Hanover County

Located just outside of Richmond, VA, Hanover County serves a population of more than 100,000 residents. During tax season, keeping up the books for the constituency can be a daunting task for the Commissioner of Revenue’s Office, which manages all of the county’s real estate, personal, property and state income tax information.

The department purchased Laserfiche to eliminate paper processes and decrease the time staff spent finding and filing tax records.

It began using Laserfiche as a digital file cabinet and digitized over 85% of its tax documents in the first year.

When the department’s systems administrator, Amy Johnson, attended a user meeting hosted by the county’s reseller, Unity ECM, she saw how other organizations were leveraging Laserfiche’s advanced functionality. She knew Hanover County could use Laserfiche to do more than document search and retrieval.

To take advantage of Laserfiche’s newest features, the county upgraded to Laserfiche Rio and started revamping entire business processes.

Improving Document Approval with Workflow

Even without a background in IT, Johnson quickly began using Laserfiche Workflow to automate important departmental processes.

For example, every year the office completes statutory assessment worksheets to measure the personal property assets of each local business in the county. Before Laserfiche, compiling and processing these worksheets prior to review led to significant printing costs and time delays.

With Laserfice:
  • An integration between Laserfiche Quick Fields and the department’s AS/400 database has the eliminated cumbersome, upfront manual data entry.
  • Laserfiche Workflow automates the entire records approval process. New worksheets are immediately searchable in Laserfiche from managers’ desktops, allowing staff to quickly review worksheets and better serve customers.
  • With Laserfiche Snapshot, an image capture tool, the office has eliminated redundant printing of records. “Snapshot seems like a minor thing, but it was a huge benefit for us because we don’t have to print paper anymore,” says Johnson, estimating that the system saves the office from printing about 15,000 pages a year.

Automating Records Management

The county also relies on Laserfiche as an automated backbone for records management and retention. With paper, each staff member dedicated at least one day a week to sorting records for filing. Laserfiche has eliminated the need for this rotating position by automatically filing and storing approved documents by type and name for the six-year retention period.

“Everything we do is linked onto a foundation based on Laserfiche Records Management Edition, which allows us to log our records according to state records management standards,” says Johnson.

Getting Buy-in

Johnson says that upfront planning with every employee involved in the process has eased the office’s transition to digital document approval. When she began using Laserfiche Workflow, Johnson invited all the managers responsible for approving documents, along with the division manager, to join her as she drew out the process on a piece of paper. The group discussed every step together and determined how the managers would prefer to approve worksheets in Laserfiche.

“Time spent diagramming upfront will more than pay itself back later. Because we took the time to evaluate our documents, we ended up eliminating a lot of junk in our paper files,” notes Johnson. “It’s also really important to give staff ownership over the process.”

Tapping into the Laserfiche User Community

Beyond her work at the county, Johnson is also a leader of the Laserfiche User Group in Virginia, a consortium of Laserfiche users that holds quarterly meetings to foster the exchange of ECM knowledge. The group has grown to include more than 100 members throughout the state.

“The user group is so beneficial for networking and talking with other users. It’s a great place to hear about the lessons that other users have learned,” says Johnson.

Additionally, Johnson cites the annual Laserfiche Empower conference, reseller support and technical white papers as invaluable resources for improving her skills in using the software.

“Our implementation is so successful because of the community. Laserfiche listens to feedback and uses it to shape its next release. Everyone’s so approachable and helpful, and that makes it easy to like the product,” she says.

Gaining Top Value

Adopting new software functionality as it becomes available has helped Hanover County gain top value out of its ECM system. With these new tools, the county is truly leveraging the power of its constituent data in digital form to help transform the way county business is accomplished.

“Laserfiche is the one tool on your desktop that actually does what it’s supposed to do and what you ask it to do,” notes Johnson. “It’s one of my favorite parts of my job.”

