City of Lakewood, CO

Back in 2001, staff from the planning and public works department at the City of Lakewood, CO, created the Digital Archives Group (DAG) to find more efficient ways to manage 30 years’ worth of maps, plats and plans. Members from the Planning and Public Works, Community Resources, the City Clerk’s Office Central Records Division and the IT department participated in DAG.

Led by Stormwater Quality Coordinator Alan Searcy, Central Records Administrator Sharon Blackstock, and Imaging Technician Greg Buchanan, DAG evolved into an ad hoc governance committee, setting recordkeeping and retention policies for each department, as well as standardizing document indexing for interdepartmental use. “My goal in the beginning,” says Searcy, “was to get as much ‘buy-in’ as possible for our fledgling imaging program. Working together on interdepartmental projects is a proven recipe for success in Lakewood.” The Digital Archives Group is a prime example of that fact.

DAG initiated the purchase of Laserfiche in 2001 from Colorado-based reseller Phil Landreth of S. Corporation, with several departments sharing the cost. “Laserfiche was the most user-friendly solution we looked at, and we knew that was going to be very important,” Blackstock says. “Laserfiche also had a very strong presence in cities around our size (population: 145,000), so we knew that support for local government operations was in place.”

Although Laserfiche was first used only by the Engineering Division and the City Clerk’s Office, it eventually spread to other departments. As new departments joined in the project, they sent representatives to DAG meetings.

Initially, Laserfiche was used for archiving permanent records and closed case files. After a couple of years, the finance department became the first to manage active records with Laserfiche by scanning sales tax returns. More active records management followed as Laserfiche use began spreading to DAG members’ departments. Eventually most of Lakewood’s 10 departments adopted Laserfiche, each relying on DAG’s training and best practices to scan and manage their own records.

“With every new project, people really welcome our support and suggestions. We all listen to each other and are willing to hear new ideas,” Buchanan says. “At the same time, people don’t just say, ‘I’m going to do this’ and call up IT—DAG helps define the project and gives the go-ahead.” The City Clerk’s Office created Buchanan’s position as Imaging Technician in 2002 to facilitate Laserfiche projects by assisting departments in training users and developing and managing scanning projects.

Today, DAG’s goals are being met—long-term records are being archived and protected, concurrent retrieval of imaged records is possible, and storage space for maps, plats and plans has been reduced. What’s more, interdepartmental cooperation has resulted in a citywide sense of pride and ownership of Laserfiche.

Breaking Down Silos to Build an Agile Enterprise

IT Software Services Manager Tom Charkut credits DAG with addressing the training element in the early days “in a way IT just couldn’t.” But by 2005, Charkut says, “There were so many departments using Laserfiche that it just made sense to centralize the software maintenance and support.” IT took over Laserfiche system administration in 2006, as well as the software maintenance costs.

The City of Lakewood’s IT staff of 27 supports more than 1,000 city employees. “We’re a small team with big shoes to fill,” Charkut admits. Filling big shoes with different sizes and styles, he says, requires an agile development philosophy.

According to Charkut, one key component to solving the diverse but often overlapping information needs of Lakewood’s business units was using the Laserfiche SDK and its Microsoft-standard .NET API to integrate with legacy business applications. “Since Laserfiche was an enterprise-wide system,” he says, “we needed to figure out how to integrate it with our other line-of-business systems.”

A recent example is an integration between Laserfiche and Planning and Public Works’ new building permit system. “The user will be in the permit system, and using the permit number, he’ll click on a ‘documents’ button we developed that shows him the documents in Laserfiche,” he explains. “If he needs to email those documents, then we send URLs linking to those documents using Laserfiche Web Access. Laserfiche gives us the ability to arrange the information so it’s at the user’s fingertips.”

The user, Charkut notes, never leaves the permitting application. What’s more, the additional content is referenced from its single, centralized Laserfiche repository. Similarly, integration with the city’s GeoSmart GIS application geo-enables searches for employees across various systems whether it’s for code enforcement cases or service requests from residents, as well as for any documents—including plats, plans and forms—already in Laserfiche.

“For us, Laserfiche integration has helped break down silos,” Charkut says. “It’s all about decentralized capture, centralized storage and an enterprise library.”

What a Transparent Web We Weave

Now, as the city maps out an overhaul of Lakewood’s web strategy, Laserfiche is one of the ingredients. “Our web strategy in the past has been a patchwork of stuff. Just last year we said, ‘We have to do something about this—we’re getting 5,000 hits a day,’” says Charkut. “Part of our plan is to promote government transparency through the use of web self-service, including access to records contained in the Laserfiche system.”

Lakewood also finds itself in the middle of an electronic records management inventory and assessment, where consultants are actually suggesting new and future uses of Laserfiche. Building on DAG’s solid support foundation and Lakewood IT’s agile, integrated web strategies, the city is now assessing whether and when to upgrade to Laserfiche Rio, with its scalable, flexible user and module licensing—as well as its unlimited servers—to meet the needs of more and more departments, business processes and users, both internally and externally, from a single enterprise application.

“We are evaluating the ROI of Laserfiche Rio,” jokes Charkut. “We will assess that model on a 7- to 10-year timeframe.”

Upcoming Laserfiche Projects
  1. Employee Relations for employee benefits and claim management.
  2. Finance for sales and use tax applications management.
  3. Planning and Public Works to manage planning case documents from submittal to archival.
  4. Municipal Court for case file management.
  5. Utility crews and inspectors of right-of-way and buildings to access plans, records and other information stored in Laserfiche from the field.

County of Essex

“What started as a niche application in the County Clerk’s Office has now become an enterprise infrastructure investment,” says Wendy St. Amour, Essex County’s IT Manager.

The county implemented Laserfiche back in 2000 because “managing paper records in an organization of our size was an arduous, time-consuming and expensive task. Complying with a myriad of new government regulations and increasingly less physical space made it even more difficult,” explains St. Amour, adding that manual workflow processes were inefficient and time consuming.

She notes that the county “makes a point of making the right decision upfront,” and that based on a combination of good references from other municipalities, user-friendly technology and an affordable price, Laserfiche won the RFP process.

Initially implemented in the County Clerk’s Office, Laserfiche immediately began providing benefits.

