How Nature Coast Women’s Care and Family Medicine Clinic Manages a Paperless New Patient Intake Process

Contributed By: Tamearia Williams, Practice Administrator, Nature Coast Women’s Care and Family Medicine

Based out of Tallahassee, Florida, Nature Coast Women’s Care and Family Medicine Clinic has a goal of being the first medical practice to go completely paperless across the board. In order to help achieve this goal, the clinic decided to implement Laserfiche Cloud.

The first process tackled by the clinic, with the help of their Laserfiche Solution Provider Business Automation Pros, was the new patient intake process.

“The transition to Laserfiche Cloud was very easy for staff. The system is user friendly and benefits were immediate,” says practice administrator Tamearia Williams.

Prior to this new process, new patients were instructed to come to the office 15 minutes early to fill out paperwork. Once they filled it out, they’d bring it to the front desk employee who would check it for accuracy and scan it into the patient’s chart in the eClinicalWorks healthcare records management system. The downside of this process was that patients would need to spend more time in the lobby, which is not desirable, especially during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, patients would occasionally skip questions on the paperwork, or had indecipherable handwriting.

Patients Can Fill out Intake Forms from Home

If a person wants to become a new patient at the clinic, they click the “Become a New Patient” button on the clinic’s website. This launches a Laserfiche Forms new patient intake process. To make the form easier to fill out, it is divided into nine pages. A button from inside the form links to the appointment scheduling system to make scheduling the first appointment easy.

As part of the process, the new patient is asked to upload a copy of a state issued identification card. He or she is also promoted to agree to and electronically sign numerous disclosures and policies.
New patients fill out the patient intake form digitally before their first appointment.

Once the form is submitted, it is assigned to a front desk staff member for review. The staff member reviews the form for accuracy. Once the form is reviewed and the staff member clicks the Approve button, the information is pushed to eClinicalWorks, from where a new appointment can be created for the patient.
A front desk staff member reviews each incoming new patient intake form.

The process diagram is shown below.
The process diagram of the new patient intake process.

Wait Time for New Patients Has Decreased by 75%

The new patient intake process has reduced the time patients have to spend waiting in the lobby before appointments by 75%. In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, this has reduced potential disease exposure for both patients and staff.

Other benefits of the new process include less errors when capturing data such as insurance information. Required fields in the form ensure that no questions are skipped. The front desk staff member doesn’t have to decipher handwriting or spelling errors, and can process new patients much faster.

Interested in seeing how Laserfiche can provide a way to automate your business processes? Schedule a demo to learn more.

What Is Document Management?

Document management is a set of practices that define how an organization manages, stores and tracks its documents.
The common components of document management: storage, annotations, check-in and check-out, version control, audit trails and security and access control.

Documents come in a wide variety of formats, from contracts and forms to images and emails. However, whatever form documents take, the principles of document management stay consistent. The common components of document management include:
  • Storage: Provide a centralized location for documents that’s easy for authorized parties to access and search.
  • Annotations: Add notes or comments to a document without needing to edit the document itself.
  • Check-in and check-out: For critical documents, ensure that changes to documents by different users don’t overwrite each other, with a system that only allows for one party to make edits at a time.
  • Version control: Track and record changes in real time so that with each new version of the document, you can view the edit history and roll back to a previous version if needed.
  • Audit trails: Support your compliance initiatives by enabling authorized users to view a log of who has viewed or edited your documents, and when.
  • Security and access control: Do everything possible to ensure access to documents is limited only to authorized parties. This is especially important in highly regulated industries.

These components play an important role in securing your organization’s information and making it useful to businesses.

What is the most important part of document management?

Although it may be up for debate, the most important aspects of document management are likely storage and organization. Proper organization and storage allows people to easily find content and information when they need it. You can expand these topics further to include things like metadata management, or even embrace more modern interpretations of the concept to include process automation and generative AI.

That said, the most important part of document management depends on your organization’s needs. We encourage you watch our webinar ECM 101: An Introduction to Document Management Features to help decide what aspect of document management is the most important.

Is document management a skill?

Although simple on the surface, document management is an important skill with a high ceiling for business professionals. The ideal document manager is:
  • Organized and detail-oriented: sweats the small stuff so others don’t have to while also being able to see the big picture when creating a robust folder structure.
  • Technically inclined: able to properly use a document management system and even troubleshoot when things aren’t going as planned.
  • A good communicator: proficient in disseminating company policies and procedures when it comes to handling content.

How is document management useful?

Organizations and teams produce content at an ever-increasing rate — according to the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM), “on average, organizations expect the volume of information coming into their organizations to grow from X to 4.5X over the next two years.”

To top it off, even with proper records retention, documents stay around a lot longer than they did in the days of paper.

When unaddressed, these challenges create:
  • Siloed desktops.
  • Cluttered network drives.
  • Unorganized databases.

Subsequently, with information scattered between individuals and team this disorganized information can result in:
  • Documents can become missing, outdated, unsecured, and in a worst-case scenario, even compromised by an unauthorized party.
  • Employees could end up working with missing or incomplete information, hindering efficiency and productivity.
  • In heavily regulated industries, improperly stored documents can be a compliance risk, and consequently a financial liability.