Jackson County

Located in the scenic southwest corner of Oregon, Jackson County is home to a growing population of more than 200,000 residents—a growing population that in recent years has produced both a higher demand for services and more public records. Like many local government offices, Jackson County was flush with paper documents and short on storage space.

Additionally, the county must store and organize most of its departments’ records in complex records structures according to state and federal laws for records retention. With paper records, enforcing retention schedules while ensuring staff could still find and retrieve records involved tedious manual steps for staff across the county.

“There was a complicated system of filing with colored labels on the folders,” says Devin Goble, Programmer Analyst for Jackson County’s IT department. “Complying with retention meant staff had to look through each folder on the shelves, a very time-consuming process.”

Even though the county knew its departments needed an enterprise content management (ECM) system, skepticism toward digital content—and new IT projects—was strong among employees.

“It was a hard fight to get ECM implemented in the county. People were thoroughly entrenched in their paper processes,” says Goble.

To offer a valuable solution to staff, Goble led a search for an ECM system that could satisfy many different users’ needs and eliminate manual paper processes.

Laserfiche appealed to the IT department because it offered a well-supported feature set with a solid, built-in records management component. After hearing the positive experiences of other cities and counties using Laserfiche, Goble was assured that his IT department could structure Laserfiche in a way that would win over skeptical departments.

Warranting a Transparent Records Management Solution

Although many departments wanted a solution to their paper problems, the county worked with Laserfiche solution provider CDI to begin its Laserfiche implementation in the Sheriff’s Office in 2011. The diverse types of records handled by law enforcement staff offered the perfect testing ground for an improved records management process. Felony records, for example, must be retained by the department for ten years, while records managers can destroy certain types of warrants after five and others after ten. Keeping track of different retention schedules while making paper documents easily accessible to clerks was difficult for the department.

Laserfiche’s Records Management Edition, a DoD 5015.2-certified records management solution, allowed the IT department to separate what Goble calls the “nuts and bolts of records management” from general document use. Using Laserfiche’s transparent records management approach, the department was able to customize content management based on staff members’ job functions and easily organize the same documents in different ways for records managers and deputies.

For example, the four types of warrants handled by the department all require two separate retention schedules. When a warrant is received and scanned into the department’s digital document repository, Laserfiche automatically puts every warrant in its own record series folder, allowing records managers to view warrants in a batch by type or year and purge them at the appropriate time.

At the same time, Laserfiche establishes a separate folder structure for deputies and clerks that lists individual warrants by warrant type and warrant number. Because deputies are usually searching for more granular information within a specific case or a subpoena, Laserfiche automatically organizes documents so that deputies can easily find the detailed case information within a record.

It’s a best of both worlds solution: records managers can easily find and filter warrants based on disposition schedules while, at the same time, deputies can access individual warrants without knowing anything about records naming conventions. Everyone can work with law enforcement documents in the manner they prefer.

“Laserfiche’s transparent records management tools allow us to create a second view of the data in as many places as we need to. Records managers see it in one way. Clerks see it in another way. In some cases, others in the Sheriff’s hierarchy can see it in a completely different way,” says Goble.

Furthermore, an integration between Laserfiche and Tiburon, the department’s CAD/RMS system, pulls relevant names, place and incident dates from the police records upon scanning. Laserfiche Quick Fields auto-populates this information as metadata within the warrant file. Laserfiche Workflow then routes the warrant through the transparent records management filing process, eliminating the time-consuming, manual data entry and document routing steps for staff.

Streamlining Information Management

Laserfiche has also completely automated the department’s civil jacket process, which once included tedious data entry by records managers.

For civil cases, deputies compile an envelope of documents called a civil jacket that includes court documents and other records related to an incident when a subpoena is served. When these envelopes are scanned into the document repository, Laserfiche automatically fixes the civil jacket number to comply with the state’s records policy and forwards the documents to clerks for quality assurance.

“We take that act of moving data around and complying with retention policies out of users’ hands as much as possible. In some cases, users never have to touch the documents after they scan them. Laserfiche does all the rest,” says Goble.

