Top Use Cases for Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

While the feature set of an enterprise content management (ECM) system can be robust, it’s not always easy to identify where and how to use the tools effectively. Below are a few use cases that highlight the benefits of implementing an enterprise content management system in your organization.

Use cases for finance departments

A highly regulated part of any business, a finance department can find many benefits in using an ECM system:
  • Customer invoicing: Find new efficiency with the ability to quickly route documents to relevant parties, including key approvers and stakeholders, creating transparency throughout the invoice management process.

  • Cash flows: Gain a clear view of incoming and outgoing funds with processes you can follow using robust analytics dashboards.

  • Audits: Make auditors’ jobs easier with audit trails that give a detailed history of actions performed on each document in your repository.
  • Purchase order (PO) generation: Extract important information from scanned or imported purchase orders, making them easier to identify and match to invoices.

  • Invoice processing: Gather data directly from scanned or imported invoices, making invoice information easier to verify and match with relevant purchase orders.

  • Expense reimbursement: Streamline the expense reimbursement process with the ability to efficiently route documents between requesters and approvers.

  • Budget transfers: Enhance your organization’s ability to move allocated funds between departments with pre-built automation templates obtained from a solution marketplace.

  • General ledger: Support transparency in your organization’s reporting practices with properly stored and kept evidence of transactions.

Use cases for HR departments

As the department usually responsible for employee onboarding and support, human resources can have many processes to manage on any given day. Here are a few ways an ECM system can help:
  • Employee onboarding: Get employees started faster by automatically routing onboarding paperwork between them and the HR department.
  • Employee forms and requests: Enable a quick turnaround for employee requests with the ability to automatically direct forms and paperwork between stakeholders.
  • Employee information protection: Get automatic reminders to dispose of or archive information, so your organization can keep employee information for only as long as required by regulatory bodies.
  • Policy transparency: Keep a centralized repository for employee handbooks and other documents outlining policies, so employees always have easy access to them.
  • Status changes: Develop a referenceable system of record that tracks status changes as employees onboard, offboard and change roles.

  • Vacation requests: Give your organization the opportunity to field vacation requests more effectively with pre-built automation templates obtained from a solution marketplace.

  • Professional development requests: Support employee growth with fast response times to requests for professional development using forms submitted electronically.

  • Performance reviews: Keep information on employee performance protected in a repository with robust security controls.

  • Timesheets: Get automatic reminders of when timesheets are due and automatically route information to approvers.

  • Benefits enrollment: Automatically set reminders to notify employees of key benefits enrollment deadlines.

Use cases for legal and compliance departments

For legal and finance departments, accuracy and efficiency is an essential part of conducting business, and helping to ensure audits of their organizations go smoothly. Below are some ways these departments can benefit from using an ECM system.
  • Sharing information with clients and customers: Utilize digital forms that can capture information directly from customer and client submission, limiting the need for email attachments that can come with the risk of being intercepted or compromised.
  • Legal review and contract approvals: Speed up approval processes with process automation functionality that directs information to appropriate stakeholders with ease.
  • eDiscovery: Keep content for as long as legally necessary, to support your organization’s efforts to fulfill its duties during the discovery process.

  • Contract negotiation: Version control capabilities make it easy to track significant revisions as contracts are changed and edited by relevant parties.

  • E-signatures: Enable convenient signing of a variety of documents with digital signatures that can be captured electronically via native functionality or using integrations with specialized e-signature software.

  • Retention schedules: Set reminders for records managers to dispose of or archive records in alignment with their retention schedules.

  • Legal holds: Change and keep track of legal hold statuses for records that are involved in ongoing litigation.

Use cases for supply chain management

Supply chain management can be a challenge for many businesses and can cause ripple effects throughout an organization if not regarded as critically important to operations. Here are some use cases for ECM systems that can help those who manage supply chains identify opportunities for new efficiencies:
  • Procurement: Get up-to-date information from parts inspections in the field with the ability to capture information from digital forms submitted online.

  • Operations: Identify bottlenecks with analytics dashboards that enable your organization to get an informative overview of ongoing processes.

  • Incoming materials and outgoing products: Leverage powerful process dashboards to identify trends in how your organization is procuring materials and producing products.

  • Quality control: Use pre-built automation templates from a solution marketplace to build workflows that streamline how quality control information is collected and delivered.

Use cases for customer service departments

Customer service departments rely heavily on the accuracy of their information in order to provide the highest level of service possible. Here are some ways an ECM system can help these departments:
  • Customer requests for service: Meet the needs of customers on their schedule with the ability to provide automated service as requests come in.

  • Customer satisfaction: Ensure customers are satisfied by collecting accurate information, extracted directly from submitted forms.
  • Case management: Easily route information between team members to stay up to date on cases and provide automatic status updates for customers.

  • Application processing: Extract key pieces of information from applications for programs and services to better organize relevant documents and respond to requests.
  • Public records and information: Increase transparency with public portals that deliver information to customers upon request.