Mary Brennan, the county’s Director of Council Services/Clerk, explains, “As the county clerk, it’s my job to respond to requests for information. With Laserfiche, I never have to venture down into the dreaded basement vault to search for and retrieve records. By giving me a way to find documents quickly, Laserfiche has saved a tremendous amount of time over the years.”

Evolution of a Shared Service

What started as a solution for the County Clerk’s Office soon spread—not just to additional departments such as Engineering and Finance, but to seven municipalities within the County as well.

“Since we purchased Laserfiche in 2000, all seven of the municipalities in Essex County have implemented the software,” says Brennan. “The Municipality of Leamington was actually included in our RFP. The others saw the success we were having, heard similar success stories from other municipalities and decided that Laserfiche would be beneficial for them, too.”

At first, the municipalities maintained and administered their own Laserfiche systems. Over time, however, they began to understand the advantages of sharing, including the ability to leverage economies of scale, take advantage of a wider knowledge base and gain access to additional ECM functionality.

Brennan explains that Essex County dipped its toe into the shared service pool by jointly purchasing and using Laserfiche WebLink as a public information portal together with all seven of its lower-tier municipalities. The online portal provides residents with access to government material such as:
  • Agendas
  • Bylaws
  • Meeting minutes
  • Historical documents
  • Studies requiring public consultation

“Laserfiche WebLink is great because all interested stakeholders can easily view public documents with the click of a mouse,” Brennan explains. “Plus, it saves our staff the work of converting documents to PDFs and manually posting them on our website.”

St. Amour notes that, with eight organizations using Laserfiche, the knowledge base staff amassed was substantial. “The ability to share knowledge and expertise with each other has proven to be very beneficial. That, coupled with the cost savings of sharing one enterprise system, gave us the confidence to upgrade to Laserfiche Rio.”

After consulting with MC Imaging Technologies, Essex County’s Laserfiche reseller, the county and its lower-tier municipalities all agreed that purchasing and deploying Laserfiche Rio as a shared service was the best way to empower employees and capitalize on everything the software has to offer.

“The ability to use unlimited servers is what made our expansion to Laserfiche Rio possible, because each lower-tier municipality uses its own server while taking advantage of the additional functionality Laserfiche Rio offers, such as Laserfiche Workflow,” says St. Amour.

“By taking a shared-service approach, we can develop a process once, and with a few small changes, eight different organizations can benefit from it,” she adds.

Enterprise Efficiency in Action

St. Amour notes that the county and its municipalities benefit from integration between Laserfiche, ESRI ArcGIS and Geocortex, an interactive mapping tool. Cathy Paduch, GIS Technician for Essex County, explains, “The integration allows staff to access documents associated with any spatial asset simply by clicking on a point on a map. This saves time and eliminates the need to store documents in multiple locations.”

Imagery supplied by the county is leveraged by many departments in local municipalities and is also available for public consumption over the web. Residents can take advantage of an interactive map to locate schools, recreational buildings, municipal institutions, hospitals, churches and police and fire stations—along with associated documents available via Laserfiche WebLink. Paduch notes that protected information such as property tax information is only available to staff.

Mike Sherwood, GIS Technician, adds that the custom script the county created dynamically searches Laserfiche and returns a list of the number and type of documents associated with any given location. “We don’t have to do any maintenance on the GIS side to keep the integration working,” he says.

Although designed and administered by county employees, staff across all seven of Essex’s municipalities benefit from the integration. “It allows all levels of staff from administration, emergency services and engineering departments to easily locate documents,” Paduch explains.

St. Amour adds, “The ease and efficiency of being able to track down and locate multiple documents associated to spatial data within the map interface is a great time saver.”

Looking Ahead

Although Essex County has only recently implemented Laserfiche Rio, St. Amour says that the county’s priority is automating business processes using Laserfiche Workflow. “Our first priority will be to automate our agendas; then we’ll take a hard look at how we can make our accounts payable and HR processes more efficient.”

Overall, implementing Laserfiche ECM as a shared service across the county and its lower-tier municipalities has enabled Essex to leverage economies of scale, gain access to additional ECM functionality and decrease the amount of time staff spends on manual tasks such as filing and finding paper documents.

“We’ve already realized a significant ROI from using Laserfiche,” says St. Amour. “Now that we have Laserfiche Rio, we can’t wait to start reaping the benefits of business process automation!”

Technology Making an HR Impact

With space at a premium, a room full of paper was a luxury the City of Denton could not afford. The city’s HR department had 15 five-drawer file cabinets crammed into 300 square feet of space. “One of the major issues was searching for documents. So many times a file had been pulled and we couldn’t find it,” says Technology Services Manager Mary Collins. To solve the problem, Denton staff began searching for a digital document management system.

“We had a directive from our city manager to look at document imaging,” says Collins. “We looked at a number of products over a long period of time, and the technology changed during that period.”

Denton tested Laserfiche in the city manager’s and attorney’s offices. In addition to the success experienced in those departments, the support Denton got from its reseller, DocuNav, made Laserfiche the city’s choice.

HR Implementation

Implementing Laserfiche has had a dramatic impact on Denton’s HR department. Staff now finds information in a fraction of the time it once took. Sarah Mabel, HR assistant for records management, notices major differences in handling open-records requests:

“We used to have someone do that as a full-time job. Now I’ve taken it over and I estimate that filling open records requests takes somewhere between eight and 13 percent of my time.”

Employee Records Management

When it comes to managing employee records, Denton’s integration of Laserfiche with its JD Edwards®(JDE) Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) has proven crucial. With nearly 8,000 applications received each year, the paperwork used to pile up.

“HR doesn’t have to type in all the index information,” says HR Operations and Training Specialist Sally Cavness. “Laserfiche pulls it in from JDE, we assign the documents a specific number and the program uses this number as a guide to fill in the blanks by retrieving it from JDE.”

In addition, HR integrated Laserfiche with its online application process. “The City of Denton has developed a user-friendly process that dramatically increased the HR department’s effectiveness and efficiency. We now have an online job application process that includes the civil service exam registration,” notes Cavness.

Automating the Hiring Process

Jesse Perez, HR technician for selection and placement, explains, “Whenever there’s a vacancy, we enter the employee requisition into the HRIS system. We then set up an appropriate folder in Laserfiche, which is where all the images and the application are scanned. Each supervisor is assigned a unique login and password for access to the intranet.”