For these reasons, it’s important to select the right tools and technologies to take full advantage of them. This is where a document management system comes in.

What is an example of a document management system?

Laserfiche is a document management platform that’s flexible and easy-to-use, enabling organizations to:
  • Store content with generated text and metadata to make them easier to search for later.
  • Digitize physical documents for preservation and processing by digital systems.
  • Utilize process automation organize content and route it to stakeholders.
  • Integrate with external applications to ensure data flows consistently.
  • Securely store and dispose of records for compliance purposes.

By performing these functions, Laserfiche enables businesses to protect their content while also making it more useful to staff for the tasks they do every day.

What are the benefits of a document management system?

By implementing a document management system, any organization can get their documents in order and take advantage of the following benefits:

• Increase transparency: Whether contracts, invoices or forms, it’s essential that employees to find documents when they need them. A document management system puts documents all in one place, ensuring that employees are working with the same “source of truth.”

• Quickly search through multiple documents: Through a combination of AI and other technologies, document management systems make documents full-text searchable. This enables employees to find information in a document’s title, metadata or deep within the full text.

• Securely share content internally and externally: A document management system can store a document in a secure location, ensure that it’s shared for a limited time, and enhance transparency by logging who accessed it and when.

• Foster employee and organizational collaboration: Document management systems allow colleagues to collaborate on a document in real-time. This process can remove back-and-forth of editing through email threads and help get final versions of documents out faster.

• Keep track of major revisions: Feature-rich document management systems have built-in version control. This helps employees track document changes and ensure that any document they’re working on is the most up-to-date version.

• Protect sensitive information: With a document management system, administrators can grant or deny access to information as needed. This helps your organization ensure that documents can be accessed by authorized users and no one else.

• Support compliance efforts: Most document management systems provide audit trails – logs of system activity, including document edits, login attempts and user permission changes. This functionality helps to show auditors that your organization is following regulations.

• Access information securely from anywhere with cloud document management: Employees can now access content securely from wherever they are in the world. Additionally, many cloud systems automatically back up content for quick recovery in case of a disruption.

What is the best software for document management?

The best software for document management usually has a few key aspects:
  • A feature-rich repository with the ability to add identifying, searchable data points to content.
  • Secure storage and disposal options for sensitive records so your organization can meet compliance needs.
  • Easy setup and configuration so you can see the benefits of document management fast.
  • Advanced functionality including process automation, digital forms and software integrations.

Each platform has its own pros and cons, so its best to assess them in relation to your organization’s needs. We recommend tools like the G2 Grid® for Document Management to help you compare top vendors on the market.
G2 Grid® for Document Management Software

Even with a good idea of your organization’s needs, the demo and purchasing process can be a challenge. For advice on how to procure the right system for your organization, download The Document Management Software Buyer’s Guide.

Choose a recognized document management platform

In its recent report, the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Document Management, analyst firm Gartner named Laserfiche a Leader in document management, evaluating vendors based on ability to execute and completeness of vision. Download the full report here.
What Is Document Management?

Document management is a set of practices that define how an organization manages, stores and tracks its documents.

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Laserfiche Named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Document Management

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GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Laserfiche. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

How the Flood Protection Authority Processes Invoices with Laserfiche

Contributed by: Kelli Chandler, Director of Finance, Flood Protection Authority

With 265 employees across four physical locations, the Flood Protection Authority (FPA) is responsible for overseeing the flood defense system in metropolitan New Orleans, LA. FPA worked with their solution provider SYGNVS to automate the invoice approval process with Laserfiche Forms, cutting invoice processing time by more than half from 30-45 days to 10-15 days.

Vendors Upload Invoices Through a Dedicated Vendor Portal

When the FPA starts a new project, the finance director creates a project folder in the Abila MIP accounting software and specifies how the project invoices will need to be coded. The director assigns the project to a specific vendor. Each vendor is identified by a unique vendor number.

Vendors submit any invoices that need to be paid through a dedicated vendor portal on the authority’s website.
Invoices are submitted through a vendor portal on the FPA’s website.

When the vendor clicks the Submit Invoice button on the website, a vendor invoice upload form loads. This form is created in Laserfiche Forms. The vendor types in the vendor number and is presented with a list of assigned projects. This is accomplished through a lookup into Abila MIP. The vendor selects the appropriate project, enters the invoice information and uploads the actual invoice. The form automatically calculates the balance that needs to be paid based on the project information.
A vendor provides invoice information and uploads the invoice through a Laserfiche form.

After the form is submitted, it is assigned to the project manager for review. The project manager looks at the pending balance and compares it to the balance on the invoice. She or he also verifies that the coding was done properly in Abila MIP, and the work has been completed.
The project manager verifies the information on the invoice and the coding.

The invoices and associated documentation are saved in the repository, in a folder by fiscal year and vendor.
Invoices and associated documentation are saved in the Laserfiche repository.

Each invoice has appropriate metadata assigned, including the name, vendor number, date, invoice number and invoice amount.
Invoices have appropriate metadata attached.