  • Customer service follow-up: Enable any staff member to provide follow-ups to requests with automation tools that make case information easy to move between team members.

  • Support ticket submissions: Gather submitted information automatically and accurately, helping to ensure faster turnaround times for support tickets.

Use cases for IT departments

Information technology departments are usually fielding many projects and requests at once. Without the right tools, resources can run thin quickly. Here are a few ways an ECM system can help your IT department utilize its resources effectively:
  • Case management: Capture data directly from documents relevant to cases, making information more convenient to store, retrieve and share.

  • Data analysis and insights: Gain actionable insights on processes department-wide with robust analytics dashboards.

  • Information governance: Utilize audit trails to track when, and by whom, actions were performed on your organization’s content.

  • Helpdesk support: Help ensure quick turnaround times for helpdesk tickets with the ability to gather submitted information directly from incoming requests.

  • Support resource hosting: Provide a centralized repository that employees can easily access for FAQs, documentation and guides.

  • Network access requests: Leverage automation to accelerate approvals of requests from staff to access applications and functionality critical to their roles.

  • Hardware device checkout: Collect information that can identify devices rented by employees, and store that information in a secure repository, so your organization can effectively keep track of equipment.

Use cases for sales teams

The more information salespeople have, the more empowered they are to inform customers and close deals. Here are some ways an ECM system can assist salespeople and their teams in generating revenue for your organization:
  • Sales contracts: Extract key information directly from contracts, making them easier to sort through, locate, retrieve and organize.

  • Sales tools: Provide a centralized repository that makes it easy for salespeople to access proposals, presentations and other sales tools.

  • Travel and expense requests: Jumpstart workflows your organization can use to furnish requests quickly using pre-built automation templates from a solution marketplace.

  • Opportunity tracking: Quickly store and retrieve quotes, invoices and other sales materials to get a better view of prospective deals available to your sales team.

Use cases for business continuity

Whether an individual unit or a group of individual experts across multiple departments, teams need effective tools to mitigate the risk that comes with disruptions to business. Here are a few ways an ECM system can assist your organization in its efforts to create a more resilient enterprise:
  • Remote content access: When your office is inaccessible, host a cloud repository that enables employees to access any and all content they need from anywhere.

  • Data security and privacy: Records management tools can help ensure your organization keeps records for only as long as needed, reducing the amount of data vulnerable to security and privacy breaches if they occur.

  • Communicating with customers: Facilitate customer requests for information and services from anywhere with online portals.

  • Business continuity planning: Leverage digital, automated workflows to keep processes moving, even if in-person staff are unavailable.

  • Disaster recovery: Host your content on a cloud infrastructure that’s supported by multiple availability zones to minimize data loss after disruptions.

  • Crisis management: Automate key crisis management processes to boost your organization’s ability to respond effectively in critical situations.

  • Business impact analysis: Evaluate performance of key processes during simulated disruptions with analytics tools to get an overview of your organization’s preparedness.

Customer Spotlight: Learning Arts

Learn how Learning Arts, a company dedicated to the care of children with autism, leveraged ECM to share data about patients with their parents and behavior specialists in real-time to enhance care and programming.

Continue Your Journey

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Check out the G2 Grid® for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and compare top vendors on the market.
G2 Grid® for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Systems

Learn how Laserfiche ECM can help you do more, faster

Discover a smarter way to automate your business processes and simplify content management across the enterprise. It’s all in Laserfiche.

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Top Use Cases for Business Process Management (BPM) and Automation

While the feature set of a business process management (BPM) platform can be robust, it’s not always easy to identify where and how to use the tools effectively. Below are a few use cases that highlight the benefits of implementing business process management within your organization.

Use cases for finance departments

A highly regulated part of any business, a finance department can find many benefits in using a BPM platform:
  • Customer invoicing: Find new efficiency with the ability to quickly route documents to relevant parties, including key approvers and stakeholders, creating transparency throughout the invoice management process.

  • Cash flows: Gain a clear view of incoming and outgoing funds with processes you can follow using robust analytics dashboards.

  • Invoice processing: Automatically extract relevant data from scanned or imported invoices, making invoice information easier to verify and match with relevant purchase orders.

  • Expense reimbursement: Streamline the expense reimbursement process with the ability to efficiently route documents between requesters and approvers.

  • Budget transfers: Enhance your organization’s ability to move allocated funds between departments with prebuilt automation templates from a solution marketplace.

Use cases for HR departments

As the department responsible for employee onboarding and support, Human Resources can have many processes to manage on any given day. Here are a few ways a BPM platform can help:
  • Employee onboarding: Get employees started faster by automatically routing onboarding paperwork between them and the HR department.
  • Employee forms and requests: Enable a quick turnaround for employee requests with the ability to automatically direct forms and paperwork between stakeholders.

  • Vacation requests: Give your organization the opportunity to field vacation requests more effectively with prebuilt automation templates obtained from a solution marketplace.