With Laserfiche, applicants can update their information as needed over the web. In addition, the system can pull candidate information from what’s already stored in the system.

The selection process is automated from the initial application submission to the creation of a new personnel file:
  • HR receives applications electronically via the web.
  • The system populates the HRIS with pertinent information and sends the applications to Laserfiche.
  • Supervisors can view applications remotely via Laserfiche WebLink.

“By eliminating the need to shuffle paperwork back and forth between the supervisor and the HR department,” says Cavness, “we’ve eliminated the risk of losing applications.”

Saving Staff Time

Because Laserfiche is integrated with the city’s payroll software, HR employees can now search for documents by name or employee ID. In addition, redaction capabilities have eliminated the cumbersome process of manually blacking out files.

Laserfiche has saved time and effort for city staff.  “As a city,” says Cavness, “we have buildings that are very, very widely spaced. Previously, supervisors might have to come all the way across town to look at paper applications. Being able to view applications from their desks is a tremendous time saver.”

Cavness continues, “Previously, it could take up to two weeks for a new application to get filed. Now that process is normally completed within a day.”

Sarah Mabel sums up the feelings of her HR coworkers. “When Laserfiche first came to the department, as with any new program, we were a little scared of it—we had that kind of mentality. Now, not a single person in our department can live without it. I love it.”

Enterprise-wide Applications

The city’s success with Laserfiche goes beyond HR:
  • The library uses it to track memorial donations.
  • The fire department uses it to access scanned map books and building footprints from their trucks.
  • The city secretary’s office has scanned thousands of documents, including city council minutes, ordinances and resolutions dating back to the 1900s.
  • The engineering department manages easements, ordinances, contracts and a variety of other documents with Laserfiche.

In addition to these processes, the city looks forward to expanding Laserfiche to the building inspection and police departments.

Saving $1.5 Million with Laserfiche

SEPT is one of the largest and highest-performing national healthcare organizations in the United Kingdom. Providing services for people with mental health problems and learning disabilities, SEPT serves a population of 1.5 million across three counties, with over 3,500 employees and an operating a budget of more than $300 million.

Mergers and acquisitions account for much of SEPT’s growth, but innovation, says Dominic Malvern, Head of Information Systems Development, accounts for much of its ongoing success. “It’s never been a stereotypical government ‘Mental Health Organization,” Malvern says.

In fact, when SEPT transitioned from a purely state-funded trust to a more privatized “Foundation Trust,” one of its primary initiatives was to partner with Adobe to develop an EMR system using Adobe LiveCycle products supported by a Laserfiche ECM system from Laserfiche reseller Fortrus. Malvern saw the chance to hit the ground running with a pilot project in the trust’s Forensic Services Department, which was moving to a new building as part of a modernization program.

“It was the ideal opportunity for us to modernize how our live patient records were accessed, as it was apparent that continuing with a manual process was not in keeping with the state of the art service we provide to our patients,” he says. That process, he adds, had remained manual by default because the legacy imaging system in Forensics didn’t meet the Trust requirement for working with live patient records.

“A single patient record could run for several years, sometimes through a person’s entire adult life, so it would extend into several volumes,” he explains. “Constant patient monitoring meant frequent updates to records for many reasons such as observation or treatment plans, sometimes every 15 minutes.”

A Pilot That Needed To Fly 24-7

When choosing a department to establish proof-of-concept before deploying a full-scale EMR system, SEPT couldn’t have chosen a more challenging one than Forensics Services—or one in which the impact of a successful ECM implementation would be so pronounced.

Malvern worked with Fortrus’ Steve Livermore to implement a Laserfiche pilot system for active patient records management system using:
  • Laserfiche Quick Fields advanced capture to input, sort and file the steady stream of patient information.
  • Laserfiche Workflow to automatically route information for reviews, approval and distribution.
  • Laserfiche Web Access to allow both remote deployment and access to the system over SEPT’s broad geographic service area and affiliated agencies.

SEPT implemented a clinical pilot project in 2009 and, over the course of a year, the new system kept up with the staff’s round-the-clock demands, amassing over 500,000 documents in the Laserfiche repository in the process.

Malvern says the real operational breakthrough was having a system aligned with the increasing need for information sharing between regional service offices. “Increasingly we have to work on a multi-disciplinary and multi-agency basis, so having shared but secure access to patient records and notes is vital,” he says.

From an IT perspective, Laserfiche Web Access gave the organization one more tool to centrally control system administration while capitalizing on Laserfiche’s flexibility to configure various access levels remotely.

“Being able to deploy the system through our server or using web browser options allowed us to control the type of access we wanted to make available,” says Malvern. “Web-based deployment is key because of the ease of maintenance when working with such a large group of users. Updates and upgrades would be unwieldy to deploy with a large number of single desktop clients.”

Going from EMR to ECM Saves $1.5M

The vision to extend Laserfiche from its supporting role in SEPT’s EMR project to a full-scale ECM deployment came with the support of Fortrus’ Livermore, who helped Malvern make the case to SEPT’s directors to implement Laserfiche for the trust’s non-clinical side.

“Once I heard the directors were looking at other solutions, and knowing what Laserfiche was capable of, it seemed a waste to restrict its application to purely clinical processes,” says Malvern. “Of course, it seemed an even bigger waste to spend further public money on more software that would be superfluous when we had a perfectly good system that would likely be better than anything else on the market.”

Now moving ahead with full-scale deployment of its Laserfiche Rio system to what will eventually be 3,000+ users, SEPT is effectively standardizing its information management on Laserfiche, eliminating the need for multiple departmental systems—and their corresponding service agreements and upgrades.

“Initially Laserfiche was envisaged solely as a clinical and medical records solution, but we have now realized that it can be a complete multi-functional document management system for the whole organization,” he says.

“We’ve begun implementation in non-clinical areas such Human Resources and Finance, as well as Vehicle Service Management, where we’re using Laserfiche Quick Fields and Laserfiche Workflow to automate our lease applications.” Additionally, another major project is underway to use Laserfiche to meet retention regulations for information governance of corporate records.

“From a roll-out prospective, it makes life much easier to have one multi-tasking system that all employees are trained on no matter what their function. It makes live support a far more streamlined and efficient activity,” he explains.

