NWFM Streamlines Accounts Payable to Scale with Growth and Increase Transparency for Investors

SITUATION

• Company expansion led to a need to optimize paper-based accounts payable processes.
• NWFM sought a means to manage invoices digitally and increase transparency between back office and field operations.

RESULTS

• Achieved hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings
• Increased accuracy in invoice processing
• Over 300% increase in invoice capacity
• Increased investor confidence in the company

NWFM is a locally owned, full-service farm investment and property management company based in Yakima, Washington. Established in 2018, the company had initially processed all its vendor invoices manually. However, as NWFM expanded, the amount of paper invoices increased proportionally with its growing operations and client base.

“Originally, we manually processed about 250 invoices a month,” recalled Tim Hull, administrative manager at NWFM. “As a few hundred acres of new land came under our management, I could see a paperwork tsunami coming.”

Recognizing an opportunity to optimize paper-based accounts payable processes and improve back office and field operations, NWFM searched for a digital capture and workflow solution. Due to its reputation as a robust cloud content services platform, Laserfiche was chosen, and NWFM worked with solution provider FreeDoc of Lynnwood, Washington, to design a dedicated, customized accounts payable workflow.

Since implementing Laserfiche to keep up with a rapid growth trajectory, NWFM has achieved substantial cost and operational savings, as well as gained the ability to leverage data and metrics built into Laserfiche to improve transparency and accuracy throughout its operations.
Farmer in the field with a crop

Cultivating a Digital Invoice Processing System

Managing hundreds of acres of farmland across Central Washington, NWFM recognizes the value of automation and technology in its operations for the sake of efficiency and accuracy. Assessing its original invoice processing system, the company identified significant challenges:

  • Area managers working on-site would typically make purchases with local vendors, but the process of tracking purchases and matching them with the correct invoice in a timely manner was prone to bottlenecks
  • Employees had to manually manage documents that could be easily misplaced during the process

“As we took on more farmland to manage, I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle such a big influx of invoices every month,” said Hull. “Laserfiche helped us to create a solution to connect our employees located almost 100 miles away to our central office and resolve many of our major challenges.”

The digital accounts payable system at NWFM routes all electronically imported invoices into a dedicated folder within the company’s Laserfiche repository. Each invoice can be reviewed for accuracy before sending it for final approval and payment processing. Throughout the process, the administrative team can make changes to expense category codes and make notes to the bookkeeper.

NWFM’s Laserfiche system is integrated with FastField purchase order software, which allows area managers to upload pictures of invoices directly to Laserfiche from remote locations. The integration extracts vendor names, ranch names, individual blocks, numerical codes and other relevant information needed for processing and approvals; facilitating the management of clear, categorized information while processing invoices.

This has significantly increased the efficiency of invoice review and finalization. NWFM has gone from processing 250 invoices a month to more than 1,000, with the potential to scale up as the company continues to grow.

“Laserfiche has really proven to be the backbone of many of our processes,” said Hull. “Its cloud-hosted infrastructure and the ability to search for specific words within documents has helped us to form a solid connection between our central office and the ranches we manage — we are able to understand each other more clearly in terms of orders and financial documents.”

In addition to the need to establish a revamped AP system, the NWFM team wanted to give investors located out-of-state the ability to review invoices and financial documents digitally. Rather than continue with the legacy process of storing invoices in filing cabinets, NWFM now has a standardized digital repository and has been able to increase its financial transparency when working with investors, giving them access to invoices in real-time. Built with email import functionality, purchase order integrations and granular access rights, the new AP management system has supported NWFM’s efforts to modernize its operations and position the company for growth.

A Fruitful Digital Transformation

Hull explains that NWFM initially tracked cost savings from the AP automation initiative for the first several months after implementation.

“We happily stopped counting savings after it exceeded $1,000 per month,” he said. “The savings was used to hire a chemical inventory specialist who now tracks inventory movement and returns unused stock. This allowed us to already return $72,000 in unused chemicals this year alone.”

NWFM’s new AP system also enables employees to process invoices while checking the price of products against bid sheets. In addition to the time savings from managing invoices, this process has additionally saved NWFM thousands of additional dollars by enabling the company to catch vendor billing errors, identifying $14,000 in billing errors per year. Leveraging data extracted from its invoice repository, the company is now making more accurate and productive purchasing decisions, and identifying savings opportunities.

Following the success of its AP system, NWFM has plans to establish satellite offices to further localize invoice processing in a more distributed strategy. This puts invoice processing closer to the ranch managers who make the purchases and generate the purchase orders. As the company continues to expand, Laserfiche has proven its effectiveness as a scalable solution.

“Organizing invoice and purchase order information by project or by ranch and block for review would have taken me weeks,” stated Hull. “Now I have it all at my fingertips.”

Prosper Scales Town Services with Laserfiche

SITUATION

In 2020, the Town of Prosper created a continuous process improvement program based on lean practices. As a part of this effort, the town aimed to eliminate paper-driven processes and manual tasks across various departments in order to meet the demands of the town’s growing population.

SOLUTION

The IT department began by replacing the paper applications for the town’s boards and commissions with a Laserfiche form. After experiencing Laserfiche’s ease of use, the department expanded with more electronic forms for the municipal court and the public works departments.

