process.

Same Goals, Different Approach

Ultimately, traditional ECM systems and CSPs seek to achieve the same goals, but they each take a different approach in doing so.

While CSPs and modern ECM systems are aimed to integrate with other tools to create composed experiences, ECM solutions were historically designed for most or all content interactions to occur within a single system.

Whether your organization uses the content services to compose experiences, or prefers a centralized experience of a traditional ECM system, it can gain valuable perspective by taking each of these solutions into account.

If you’re in the market for a content services platform and want to compare top vendors, we recommend taking a look at the Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Content Services Platforms Report, which you can download here.

4 Ways Document Management Software Saves Time and Money

The inefficiencies of pushing paper and using manual processes in today’s office can add up. With the demand for information—contracts, forms, approvals, invoices—to be both accessible and secure, the old business practice of manually filing documents and creating paper trails severely limits an organization’s ability to compete.

Document management solutions exist to make the most of business’s most critical resources: time and money.

By implementing document management solutions, organizations can:

1. Automate Tasks and Increase Process Efficiency

Document management software can help employees work more quickly with instant access to information. This type of software also enables organizations to set up workflow automation that speed reviews and approvals, keeping business processes moving.

Further, a document management system can help organizations:

  • Use intelligent search methods that support searching with any criteria
  • Streamline document distribution with automated workflow routing and notification, improving accountability
  • Reduce labor and clerical mistakes with automated optical character recognition and indexing
  • Better manage organizational archives from a desktop computer
  • Minimize lost documents
  • Create copies and distribute documents as simply as sending an email

To streamline staff requisitions, St. Louis Public School District recently digitized its archives and active paper storage, and quickly automated new hiring. The district has 47,000 employees and maintains over 4.5 million documents.

According to Clarissa Buckley, HR Information System Coordinator for the district, staffing requisitions are now completed in three hours instead of three weeks. This increase in efficiency allows the district to invest their resources in new endeavors and explore new opportunities.

2. Improve Communication between Departments and throughout the Organization

Document management systems make it easy to share documents electronically with colleagues and clients, whether you’re at the office or on the go. A quality document management solution can:

  • Be accessed remotely or online, allowing documents to be viewed and retrieved anywhere you have access to the internet.
  • Integrate seamlessly with your website, presenting a consistent face to customers and allowing you to securely share read-only documents with the public
  • Balance accessibility with security, retaining strict control over which documents are available to staff and the public
  • Work from virtually anywhere: web browsers, smartphones, tablets, operating systems and hardware

Oakland County, MI, has more than 60 cities, villages and townships with over 1.2 million people living within its borders. By digitizing information and automating processes, the county aims to empower government employees to streamline operations and improve citizen services. “We want to make processes more efficient, more automatic and better for the public,” says Bill Jobes, Program Manager at Oakland County.

They’re now able to increase access to information for authorized government employees and to citizens through online portals. The county has enhanced transparency of processes, to keep citizens informed. “In order to grow, we have to innovate,” says Jobes.

3. Shift Time from Filing Documents to Focus on Business-Critical Objectives

By implementing a document management solution, an organization make better use of time to:

  • Retrieve documents and essential information without employees leaving their workstation
  • Keep track of documents that must be viewed and signed by other personnel
  • Meet with clients and close deals
  • Instantaneously answer information requests from auditors and clients to eliminate call-backs and phone tag
  • Respond more quickly to customer queries
  • Provide quality customer service, which ultimately leads to more business

Halquist Stone, one of the largest stone quarries in the Midwest, generates sales orders that require the cooperation of several departments, across seven facilities. According to Wade Balson, CFO of Halquist Stone, the supervisors “were spending two to three hours a day manually inputting data.”

Supervisors now enter orders on iPads, and information is automatically routed to the relevant departments to be processed. “Now we’re automating processes.” said Balson. “That just increases my return exponentially.”