Malvern says the efficiency—and cost-savings—are starting to add up. “Within 18 months to two years we’ll be able to replace all our legacy imaging systems with Laserfiche. Implementing Laserfiche and its enterprise licensing enables SEPT to discontinue several annual contracts and service agreements. It also delivers savings on labor and print costs for information requests, as well as paper document archive and retrieval services. Realistically, this will save us US$1.5 million over the next three fiscal years,” he says.

SEPT’s Run Smarter Philosophy

Malvern’s advice for successful implementation and adoption from his experience with SEPT’s jump from departmental EMR to organization-wide ECM is simple. “Be open-minded in your approach. Don’t just try to replicate what you already have; Laserfiche can do so much more! Even a year down the road we’re still discovering new things it can do for us. It has great functionality combined with enormous flexibility that’s capable of revolutionizing your whole approach to records and document management—both live and archival,” he says. “We wish we’d discovered it sooner!”

Essar Group

With construction and mineral operations in more than 20 countries across five continents, the Essar Group employs 60,000 people in 63 companies, with annual revenues of $15 billion. In 2009, the Mumbai-based conglomerate initiated a plan to establish an enterprise-wide Shared Service Center to consolidate and automate finance and accounting processes across India. It looked to Laserfiche to serve as a foundational component of its agile ECM framework through an integration with its SAP–DMS system to support it.

“We saw Laserfiche as a way to bring visibility, time-bound execution and accountability to our accounting business processes,” says Mandeep Singh, Head of Finance Shared Services at Essar.

Working with Laserfiche reseller Sigma-Tech India Pvt. Ltd, Essar Group initially purchased a 100-user Laserfiche Rio solution. What started as simply a way to centralize all finance-related information evolved into a full-scale ECM/BPM implementation.

According to Singh, “We started using Laserfiche primarily as a scanning and document management solution, but after experiencing the way Laserfiche Workflow and its integration capabilities could be used for our scanning operations, we scaled up use dramatically.”

Chandresh Sharma, Vice President at Sigma-Tech, worked with Essar business analysts to map out the end-to-end processes for finance and accounting functions. These processes were mapped in Laserfiche Workflow to validate vendor, customer, company and invoice information from the SAP masters, and ultimately route and approve invoices and contracts processed between Essar’s global business units and the Shared Service Center at its Mumbai headquarters.

Balancing Centralized and Decentralized Processes

“Laserfiche operates as part of a ‘hub and spoke’ model with the Shared Service Center as the hub and business geographies as the spokes, which connect to the central hub for document processing,” Singh explains.

A major operational benefit has been the ability to seamlessly balance centralized and decentralized processes using Laserfiche as both the hub and the spoke. “Financial Shared Services uses both models to fulfil transactions,” explains Singh.
  • The centralized process approach is enabled by a central hub that accesses Laserfiche to process documents. Work allocation is assigned using Laserfiche Workflow, which detects exceptions to mapped data validation rules during the scanning process and provides notifications to responsible parties to resolve discrepancies. “This ensures that clean data is passed into the downstream operations of the financial services,” Singh says. A mail room solution is also in place to track and deliver transactions to Laserfiche, further accelerating the process and increasing productivity.
  • The decentralized process approach uses Laserfiche deployed locally to establish remote common collection hubs at various offices across India (and eventually globally) through which vendors working with ESSAR can submit hard copies of transactions. “Laserfiche is run in a dedicated center and further downstream processes like scanning, indexing and quality assurance are carried out before being published to the SAP-DMS,” he adds.

International offices use an FTP route offline. “Here the SPOCs [single point of contact] submit their invoices to the FTP folder. From there the invoices are scheduled for automatic entry into the Laserfiche server using Laserfiche Import Agent. This enables further processing,” explains Singh.

In addition to streamlining accounting processes, Laserfiche has standardized work allocation enterprise-wide. “Operationally, work allocation is now defined based on certain parameters mapped in Laserfiche. For example, ‘Process Type,’ ‘Document Type,’ ‘Location Code,’ ‘Country Code,’ ‘Business Vertical,’ ‘Priority’ and others,” says Singh.

Shared Services, Enterprise Benefits

The benefits of using Laserfiche as part of the Shared Service Center have been both immediate and long-term:
  • Better throughput in terms of number of transactions per process associate.
  • Accelerated invoice turnaround times of less than an hour for urgent invoices across geographies and less than a day for normal invoices.
  • Increased visibility of daily transactions across 63 group companies. Laserfiche publishes a daily report to the business intelligence layer for companywide unified reporting.
  • Increased visibility of pending transactions in a categorized manner. Laserfiche Workflow notifies business process owners of necessary actions by way of mail alerts. “Moreover, we also unify these numbers with the business intelligence (BI) platform to provide better visibility,” says Singh.
  • Enhanced control environment through automatic system-end integrated validations with SAP-DMS using Vendor, Customer and Company Code checks for duplications or mismatches at the source stage itself. Laserfiche also does a validation for the key fields entered and runs a duplicate check across its database for any potential duplicates—which are then provided as reporting numbers and integrated with the BI platform.

The most ostensible benefit is obviously reducing invoice processing times from, on average, a matter of weeks into days and sometimes hours. But combined with increased transparency of business processes, Laserfiche has brought a new level of accountability to staff. With Laserfiche Audit Trail giving a step-by-step history of each action and user in the process, there are significant quality control and productivity benefits. Says Singh, “People think twice before performing a transaction.”

Though formal impact analysis has not been conducted, Singh estimates that Essar Group has realized a 40% return on its Laserfiche investment already, but foresees ongoing and expanding operational improvements. “Major ROI will come by de-skilling profiles deployed across companies for financial processes,” he explains.

Following the success of integration with SAP-DMS, Essar is now working with Sigma-Tech India to integrate Laserfiche (and SAP) with ARIBA financial software, as well as related procurement and e-invoicing modules to develop straight-through processing for accounts receivable, fixed assets, business expense reimbursements and income tax declaration. “We’re also now contemplating using [PDP partner] LincDoc for form-based workflow requirements,” Singh concludes.

Mandeep Singh on Putting the Laserfiche Run Smarter® Philosophy into Practice

Understand the content and information requirements across your organization and you’ll see the value of using Laserfiche for more than search and retrieval. As our ongoing success has shown, Laserfiche is agile enough as an enterprise solution to manage document-based workflows and accelerate turnaround time. At the same time, implementing these workflows yields a fresh perspective on how processes can be most effectively managed. In that sense, Laserfiche has been a tremendous tool for change management and developing new, more comprehensive business processes that have given Essar Group fresh perspective and improved our overall investment perspective as a company.