  • Professional development requests: Support employee growth with fast response times to requests for professional development, using tools that can route information automatically to relevant parties.

  • Timesheets: Get automatic reminders of when timesheets are due and automatically route information to approvers.

  • Benefits enrollment: Automatically set reminders to notify employees of key benefits enrollment deadlines.

Use cases for legal and compliance departments

For legal and finance departments, accuracy and efficiency is an essential part of conducting business, and helping to ensure audits of their organizations go smoothly. Below are some ways these departments can benefit from using a BPM platform.
  • Legal review and contract approvals: Speed up approval processes with process automation functionality that directs information to appropriate stakeholders with ease.

  • Contract negotiation: Quickly route contracts between relevant parties as items are updated or changed, and use integrated digital signature tools for signoff.

Use cases for supply chain management

Supply chain management can be a challenge for many businesses and can cause ripple effects throughout an organization if not regarded as critically important to operations. Here are some use cases for BPM platforms that can help supply chain managers create new efficiencies:
  • Procurement: Enable a responsive and quick-to-act procurement process with the ability to move information about materials readily between appropriate stakeholders.

  • Operations: Identify bottlenecks with analytics dashboards that enable your organization to get an informative overview of ongoing processes.

  • Incoming materials and outgoing products: Leverage powerful process dashboards to identify trends in how your organization is procuring materials and producing products.

  • Quality control: Use prebuilt automation templates from a solution marketplace to build workflows that streamline how quality control information is collected and delivered.

Use cases for customer service departments

Customer service departments rely heavily on the accuracy of their information in order to provide the highest level of service possible. Here are some ways a BPM platform can help:
  • Customer requests for service: Meet the needs of customers on their schedule with the ability to provide automated service as requests come in.
  • Case management: Easily route information between team members to stay up to date on cases and provide automatic status updates for customers.

  • Application processing: Automatically route applications for services and programs to the appropriate approvers.

  • Customer service follow-up: Enable any staff member to provide follow-ups to requests with automation tools that make case information easy to move between team members.

  • Support ticket submissions: Quickly route support tickets to relevant personnel based on expertise and availability.

Use cases for IT departments

Information technology departments are usually fielding many projects and requests at once. Without the right tools, resources can run thin quickly. Here are a few ways a BPM platform can help your IT department utilize its resources effectively:
  • Case management: Provide automatic status updates on cases and easily route relevant case information between team members as needed.

  • Data analysis and insights: Gain actionable insights on processes department-wide with robust analytics dashboards.

  • Helpdesk support: Streamline operations and information-routing with prebuilt automation templates obtained from a solution marketplace.

  • Network access requests: Leverage automation to accelerate approvals of requests from staff to access applications and functionality critical to their roles.

Use cases for sales teams

The more information salespeople have, the more empowered they are to inform customers and close deals. Here are some ways a BPM platform can assist Sales teams in generating revenue for their organizations:
  • Sales contracts: Accelerate deals with the ability to automatically route contracts between relevant parties as items are updated.

  • Travel and expense requests: Jumpstart workflows your organization can use to furnish requests quickly using prebuilt automation templates from a solution marketplace.

Use cases for business continuity

Whether an individual unit or a group of individual experts across multiple departments, teams need effective tools to mitigate the risk that comes with disruptions to business. Here are a few ways a BPM platform can assist your organization in its efforts to create a more resilient enterprise:
  • Communicating with customers: Keep customers up to date on requests for information and services from anywhere with automation tools.
  • Business continuity planning: Leverage digital, automated workflows to keep processes moving, even if in-person staff are unavailable.
  • Crisis management: Automate key crisis management processes to boost your organization’s ability to respond effectively in critical situations.

  • Business impact analysis: Evaluate performance of key processes during simulated disruptions with analytics tools to get an overview of your organization’s preparedness.

Customer Spotlight: Sky Telecommunications

Learn how the HR department at leading telecommunications company Sky was able to deliver more efficient services for its 25,000 employees by leveraging automation.

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Top Use Cases for Electronic Records Management

While the feature set of a records management system can be robust, it’s not always easy to identify where and how to use the tools effectively. Below are a few use cases that highlight the benefits of implementing electronic records management within your organization.

Use Cases for Finance Departments

A highly regulated part of any business, a finance department can find many benefits in implementing electronic records management:
  • Customer invoicing: Keep a historical record of invoices and purchase orders for as long as they’re needed or required.
  • Compliance: Automate reminders to perform records management actions, such as archival and disposal, to promote regulatory compliance.
  • General ledger: Support transparency in your organization’s reporting practices with properly stored and kept evidence of transactions.

Use Cases for HR Departments

As the department responsible for employee onboarding and support, human resources manages many records that contain sensitive and regulated information. Here are a few electronic records management use cases for HR:
  • Employee information protection: Get automatic reminders to dispose of or archive information, so your organization can keep employee information for only as long as required by regulatory bodies.
  • Status changes: Develop a referenceable system of record that tracks status changes as employees onboard, offboard and change roles.