RESULTS

In addition to reduced opportunity for error and a streamlined staff experience, the time the public works department spends on the water equipment readings process has been cut by 75% or more. The department estimates it has saved more than 100 hours annually by re-engineering the process.

The Town of Prosper is a fast-growing suburb with small-town charm, located 30 miles north of Dallas at the crossroads of U.S. 380, Preston Road and the Dallas North Tollway in Collin and Denton Counties. Prosper sits on 27 square miles and is home to more than 35,430 people. A home-rule municipality, governed by a council-manager form of government, the town has full-time fire and police departments, including its own dispatch service. As the Town grows to its projected build-out population of 70,000 residents, Prosper’s vision is to remain a “Place Where Everyone Matters.”

Prosper is a town within Texas’s Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area that has experienced tremendous growth in recent years. With a projected build-out population of 70,000 — double its current population — the town’s IT department has had the foresight to prioritize increased efficiency, implementing processes and solutions that will help the town scale with growth and continue delivering high quality public services.

As a part of this effort, IT has leveraged Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) in various departments as a channel for process modernization and efficiency. The town started by replacing the paper applications for the municipality’s boards and commissions with a Laserfiche form. After experiencing Laserfiche’s ease of use, the department expanded with more electronic forms for the municipal court and the public works departments.

“We’re utilizing Laserfiche for what it’s good at, which is routing information, filing it into a system that makes it easy to search, easy to retrieve and easy to maintain with retention guidelines,” said Leigh Johnson, director of information technology at the Town of Prosper. “Anywhere that we can get a department to start using it more we’re trying to do so.”

Johnson’s vision puts digitization and centralization at the forefront, reducing opportunity for human error while providing a streamlined staff and citizen experience when interacting with the town’s information. Laserfiche supports this vision, as the town continues to explore new ways to leverage Laserfiche’s robust records management, electronic forms and integration capabilities.

Supporting Town Services Through Process Modernization

The Town of Prosper recently implemented a continuous improvement program with the ultimate goal of maintaining a high quality of service to the town’s growing population. This initiative led the IT department to explore opportunities for new efficiencies within existing technologies and processes.

“From the moment I started digging into Laserfiche, I thought ‘This is really slick,’” Johnson said. “I learned about forms and workflow, and we decided at some point that we needed to be utilizing it more and get some training on it.”

The IT department tapped the town’s Laserfiche solution provider, MCCi, for support and training on the platform, which inspired new ideas and opened doors to more advanced solutions.

One of the first Laserfiche-driven process improvements was done in collaboration with the town secretary, who wanted to modernize the way people applied to be on one of the town’s boards or commissions. Like in many municipalities, Prosper’s application was previously done on paper and the process was entirely manual.

“Any place we can eliminate inefficient processes, whether they are paper or otherwise, is going to benefit us,” Johnson explained.

The new process allows applicants to fill out a digital Laserfiche form on the town’s website. Applicants attach their resumes; information is filed in Laserfiche and assigned a retention schedule, lessening the burden of managing paper records hidden in a filing cabinet.

When COVID-19 arrived, the IT department saw an increased need for digital forms to help decrease foot traffic to Town Hall. Building on their knowledge of Laserfiche forms, the team built several new forms, including:
  • Hearing requests
  • Attorney document submittals
  • Jury summons response

“Laserfiche became our go-to, because it was existing platform and we knew how easy it was to build a form with minimal training,” Johnson added.

Expanding Digital Transformation Across Town Departments

After their experience with creating some helpful Laserfiche forms for the town secretary and municipal courts, the IT department was ready to take on a more complex challenge. The team identified a legacy process that the public works department used daily to collect readings from equipment (such as water meters) at public works facilities throughout the town.

Previously done using a stack of paper comprising a sheet for each facility, the process involves field workers who drive out to each site to take readings from the equipment and note the relevant numbers by hand.

“Employees would then go back to the office and transcribe the information into what I called a ‘dirty log,’ which is basically another piece of paper where numbers could be erased and redone, mustard or coffee could be spilled on it,” Johnson said. Numbers were then transferred into a “clean log,” which could be kept as record and shown to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) during audits. “There were so many opportunities for numbers to be input incorrectly, and it was very time consuming.”

With support from MCCi, the Town of Prosper IT team reimagined the process using Laserfiche, which made the readings available to supervisors back in the office in real time. The new process involves equipping field workers with tablets and enabling them to enter readings digitally into a Laserfiche form. The forms presented a list of facilities and, depending on which facility the field worker selected, the form would dynamically change fields for different types of readings. Field workers electronically sign the form, which would also automatically be geotagged with the location of the facility.

“The public works department wanted another way to verify that a person was at the facility, so that if there was ever any question about it, we would have that signature and geotag,” Johnson said.

Field workers then move onto the next facility and repeat the process. If a supervisor in the office notices an anomaly with any of the information entered, they can immediately notify the field worker to take another reading.

“Before, they have even gotten back to the office before a supervisor could notify them that something looked off, so we’re saving more time and fuel as well,” Johnson added. “As they submit the numbers, they are written to an SQL database. We also file the forms in Laserfiche by month. When TCEQ comes out to do the audit now, instead of having to look through a file folder, we’ve got all the forms filled out, timestamped, geo-tagged, signed, and we know we went out there and did readings as we’re required to do. It’s much more efficient, and it’s updated in real-time.”