Bremer County

Bremer County, IA, faced a problem not unique to modest-sized municipalities: after making a significant investment in a document management system to manage its land records, users had a hard time letting go of the paper. “Scanning files was a very manual process—it took hours to scan and index even small stacks of paper,” remembers Nate Koehler, Bremer County IT Administrator. “Staff would get frustrated and just not use the system at all.”

Besides the already low user adoption rate, the county faced stringent formatting for annual submission of digital copies of its land management records (“fee book pages”) to the state’s County Land Records Information Services (CLRIS) agency—now the Iowa Land Records System (ILR)—utilizing an application provided by the state to upload images. Or at least it was supposed to.

“We were never able to get this integration set up with our old system,” Koehler admits. “We had to pay the ILR an extra $2,500 in fees because we were simply unable to submit our images to the state.”

Agility in Action, Part 1: A New System for Less Than an Upgrade

By January of 2010, Koehler faced a challenge—and a choice. The county was on version 5 of EMC Application Xtender (AX), and it was being phased out by provider EMC/Documentum. So not only was Koehler’s team facing a mandatory upgrade, but also a service agreement renewal. And they were still likely facing $2,500 annually in fees to the state for fee book page submission.

“We were looking at a substantial enough reinvestment to retain our current system that it made sense to start looking at other solutions,” he says.

Koehler researched other CLRIS/ILR-approved systems and discovered Laserfiche via Advanced Systems, Inc. (ASI) based nearby in Waterloo, IA, which had a relationship with the county from servicing its printer and copiers. ASI solutions consultant Steve Lewis showed Koehler how the Laserfiche Quick Fields Zone OCR component could capture and index information from specific areas of land records forms, which could then be used to submit images to ILR utilizing the state’s uploading application.

What’s more, implementing Laserfiche could address all of the county’s information management needs in a single system—at less cost than upgrading its existing system.

Agility in Action, Part 2: Deployment to Six Departments in Two Months

In March 2010, Bremer County purchased a 24-user Laserfiche Avante system with Laserfiche Quick Fields advanced capture, Laserfiche Import Agent and Laserfiche SDK. Just two months later, Laserfiche was successfully deployed to six county departments:
  • Auditor
  • Treasurer
  • Attorney
  • Recorder
  • Assessor
  • Building and Zoning

Each department was equipped with a scan station that Shane Peterson, solutions engineer at Advanced Systems, set up to automatically recognize and retrieve index information based on the standard forms used by each department.

The impact on scanning efficiency was immediate: in the Assessor’s office, four stacks of tax credit forms two feet tall were scanned and indexed within a few days. “Laserfiche Quick Fields automated all our scanning processes in all our departments,” Koehler says.

Agility in Action, Part 3: Six Months of Scanning in Less Than a Week

To illustrate the scale of improvement, Koehler uses the example of Bremer County’s Zoning Department. “Zoning was six months behind on their scanning,” he begins. “It would have taken staff over a month and a half to scan in all those documents using our old system. Instead, using Laserfiche Quick Fields, we were able to get those documents scanned in less than a week.”

At the same time, Koehler adds, staff who had given up on the previous system and scanning in general have warmed up to Laserfiche. “I am starting to see more people getting rid of the paper and using Laserfiche,” he says.

The end result of significantly improved scanning, Koehler says, is the reclaimed staff time. “We can devote the man hours we save from scanning for other projects.”

Agility in Action, Part 4: Integration Saves $2,500 in Fines

By November of 2010, Bremer County was submitting land records’ fee book pages automatically to the ILR, thanks to a combination of Laserfiche Quick Fields, Laserfiche Workflow and a custom integration developed by ASI:
  • When staff in the Recorder’s Office scan land records, Laserfiche Quick Fields automatically retrieves index information from the image utilizing Zone OCR and Pattern Matching.
  • Laserfiche Workflow then sends the image from a processing folder to a completed folder in the Laserfiche repository, where a custom integration exports the image and index information into an XML file.
  • The XML file is then used to send the image to the state.
  • This index information is then searchable by both the county and the state to tie the image to other pertinent index information about the land record.

Koehler says this process is not only more efficient, but more cost-effective, too. “We’re no longer charged $2,500 in fines for not providing the digital documents to the state that was such a problem with our old system,” he says.

Agility in Action, Part 5: Adding the Sheriff’s Office and More

The newest chapter of Bremer County’s information management overhaul has been the 2011 addition of five more named users for the Sheriff’s Office, which will use its own repository to catalogue video, photographs, ticketing, incident reports and other documents. The expanded implementation will include Laserfiche Web Access to enable the county attorney to retrieve information without going to the Sheriff’s Office to request that a detective put files on a disk for the attorney to review.

Koehler notes that with the addition of the Sheriff’s Office comes enhanced document security concerns. “We’ll be utilizing the auto-redaction capabilities of Laserfiche Quick Fields for more sensitive information, but we’re also able to manage the system from a central point of control,” he says.

Laserfiche use, Koehler predicts, will keep growing with each departmental success story. “The remaining three departments that don’t use Laserfiche are seeing how much the other departments love its ease of use and speed, so they’re starting to ask how they can use it too.”

City of Shakopee

When making the case for upgrading Shakopee, MN, to Laserfiche Avante, Carrie Duckett, the city’s Information Technology Coordinator, did her due diligence. “To date, there hasn’t been one Minnesota city that’s purchased Laserfiche and left for one of its main competitors. But in 2010 alone, six of the state’s cities and counties migrated onto Laserfiche from a competitive system.”

She ticks off a few of the benefits that give Laserfiche a leg up on the competition: “First, Laserfiche is easy to use, because it looks and functions like Windows and Google. Second, it’s stable and easy for the IT department to maintain. Third, it has an open API that makes it easy to integrate with our other applications.”

These benefits, Duckett notes, are vital to Shakopee, which has a two-person IT department supporting approximately 125 city staff in nine different departments. In fact, if Laserfiche wasn’t easy to use, maintain and integrate, the city wouldn’t have considered shaking up its approach to enterprise content management (ECM) by upgrading from four concurrent users to a 50-user Laserfiche Avante system.