Eliminating manual steps helps staff focus on getting their jobs done instead of tracking down and organizing paper. Temporary staff can complete scanning tasks without needing to be trained on document retention parameters, and records managers aren’t burdened with data entry. Laserfiche’s automation tools also eliminate the security risk of records being moved out of their records series.

“Not only do users not have to worry about where things go, they can’t change the filing structure even if they want to. This structure is locked in place by policy,” says Goble.

Furthermore, the Sheriff’s Office can directly push documents to the District Attorney’s office using Laserfiche WebLink, an online Web portal that provides read-only access to documents. High-profile cases often require transferring thousands of pages of records to the DA. With WebLink, the Sheriff’s Office can upload select documents to the online portal and give DA staff secure access to the information, eliminating costly printing and shipping expenses and streamlining litigation.

Building Enterprise-Wide Enthusiasm for ECM

The initial implementation was so successful that the skeptical end users have started evangelizing Laserfiche to other departments. Goble says he is fielding questions from other departments about records management and Laserfiche all the time.

“It’s nice to give users something solid. Now that our staff has had a chance to see what the product can do for us, they’re getting excited about it,” says Goble.

In addition to using Laserfiche for other documents like purchasing records and contracts for the Sheriff’s Office, IT has expanded ECM to the County Assessor’s Office. The department uses Laserfiche to scan and store historical deed cards, 100-year old property assessment jackets and current personal property returns for local businesses. The county’s Human Resources department has also started integrating Laserfiche with its Oracle ERP system to manage personnel records.

Using Laserfiche Workflow and Laserfiche Quick Fields to automate as much of the capture and indexing process as possible went a long way in showing the value of the application to multiple departments. Goble says that setting up a system that requires as little user interaction as possible was key to expanding ECM into an enterprise application.

“I’m more proud of our users than anything else. We’re really happy to see the expansion that we’ve been able to do with Laserfiche,” notes Goble.

Florida League of Cities

With the mission of shaping legislation and promoting cooperative action among Florida’s municipal governments, the Florida League of Cities represents over 400 cities, towns and villages throughout the state. The organization, based in Orlando and Tallahassee, serves as the primary provider of critical services for member organizations, including insurance plans, pensions, loans, legal consultation and policy research.

As its membership base grew, the League faced an influx of documents and service needs that its previous document management system, Alchemy, couldn’t handle without instability issues. To build a stable, long-term content management plan for the whole enterprise, which houses 16 departments and 170 employees, the League turned to Laserfiche ECM based on its widespread use among Florida governments.

“We selected Laserfiche because of its reputation as an industry leader,” says Chris Noyes, Business Systems Analyst for the League. “Laserfiche was chosen not only for its reputation and ROI, but for the stability and scalability it would provide our internal operations.”

In fact, purchasing Laserfiche prompted the organization’s IT department and business units to collaborate on new, more efficient ways of structuring business processes.

“For the first time in years, we have directed significant resources into dissecting our existing processes and reengineering them to fit new business conditions using Laserfiche. It has forced us to rethink how we do business—in a positive way,” says Noyes.

Initiating Change in Insurance Units

The League initiated partnerships between IT and business units during its first Laserfiche deployment in the worker’s compensation claims department, which handles more than 180,000 documents from doctors, providers and the state every year.

The IT department started by mapping out the entire claims process into large-format flowcharts and then hosted inter-department meetings where IT staff and business heads worked together to identify antiquated paper processes, identify business goals and create a strategy for improving the flow of claims information.

Within six months, this collaborative effort resulted in a completely reengineered claims processing cycle. Instead of manually passing multiple copies of documents around the office, claims adjustors and clerical staff now use Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management tool, integrated with a backend SQL database to automatically route claims to the right adjustors in both the Orlando and Tallahassee offices.

“We’ve gained efficiencies by creating a centralized intake department. The printers are silent and there isn’t an army of personnel moving documents between cubicles,” explains Noyes.