In addition to supporting the auditing process, the new equipment readings form has reduced the opportunity for error by eliminating 75% of the legacy process’s manual data entry. Johnson also estimates that the new process saves at least two hours per week in manual transcription, all of which results in huge efficiency gains for the public works department.

Today, the IT department is working on integrations to create even more connectivity and efficiencies.  An integration between Laserfiche and the town’s enterprise permitting and licensing system, for example, will enable the planning department to streamline records management by auto-filing paperwork related to permitting and licensing into Laserfiche. The human resources department, too, has embraced a digital approach to managing content and exploring new solutions.

“We went from having just one form for the boards and commissions application to creating dozens,” Johnson said. “We are growing so fast — we have lots of new employees starting, which has been the trend in recent years. So we’re not slowing down; we can’t slow down. There’s so much growth. Residents are very engaged and they demand a lot. Laserfiche is an example of one of the ways we can use technology to scale our services.”

Berkshire Hathaway Homestate Companies Improved Data Accessibility for More Informed Decision Making

By simplifying its processes and making better, data-driven decisions, the group of insurance carriers elevates the experience it provides for employees and customers alike.

Transcript

Our focus is to provide worker’s compensation insurance products across a wide variety of industries. Our primary responsibility there is providing our policy holders with the products that they need and providing our injured workers with compassionate care, helping them to get healthy and back to work. You know, we want to give our customers tomorrow more value than they have today, so it’s about continually releasing products, giving them what they need as quickly as possible.

We’ve gone through a lot of growth over the last eight years and as the organization scaled, we realized we weren’t staying current in a lot of our technologies so we had to go out and find a document management solution for the company.

I was really looking at a document management system that was secure, stable and had the ability to scale. We took a look at Laserfiche from a technology standpoint and it fit nicely in the tech stack that we have, but we also like the fact that, from an enterprise perspective, we’re going to be able to grow and expand our Laserfiche footprint into other areas of the company, so really it has the ability to become an enterprise-class product. Right now we are using Laserfiche as a document management repository for all of our policy and underwriting applications.

Finance certainly uses it, marketing, loss control. This platform has a lot of features and functionality than the previous one. Already, some of the feedback from the users is, “Wow there’s a lot more to do here. It’s a lot more powerful.”

Laserfiche provides us with a secure and stable platform; its something that’s going to allow us to grow. It’s going to scale with us as we continue to scale as an organization and it’s really going to enable us to have a single enterprise document management system that we’re able to extract good data and information out of so that we can make better decisions for our customers moving forward.

Digital transformation is something that a lot of companies are faced with right now. For us it’s taking at the tools and technology that we use, getting on to consistent, consolidated platforms, leveraging common technology and technology stacks that developers want to develop in so we’re moving to a bunch more current technologies.

So as an injured worker is injured, we want to make that process, you know, it’s new for them, it’s something that they’re unsure of. How can we give better tools, better features,better functionality to our injured workers to that we can make the overall process easier for them so that their focus is on, “how do I get better, how do I get healthy, how do I return to work quicker” and not on, you know, “when am I getting my check, where is my claim status, you know, where is my doctor’s appointment.” Being able to provide these things and make that easy for them there are less things that they have to worry about.

Explore additional insights on the Laserfiche insurance solutions page: https://www.laserfiche.com/solutions/financial-services/insurance/

What Is a Document Repository and What Are the Benefits of Using One?

Having a sufficient document management strategy is essential regardless of your business’s size. A vital element to this strategy is a document repository. Repositories serve as the central hub for all your organization’s vital forms and documents.

Read on to learn more about document repositories and how they help your organization save time and resources.

What is a Document Repository?

A document repository serves as a centralized storage point for all your organization’s critical and day-to-day content. Document repositories are a vital component of your organization’s overall document management strategy and can assist your organization in efforts to ensure that:
  • All content is centrally managed and accessible to all team members
  • Files and documents are systematically organized and easy to locate
  • Your content is safe and compliant with regulatory and security standards

What is a Document Repository Used For?

The main function of a document repository is to centralize all content produced and housed by your organization. Limiting your document management to physical documents is risky and becomes less efficient as your company grows and scales. A document repository eliminates the need for paper and conveniently organizes your documents into logical categories, folders and subfolders.

Document repositories aid in boosting productivity and collaboration within your organization by simplifying how teams share necessary documents amongst each other.

Additionally, many document repositories come with features that make it easier to locate documents, track their lifecycles and set in place security measures to protect sensitive information.

What are Common Features of a Document Repository?

Many document repositories come with a suite of useful features that allow you to boost your company’s productivity, streamline processes through automation and employ the latest security tools. Features you can expect to make use of in a document repository include:

Capture tools: Capture tools assist with bringing data into your document repository. Having a variety of capture tools increases your team’s ability to work efficiently. Some common capture tools include drag and drop, scanning, online forms and mobile capture.

Automation: Document repositories may allow you to digitize manual workflows and automate processes such as naming and organizing files, modifying document security levels and sharing content with relevant team members.

Integrations: Some repositories integrate with third party software your organization utilizes, boosting efficiency and collaboration.

Collaboration tools: These tools improve productivity by streamlining processes that enable your team members work on various projects together. Other useful collaboration tools allow members to collaborate in real time, add comments and share with stakeholders.