Leading Up to the Upgrade

“We first implemented Laserfiche in 2005, using it to manage building permits through an integration with our PIMS building permit software,” Duckett explains, outlining how the process works:
  • “We print barcoded permits that our records clerk scans into Laserfiche Quick Fields, which is an automated data capture solution.
  • “Within Laserfiche Quick Fields we have an ODBC connection that connects to the PIMS database.
  • “Laserfiche Quick Fields pattern matches the permit address, permit type and permit ID and automatically archives the document in the Laserfiche repository.”

She also notes that the city has long used Laserfiche to manage council agenda packets and other miscellaneous items, some of which are made available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink, a browser-based thin client that provides read-only access to public information.

The desire to upgrade the system came last year, when the police department hopped on the Laserfiche bandwagon. “In October 2010,” Duckett says, “the police department started using Laserfiche for evidence photos, and we integrated Laserfiche with the PD’s case management system, to enable officers to automatically open photos that pertain to specific cases.”

Jennifer Boudreau, Shakopee’s Police Records Technician, explains that one way the PD leverages the integration is to track graffiti, making it easier for officers to identify all instances of a tagger’s work so the city can recoup clean-up costs.

Boudreau notes that in the past, search options were limited. With Laserfiche, officers can search photos by case number, but they can also search based on the metadata associated with each photo. This makes it easier to discern patterns that might not have otherwise been apparent.

Now that Shakopee has upgraded to Laserfiche Avante, the police department is looking forward to scanning all case files into the system. “Right now, case documents are contained in a paper file, which eliminates collaboration and the ability to work on the case at the same time as someone else,” says Boudreau. “As a result, we end up doing a lot of photocopying, which wastes paper. It can also get confusing to have so many copies of the same document floating around, because you never know which is the most current, complete version.”

Further, she explains that Laserfiche will be able to store more than copies of paper documents; where applicable, electronic case files will also contain audio files, squad car video and so on.

Since the Upgrade

Less than a month after implementing its 50-user Laserfiche Avante system, Shakopee has already brought the finance department onboard. It now uses Laserfiche Quick Fields to scan barcoded accounts payable documents into the repository, where they’re instantly searchable from the desktop.

“With the upgrade to Laserfiche Avante, which for us included the ‘Barcode and Validation’ and ‘Real Time Lookup and Validation’ packages, we can now use the pattern matching feature in Laserfiche Quick Fields, which automatically creates the folder structure in Laserfiche,” explains Duckett. “This creates a more efficient and seamless process for the users who scan documents into the system.”

She adds that once the police department starts using Laserfiche for its case files, it will use Laserfiche Quick Fields for its scanning, as well.

The next department to start using Laserfiche will likely be HR, which wants to use the system to digitize employee records and automate the hiring process using Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management tool that automatically performs specified actions (such as document routing) based on organizations’ unique business rules.

According to Duckett, this is just the beginning. “We hope to have every department using Laserfiche by this time next year.”

Additional Integrations

With the case management integration well underway, and the integration with the city’s PIMS building permit software already in place, Shakopee has big plans for linking Laserfiche to additional city applications. “Next, we plan to integrate Laserfiche with GeoLink, our GIS/mapping application,” says Duckett. “When you click on a land parcel, you’ll be able to launch Laserfiche and pull up all the documents associated with that particular piece of land.”

This functionality will be useful for multiple departments, including:
  • The police department, which will use it for crime mapping.
  • The fire department, which will be able to quickly retrieve building plans during emergencies.
  • The public works department, which will gain easy access to sewer information.

She goes on to explain that the city is also looking to integrate Laserfiche with JDE, Shakopee’s finance, payroll and HR software. “By integrating these two systems—and taking advantage of Laserfiche Workflow—we’ll be able to simplify the payment cycle with electronic invoices and purchase orders that can be automatically routed through the approval process. Once we digitize our HR records, we’ll be able to automate the hiring process as well.”

From Duckett’s perspective as an IT professional, the best thing about the planned integrations is how easy they’ll be to set up. “Because Laserfiche is used across so many cities and government entities, there are a lot of proven, pre-built integrations available to us at no additional cost.”

Laserfiche Avante = Affordability

In terms of cost-effectiveness, Duckett also appreciates how affordable it was to upgrade to Laserfiche Avante. “If we’d stayed with a concurrent user system and simply purchased the additional functionality and users we needed, it would have cost us $40,000 more than the upgrade to Laserfiche Avante,” she explains. “Plus, our named users now have 24/7 access to information, which is important from a productivity standpoint.”

She concludes, “Although it’s early in the implementation process, we’re starting to see financial and efficiency savings in the finance, building and police departments. Once we extend Laserfiche to all city departments and start creating workflows, we expect to save a lot more on paper and printing costs, and we also expect to greatly enhance employee efficiency.

“It’s our goal to have Laserfiche installed on every desktop in the city. We envision that it’ll be used as often as our email client, providing instant access to records, streamlining business processes and allowing us to move data across multiple platforms.”

How Franklin County Deployed Laserfiche Enterprise-Wide

SITUATION

• Needed to make information more accessible to those who needed it
• Safeguarding sensitive data and compliance with recordkeeping requirements is a high priority

RESULTS

• Centralized documents and records
• Strengthened information governance across the organization
• Simplified the audit process

Ed Yonker joined the Franklin County IT department in 2004, after spending many years in the banking industry. “Government is a different world,” he explained. “Because of its size and structure, it’s a lot harder to implement new technology and get everyone on the same page.”

With approximately 150,000 residents, Franklin County comprises 52 different departments, including the Commissioners’ Office, Human Resources, Human Services and Risk Management, to name just a few. Yonker noted that these departments “operate like 52 separate businesses under the same umbrella.”

In this kind of environment, it’s especially important to establish enterprise-wide IT standards to promote consistency and cross-departmental collaboration, Yonker said. However, it’s often difficult to find technology that’s agile enough to meet the needs of many different departments and flexible enough to adapt quickly and cost-effectively to changing conditions.

“It’s hard to convince all the different departments that they can all use the same system,” said Yonker. “Because of that, we didn’t start out thinking Laserfiche was going to be enterprise technology. But after the enterprise content management seed was planted in one department, suddenly all our departments wanted to know more.”