Once a week ,  Accounts Payable exports the metadata information for the approved invoices from Laserfiche into a spreadsheet and uploads it into Abila MIP.
The invoice upload and approval business process designed in Laserfiche Forms.

Invoice Processing Time Has Been Cut in Half

In the first four months after launching this project, 2,000 invoices have been received through this new process. Invoice processing time has been cut by more than half. It used to take 30-45 days to process an invoice and now takes 10-15 days.

“Before Laserfiche, approving and tracking contracts and projects was super manual. The more data/documents we have in the system, the more powerful Laserfiche becomes,” says director of finance, Kelli Chandler.

See how Laserfiche can help you automate accounts payable by scheduling a free demo.

How the City of Fullerton Modernizes Elections by Automating the Candidate Nomination Process

Contributed By: Lucinda Williams, MMC, City Clerk, City of Fullerton, CA

The City of Fullerton, located in Orange County, CA, incorporated in 1904 and has a population of more than 142,000. Fullerton is a full-service city with over 500 employees and a five-member, by-district city council.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, city facilities closed to the public and most city employees worked from home. Even after the partial reopening of city hall, citizens continued to demand that the city provide more remote services. The city clerk’s office needed to prepare for the upcoming local election, but due the uncertainty of COVID-19, this year’s preparation included planning for both in person and remote candidate processing.

Fullerton partnered with their Laserfiche solution provider, ECS Imaging, to develop an online candidate nomination process using Laserfiche Forms. The process that was developed was modeled after the Orange County Registrar of Voters online candidate filing process.

Candidates Start the Process by Filling out an Electronic Form

To begin the candidate registration process, a candidate fills out the online candidate registration form. This form asks for the candidate’s identifying information and details about the office the candidate wishes to run for. The city clerk uses this information to verify the candidate’s eligibility to run for office. The form requires the candidate to complete key fields before submitting the form for review. Certain fields, such as the driver’s license number field, require the candidate to enter the exact number of characters found on a California driver’s license.
A candidate fills out the online candidate registration form to begin the registration process.

Once the form is submitted, the candidate gets an automated confirmation message on screen and via email.
The candidate receives a confirmation message on screen.

The city clerk also receives an email notification when a new form is submitted. The city clerk clicks on the email link to open the task in Laserfiche Forms.
The city clerk receives an email notification when a new candidate registration for is submitted.

After opening the task, the city clerk sees a read-only version of the candidate registration form, except for a section on the bottom for performing the candidate eligibility determination.
The city clerk reviews the candidate information and completes the Candidate review section of the form.

If the candidate does not meet eligibility requirements, the city clerk selects “Not Registered” and includes a notation with the reason for the rejection. The candidate then receives a notification email.
The candidate is notified by email of a rejection.

If the candidate meets all of eligibility requirements, then the city clerk selects the “Registered” option. The candidate she is notified by email. The email also lets the candidate know of an upcoming meeting with the city clerk.
The candidate is notified by email when meeting eligibility requirements.

The city clerk will meet with the candidate either in person or via remote web conference. The city clerk documents the meeting in the electronic form.
The city clerk fills out notes from the meeting with the candidate, in another section on the form.

After the city clerk submits the candidate meeting form, Laserfiche Forms emails the necessary nomination forms to the candidate. The email includes a link to an electronic form that will be used to upload the completed documents, as well as an automatically generated access token. The access token provides a unique identifier to link together all of the documents submitted by this candidate later in the process.
The candidate receives and email with additional forms to fill out.

The candidate has to provide the access token in the form along with uploading the required documents.

Once the form is submitted, the city clerk is notified by email. The clerk opens the assigned task and can find all of the candidate’s information, including a link to the candidate’s submitted documents. The link opens the candidate’s folder in the repository, where all of the documents have been imported.
All documents related to the candidate are stored in the repository.

The city clerk reviews the submitted documents for completeness and adds any comments to the form before approving or revoking the candidate. The system emails the candidate of the outcome of the review.
The city clerk performs one more review of the documents before approving or revoking the candidate.

Benefits of Laserfiche

Implementing this Candidate Processing Laserfiche Forms process has provided the City of Fullerton with the ability to remain nimble and still provide excellent customer service while remaining in compliance with election regulations during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 era. The city has the ability to process candidates in person or remotely at any time. Additionally, using Laserfiche Forms for candidate processing streamlines the entire nomination process not just during COVID-19, increasing efficiency and transparency.

Learn more about this process by watching this on-demand webinar.

Dakotaland Federal Credit Union Drives Innovation and Efficiency by Automating Nearly 250 Workflows and 100 Forms

The fast-changing economic landscape of the credit union industry has highlighted the importance for firms to leverage technology to meet customer needs.

Many credit unions that rely on legacy systems built around proprietary technology and manual processes have found it challenging to maintain and attract new members and stay ahead of the competition. Committed to putting its members first and continuously improving its service offerings, Dakotaland Federal Credit Union (“Dakotaland”) — a full-service, not-for-profit financial cooperative — has challenged the status quo, transforming traditional paper-based workflows to digitally transform its business. In 2004, the firm implemented a Laserfiche electronic document management system and has since expanded its use across its departments, while continuing to explore new ways to drive efficiency throughout the organization.