The claims department saved 3,400 labor hours in just the first year of using Laserfiche and reduced a process that once took up to 24 hours to complete to just a few hours. With files in a central location, the department’s special investigations team no longer needs to rifle through the contents of CDs and DVDs and can work more proactively during insurance fraud investigations.

The League’s Property and Liability Claims Center, comprised of statewide field members who assess losses from natural disasters, also implemented Laserfiche to automatically push property claims received by phone to claims adjustors in the field through a completely paperless process.

An integration between Laserfiche Web Access, an online version of the Laserfiche digital document repository, and the League’s risk management software automatically links claim files, bills and state forms together in an online portal that’s quickly accessible by field members.

“In the event of a regional disaster, Laserfiche Workflow promptly notifies our response team and coordinates claim information between our offices and field staff,” says Noyes. “We know immediately if a member has incurred a loss and can act upon it quickly, greatly improving customer service.”

The Property and Liability Claims department is now routing more than 55,000 claim documents a year and has reduced printing expenses by 80%, saving more than $9,000 in operational costs.

With these time and cost savings, insurance staff in the Worker’s Compensation and Property Claims Centers can redirect their efforts to adjusting claims instead of performing back-office tasks like printing faxes and alphabetizing checks. Claims staff are collaborating more quickly with other departments, like underwriting, finance and risk control—the League’s ultimate goal.

Laserfiche + Great Plains + iPads = Automated Mobile Accounting

When other business units realized what interdepartmental document collaboration and Laserfiche’s ease-of-use had achieved for the insurance groups, suddenly everyone wanted to get in on Laserfiche Workflow, says Noyes.

“Laserfiche Workflow is easy to understand even if you don’t have a lot of technical skills. It’s a tool that helps logically show how information can flow efficiently through the organization. You start seeing light bulbs go off in people’s heads,” he explains.

The League’s Finance department requested a more streamlined solution to its check printing and invoice approval process. Clerks were spending 30 hours a week just matching checks with supporting documents generated from multiple applications.

Using Laserfiche’s integrative abilities, the IT department combined Laserfiche Workflow with Great Plains, the department’s ERP system, the League’s Microsoft CRM system and RightFax faxing software to streamline this process. Laserfiche acts as integrative middleware that updates member information between the databases and pushes customer information through the approval process, from the arrival of fax documents to the printing of a check or invoice.

The IT department also connected Laserfiche with the Apple iPad, giving management the ability to review and approve invoices off-site. Staff can simply access their desktop remotely and open Laserfiche to view files. In the future, the IT department plans to migrate the department onto Laserfiche’s iPad app, an app that allows employees to securely create, upload, view and act upon content from wherever they are.

The department has saved over 500 labor hours using this Great Plains and Laserfiche Workflow integration. Instead of relying on staff to pass information back and forth, Laserfiche now automatically routes 800 invoices a month, significantly improving check turn-around time for vendors and customers.

“Laserfiche Workflow handles our manual processes while also adding value, security and accountability to the process,” says Noyes.

Accounting staff has enthusiastically embraced the solution, which Noyes credits to Laserfiche’s integrative capability. Because Laserfiche works with, not against, applications that users are already familiar with, IT was able to create solutions that didn’t burden staff with learning an entirely new system.

“The more you can integrate Laserfiche with your existing applications, the happier and more productive your users will be. Laserfiche allows for so many different methods of hooking into your existing systems, whether they are off-the-shelf or custom-built,” explains Noyes.

Merging IT Requirements with User Acceptance

In total, over 155 employees across the League use Laserfiche and the organization manages two digital repositories that house over 10 million pages from various departments. With Laserfiche, the League has reclaimed 700 square feet of office space, allowing the organization to add more staff and service more customers as business grows.

“Potential costs savings are everywhere, and the business process analysis combined with the Laserfiche toolset can greatly increase productivity,” says Noyes. “You can translate a single solution that you come up with into an interoperable process across your organization.”