Use Cases for Legal and Compliance Departments

For legal and finance departments, accuracy and efficiency is an essential part of conducting business, and helping to ensure audits of their organizations go smoothly. Below are some common electronic records management use cases for these departments.
  • Retention schedules: Set reminders for records managers to dispose of or archive records in alignment with their retention schedules.
  • Legal holds: Change and keep track of legal hold statuses for records that are involved in ongoing litigation.
  • Regulatory compliance: Stay In good standing with regulators using a system that enables proper adherence to retention schedules and other information governance guidelines.
  • eDiscovery: Keep content for as long as legally necessary, to support your organization’s efforts to fulfill its duties during the discovery process.

Use Cases for Business Continuity

Whether an individual unit or a group of individual experts across multiple departments, teams need effective tools to mitigate the risk that comes with disruptions to business. Here are a couple of ways electronic records management can assist your organization in its efforts to create a more resilient enterprise:
  • Remote access to records: When your office is inaccessible, host a cloud repository that enables access to records as needed for internal use, litigation or audits.
  • Data security and privacy: Records management tools can help ensure your organization keeps records for only as long as needed, reducing the amount of data vulnerable to security and privacy breaches if they occur.

Customer Spotlight: City of Ithaca/Tompkins County

Learn how one county in New York reduced the time to furnish records in response to FOIA requests by more than half.

Continue Your Journey

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Want to further explore how Laserfiche can help your organization achieve its goals? Schedule a consultation today.

Unlocking Productivity: The Power of Using Regular Expressions with AI for your Enterprise

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, data plays a crucial role in every business operation. From customer information to financial records, organizations deal with massive amounts of data on a daily basis. Extracting meaningful insights and automating processes requires efficient tools, and one such tool that was developed nearly 50 years ago and has stood the test of time is regular expressions (regex) for searching, finding, replacing, or validating text. However, a regex is notoriously difficult to work with, mostly due to the complex memorization of rules needed to create expressions and challenging nature in reading and troubleshooting them.

Laserfiche Introduces Regular Expression (RegEx) Builder
Laserfiche AI powered regex

The Laserfiche RegEx Builder utilizes Generative AI to help users natively build and update regular expressions with much less coding. Instead of building solutions from scratch, the Laserfiche RegEx Builder can be used to accelerate the process of turning ideas into a usable piece of code that can be integrated into a Laserfiche Form, dramatically shortening the time from idea to delivery.

The Power of Regular Expressions

Regular expressions are powerful tools used for pattern matching and data manipulation. They provide a concise and flexible way to search, validate, and extract information from text strings. With regex, developers and data scientists can perform complex data operations with ease, saving time and effort. Whether it’s parsing log files, extracting email addresses, or validating user input, regex offer a versatile solution for handling various data processing tasks.
Window featuring the Regular Expression Builder within Laserfiche, that showcases AI creating a regular expression for postal codes.

The Challenges of Regex

While a regex is a valuable asset, expressions can be daunting for those unfamiliar with their syntax and intricacies. Constructing complex regex patterns often requires a deep understanding of the language, and mistakes lead to inaccurate results. Moreover, regex patterns become convoluted and challenging to maintain as requirements evolve and expressions grow larger. These challenges hinder productivity and limit the potential benefits of regex.

AI Empowers Regex Users

Artificial intelligence, with its ability to analyze patterns, learn from data, and make intelligent predictions, significantly enhances the productivity of regex builders. By leveraging AI, regex users can now automate various aspects of regex pattern creation and optimization, empowering users with enhanced efficiency and accuracy.

Smart Pattern Recommendations

AI-powered regex builders using large language models (LLMs) process large datasets and offer intelligent pattern recommendations. These models identify common patterns and suggest suitable regex expressions, reducing the time spent on trial and error. By learning from existing data, AI provides regex users with insights and suggestions that improve the quality of their patterns.

Error Detection and Correction

AI can assist regex users by detecting and correcting errors in their expressions. By analyzing the syntax and semantics of the regex, AI algorithms can identify potential issues and provide suggestions for improvement. This helps prevent runtime errors and ensures the accuracy of the regex patterns.

Automated Testing and Validation

Validating regex patterns against sample data can be time-consuming, particularly when dealing with complex expressions. AI can automate this process by generating relevant test cases and validating the regex patterns against them. This ensures that the expressions work as intended, saving developers the effort of manual testing.
Window featuring the Regular Expression Builder within Laserfiche, that showcases AI validating a regular expression for postal codes.

Integration with Automated Business Processes

AI-powered regex builders seamlessly integrate with existing workflows, streamlining the creation and deployment of regex patterns. They can be integrated into programming languages, data processing pipelines, or text editors, allowing users to harness the power of regex within their preferred environments.