Dakotaland started with just 10 members in Huron, South Dakota, in 1935. In 2020, celebrating its 85th anniversary, the firm spans across 11 branches and serves nearly 40,000 members in 46 states. This growth further underscored the need to build more automated business processes in order to streamline information sharing and accelerate collaboration. “With Laserfiche, we can develop and assign tasks regardless of location, share that information easily across branches and automate notifications, and know exactly where we are in the process,” said Gina Hansen, vice president of product development at Dakotaland.

Additionally, increased regulatory burden, and a growing expectation of incorporating advanced technology solutions, have all presented opportunities for Dakotaland to acquire other small institutions to help these firms align their services with the evolving industry landscape. With the help of Laserfiche’s customizable technology solutions, Dakotaland has been able to continue providing the best possible service to its current member base while also growing its business.

Boosting Operational Efficiency Firm-wide With Electronic Document Management

Before implementing Laserfiche, Dakotaland’s information storage took the form of five rooms stacked with filing cabinets. The team realized it needed to store documents electronically to save space and avert document loss, while addressing recordkeeping requirements enforced by different regulatory bodies. These needs led Dakotaland to select Laserfiche for its robust electronic records management and automated workflow capabilities.

“Regulators and examiners expect us to document everything, requiring us to show proof of the firm’s work,” Hansen said. “Laserfiche helped us present all our data — including all mandatory details — in a format that leaves no room for error.”

The Laserfiche implementation enabled Dakotaland to digitize its records, while preserving record integrity and simplifying compliance processes. The efficiency driven by the Laserfiche initiative spurred the expansion of Laserfiche’s use in other projects aimed at improving the end-user experience and creating a stronger operational infrastructure across departments, including human resources, IT, insurance, mortgage, and more.

“Today, we heavily rely on Laserfiche for almost all our day-to-day operations, automating nearly 250 running workflows and almost 100 active forms processes,” Hansen said. “I do not believe there is any part of our organization that is not using Laserfiche in some capacity. While some forms and workflows are simple routing to logically file documents, others are utilizing the report feature to provide tracking ability, and some automate more complex processes such as our new hire or vendor management tracking process.”

Business Advancements Driven by Human Resource Innovation

While all departments within Dakotaland use Laserfiche in some shape or form, one department that has harnessed the great values of digital transformation is human resources.

Multiple teams across different departments are impacted whenever an employee is hired or terminated, or moves to a new department. To keep employees and teams informed, Dakotaland used Laserfiche to create an end-to-end solution to process employee and candidate records, and combat information loss. The platform streamlines the workflow through a new-hire checklist, comprising of analyzing applications, processing forms, sharing the database with the supervisors, helping them classify the applications, and developing a comprehensive pool of interview candidates. By automating the HR processes, the firm is able to save countless hours — allowing teams across a multitude of departments to focus on more client-facing services that require a human touch.

Most recently, the firm also used Laserfiche to automate a key process for its now-virtual Employee Enrichment Day — a team-building program, where the firm engages in activities that enhance staff connection and give employees an opportunity to learn about each other. During this day, the team works on a spotlight commemoration developed and assigned to the staff in Laserfiche Forms with questions directed to the respective personalities of the employees. The answers then develop a quiz that goes back to all employees, and within that process, the team uses Forms to analyze and file the answers. Automating the process with Laserfiche saves the firm around 10 to 15 hours, analyzing the scores of more than 160 employees in one day.

Technology Guiding the “New Normal”

COVID-19 has compelled firms across different industries to challenge their technological capacities and reevaluate their resources. When the pandemic first hit, more than 30 team members at Dakotaland were deployed to work remotely within a week — enabling the firm to fully rely on its digital repository of data and its automated workflows. The seamless transition enforced business continuity at Dakotaland, allowing for uninterrupted services to its members, even in an unpredictable environment.

One of the biggest hurdles to adopting a new system can be identifying areas that need improvement and processes that can be streamlined. The management at Dakotaland takes pride in driving a thorough observation across the firm to determine loopholes and encourage innovation that can help avoid system failures and boost operational competency. With support from the executive team, the firm leverages its Laserfiche champions, who lead the technology shift across different teams and help them adopt new solutions. These champions play a critical role in training employees about the new processes and identifying unique ways in which Laserfiche can be customized to further enhance productivity and maximize the firm’s investment in Laserfiche technology.

“There are always new challenges and concerns that the credit union industry has to address,” Hansen said. “However, our confidence in Laserfiche’s capacity has encouraged us to identify and resolve any technology challenges upfront and continue to enhance our competitive edge in the industry. I am excited to see what innovation is in store for our collaboration and how we can collectively revolutionize the credit union space.”

Learn more about how banks and credit unions use Laserfiche to transform back office operations, reduce the cost and complexity of compliance, and improve the employee and customer experience.