The Beginning: Going Digital in the Commissioners’ Office

Franklin County worked with Laserfiche solution provider ICC Community Development Solutions to implement Laserfiche, with the county’s earliest adopters being in the Commissioners’ Office. “We had some younger commissioners come in, and they were more familiar with technology and the benefits it could have for Franklin County than previous commissioners had been,” explained Jean Byers, deputy chief clerk in the Commissioners’ Office. “They selected Laserfiche for its instant search capabilities, as well as the fact that we could install it directly on the computers already in use.

“We immediately realized tremendous benefits from Laserfiche,” she added. “Documents that used to take days to find became available with the click of a button. It used to take hours to find specific text within meeting minutes that were hundreds of pages long, but with Laserfiche it only took seconds.”

Laserfiche also made it easy to share documents with colleagues, and due to its intuitive interface, Laserfiche quickly became popular with both management and staff.

The Evolution of an Enterprise Standard

As Laserfiche took root in the Commissioners’ Office, other departments began to take notice. With their focus on compliance and prudent financial management, both the Fiscal Office and the Controller’s Office deployed Laserfiche shortly after the success in the Commissioners’ Office.

“Laserfiche is great for accounts payable functions and auditing. For AP, instant document retrieval speeds and simplifies the review and approval of invoices. And with electronically stored documents, employees can quickly and easily pull the files needed to satisfy an auditor’s request, with no need to spend hours digging through file cabinets. That’s a pretty impressive efficiency boost right there.”

Ed Yonker, CIO (retired), Franklin County

Yonker notes that rolling Laserfiche out to additional departments was an easier sell than other system expansions because there was buy-in from the top right from the start.

“Whenever county purchases exceed a certain amount, they need to be approved by the commissioners,” he explains. “Because the commissioners were already very familiar with the value of using Laserfiche, they never hesitated to give the go-ahead when other departments wanted to get on board.”

The next departments to raise their hands and ask for Laserfiche were Human Services, which was particularly excited about Laserfiche from a disaster recovery standpoint, and Human Resources.

Digitizing Human Resources

The first thing the HR department did after implementing Laserfiche was to start scanning personnel files into the system and develop a folder structure that separated employees’ employment records from their confidential medical records and discipline files.

A few of the benefits of this digital transformation include:
  • Reduced paper consumption: The department used to photocopy hundreds of thousands of pages of job applications a year for review by elected officials; today, officials have access to everything they need in Laserfiche.
  • Reclaimed time from searching for information: Laserfiche’s search capabilities makes it easy for staff to find the information necessary to do their jobs, along with fulfilling ad-hoc requests from directors for material from an employee’s personnel file for various purposes.
  • Higher staff productivity: “Doing more with less” is a familiar adage for local governments, and Franklin County is no exception. The county’s Laserfiche system accelerates processes and eliminates manual tasks so that staff can focus on the work that matters.
  • Reduced document storage space and cost: The county was able to remove a large 1,500 file-capacity cabinet in addition to five other standing file cabinets, allowing for more space for staff.
  • Easier audits: Digital files and a standard folder structure streamline audits for the county and enable the HR department to easily show compliance with recordkeeping mandates. The department no longer has to stop work on all other projects in order to organize for the audits.

In addition to managing personnel files in Laserfiche, the HR department has also added recruitment documentation and union and arbitration files to the system, which has led to quicker resolution of grievances.

“Franklin County is a forward-looking organization— which is reflected in their use of Laserfiche,” said Sandy Hess, sales operations manager at ICC Community Development Solutions. “By implementing an enterprise-wide system of record, the county has been able to preserve and protect the information that’s important to the county, while enabling staff to operate in a streamlined, responsive way that today’s employees and citizens appreciate.”

Laserfiche Rolls Across the Enterprise

With some technologies, organizations hit a tipping point for enterprise adoption. For Franklin County, that tipping point for Laserfiche was the implementation in HR.

“After HR deployed Laserfiche, everybody started to ask for it,” Yonker recounts. “People saw how successful the HR implementation was, and they began to talk about what the benefits for their departments could be.”

As Laserfiche was adopted by more and more departments, the types of content stored in the system grew more and more diverse:
  • Emergency Services uses Laserfiche to manage notes from its 911 calls and cases.
  • Franklin County Jail stores inmate records and requests in the Laserfiche repository.
  • Planning, which is tasked with fostering the proper growth of communities within Franklin County, manages new development records with Laserfiche.
  • Open Records, with its goal of making government transparent to County citizens, makes plans, drafts and studies stored in Laserfiche available to the public.
  • Real Estate manages audit reports and past voting results using Laserfiche. It is also able to respond to 13,000 queries a week in a fast and efficient manner thanks to Laserfiche’s ability to email digital documents.

Although the IT Department had not initially planned to implement Laserfiche as the county-wide standard for ECM, it’s now grateful to have that consistency in place. “We got rid of a couple departments’ antiquated imaging systems in order to move them onto Laserfiche, which makes my staff more efficient because it only has to administer the one ECM system. It’s also easier from a user training perspective, since everybody’s using the same thing,” Yonker said.

4 Ways to Drive Collaboration Among Departments

A company with internal strife among departments is like a person who constantly trips over his own feet. Progress is nil, and the potential for self-destruction is almost comical. Glassdoor is an employer review site that reveals the best—and worst—companies to work for. Employees at low rated companies frequently mention “poor communication” and “disorganization” in their reviews, which are key indicators that collaboration is lacking. Not coincidentally, several of these companies have also been rated poorly by their customers. Here are four ways an organization can drive interdepartmental collaboration, which can ultimately improve customer service.

1. Focus on the Main Goal

In BOOM!: 7 Choices for Blowing the Doors Off Business-As-Usual, authors Kevin and Jackie Freiberg point out that firefighters, police forces and other first responders rarely get caught up in “tribalistic” or fragmented behavior when working together because there is no confusion as to what their goal is: saving lives. Collaboration comes a lot easier when every department realizes and works toward a shared goal. It’s no longer about every department for itself—it’s about working together to accomplish the larger enterprise mission.

2. Start from the Top

A culture of collaboration ultimately begins with the leadership team. According to leadership development consultant Susan Cucuzza, collaboration can turn into competition when it isn’t managed well. “Because collaboration consists of interdisciplinary groups trying to come together, intended collaboration can turn into whose idea is better, whose solution should be followed and who is smarter,” says Cucuzza. Having departmental leaders step up to oversee collaboration is a great start. Cucuzza argues that even informal or unofficial leaders can be a huge help in determining who needs to be involved, helping everyone understand the benefits of collaborating and identifying the overall goal.