Leveraging the Capabilities of AI

Regular expressions have long been a valuable tool for data manipulation and analysis. With the assistance of the Laserfiche RegEx Builder, enterprises can unlock new levels of productivity by automating the creation, optimization, and validation of regex patterns. The Laserfiche RegEx Builder is just one example of deploying AI at scale — or using AI to streamline operations across the enterprise. By harnessing the power of AI to accelerate the creation of a powerful tool for process automation, organizations can achieve their goals of enterprise-wide digital transformation.

The Future of AI and Laserfiche

Laserfiche is embracing a new era of computing and productivity — and this is just the beginning of it. We’re excited to explore AI and introduce you to new AI-powered capabilities and innovations with Laserfiche in the coming months.

Top Use Cases for Document Management

While the feature set of a document management system can be robust, it’s not always easy to identify where and how to use the tools effectively. Below are a few use cases that highlight the benefits of implementing a document management system in your organization.

Use Cases for Finance Departments

A highly regulated part of any business, a finance department can find many benefits in implementing a document management system:
  • Customer invoicing: Find new efficiency with the ability to quickly locate and distribute documents to relevant parties, creating transparency throughout the invoice management process.

  • Audits: Make auditors’ jobs easier with audit trails that give a detailed history of actions performed on each document in your repository.

  • Purchase order (PO) generation: Apply metadata to purchase orders, making them easier to identify and match to invoices.

  • General ledger: Improve transparency and accuracy in reporting on cash flows with document management software that makes it easy to search for and retrieve financial information.

Use Cases for HR Departments

As the department usually responsible for employee onboarding and support, human resources can have many documents to manage on any given day. Here are a few ways a document management system can help:
  • Policy transparency: Keep a centralized repository for employee handbooks and other documents outlining policies, so employees always have easy access to them.

  • Status changes: Easily locate and retrieve relevant information when employees onboard, offboard or change departments.

  • Performance reviews: Keep information on employee performance protected in a repository with robust security controls.

  • Benefits enrollment: Host a centralized repository for relevant benefits enrollment resources, so employees can make informed decisions about their benefits.

Use Cases for Legal and Compliance Departments

For legal and finance departments, accuracy and efficiency is an essential part of conducting business, and helping to ensure audits of their organizations go smoothly. Below are some ways these departments can benefit from implementing a document management system.
  • Sharing content with clients and customers: Use secure file sharing tools to keep track of any documents sent outside your organization.

  • Legal review and contract approvals: Speed up approval processes with digital document templates that make information easy to review.

  • eDiscovery: Keep information both secure and accessible with robust security controls to only allow authorized access to content, and full-text search capabilities that enable those authorized to quickly locate requested information.

  • Contract negotiation: Version control capabilities make it easy to track significant revisions as contracts are changed and edited by relevant parties.

Use Cases for Customer Service Departments

Customer service departments rely heavily on the accuracy of their information in order to provide the highest level of service possible. Here are some ways a document management system can help these departments:
  • Customer satisfaction: Support customers and stay responsive to their needs with a centralized, secure repository that helps ensure information is accessible and accurate.

  • Public records and information: Increase transparency with public portals that deliver information to customers upon request.

Use Cases for IT Departments

Information technology departments are usually fielding many projects and requests at once. Without the right tools, resources can run thin quickly. Here are a few ways a document management system can help your IT department utilize its resources effectively:
  • Case management: Host a centralized repository that makes it easy to store, retrieve and share information about support tickets or ongoing projects.

  • Information governance: Utilize audit trails to track when, and by whom, actions were performed on your organization’s content.

  • Support resource hosting: Provide a centralized repository that employees can easily access for FAQs, documentation and guides.

  • Hardware device checkout: Collect information that can identify devices rented by employees, and store that information in a secure repository, so your organization can effectively keep track of equipment.

Use Cases for Sales Teams

The more information salespeople have, the more empowered they are to inform customers and close deals. Here are some ways a document management system can assist salespeople and their teams in generating revenue for your organization:
  • Sales contracts: Track changes to contracts as needed with version control tools that let you document significant changes to documents.

  • Sales tools: Provide a centralized repository that makes it easy for salespeople to access proposals, presentations and other sales tools.

  • Opportunity tracking: Quickly store and retrieve quotes, invoices and other sales materials to get a better view of prospective deals available to your sales team.

Use Cases for Business Continuity

Whether an individual unit or a group of individual experts across multiple departments, teams need effective tools to mitigate the risk that comes with disruptions to business. Here are a few ways a document management system can assist your organization in its efforts to create a more resilient enterprise:
  • Remote content access: When your office is inaccessible, host a cloud repository that enables employees to access any and all content they need from anywhere.

  • Data security and privacy: Utilize secure file sharing tools to mitigate security risks associated with email attachments, and keep any files, shared or otherwise, in a repository with robust security controls.

  • Communicating with customers: Facilitate customer requests for information and services from anywhere with online portals.

  • Disaster recovery: Host your content on a cloud infrastructure that’s supported by multiple availability zones to minimize data loss after disruptions.

Customer Spotlight: City University of Hong Kong

Learn how one university leveraged its document management system to better manage and protect the student and staff information it handles.