New Account Opening in 30 Minutes

SITUATION

• New account opening process depended on paper forms and direct mail
• Legacy new account opening process could take from three to seven days
• Difficulty tracking activities taken on documents resulted in challenges with audit preparation

SOLUTION

• Accelerated new account opening process from one week down to 30 minutes
• Simplified audit preparation
• 40,000 hours of annual time savings

An independent investment advisory firm that provides financial consulting services to more than 4,000 households with approximately $2 billion in assets under management needed a way to expedite client services.

The firm sought out document management technology to automate its new account opening process. The legacy process was paper-based, requiring the firm to prepare stacks of paper forms and individually mail them between advisors, a client service representative, the firm’s cashiering department, the client and the custodian. This typically took three to seven days and often delayed important client transactions.

“New account documents are extremely time sensitive. At times, we would have to interrupt advisors during meetings to get a signature,” said the firm’s IT director. “We were looking for a paperless system with efficient workflow, SEC and FINRA compliance and a strong integration capability.”

Accelerating New Account Opening from a Week to 30 Minutes

After a demonstration of Laserfiche software, the firm’s IT team felt that Laserfiche’s configurable workflow tools could easily address their operational needs.

To automate account opening, the firm integrated Laserfiche with DocuSign, its Tamarac customer relationship management (CRM) system and Laser App. By integrating these systems, client paperwork can be reviewed, signed and finalized in under half an hour:
  • Laserfiche pulls the new client contact record from Tamarac CRM and routes it to Laser App.
  • Laser App automatically populates an electronic form with the client’s account information.
  • The system automatically identifies who should receive the form next and routes it to the client service representative for review.
  • The applicable advisors electronically sign the form using DocuSign.
  • The custodian and client each receive a copy of the form for final sign-off.

New Account Opening in 30 MinutesCompared to the legacy system, this new process has generated a week in time savings. The process is not only quick, but enhances personnel accountability from start to finish.”

“If a document that requires review sits for more than 24 hours, the system emails a reminder to the responsible person,” said the IT director. “If the same document sits for more than 72 hours, the system emails that person’s boss.”

Creating Comprehensive SEC and FINRA Compliance

Improving operations was only part of the firm’s information management overhaul. The firm also needed comprehensive compliance functionality to meet the strict standards of its industry.

“The SEC and FINRA require that firms use a certain type of document management technology, such as unalterable database software,” said the IT director. “Our research showed that Laserfiche’s technology is not only the most flexible, but also offers the option to use numerous add-on features.”

New Account Opening in 30 MinutesOne feature that simplifies audit preparation is Laserfiche’s event log capability, which tracks the creation, deletion and modification of documents.”

“Our system logs every possible interaction with a document,” said the IT director. “Even if a document is deleted, it is still available in the Laserfiche repository and we can see who modified it.”

The firm’s DocuSign integration also verifies the identity of a document’s signer. Detailed security questions, social security verification and access code protection maintain the integrity of client transactions and prevent fraud.

New Account Opening in 30 Minutes“It’s pretty astounding when you consider the time savings,” said the IT director. “We estimate that Laserfiche saves us up to one hour per document. “Given the firm’s estimated average of 165 documents processed per day, Laserfiche produces an annual time savings of roughly 41,415 hours.”

Chinook’s Edge School Division Expands Outdoor Learning Opportunities with Process Automation

A short drive from the Rocky Mountains and some of Canada’s most postcard-worthy national parks sits Chinook’s Edge School Division. The largest rural school division in the province of Alberta, Chinook’s Edge has an established reputation for staff and student wellness, and is on a mission to engage every student in meaningful learning. Although temporarily put on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic, field trips to the mountains and beyond — with opportunities for world-class hiking, outdoor adventures and skiing — are an integral part of achieving that mission.

With 11,000 students and 43 schools in its division, Chinook’s Edge uses Laserfiche to streamline its field trip management processes, maintaining the integrity of its records as well as supporting its risk management for field trips.

School Division Goes Digital to Improve Risk Management

Parents and guardians voiced their frustrations with the overwhelming amount of paperwork required to provide consent every time a student participated in a field trip, which could be more than 10 times a year per child. The forms included a guardian consent form, medical consent form and health consent form — each of which required duplicate information, such as student name, address and guardian name.

For teachers, the internal request forms to create and plan a field trip were long and detailed. All field trip planning was performed manually, generated mountains of paperwork and required school staff to spend hours of time to coordinate a single trip.

Principals and members of the Chinook’s Edge School Division Board of Education were also concerned about legal liabilities due the rugged nature of numerous field trips and potential natural disasters, as well as a lack of conformity in parent sign-off processes. For example, if a form was forgotten, a guardian might write their consent on a napkin and hand it over to the school. Risk management became an increasing concern, exacerbated by skyrocketing insurance costs.

Chinook’s Edge looked to Laserfiche to automate field trip management, streamline approval processes and enhance the integrity of its records. Jeremy Regehr and his team at Inspiris, a Laserfiche solution provider, developed an end-to-end digital solution that would reduce the work required for parents, teachers and administrators while enabling improved transparency and accountability. All guardian and medical consent forms were consolidated into one user-friendly electronic form, which could be pre-filled for subsequent field trips for the same student. The solution was configured to integrate with Rycor, an online payments software, to simplify payment collection and processing, and PowerSchool, a student information system, to ensure student data is automatically updated.