Security controls: One of the most important aspects of your document repository will be upholding your organization’s security policies. Document repositories allow you to assign privileges and rights, oversee document access and sharing and employ access restrictions.

Metadata: Many repositories enable you to store details about a document, such as document type, owner, description and date of creation, as metadata. Metadata aids searchability and ensures documents are easy to query.

The Benefits of a Document Repository?

Your organization’s document repository provides many benefits in addition to increasing productivity and efficiency. Here are three benefits of utilizing a document repository:

Systematically organize your content: A document repository gives your organization full capability to organize content to fit your company’s needs. This allows you to create folder structures and naming conventions that work well for your company’s current workflows.

Manage the lifecycle of your content: A great benefit of uploading content into your document repository is the ability to track its digital footprint. This allows you to monitor who has viewed a document, limit editing and duplication and control the amount of time a document remains accessible.

Maintain security and privacy standards: Document repositories allow you to grant specific access rights and privileges to your folders. These security features give your organization more control to grant various teams and departments the appropriate level of access to perform their duties.

Further Reading

Download our Document Management Buyer’s Guide to discover software that will support your organization’s growth and productivity goals.
The Document Management Buyer’s Guide.

Canadian Seed Growers’ Association Pioneers Digital-First Agriculture

The Canadian Seed Growers’ Association (CSGA) is a science-based non-profit organization committed to supporting a competitive Canadian agriculture sector as a respected global leader in seed quality assurance and genetic traceability.

CSGA provides leadership as the only Canadian organization to monitor and certify pedigreed seed for all agricultural crops in Canada except potatoes. CSGA certifies over 1.2 million acres, over 60 different crop kinds of 2,000 varieties for nearly 3,100 seed growers and 2,500 seed-growing businesses annually. Bringing together plant breeders, seed growers and seed sector stakeholders to reliably deliver a national seed certification program through the assurance of genetic identity of pedigreed seed.

Canada’s seed certification system ensures germination and mechanical purity while providing a third-party verified audit trail of the seed’s varietal identity. It ensures that the agricultural supply chain is secure, farmers trust the seed they purchase and plant, and trading partners have the utmost confidence in the seed and food products they import. The system is a globally trusted quality-management system that ensures plant breeding innovation is delivered from the lab to the farmer, producer and end market.

To continue strengthening Canada’s global reputation for producing high-quality seed, CSGA has been at the forefront of seed certification system modernization and digital transformation over the last decade.

Since 2014, CSGA has used Laserfiche as a behind-the-scenes champion for many of its key business processes. Using Laserfiche’s electronic forms and business process automation capabilities, CSGA accelerated the seed certification process for its 3,100-plus members.

Agriculture is an essential sector where relationships are key. The recent push for a more digitally driven CSGA has led to better relationships with growers, sector stakeholders and government. The Association’s “CSGA 2.0” Business Plan includes a focus on digitalization or providing transparent, digitally enabled, enhanced traceability services that reduce administrative burden and add value.

A recent blockchain validation pilot project enabled consumers to see their food’s journey from seed-to-table. Using data gathered from seed crops and the blockchain pilot, CSGA’s model tracked and verified a product’s history, which consumers could access by scanning a QR code on the packaging.

These digital initiatives continue to underscore CSGA’s commitment to its stakeholders, the Canadian agricultural community, and the Canadian public, who consume Canadian seed growers’ products every day.

“In any given year, we receive roughly 16,000 to 20,000 applications. The vast majority of these are processed through Laserfiche. We’ll have over 1,000 workflows running in the background. It essentially runs our business.”

— Doug Miller, CSGA Executive Director and former Managing Director, Certification and Technology Services

Streamlining Key Business Processes

CSGA is the delegated regulatory authority for the Canadian Seed Crop Certification System via a public-private partnership with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). CSGA certifies that a seed crop is produced in compliance with CSGA standards for varietal purity in pedigreed seed crop certification.

In the past, the Canadian government provided inspection services for thousands of fields seeking seed crop certification from annually. In 2012, however, the government announced that it would no longer provide those services. Going digital was the solution to connect CSGA, the CFIA and 23 different inspection companies across the country. The CFIA now oversees private seed crop inspections with ensured coordinated access to information.

CSGA created SeedCert, an online portal and one-stop-shop powered by Laserfiche Forms and business process automation to streamline the inspection and verification processes.

Today, seed growers request certification online by logging into SeedCert and submitting a Laserfiche form routed to staff for review. Approved applications are transmitted to inspectors who access requests through Laserfiche on a computer or mobile device. Those inspectors submit completed inspection reports online, even when they are out in the field.

By removing paper and the manual shipping of information, CSGA took something that once took weeks and created a more user-friendly, standardized, and simplified experience for members, inspectors and CSGA staff. CSGA staff now have access to reports quickly, allowing CSGA to promptly communicate with the grower if issues are identified in the field, allowing the grower to address those issues before harvest and obtain certification

A Data-driven Approach to Decision-making

What initially started as a challenge ultimately drove innovation for CSGA. “Our whole system was paper-based and back-logged. Now, processing takes only days,” says Miller. The new digital processes enabled the Association to scale up. CSGA’s SeedCert platform now helps coordinate 23 different Authorized Seed Crop Inspection Services (ASCIS) organize inspections and their 250 individual inspectors — saving CSGA’s current staff countless hours.