Continue Your Journey

Compare top document management vendors on G2

Check out the G2 Grid® for Document Management and compare top vendors on the market.
G2 Grid® for Document Management Software

Watch our video demo

Get an overview of key document management features within Laserfiche.

See Laserfiche in action

Want to further explore how Laserfiche can help your organization achieve its goals? Schedule a consultation today.

Can Generative AI and Content Services Increase Productivity and Transform Processes? Here’s How We’re Thinking About It.

Advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the emergence of revolutionary technologies, such as generative AI. At Laserfiche, we believe that generative AI has the potential to fundamentally alter how people use technology and to change our lives — in our homes, in our classrooms and especially in our workplaces.

Laserfiche’s vision for how AI will transform the workplace focuses on empowering individuals to transform their work, take control of their processes, and supercharge their productivity — all without losing sight of increasingly important and ever-evolving data privacy and security standards.

Use cases for AI are diverse and ever-expanding, however, to achieve enterprise-wide transformation, organizations will need to deploy AI at scale.

What is AI at Scale?

Implementing AI at scale will require the use of AI across the enterprise to streamline operations, improve decision-making, and react faster to changes. Here are a few examples of business-critical processes that can be made more efficient and agile using AI technology:
  • Customer acquisition, service and strategy
  • Product development and service delivery
  • Financial analysis and capital management

Some of the challenges of deploying AI at scale include the creation of sophisticated data management frameworks that cover all components of a data lifecycle, and efficiently deploying AI solutions across platforms.

A content services platform is already foundational to an organization’s business-critical content and processes, managing data lifecycles including capture, storage, integration and disposition. These platforms are also often integrated with other core technologies to support the flow of information enterprise-wide, making it the ideal context in which to use AI and deploy it at scale.

Using AI within content services has the potential to uncover new ways to deliver business value, by accelerating the speed of business; improving monitoring and analysis of process data; creating new business capabilities and innovations; reducing error; and enabling the organization to keep up with rapidly evolving markets.

Considerations for Using AI at Scale

Doing anything at an enterprise scale comes with a set of considerations that should be thoughtfully evaluated, but AI tools pose some new and unique challenges. AI technology processes vast amounts of data, creating increased risk of the intentional or unintentional exposure of sensitive and proprietary enterprise data. AI tools can also produce biased or incorrect responses to prompts, potentially leading to biased or unethical decision making. Therefore with AI, security, privacy and ethical considerations come first and foremost.

Data Transparency: At Laserfiche, data transparency is a cornerstone of our development and operational approach. We are approaching AI in the same way we have always approached Laserfiche features and tools, which are trusted by organizations in the most highly regulated industries, such as government, healthcare, financial services and manufacturing. To facilitate the responsible deployment of AI, Laserfiche is employing a risk-and-benefits framework rooted in leading industry practices for assessing risk and protecting sensitive information to assess the benefits and risks of AI. In conjunction with Laserfiche’s existing data privacy and security initiatives and code of ethics, this framework will guide Laserfiche’s development and use of AI technologies in its products in a responsible manner.

Security: Laserfiche believes that enterprises and technology vendors must implement multiple technical safeguards to minimize the risk that inappropriate use of AI may pose to sensitive data. Additionally, centralized security policies that limit access to data as privacy and security policies permit will be essential to giving administrators fine-grained control over their data.

Adoption: Another important consideration — and possibly the most challenging — is how teams will adopt AI across the organization. AI at scale will require organizations to break down the silos that are currently separating data as well as people and processes to adopt new ways of working and create a company culture that embraces change and innovation. Using AI to transform the enterprise will require new skills, restructured business processes and new ways of communicating so that everyone knows what is changing, why it is changing, and what expectations are across teams and departments.

The Future of AI and Laserfiche

Laserfiche is embracing a new era of computing and productivity — and this is just the beginning of it. We’re excited to explore AI and introduce you to new AI-powered capabilities and innovations with Laserfiche in the coming months. Be sure to stay tuned for more news here on laserfiche.com.

How Banking Institutions Can Use Automation to Enhance the Customer Experience

Banking institutions — including banks and credit unions — place high value on the interaction between customers or members and employees in order to build loyalty and drive business growth. Today, the customer-first approach is more important than ever before, and the digital customer experience is at the top of their priorities. While brick-and-mortar branches are here to stay in the post-pandemic era, customers expect consistent in-branch service as well as a seamless omnichannel experience. Recent BAI research reported that consumers expect 61% of their banking business to be digital and 39% to involve human intervention by 2024. To achieve omnichannel excellence, banking institutions need to provide 24/7 access to services and digital self-service for activities ranging from new account opening to loan applications, as well as an online portal for clients to access their own documentation.