Digital Transformation Expands Staff Capacity and Student Horizons

In the three-month initial rollout of the new field trip management process, more than 150 field trips had been completed — with over 11,000 students and 18,000 parents or guardians. By the end of the first year of implementation, a total of 758 field trips were processed. The digitized solution with Laserfiche produced 10,697 emails, saving 57,000 pieces of paper. With 70 cases of paper saved, Chinook’s Edge reduced 1,750 kilograms of carbon emissions in one school year.

With much of the workload now completed through an automated process, the division can monitor all trips with just three staff members, who are easily able to do so while fulfilling their other daily responsibilities.

“The new Laserfiche field trip program has been a huge asset to us in the school,” said Leanne Stickland, administrative support in finance for Innisfail Middle School. “It’s quick and easy for both the school and parents. And even better, we don’t have boxes of paper to store at the end of the year.”

“It’s just that easy,” added Susan Roy, FOIP coordinator and treasurer.

The time parents and teachers spend preparing for field trips has been reduced dramatically. What was once eight to 10 pages of paper per trip, per student is now completed via an automatically generated email link. The four hours teachers took to prep for each field trip now takes an average of 30 minutes, and what originally took 30 minutes for parents was reduced to just one minute. All in all, teachers across the division saved an estimated 3,250 total hours, equating to at least $100,000 in cost savings.

Centralizing all field trip information helped teachers identify opportunities to diversify outdoor learning experiences, as well as inspire ideas for new field trips. Laserfiche helps provide oversight for members of the Board of Education, and makes it easy for them to see approvals. On top of that, administrators and teachers use Laserfiche to verify whether all legal and logistical requirements are met and that consent forms are collected before students board the buses. If a natural emergency, such as a wildfire, were to occur, all field trip participant information would be available at a moment’s notice, so that all participants could be easily accounted for and safely evacuated.

Inspiris owner, Regehr, reiterates, “The ROI on the process was as close to instantaneous as you can get. The improvements to efficiency for all teachers and administrative staff was apparent the moment we helped roll out the process— and feedback confirmed that. When I heard the principals exclaim they could sleep at night because they understood the reduced liability, it was obvious to me that the process had already paid for itself.”

Making Honor Roll for Saving Time and Money

Even before Chinook’s Edge set out on the adventure to automate its field trip management process, the organization aimed to streamline processes across the division.

“The finance department had a process to collect eight different documents, twice a year from each of our 41 schools. It was a time-consuming task and often required a staff member to search through emails, open attachments, rename and save files,” says Paul Matsune, core services manager for Chinook’s Edge School Division Technology Services department. Now the forms are easily accessible online for staff division-wide.

The provincial government requires that student report cards are uploaded as individual files, with each student’s unique number. With over 11,000 students, this was a time-intensive undertaking to do several times a year. Laserfiche Forms and Quick Fields — a high-volume capture tool that automates document import, classification and indexing — helped save over 1,000 hours a year for administrative support staff on this task alone.

Other daunting administrative tasks for the Chinook’s Edge People Services team of two have nearly been eliminated thanks to Laserfiche, with automated processes created for personal leave, maternity leave and ID card requests, among others. A dashboard was created for payroll and HR to be notified of employee changes. If a coworker is sick, it’s easy for another staff member to see what tasks need to be done.

The centralization of administrative work hasn’t just saved time across the division, it has also made it easier to reallocate funding and minimize overtime worked. Like any organization on a digital transformation journey, Chinook’s Edge School Division is still seeking new ways to nurture efficiency. For instance, its accounts payable department aims to soon begin using Laserfiche to automate processes such as credit card reconciliation and expense claims.

Laserfiche has touched nearly every stakeholder at Chinook’s Edge, including teachers, staff members, students and families, principals and other division leaders. The optimized processes, improved access to information, reduced liability and increased satisfaction of parents all add up to support the school’s vision to help students achieve success as compassionate and innovative global citizens.

Explore more ways to increase staff productivity, automate processes district-wide and efficiently manage student records by visiting Laserfiche for K-12 Schools and Districts.

Jones College Provides One-Stop Student Services with Laserfiche Cloud

In the past year, Jones College began an initiative aimed at improving the student experience by bringing five previously separate departments (financial aid, admissions, records, recruiting and the student success center) under one umbrella. Using Laserfiche Cloud, the college centralized the five teams’ documents and processes, giving staff and students access to forms and information online, and streamlining key student services.

These digital transformation initiatives have enabled Jones College to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and various government mandates, even as the college saw a 15% jump in enrollment during the summer of 2020 over summer 2019

Moving Enrollment Management to the Cloud

Jones College is a public community college in Ellisville, Mississippi, that was established in 1911.

“As a community college, the impact we have in our society is big — we offer high-quality education at a lower price,” said Paul Spell, vice president of enrollment management. “We’ve been here 100 years, and there have been a lot of changes through the years. We have to continue to show value to students and to our community, and to do that we have to think outside the box.”

As part of the organization’s commitment to providing the best possible experience to students, Jones College President Dr. Jesse Smith looked for opportunities for modernization and new efficiencies. In 2018, the college embarked on a mission to bring together five disparate teams — financial aid, admissions, records, recruiting and the student success center — under one department called enrollment management.