CSGA-certified seed crop information is stored in a database, allowing CSGA staff to dive deeper into the data. They can identify patterns and gather insights that could influence strategic decision-making, improve processes and operations, and strengthen relationships between seed growers and regulators — all to serve CSGA’s members and the sector as effectively and efficiently as possible.
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A Digital-First Future for Business

CSGA is finding new ways to leverage technology every day. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization used Laserfiche Forms to enable inspectors to report if they were sick, allowing in-field inspections to be reassigned. Electronic forms also allowed the Association to communicate coronavirus-related travel restrictions with inspectors quickly. In a time of worldwide uncertainty, the improved communications facilitated the continuity of essential operations.

The CSGA sees a new, more diverse wave of producers in the future. The younger agricultural professionals expect digital-first, intuitive interfaces, and quick responses to requests. This highlights the need for the agricultural sector to keep pace with new innovations and technology-driven solutions.

With the help of technology like Laserfiche, CSGA has adapted to this new set of expectations and changing business climate. “We’re looking ahead for the next generation of seed growers and the entire pedigreed seed certification system. We’ve already launched our digital crop certificates and taken big strides forward to a digital end-to-end seed crop certification system. Leveraging digital platforms will elevate the seed sector and Canadian Agriculture,” Miller says.

Process automation has made it possible to certify seed faster, and e-forms have made it easier for CSGA to coordinate among its large and growing network of growers, inspectors and government. All these improvements are critical to CSGA’s mandate to deliver a national third-party seed crop certification system for Canada.

“Regulated sectors like agriculture are going to have to adopt digitization technologies as a necessity.”

— Doug Miller, CSGA Executive Director and former Managing Director, Certification and Technology Services

To learn more about how Laserfiche drives digital transformation, schedule a consultation today.

University San Francisco

Westbank First Nation Elevates Employee Experience and Safety

Located in south central British Columbia, Westbank First Nation (WFN) is one of eight Okanagan Nation communities representing a portion of the Syilx traditional territories that have inhabited the valley for thousands of years. Today, the First Nation government comprises about 200 staff members who serve a population of 10,000 residents spread across four reserves. In an effort to address silos between departments and reorganize physical documentation in storage, WFN sought to digitize and inventory its existing paper records. After exploring options with its digital workplace solutions provider Ricoh Canada, WFN selected Laserfiche as its electronic records management (ECM) system. Since implementing Laserfiche more than a decade ago, WFN has expanded its digital transformation efforts, introducing Laserfiche Workflow and Forms to automate business processes, and utilizing metadata to improve reporting and turnaround times.

“We grew so fast as an organization, identifying many processes that we could streamline along the way,” said Chad Rota, Records and Information Management Supervisor at Westbank First Nation. “Laserfiche has provided us with an opportunity to assess our processes and improve the organization holistically.”

Laserfiche is now used for numerous internal processes across departments, streamlining approvals and records management through automated document routing. In addition to time savings, benefits have also included investigating the ability to support COVID-19 contact tracing efforts, and the flexibility to continue addressing community health and safety through incident reporting.

Establishing a Digital Foundation

WFN manages over 4,400 properties, which requires intensive property tax documentation processes. From early on, WFN recognized the need for a more efficient records management system. A majority of its vital records management and property tax documents relied on off-site filing, resulting in substantial fuel surcharges to store and retrieve boxes. Seeing an opportunity to improve compliance, transparency and efficiency, WFN explored ways to digitally transform the way the organization managed these documents.

Today, the organization uses Laserfiche to process all documents related to each property tax folio digitally, and automatically store them in a centralized location, eliminating lost files. The system enables metadata to be attached to each document, making them easily searchable. The process now requires less paper, which originally required five floor-to-ceiling shelves containing over 4,000 folders to store. Now, there are only a few small folders for processing documents that either need to be scanned weekly or mailed out to residents, helping to improve responsiveness to members. As the organization grew, file storage rooms were converted into functional workspace.

“The repository grew from managing meeting minutes and policies into managing working documents and case files. We really experienced an organization-wide transformation — department by department.”

— Chad Rota, Records and Information Management Supervisor at Westbank First Nation

Increasing Administrative Efficiency and Elevating the Employee Experience

Following the success digitizing its document management process, the organization recognized that internal requests — such as employee change notifications and staff reports — could also be digitized and automated to reclaim time for employees who were manually managing files being passed between departments.

“We really needed a way to improve monitoring and transparency to streamline these submissions,” said Rota.

WFN implemented Laserfiche Forms, which can be edited digitally without being passed between departments for amendment and approval. This system has been fully adopted and integrated across the organization, including the finance department, legal department and HR. Notably, finalized employee change notification requests are automatically filed in Laserfiche via an automated Laserfiche Workflow, with a notification sent to the payroll team for review and approval. This fully digital process has increased efficiency, as well as boosted employee satisfaction as requests are resolved more rapidly.

Additionally, the request portal is hosted using Laserfiche Forms, which can be easily modified and updated with newly available resources. This has supported the dissemination of information throughout WFN, creating a self-service portal for employees, who now have the independence to navigate forms, pending requests and their associated documents.

“Being able to access everything in one central location has empowered staff to become more independent Laserfiche users.”