4. Increase Bottom-Line Benefits by Minimizing Costs of Paper Storage, Office Space and Additional Hiring

Implementing a document management system requires upfront costs. That said, various market studies and case studies have shown that it does lead to long-term savings. Organizations can save money in the long-term by:

  • Eliminating the filing, duplication and retrieval costs of off-site storage
  • Reducing organization downtime in the case of disasters like floods, fires or theft
  • Replacing paper storage space with more workstations or other productive revenue-generating activities

For instance, to ensure workplace safety for 3 million citizens each year, the Arkansas Department of Labor recently upgraded their manual system to enterprise content management. Staff created an electronic form enabling any citizen to submit wage claims online. The claims are stored in a digital repository and easily accessed by inspectors.

The department can complete wage claims in about a quarter of the time, saving the department $60,000 annually, producing significant ROI for the use of taxpayer dollars. Their investment in technology will continue to benefit citizens long after the initial implementation.

Bottom Line

Document management software is a tool that can completely overhaul manual processes. Digitizing documents and controlling electronic documents allows organizations to eliminate paper storage, streamline operations, and improve communication. Organizations will reap the benefits of this boost in efficiency by shifting resources from clerical tasks towards revenue-producing tasks.

For an overview of how document management can help your organization streamline operations, watch our webinar, ECM 101: An Introduction to Document Management Features.

Discover everything you need to know to find the right document management software for your office.

Getting Started with Laserfiche eBook

Laserfiche ECM software eBook guide

What’s inside this free eBook?

Getting Started with Laserfiche is your quick start guide to using the platform with ease.

This guide walks you through the most commonly used features to help you easily master the basics

This resource provides a high-level overview of Laserfiche’s interface and platform capabilities, plus bonus tips to make the platform even more intuitive.

In this eBook:

  • Tour of Laserfiche to get you familiar with the user interface
  • Quick guide of the most popular features
  • Tips & tricks to customize the settings for your organization’s needs
  • A glossary defining key Laserfiche terminology

How Oakland County Drives Innovation for Better Citizen Service

Located just north of Detroit, Oakland County, MI, has more than 60 cities, villages and townships with over 1.2 million people living within its borders.

The county’s ongoing commitment to innovation—led by CIO Phil Bertolini, who was inducted to the CIO Hall of Fame in 2017—has resulted in award-winning initiatives such as the G2G Marketplace (an online resource for governments to research, purchase and implement technology solutions and professional services), and Automation Alley, the state’s nonprofit technology and manufacturing business association.

“At the end of the day, my job is about working with a team that provides innovation and collaboration for Oakland County to improve customer service,” Bertolini says.

Oakland County’s IT team recently assessed its document management system, which was becoming time- and cost-intensive to maintain and update in order to keep up with the county’s constant state of digital transformation.

Increasing Information Access and Automating Processes

After evaluating a number of options, the county selected a Laserfiche enterprise content management solution to replace its legacy system. “The Laserfiche team was able to prototype and show us exactly how we would be able to use the software in our organization,” says Kevin Bertram, IT Applications Services Leader. “That was a key factor for us.”

Oakland County is now implementing Laserfiche across departments and business units including the county courts, to provide better access to information and automate key government functions.

“We want to make those processes more efficient, more automatic and better for the public,” says Bill Jobes, Program Manager at Oakland County. “In order to grow, we have to innovate.”

Empowering Employees and Citizens

By using Laserfiche to digitize information and automate processes, Oakland County aims to empower government employees to streamline operations and improve citizen services.

Benefits include:
  • Reclaimed IT staff time previously spent maintaining and supporting the legacy system
  • Increased access to information for authorized government employees
  • Around-the-clock access to public information and services for citizens through online portals
  • Better reporting and analytics for department leaders, leading to more informed decisions about resource allocation
  • Enhanced transparency of processes for citizens who want to be kept informed of how their service requests are progressing

“We’re always looking for opportunities to be more effective and really bring that cost for service or cost per unit down,” Bertram says. “Not for a bottom-line profit like in the private sector, but to try to reduce the cost of service to our constituents, and use their tax dollars appropriately and as wisely as possible.”