“The goal was to have students go to one admissions counselor who can get their paperwork processed and guide students through the enrollment process in a centralized way,” said Spell. Previously, staff and students had to physically walk paperwork across campus to get it to the right people, which was not only inconvenient and time-consuming, but also introduced the risk of information loss. “To centralize the experience, these five departments had to work together as a team, and Laserfiche really enabled that.”

The college turned to Information Consultants, a Laserfiche solution provider, to implement Laserfiche Cloud and help to map out the newly formed enrollment management department’s processes. Information Consultants was able to implement Laserfiche within a week, as a result of the cloud deployment.

“We chose to use Laserfiche Cloud because we wanted less of a hassle managing servers and software here on campus,” Spell explained. “We don’t have a lot of IT people, and we are always looking to be as efficient as possible. On top of that, we want our staff to be able to access documents from the office or home — or anywhere — easily.”

“The enrollment management department really took Laserfiche and ran with it,” added Pierre Smith, workflow specialist at Information Consultants (ICONS). “Jones College and its embrace of digital transformation using Laserfiche Cloud is proof that a 100-year-old institution can continue to innovate, and deliver a modern experience for staff and students.”

New Opportunities for Efficiency

Initially, the enrollment management department implemented Laserfiche as a digital filing cabinet, and began scanning paperwork into the Laserfiche repository. Staff quickly saw, however, that capturing information digitally from the beginning of the process would eliminate the need for paper and open up greater opportunity for transparency, efficiency and ongoing optimization through business process automation. The COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders further highlighted the need to transition to a more digital workplace.

“Everything was put on hold when COVID-19 hit,” Spell said. “When we were able to come back, we realized that paper processes were just inefficient. We decided to have a ‘digital day,’ essentially a deadline for us to go digital with everything. This was all during the pandemic, and we were able to go digital in about a week.”

Spell introduced Laserfiche Forms to the financial aid team. The team’s responsibilities, including managing processes related to grants, fee waivers, scholarships and other financial assistance programs, made it an ideal candidate for transitioning to Laserfiche electronic forms and automated workflows. Within two weeks, the financial aid team had created more than 30 online forms to replace their paper counterparts, including the form to validate students’ tax status, income verification and others needed to qualify for financial aid like FAFSA.

“For financial aid programs, we need to collect and verify a lot of information, which previously was done manually on paper and could take days to weeks,” said Jones College Director of Financial Aid Kari Dedwylder. “Now, students don’t have to come to the office in person. They can access the form they need and get it filled out in less than 10 minutes. We can also leverage electronic signatures which is helpful since a lot of people don’t have a printer, and verifying information electronically is so easy to get done while also meeting the needs of the college, the financial aid organizations and the federal department.”

The college is also working to digitize the graduation application, a long document which students previously had to fill out and physically take around campus for advisors to sign it. Another opportunity for automation is the process of accepting transcripts, which have traditionally come through the mail or brought in by hand. With a new, automated workflow in Laserfiche, the college can automatically email students to tell them whether they have been accepted.

“Communication with our students is huge, and something we’re always looking to enhance,” Spell said. “Through Laserfiche, we can effectively build communication into our processes without having to manually email each student.”

With Laserfiche helping to centralize information and standardize and automate processes, the enrollment management department now offers a more streamlined experience for students. Meanwhile, Laserfiche has improved accountability and trust among the five teams that were merged to form the department.

“Laserfiche not only helped with digitizing our paperwork and processes, but it’s also helped with our teamwork,” Spell said. “Now, we have processes we can see; we have better accountability.”

Spell estimates that the Jones College’s Laserfiche initiative has saved the institution about $30,000 to $40,000 in staff hours, or about three to four months of work for the department. Over the summer, enrollment was up 15% over the summer of the previous year and — during a pandemic and without adding additional staff — the enrollment management department was able to manage the larger workload due to their efforts to streamline processes using Laserfiche.

“When the pandemic hit, we were planning for lower enrollment,” Spell said. “We had transitioned learning to online, and administrative processes were online thanks to Laserfiche. Over the summer, though, enrollment was up while other community colleges have taken double-digit drops. People don’t know what’s going to happen, but the digital processes and automations have taken the burden off of our staff as we navigate these changes.”

Building on a Digital-First Approach for Student Success

The Jones College team continues to look for new opportunities to leverage Laserfiche for business process automation and improved efficiency.

“This is only our first year using Laserfiche, and all I can think about is how much more streamlined we’re going to make these processes,” Dedwylder added. “Right now, we still have some students who are used to the old processes but, being a two-year college, we’ll have new students who will be introduced to the digital forms right away. Our students are going to expect this digital experience.”

Spell already has plans to enhance existing forms with auto-fill functionality so that there is even less manual data entry for students, and to integrate Laserfiche with the college’s other applications including the student information system (SIS). Some future projects that are not student-facing include a Laserfiche form that keeps a log of all of the activities required for student admission, so that admissions counselors can quickly see what a student has completed and what paperwork has been submitted.