In order to keep pace with customer expectations, banking institutions  are leveraging process automation to enhance human interactions — by supporting customers’ ability to access the services they want when they want them; reclaiming time for employees to spend on value-added activities and customer service; and easing collaboration between teams, departments and branches. Digital workflows and processes are also key to boosting productivity so that banking institutions can take on more customers and add new services without the resource strain or sacrificing quality of service. Here are some of the top transformative process automation initiatives that forward-looking banking institutions are leveraging to enhance the customer experience:

1. Self-Service Portals and Online Forms
Even when digital, incoming applications and customers’ records are often scattered electronically across organizations’ local network drives and individual repositories without a standardized folder structure. Studies have shown that the average employee spends 3.6 hours each day searching for information. When customers are waiting — whether in-person at a branch or online — this translates to longer wait times and decreased satisfaction. Self-service portals with links to online forms where customers can easily initiate service requests or send in information — which can then be automatically routed to the appropriate departments or personnel for approval, or to customer folders — help to alleviate the headaches of manually routing data and shorten processing time, while also creating a 24/7 access to services for customers.

2. A Single Source of Truth: Automated Records Management in a Central Repository
Digitization of paper files is nothing new to banking institutions, however, many of them can take these efforts much further. By establishing a centralized repository, and leveraging process automation tools to auto-file customer information into a standardized folder structure, banking institutions can save time for employees who are able to be more responsive to customer needs since they have customer information at their fingertips. At the same time, automating processes related to customers’ data eliminates error-prone manual tasks, improving accuracy of information. With a centralized repository that has granular access controls, too, banking institutions support information governance and compliance with regulatory requirements. As a result, organizations mitigate the risk of unauthorized access to customer information and build and maintain trust with their customers.

3. Integrate Line-of-Business Applications for End-to-End Automated Solutions
Many banking institutions took a piecemeal approach to digital transformation during the pandemic as a reaction to immediate needs. Today, however, organizations need to assess the technologies adopted over the past few years in order to consolidate and optimize IT investments. Integrations can help to connect the different applications, systems and sites where customer data is stored, enabling banking institutions to create more holistic automated solutions and a complete digital experience for customers and the employees who serve them. For instance, integrations can further reduce manual and repetitive data entry by prepopulating customer information into electronic forms. Integration tools such as integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) connectors and APIs can support organizations’ increasingly complex integration needs. By creating a more connected enterprise, banking institutions can better facilitate information flow and avoid repetitive data entry; provide branch employees with accurate, real-time information; and enable a better, more personalized customer experience overall.

The Member-Centered Digital Transformation Journey

Even as many banking institutions are accelerating digital initiatives, the human element remains the most important piece of the transformation puzzle. A recent survey found that more than 80% of credit unions are prioritizing digital as a competitive differentiator, however, only 14% provide solutions that focus on their members’ digital experience. Banking institutions are at an inflection point, and it’s critical that business leaders make decisions about digital initiatives — whether it’s creating an automated customer onboarding process or implementing an AI-powered chatbot — through the lens of the customer experience.

How can Laserfiche help banks and credit unions enhance the customer experience with process automation?

Check out our banks and credit unions solution page for more information!

Embrace The Game Changer: Transform Wealth Management Operations with AI-Driven Process Automations

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, or AI, have captured attention and imagination around the world. In fact, AI and its enabling technology, machine learning, have been around long enough to drive game-changing benefits that we already enjoy as clients and staff.

For wealth managers in particular, AI can improve what both clients and staff experience, while saving on operational costs — in effect, better results for less investment. Supporting interactions with AI-driven tools such as automatic form fill, chatbots and automatic documentation filing can streamline operations and reduce the potential for human error. It also frees employees to focus on higher-value tasks such as supporting clients and developing new business. AI-driven automation can improve the top and bottom lines, while helping organizations tighten their compliance programs.

For example, automating client data transfer with robotic process automation (RPA), frees back-office administrators from repetitive tasks such as data collection, data entry and process documentation. Imagine having a cleaner, better-documented process with fewer data-entry errors to resolve, and more time for staff to spend on higher-value tasks such as resolving those errors — or automating more processes. Moreover, making client data available across a wealth manager’s systems also creates opportunities to leverage that information to provide tailored services. The ability to offer clients new products and services at the right time can further improve the investor experience— particularly when wealth managers can offer these opportunities before clients are even aware they need them.

AI-driven process automation tools are already available and can be simple to customize or even build using low-code or no-code platforms. In other words, you don’t have to be a software engineer to get started. The key for advisors looking to take advantage of these tools is to take an incremental approach. There’s no need to do everything all at once—however, it is important to have a broader digital transformation strategy to serve as a guide and to prioritize your efforts in a way that yields the greatest operational impact over time.

Want to learn more?

Download the whitepaper “What ChatGPT Means for Wealth Management”.

Hyperautomation Is The Future, But It Starts With This First Step

By Grace Nam, Laserfiche strategic solutions manager for manufacturing and healthcare.

Hyperautomation started as a tech buzz word but is now influencing leaders as a top strategic technology trend, with many seeing the potential value in leveraging RPA (robotic process automation) and AI (artificial intelligence)/ML (machine learning) to transform legacy processes. According to Gartner®, “ hyperautomation is a business driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many businesses and IT processes as possible”1 It is increasingly becoming a vital part of organizations’ digital transformation roadmaps as a means to achieving digital resilience and agility.