Laserfiche Enables Digital Transformation in the North Carolina Division of Water Resources

The North Carolina Division of Water Resources’ mission is to protect the state’s surface water and groundwater resources, which includes ensuring safe drinking water, issuing pollution control permits, evaluating environmental water quantity and quality, and enforcing environmental regulations.

The division’s functions—from day-to-day operations to long-term initiatives—require the collaboration of multiple agencies, communication with citizens and the relaying of time-sensitive decisions and documents.

“When it comes to project-related decisions, we have a 30-day turnaround, and sometimes we need to send information across the state,” says Beverly Strickland, Laserfiche Administrator for the North Carolina Division of Water Resources. These deadlines, coupled with the growing need to operate more efficiently, led the division to examine how it was managing information.

Changing Tides

“When we used to snail-mail documents, it was really hard to meet deadlines,” Strickland says. “If the mail gets lost or delayed, you’ve just waived a project. It doesn’t matter how big it is.”

To facilitate faster review and decision-making, the division digitized documents with Laserfiche enterprise content management software. Using Laserfiche, employees can now perform quick searches for information, automatically archive records and easily share documents with other employees or the public by simply sending a link.

Even employees who work in remote areas benefit from the division’s digital transformation. “We have people in the mountains and on the coast that have small bandwidth,” Strickland says. “Laserfiche enables them to view necessary information without having to download an entire PDF.”

The Wave of the Future

The division recently began automating business processes using Laserfiche, which will unlock even more efficiencies as managers gather data on workflow and resource allocation. The Laserfiche Business Process Library, which provides downloadable templated solutions to automate hundreds of common business processes, has been a starting point for the division.

“What I love about the Business Process Library is that I’m not having to reinvent the wheel,” Strickland says. “I can sit with people involved with the process and say, ‘What do you need to see?’ and make adjustments to what Laserfiche has already created.”

Benefits include:
  • Shortened response times to requests for information from days to minutes
  • Reclaimed staff time that is now used for tasks such as writing permits and enforcing environmental regulations
  • Digitized information that enables the division to automate processes for even more efficiency

“It’s the wave of the future,” Strickland says of the division’s digital transformation. “If we want to work toward processes that are more efficient for citizens as well as staff members, we have to find those time savings.”

Alabama Department of Mental Health Digitizes Patient Records

The Alabama Department of Mental Health provides critical services to over 200,000 patients annually at hospitals and clinics across the state. With medical archives dating back over 150 years, the agency must manage patient data in a manner that enables staff to easily and quickly find the information they need.

Implementing Agency-Wide Records Management

“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act asked all organizations, such as ours, to demonstrate meaningful use for information and have electronic health records to keep funding with Medicare and Medicaid,” said Cindy Shrum, Director of Information Systems. “We want to maintain our Medicare or Medicaid funding, but having an electronic records management system is also just easier. We’re able to get the information when we need it.”

Upon the recommendation of the State of Alabama, the agency selected Laserfiche as its records management solution. Laserfiche’s ease of use and competitive pricing meant the department could more productively use federal funding to create an agency-wide records management system for patient records.

Improving Patient Care through Staff Efficiency

The department partnered with the state, which was already using Laserfiche, to procure the software; this partnership also shortened implementation time and improved data sharing. The department has since digitized all medical records at Bryce Hospital, the state’s oldest and largest inpatient psychiatric facility.

“We’ve got them organized so you can see the physical history, the summary, and the progress notes,” Shrum says. “What I like about Laserfiche is that in just three clicks, we’re in the electronic health record. For a clinician, especially our doctors, that time matters to them.” Benefits include:

  • • Eliminated the need to build a warehouse for patient archives, freeing up additional funds for patient services
  • • Created efficient process to automatically digitize, organize and file full charts of new and archived patient data in a shared repository accessible to clinicians and nurses across departments
  • • Integrated document management with the agency’s CoCentrix medical system eliminates repetitive data entry
  • • Increased compliance with federal laws, ensuring continued Medicaid and Medicare funding

These financial and operational improvements have ultimately enabled the Alabama Department of Mental Health to provide better quality health care and a greater volume of patient visits. “We started out small, but the potential is unlimited,” Shrum says.

test