3. Whiteboard the Collaborative Processes

A large part of understanding how departments fit together to achieve the organization’s mission is knowing what and how a department contributes to a process. Several companies that have gone through company-wide system updates strongly suggest “whiteboarding” their processes, or gathering teams and departments together to understand multi-department tasks. Extensively “whiteboarding” every process was helpful for two reasons:

  1. With the entire team in the room, everyone was able to see how every role contributed to each process.
  2. Everyone involved had a chance to provide input on how to make the process better and to officially agree on how new processes would work.

Of course, it isn’t necessary to wait for a system overhaul to get to know the departments around the organization. Bringing teams together is a proactive way to give departments the opportunity to learn about each other and discover:

  • What other departments do.
  • What tasks require which departments.
  • How departments support each other.
  • What pressures, roadblocks and barriers other departments face in carrying out the enterprise mission.

4. Communicate More Effectively with Tech Tools

Conference meetings aren’t always the best way to communicate, and emails aren’t always the best method to exchange ideas. An enterprise content management (ECM) system can facilitate interdepartmental communication and collaboration by:

  • Capturing documents and automatically filing them, making it easier for everyone—regardless of department—to find the right information.
  • Providing versioning control so everyone references—and edits—the current copy of a document.
  • Automating notifications to remind team members of upcoming deadlines.

There’s no room for overly competitive departments bickering with each other in today’s competitive landscape. When departments cooperate to achieve organizational goals, tasks are completed faster and more efficiently, which can ultimately translate to a better customer experience.

Many business processes, such as employee onboarding or A/P, require interdepartmental collaboration. How can you improve these processes so that departments are in sync? Download the free guide How to Diagram Your Business Process and get started!

Solving Tax Season Headaches

SITUATION

• Manual processes took too long, and information was too hard to find in a legacy document management system.
• As the business grew, it needed a new solution that would reclaim time to spend with clients.

SOLUTION

• Immediate savings of 20,000 per year from not having to hire part-time clerks for tax season.
• Reduced tax preparation time, saving thousands of hours per year that can now be directed toward client service.

For a leading total wealth management and financial planning firm, tax season regularly meant doubling staff due to the sheer volume of work — and paperwork.

But as the business steadily grew, the firm had also outgrown what its chief operating officer called its “Stone Age document management system.”

In one attempt at a solution, the firm developed a proprietary and non-SQL based system, which was an add-on module for the firm’s tax preparation software, “purely for storage,” the COO said. Data transfer to PDF was difficult and error-prone, and “we were essentially scanning to create a back-up for the actual physical file. But that was unreliable — we lost data once, and it had no security or audit trail of any sort.”

From Paperless to Purposeful: An ECM Vision Takes Shape

Eventually, the firm’s files — containing 10 years of data — were simply too big to manage and too hard to find. “We’d already added a scanning clerk and a designated file clerk, but it was quickly becoming an operational nightmare, with more staff to manage and more documents getting misplaced,” the COO said, adding that the firm needed to reassess its vision for digital transformation to go beyond simply going paperless. “We first looked into Laserfiche in 2006, but back then, we weren’t looking at ECM in terms of business process automation or any bigger-picture operational improvements. We just wanted to get rid of the paper.”

The firm began to see how integral a content services platform was to not only keep up with, but also anticipate, the organization’s projected growth. “We looked at a few solutions, and they all did things in their own way. Only Laserfiche offered the flexibility to develop our own folder structures and templates — and we’d be able to change them depending on requirements without calling in a consultant, the COO added. “Plus, we required that Laserfiche integrate with our Microsoft Dynamics CRM and [our] tax software, as well as send Microsoft Office documents directly to Laserfiche. We wanted everything to mesh together. Other systems either didn’t integrate, or if they did, it was going be complicated and expensive.”

Laserfiche Workflow Saves Thousands of Hours Per Year

With a looming tax deadline, the organization focused its initial deployment of Laserfiche on the tax preparation side of the business, beginning with a substantial backlog conversion of paper files. “It took around 30 days to deploy, customize and integrate the system,” the COO said. “We had one day of training for full-time staff. And it took me 30 minutes to train the part time staff on how they’d be using Laserfiche.”

The ease of deployment was significant based in no small part on Laserfiche’s ability to mirror the firm’s familiar paper filing structures. The firm set up Laserfiche as the single source of truth: Tax worksheets were automatically sent to Laserfiche with a single click from Microsoft Office programs, while Laserfiche also collected all forms from the tax software.

A Laserfiche Workflow automatically routes files between staff and clients. “A file used to ‘jump’ between seven sets of hands, from client meeting to the client delivery,” the COO said. “File clerk to front desk staff to preparer to checker to scanner to processor to mail clerk — and back to the file clerk.

“Now, using Laserfiche Workflow, the front desk sets up the appointment and creates the file for the preparer, and it’s just ‘click’ the field, ‘approve,’ ‘approve,’ ‘approve,’ all the way through the process. If something isn’t approved, it is sent back automatically with a ‘sticky note’ on the document in Laserfiche. Nobody has to leave their desk, and I can monitor the whole process and see where everything is so I know what’s getting done. It just raises the level of efficiency and accountability,” the COO added. “Instead of people getting up and moving files from cabinets, it ‘jumps’ by itself.”

And benefits went beyond removing the burden of manual routing from staff. “Operationally, we had the best tax season ever, especially for me since I could monitor every detail of the business and everyone’s performance from my screen,” the COO said. “We made our ROI in the first year alone. But the biggest savings was the preparers’ time — at least 10 minutes for every hour. When you add that up, that’s literally a thousand hours our staff can spend working with more clients.”

Expanding Deployment, Saving More Clicks with Image-enablement Integration

Solving Tax Season Headaches“We’re taking things step by step,” the COO said. “One thing we’ve learned from this process is that in order for the transition to a totally paperless environment to be successful, users have to accept it and want to use it. Laserfiche has the flexibility to make that happen.”

From an operations standpoint, the COO explains, they are very satisfied. “Laserfiche is easy to maneuver and to develop and change.”