“As a community college, the services we offer are incredibly valuable,” Spell said. “Many students are from rural or underserved communities. The main part of our job is people — the technology solutions that can make us more efficient and improve our processes help to keep us focused on that.”

U.K. Law Firm Modernizes Legal Forms

SITUATION

• Paperwork after courtroom or police station visits took time away from client service
• Manual processes caused delays in billing and case completion
• Compliance and governance practices added time and burden of manual tasks on employees

RESULTS

• Less time spent on manual routing of information and data entry
• Faster, more responsive client service
• Increased accountability and transparency across the firm
• Reduction in administrative costs

A general practice law firm located in the United Kingdom offers a broad range of services across many types of U.K. law — such as crime, personal injury, property, and commercial — and needed a way to create clear accountability and support compliance for each litigator’s daily activities.

Helping Firm-wide Compliance

Prior to using Laserfiche, lawyers would fill out a 40-page form after courtroom or police station visits, creating a cumbersome and time-consuming process for both the lawyers and clients, as well as delays in billing and case completion.

“The compliance wasn’t there and the money wasn’t there,” said the firm’s operations manager. “The starting point for us was to deal with that particular issue of ensuring that when someone went to the police station, the paperwork actually got to us and got to us on time, instead of two weeks later.”

Laserfiche’s advanced electronic forms capabilities were an attractive solution for improving processing times and creating compliance controls. The company selected Laserfiche to bring information accessibility and accountability to the firm’s client and administrative processes.

Taking the Leg Work Out of Legal Work

The firm began by implementing mobile forms within its Crime and Litigation Department. With Laserfiche Forms, litigators can now use iPads to immediately capture and update client information at police stations or courtrooms, then instantly send the information to the firm’s administrative department for end-to-end processing. Forms-based workflow and analytics automatically track litigators’ court attendances and time reporting, simplifying accountability and providing more accurate data for billing.

“Laserfiche gave us a fantastic vehicle for that,” said the operations manager. “The Laserfiche system could capture information from the client, which is more and more important from a data protection point of view now. There was accountability. Things weren’t just going to disappear.”

Benefits include:
  • Solicitors can instantly and accurately capture client information on mobile devices.
  • Client paperwork is automatically sent from lawyers to administrative teams for processing.
  • Offline access to documents helps solicitors address client needs on the fly.
  • Police station visits, court attendances and litigator timecards are automatically tracked, creating more accurate and transparent reporting.
  • Administrative costs in the company’s Crime department were reduced.

“Laserfiche looks after all the typical elements of what a lawyer does,” added the operations manager. “That’s been the biggest breakthrough for us as a practice, and the most spectacular application of it for the firm as a whole.”

How Premium Packing Digitizes Daily Wellness Checks with Laserfiche Forms

Contributed By: Ronnie Alderete, General Manager and Yesenia Marquez, HR Coordinator, Premium Packing

Premium Packing is headquartered in Salinas, California and has offices in Stockton and the Coachella Valley. The company provides contracted labor and all related human resources administration work for companies, primarily within the agricultural and construction industries.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, many of the companies served by Premium Packing staff were considered essential and employees had to continue working. In order to keep workers safe, Premium Packing had to introduce a daily wellness and temperature check for indoor factory workers. Any workers who did not pass this check had to be sent home. The information had to be stored for a specified time period due to legal regulations.

Initially, this information was kept on paper. 90 employees just in one facility needed to have their temperature checked and recorded six days a week, resulting in quite a lot of paper that had to be stored. In addition, this paper had to be securely stored to comply with HIPAA regulations.

Laserfiche Forms was the ideal solution to this challenge. Premium Packing’s Laserfiche Solution Provider Appleby helped implement this solution in three days.

Employees Fill Out a Wellness Check Questionnaire on the IPad

When an employee reports to work, the first thing that he or she does after clocking in is get his or her temperature checked using a non-contact thermometer by a supervisor. The employee then fills out a wellness check questionnaire on an IPad. Among other things, he or she enters their temperature reading. The employee can select an English language or Spanish language version of this form.
Employees fill out the wellness check form when arriving at work.

If the temperature reading is over the 100-degree threshold, or if the employee answers yes to some other symptoms, a red message appears on the form. This message tells the employee to step aside and see a supervisor after submitting the form. The human resources coordinator also gets an email about the high-risk individual.

The employee is evaluated, and, if found to be sick, sent home. If the employee made a mistake in filling out the form, such as forgetting to include a period in the temperature box, he or she is cleared and is able to resume work.

The human resources coordinator follows up with each site supervisor to learn how each incident was handled.
The wellness check process diagram.

The New Process Helps Support Premium Packing’s HIPAA Compliance Program

Once the employee submits the wellness questionnaire, there is no way to retrieve the data from the IPad. All of the forms filled out by employees are stored in a secure folder in Laserfiche, to which access is limited to only those individuals who should legally be able to see the information. All of this assists Premium Packing in managing its HIPAA compliance strategy.

The organization does not need to worry about how to securely store multiple paper documents with health information, as information is automatically filed in its Laserfiche repository, with appropriate security rights applied.
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