— Chad Rota, Records and Information Management Supervisor at Westbank First Nation

Prioritizing Employee Health and Safety

In addition to creating a long-term digital culture, Laserfiche has provided WFN with a high-level view of working conditions for its employees, improving health and safety when it matters most. If an incident occurs on-site, employees can complete a dedicated Laserfiche form which is automatically forwarded to WFN’s occupational health and safety advisor, while notifying the director of the submission. The system generates a corrective action task, prompting a discussion about the cause of the individual incident and preventative measures. In addition to metadata based on the location and department of the incident, WFN can leverage advanced reporting tools to identify health and safety trends and make more informed, data-driven decisions to improve conditions for specific locations.

This system also helps support compliance requirements — in terms of policy development, WFN submits annual reports to regional and national governing entities in Canada. Now, staff can extract relevant information from incident responses and complete these forms more quickly and accurately. Additionally, during the early stages of the pandemic, WFN also used Laserfiche to support contact tracing efforts, developing a dedicated form for staff entering the premises in order to comply with British Columbia’s health reporting requirements, eliminating the need for Health and Safety specific software.

Understanding Organizational Priorities

By using Laserfiche to establish replicable solutions that can be applied to a variety of processes, WFN has optimized its resources while enabling employees to be more independent and less reliant on paper files. Documents can be retrieved in seconds, allowing staff to work far more efficiently and take more ownership over core processes. Achieving such substantial savings in time and resources has translated to reduced operational costs and headcount allocations, allowing the organization to run more efficiently.

In terms of future digital transformation plans, WFN is working to digitize and streamline accounts payable using Laserfiche Forms and process automation. The organization is also exploring Laserfiche Cloud as a storage solution moving forward.

“We are able to go from the troubleshooting and testing phase to launching new processes so rapidly because we have so much at our fingertips with Laserfiche. It’s easy for us to mobilize efforts and prioritize our workload the right way.”

— Chad Rota, Records and Information Management Supervisor at Westbank First Nation

To learn more about how Laserfiche drives digital transformation, schedule a consultation today.

Streamlining Student-Centered Processes at Colegio Alemán

Colegio Alemán Alexander von Humboldt A.C. is a network of three German-language schools based in greater Mexico City. Serving 3,000 students, the organization is one of the largest German educational institutions outside of Germany. In order to serve its growing student body, the organization found the need to reimagine the ways in which it provided core student services, such as enrollment, re-enrollment and scholarships.

The Colegio Alemán team seized the opportunity to digitize and automate key processes using a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system, which enabled them to create electronic forms to capture student information digitally, and automate workflows to streamline document processing. The team started by creating a better experience for students and their families with the re-enrollment process, and has since built on their success by continuing to optimize and automate other key activities throughout the organization.

“We’ve experienced many benefits from automating our workflows using Laserfiche, we’ve found that what we need to do, we can do in the Laserfiche platform.”

—Victor Valverde López, technology manager at Colegio Alemán

Reimagining Re-enrollment

After managing many time- and resource-intensive re-enrollment cycles, Colegio Alemán Administrative Manager Ema Medina brought a challenge to the organization’s leadership: “We couldn’t continue the way that we were doing the re-enrollment process,” Medina said. “Parents had to come to the school with lots of paperwork, documents that we needed signed, and in the best-case scenario, it would take an hour or more to get through with all of the steps involved.”

The Colegio Alemán team worked with Apoint Mexico, a Laserfiche solution provider, to implement Laserfiche with the goal of reimagining re-enrollment as a digital, automated process that would save time for parents and administrative staff. In the new process, a Laserfiche form collects the necessary information from parents — because this is the re-enrollment process, parents only need to confirm and update information as needed. They can review the contract with the school, provide an e-signature and even pay tuition with the new Laserfiche-powered automated process.

“One of the most important parts of our Laserfiche implementation was the ease of integration,”said Valverde López. “It was easy for us to integrate our Laserfiche process with our ERP, Intelisis, which enabled us to streamline the activities — from inputting student information to payments. And with records management, our documents are organized and classified in such a way that it’s easy for administrative staff to find information.”

When COVID-19 hit Mexico in 2020, the Colegio Alemán team was grateful to have a process in place for parents to re-enroll their students online. Now that the staff has returned to the office, however, parents still prefer the online process. “For me, the biggest benefit has been the improvement in our customer service,” Medina said. “The parents are very happy with this process and they tell us all the time. And having all of our documents in a digital platform — it’s such an important tool.”

“Today, parents don’t have to physically go to the school to re-enroll; they don’t have to print a single page. They can do the entire process from their house, from their offices, wherever they are. It takes about five to 10 minutes — the contract, the payment, everything. It’s saved us time and money, but the most important thing is that our parents are happy because they don’t lose one to three hours doing this process.”

—Victor Briseño Candela, CFO at Colegio Alemán

Building on Digital Transformation Organization-wide

The parents and employees’ satisfaction with the new re-enrollment process led the Colegio Alemán team to continue digitally transforming other student-facing processes. Naturally, the new student enrollment process was a prime candidate for automation. “The new student process is very important,” Briseño Candela explained. “Today, we have an enrollment form for new students, so parents can give us information, all the documentation, and it’s all saved in the Laserfiche repository.”