As you dive headlong into hyperautomation at your manufacturing organizations, it is critical for leaders to plan strategies to accelerate processes and deliver value without getting lost in the current technology weeds. After several years of planning and implementing digital transformation and smart manufacturing initiatives, how far do the benefits currently extend at your organizations? Even with recent events and disruptions like COVID-19, supply chain issues, and staffing shortages, 60% of executives say digital transformation is their most critical growth driver.2 Though digital transformation can be difficult as it requires organizations to change culture and traditional structures, digitalization is crucial to the industry’s ability to increase efficiency in production and drive further growth of the enterprise.
Image showing current bottlenecks to digitizing business processes: inadequate budget - 27%; competing priorities - 46%; legacy system limitations to digitizing across the enterprise - 28%.
Note: Percentages are rounded and may not add to 100%.

While disruptions and challenges have stalled out, major challenges with the supply chain and increased operational costs can persist through digital transformation initiatives. Of course, it’s not realistic to expect to eliminate longstanding challenges in such a short span of time. Currently, many leaders share common challenges in justifying ROI for smart manufacturing investment using end results.3 While having access to data is now certainly realistic for most organizations, building visibility into real-time data across multiple databases at the organization remains as a huge roadblock. Siloed data and unstructured data sets, multiple versions of pieces of digital content without the ability to track them — such as sales contracts and datasheets — and the inability to streamline business processes across different applications and departments are just some of the unimproved roadblocks that are still managed manually. When envisioning the end-results of our digital transformation efforts, it may not be what leaders were expecting: It is a common reality that employees are still spending hours on repetitive manual tasks.

Want to learn more?

Download the whitepaper, “Making Automation Accessible, Connectability Universal & Workforces Eager To Contribute“.

1Gartner IT Glossary, “Hyperautomation,” as of 16 January 2023. https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/hyperautomation. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

2PWC Pulse Survey: Executive views on business in 2022.

3SME, 2022 Smart Manufacturing Market Survey.

Don’t Miss Your Connection: Secrets to Connecting Data with iPaaS

What is iPaaS?

In the modern workplace, employees jump from application to application to complete daily tasks. Sometimes, if apps aren’t integrated properly, employees are left with an extra step of transferring information manually between applications to keep processes moving.

While integrations like APIs and pre-built solutions have been around for quite some time, they come in many forms, and are not always standardized. These integrations combined can create a digital ecosystem that is functional, but possibly not the most efficient or organized. This is where an iPaaS, or integration Platform as a Service, steps in. It coalesces ad-hoc webs of individual integrations — pre-built solutions, APIs, and other connections an organization utilizes — into a centralized hub that brings everything together.

As part of our mission to enable digital transformation for organizations the world over, Laserfiche is now bringing the robust set of ECM, process automation and records management features it is known for to iPaaS platforms through a strategic partnership with Boomi.

How does iPaaS work?

We all know how difficult airline travel can be with just one or two connections. Navigating unfamiliar airports and locating the right gate, not to mention the possibility of delays and cancellations can be stressful, exhausting and at its worst leave us so lost that we miss our connection completely.

Now consider your average enterprise organization, with its employees making dozens if not hundreds of connections between applications daily, far more than your average flight. Establishing and maintaining this many connections can be a formidable business challenge, especially for organizations that are short on IT resources.

iPaaS is designed to lessen these pressures on IT by standardizing how applications are integrated into an organization, and subsequently making it easier to automate business processes and share data across multiple applications with increased transparency and consistency.

What are the benefits of iPaaS support for Laserfiche?

As a true enterprise content management system, Laserfiche excels at managing the entire lifecycle of an organization’s content, including documents, spreadsheets, contracts, and scanned images. Consequently, Laserfiche can serve as a backbone for mission-critical line-of-business applications across your organization. In addition, its process automation capabilities can kickoff everyday processes from invoice matching to employee onboarding.

Through a strategic partnerships with Boomi, organizations can now easily connect Laserfiche’s leading enterprise content management system and process automation feature set with all the other applications they run on, creating more seamless business processes for employees and saving them time from having to manually re-enter information as they move it between systems.

For organizations looking to integrate Laserfiche further into their digital ecosystem, these partnerships mean reduced complexity, faster ROI, opportunities to do things they couldn’t do before, and quickly connect Laserfiche with mission-critical systems such as Workday, Epic, Netsuite, ESRI, ServiceNow, and many more.

How can Laserfiche customers get started with iPaaS?

Customers looking to start their journey with iPaaS and other integrations can explore over 140 Laserfiche connectors, including an integration with Boomi, on the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace.

Questions about our partnership with Boomi? Email boomi@laserfiche.com.

Not a Laserfiche customer yet? Check out our homepage for information on product benefits, solutions and more.