As part of Costa Rica’s Ministry of Labor and Social Security, DESAF finances and oversees a broad range of social services across the nation. The agency is responsible for administering the Fund for Social Development and Family Allowances, which allocates budget to 28 different institutions for education, poverty, housing and other programs.

In 2010, new federal regulations required DESAF to modernize its internal processes, and make its legal operations and administrative processes more accessible to its citizens and clients. DESAF, which relied on large physical facilities to store documents and cumbersome manual document searches, implemented Laserfiche to streamline operations and improve client response time.

The agency began using the Laserfiche system to digitize over 32,000 employer files within its Department of Collection Management. With direct access to client files, staff can streamline funding allocation and track employment needs across each agency.

“Initially, the only expectation that we had was digitalizing all of the documents,” says Robert Delgado Castro, Debt Control Analyst for DESAF. “When we began to use the application and all the tools, we found out that we could obtain a lot of complementary usage of the platform.”

By eliminating physical paperwork and manual processes across the agency, staff members can conduct more productive meetings with employers or clients without worrying about missing documents or delaying service.

“In the past, meetings lasted hours and required the review of physical documents,” Castro says. “Now, a meeting is conducted in a digital way without any risk of losing information. What took hours before, now takes just 10 minutes using Laserfiche.”

Streamlining document access ultimately allows the agency to more quickly allocate the right amount of funding to the right organizations, respond to inquiries from each agency and analyze the efficiency of its social programs across the board.

“I’m sure the relationship between DESAF and Laserfiche will last for many years in the future in order to accomplish our objective, to fight against poverty in a very efficient way,” says Castro.

Click here to learn more about streamlining records management using Laserfiche.