Additional processes that the Colegio Alemán team have automated include:
  • Scholarship requests: Families can provide financial information, which is automatically routed to the relevant personnel to review and make a determination.
  • Bus transportation process: Colegio Alemán provides bus transportation for nearly 2,000 students per school day. This process streamlines the collection of authorizations from parents that their children can take the bus, and updated addresses to support efficient pick-up and drop-off.
  • Vendor registration: Vendors that work with Colegio Alemán provide legal and fiscal documents through this process, which automates validation and document classification.
  • Employees’ children enrollment: Colegio Alemán employees can enroll their children through a special enrollment and approval process.
  • Teacher benefit discount: School teachers can submit a form to receive discounts for different materials and services.
  • Legal or parent meeting attendance: A simple but important process allows Colegio Alemán staff to keep record of who attended meetings.

“Any school district or network of schools operates with a lot of different systems. Laserfiche has helped us to pull information from all of these systems that normally operate independently, so that we have more visibility into the data that we have.”

—Víctor Valverde López, technology manager at Colegio Alemán

A Digital-First Future

The team at Colegio Alemán continues to automate processes and move toward a digital-first approach to student services. As Colegio Alemán started with more student-facing processes, the organization’s future plans include assessing back-office processes for additional efficiencies.

“Ultimately, we want to implement a dashboard for our process data in Laserfiche,” Briseño Candela said. This will enable even more optimization moving forward, allowing the organization’s leadership to identify process bottlenecks or spot trends that can help them make informed decisions when resource planning.

“A lot of our current Laserfiche processes are communication between the school to our different publics — our parents, our associates, our teachers,” Briseño Candela said. “The next step is to use Laserfiche for our internal processes, to be more efficient in our day-to-day work. It’s our social responsibility not to print so much paper. And it is also our responsibility to be efficient with our time to support the people working in administration, as well as the parents. We want to create a good experience for everyone involved.”

To learn more about how Laserfiche drives digital transformation, schedule a consultation today.

Putting Customers First in Claims Processing

The focus on customer experience was one of the core drivers in the process automation strategy for MSIG Hong Kong (MSIG), embracing customer needs in light of a shifting technological landscape and major disruptions. The company sought to phase out legacy systems and increase efficiency for its claims submission service, requiring a highly adaptable content services tool to do so.

Since implementing Laserfiche for claims in 10 different product lines, the MSIG claims team can now manage all claims in a centralized platform, allowing staff to focus on more important claim assessment tasks. By investing in digital transformation for the organization’s EASY Claims System, MSIG has been able to differentiate itself in Hong Kong’s highly competitive insurance industry. The organization’s EASY Claims system has received wide recognition in Asia’s insurance landscape, as well as won MSIG a number of industry awards, including a Laserfiche Run Smarter award in 2019.

“Laserfiche is the catalyst for our users and customers to improve their day-to-day work experiences,” said Alan Yue, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at MSIG.

Seeking a means to respond to customer needs and enable staff to transition to remote working arrangements during periods of instability during the COVID-19 pandemic, Laserfiche has also helped MSIG successfully achieve business continuity, maintaining a high level of operational efficiency and customer service through dedicated portals.

Putting Customers First

Providing general insurance solutions for more than 100 years, MSIG Holdings (Asia) Pte. Ltd. has a history of combining global and local best practices in the organization’s customer-focused approach, believing that the relationship between insurance companies and customers should be based on trust. This commitment to customers led the organization to reassess its reliance on manual legacy systems for process management. MSIG recognized that customers are embracing more digital solutions, presenting an opportunity to make correspondence with clients more seamless and efficient, as well as reengineer the IT infrastructure.

“As a core part of our business, the claims system is one of the most important parts of the MSIG customer journey,” Yue said. “We realized that the entire process was actually quite paper-driven, making it the perfect candidate to digitalize and automate.”

MSIG initiated a business transformation program known internally as “Transformer” in 2017. Laserfiche was chosen as MSIG’s core digital transformation solution with the goal of automating manual and paper-based core business processes, targeting the customer claims submission platform as a starting point. Eventually named EASY Claims, the system improved both operational efficiency and service with a focus on the customer experience. The platform supports self-service submissions, as well as provides transparency of claims status to MSIG customers.

Within the first three months of launch, EASY Claims significantly improved efficiency at MSIG, automating over 100,000 tasks that previously required manual user input. Additionally, the number of clients submitting claims via the new system has increased by up to 80%. This has streamlined and simplified the claims submission process for customers, aligning with shifting technological expectations and improving response times.

The EASY Claims system also improved the experience for staff processing customer submissions. Originally, acknowledging a newly submitted claim could take two days. Today, it takes fewer than 15 minutes. This translates to a savings of more than 200 work days a year for the claims processing staff organization-wide. The property claims management team specifically was able to save 57 days a year through the EASY Claims system.

The initiative has created the opportunity for ongoing optimization. In 2022, MSIG introduced Zero Touch for Helper insurance plan claims. Zero Touch is MSIG’s digital solution for claims assessment, enabling customers to submit their claims form, supporting documents and contact details online. The system then checks the customer’s claims history, policy validity and claim payment amount. For eligible clinical or dental expenses claims, payments are settled in just two working days. MSIG is planning to add Zero Touch to more products, creating a more seamless customer experience across product lines.