IT approaches every implementation as an opportunity to learn a department’s business needs and to create solutions that employees are comfortable learning and using. The result is a collaborative mindset that empowers staff to discover their own innovative ways of configuring Laserfiche.

For example, Noyes says finance staff brainstormed a new method for indexing and routing their annual renewal packets. Their solution ended up reducing the task from a two-week project into a four-hour activity.

“Through the business process discovery, departments have come together, collaborating like never before. Technology Services is now a partner with the other business units, giving the non-technical folks more ownership of the tools they use every day. We’re not just a service utility anymore.”

Noyes says the League plans to use this collaborative spirit to thoroughly evaluate more business processes and continue to deploy Laserfiche across the enterprise. IT also plans to provide more iPads with the Laserfiche Mobile app to staff to power mobile content management.

“We have just scratched the surface to uncover the potential uses of Laserfiche within our organization,” he concludes.

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stretching the IT Investment

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

Whitis was impressed that so many of Laserfiche’s key functionalities aligned with LPO’s checklist of requirements, including Laserfiche’s ability to:
  • Monitor activities occurring within the department in real-time.
  • Support a complicated routing structure for LPO and provide transparency at each step of the loan process lifecycle.
  • Generate performance quotas and productivity statistics.
  • Offer snapshot printing, scanning and conversion of diverse content formats.

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

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

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

Eliminating Redundancies and Building Transparency

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaining Enterprise-Wide Buy-In

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

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

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

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

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

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

Computerized Management Services

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

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

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

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

To facilitate access and improve productivity, the company now uses Laserfiche to process, manage and store four main document types:
  • Reports and face sheets from providers.
  • Explanation of benefits forms (both paper and electronic) from payers.
  • Credentialing documents from providers.
  • Internal training documents.

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

Documents are processed and stored using Laserfiche Quick Fields 8, a high-volume capture and processing tool, and Laserfiche Workflow 8, a business process management tool. These tools eliminate the need for manual data entry and filing by:
  • Automatically extracting metadata from documents.
  • Auto-populating index fields.
  • Creating new folders.
  • Auto-filing documents.

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

Processing EOBs with Laserfiche

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

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

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

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

Laserfiche Workflow Automation Accelerates Coding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Key to Going Digital

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

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

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

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

Shareholders Service Group

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

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

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

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

Content management that improves customer relationships

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

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

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

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

Smoother audits

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

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

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

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

The competitive value of “technology strength”

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

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

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

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

Loudoun County

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

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

Turning to Technology

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

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

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

Going Enterprise

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

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

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

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

Managing Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

McIntyre notes that the IT department will be busy rolling out three new systems over the next year:
  • Enterprise-wide: An Oracle ERP system.
  • Assessor’s Office: iasWorld appraisal software from Tyler Technologies.
  • Tax: A new tax software system from PCI Systems.

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

To date, Loudoun County has implemented Laserfiche in ten departments, including:
  • Assessor’s Office
  • Building & Development
  • Management & Financial Services (Controller’s Office)
  • Environmental Health
  • Family Services

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

Red River Regional Dispatch Center

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

Serving the metropolitan community of Fargo-Moorhead, RRRDC handles more than 121,000 emergency calls a year, dispatching responders from:
  • Two sheriff’s departments.
  • Seven police departments.
  • Three city fire departments.
  • 28 rural fire departments.
  • 15 rural emergency medical service providers.
  • One ambulance service.

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

Integration with CAD/RMS/CMS Is Key

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

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

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

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

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

ECM Enhances Security, Mobility and Compliance

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

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

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

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

Workflow Makes Work Easier Across Agencies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stewart Enterprises: Using ECM Software for Disaster Recovery

Mitigating Documents During Disaster Recovery

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

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

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

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

Setting a Document Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

Centralizing Contracts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enterprise-Sized Gains

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schools Turn to Technology to Save Money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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