Along with facilitating claims submission for customers and acknowledgement in the backend, the automated process has helped save 12 days a year during the claims finalization stage. In terms of improved staff efficiency, MSIG has increased overall productivity by 1.4 times per hiring cycle within the Claims department alone. As a team with a significant amount of customer facetime and interaction, the Claims department’s increased productivity has improved both employee and customer experience.

In 2022, MSIG Hong Kong honored over HK$356 million, with a claims ratio of 92.9%, seeing a consistent increase for three consecutive years. The organization also reduced the number of complaints received by 50% in two years.

“Claims is only the beginning of our digital transformation. Since implementing Laserfiche, we are looking at expanding to multiple channels, underwriting teams and core business processes to digitize and automate as well,” said Yue.

Enhancing Customer Service During COVID-19

Even during major disruptions, it is important for companies to carry out vital processes and services to customers — especially in the context of insurance where clients may be working through sudden, unexpected incidents. As the platform that powers the EASY Claims system, Laserfiche has helped to ensure a high level of customer service and a user-friendly, customer-oriented interface. The platform removes friction from the process of filing a claim, with intuitive features such as a “save-as-draft” function that enables customers to retrieve incomplete forms at any time using an email link, and smart suggestions that provide basic information and documents that customers will need to make a claim before they fill out the form. Customers can also receive SMS messages, email confirmations and tracking numbers to stay informed of the status of their claims.

The system has also been a scalable solution for MSIG to continue providing services to customers with minimal interruptions.

In accordance with government recommendations, MSIG was able to successfully initiate a work-from-home arrangement for all staff in the Hong Kong office less than one week after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the city. As Laserfiche automates key steps in claims submission and processing, MSIG staff can focus on pertinent tasks without needing to be in the office. From the customer perspective, claims can be submitted as normal, even during the height of the pandemic.
Establishing a digital infrastructure that supports automation early on has enabled MSIG to enhance the quality and scope of service and gain recognition as a provider of general insurance, as well as build long-term business continuity and resiliency.

“Laserfiche has helped us to develop a system in line with our commitment to our customers and staff,” Yue explained. “We can put their health and safety first while responding to current challenges and planning for the future.”

Investing in the Future

Recognizing that the insurance industry has historically relied on legacy processes, MSIG looked to digitize its claim service, rebuilding it to address both staff and client needs. With core business processes established between 10 to 20 years prior, the firm had an intimate knowledge of its users’ needs, refreshing a part of its business that focused heavily on customer and employee input. Working with Laserfiche to develop a nimble IT strategy, MSIG has been able to improve the customer and back-end experience within the claims process without disrupting day-to-day operations.
“Both business and technology landscapes have experienced so much rapid change and development,” said Yue. “These are the primary driver for MSIG’s digital transformation program, equipping us to anticipate our future needs as well as our customer expectations.”

Experiencing unprecedented and unanticipated changes in 2020, the EASY Claims System has proven itself to be highly adaptable, highlighting the need for digital transformation at MSIG. With claims as an obvious starting point, MSIG is looking to expand Laserfiche to other departments and processes. The organization is preparing to introduce claims process tracking for customers, allowing customers to track their claims in real time through the MSIG app or website — further enhancing visibility and continuing to build trust with customers.

“We now have a way to differentiate ourselves within Hong Kong’s insurance marketplace,” said Yue. “Laserfiche has helped users throughout the company to identify opportunities to improve day-to-day work. The sky is the limit.”

To learn more about how Laserfiche drives digital transformation, schedule a consultation today.

Santa Monica’s Digital First Approach

The City of Santa Monica, California, leverages Laserfiche to provide better services at a lower cost and with lower friction to constituents.

Transcript

Santa Monica is a city of 8.3 square miles. 93,000 residents and about 1800 staff members. We’re a full service city. We have our own utilities, our police, fire traffic, even our federal airport. First, we got a great beach and we have a lot of technology, a very complex environment with probably over 300 applications that we utilize. So I came to the city about five years ago.

Laserfiche was already in our environment. I saw an Opportunity to leverage tools like Laserfiche more extensively to help digitize our environment. And the game changer for us was when Laserfiche came to us and talks about an integration with DocuSign. And so we implemented that. One of the big benefits is that it’s in sustainability.

We no longer use as much paper as it. And in the past three and a half years, we estimated you’d saved over 180000 hours staff time. That integration when the pandemic hit, we had to quickly and become a virtual workplace. We had made the city workforce completely mobile with technology. We had created a user experience that was the same whether you were virtually working or face to face on site.

And we had done all this not because we were anticipating a pandemic We did it because we wanted to enable flexibility and Work-Life Balance for our staff. What we were able to do very quickly was to pivot and have 80% of our staff teleworking with all the tools they needed in 36 hours. Part of that was we had workflows already in place which utilized these Most people don’t think of government as being frictionless.

This matter of fact, most people consider the government a main source of friction But why does it have to be that way? Can we see a way to provide better services at a lower friction, at a lower cost to our constituents? If we can use the same tools that any other organization uses, it’s just thinking about things different.

I see Laserfiche as one of our key platforms that we can leverage and simplify our environment, but also give us greater capability within one system to do more. I’m Joseph Cevetello, and I’m using Laserfiche to empower the people of Santa Monica.