St. Louis Public School District Streamlines HR Management

As one of the largest urban school districts in Missouri, the St. Louis Public School District oversees 70 schools and 4,700 employees. For the district’s HR office, transparency and quick communication between hiring and budgeting teams is critical for efficiently allocating staffing resources to classrooms throughout the year.

Reducing the Paper Burden

The district maintains over 4.5 million documents dating back to the early 1900s. To find files, staff previously had travel to a storage facility 10 miles away. This paper-intensive search and retrieval could often delay hiring decisions that require multi-department reviews.

“If the request for a new position involved funds outside of what the district was allocated, the information could really go a million different places,” says Clarissa Buckley, Coordinator for Human Resources Information Systems. “We had almost eight levels of approval built into the previous process that made having a paper form extremely difficult and cumbersome. And we never want to reach a point where we’re asking, ‘Do we let this classroom go without a teacher because we’re waiting on this paper form to get approved?’ ”

Streamlining Staff Requisitions

The district began using Laserfiche to digitally organize its archived and active paper storage, and quickly moved on to automate new hiring, benefits enrollment and other core HR services.

Staff requisitions are now completed in hours, with all involved parties able to share information and collaborate on decisions. “Laserfiche helps everyone stay on track,” Buckley says. “We can always see and monitor where our requisitions are caught up in the process.” Instant information access also means the HR department can better service teachers and staff with timely W2s, emergency information, student transcripts and more.

Benefits include:

  • 80 percent of the district’s HR active records and historical archives have been digitized
  • HR documents are instantly accessible, where previously staff needed to wait 48 hours to retrieve a file from a storage facility
  • Staffing requisitions are completed in three hours instead of three weeks

“Our teachers are beginning to see when they bring other records to us, not only are we able to receive that information and quickly digitize it, but we’re also able to retrieve it for them if needed in the future,” Buckley says.

Best Practices for Laserfiche Configuration

Installing and configuring Laserfiche in an enterprise environment can seem complex and intimidating. With some thorough pre-planning and configuration, installation of your Laserfiche system will be smooth and problem-free.

What are the different components of Laserfiche architecture?

Laserfiche Server

The Laserfiche server is the key relay station. It acts like a traffic cop, transferring requests from the client applications to the database server and back to the client.

Laserfiche Full Text Search Service (LFFTS)

This contains all of the searchable text. There is one LFFTS catalog per repository.

Laserfiche SQL Database

Can be:

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2,SQL Express, SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 2014 or SQL Server 2016
  • Oracle 10g, Oracle 11g or Oracle 12c

Best Practices:

  • It is recommended that you install the Laserfiche Server, SQL Database, LFFTS and each Laserfiche Application Server on separate machines.

What should I consider when allocating storage?

Volume Storage

Keep the following statistic in mind to help you allocate storage:

75 GB = 1 Million Standard Images (black and white, Type IV TIFF, 8.5” by 11” in size, scanned in at 300 DPI)

The amount of storage space required could be increased or decreased slightly depending on how much metadata is associated with the images.

SQL Database Storage

Since this is where all of your metadata and file locations are stored, allocate 10-15% of what you allocate for your total volume storage. Depending on how you manage you SQL logs, you will also need to allocate another 5-10% for those.

Best practice: Allocate enough storage for sufficient system growth.

What are the installation prerequisites?

Most software is installed as part of the Laserfiche installation. Other components, such as MSMQ, IIS, ASP.NET and .NET need to be configured prior to the installation. A complete list of the installation prerequisites is located here.

How do I prepare for the installation?

Make sure you address each of the following in your planning:

  • Make sure you know where you will be installing each product.
  • Make sure that you have the username and password for each server.
  • Make sure that you have the proper permissions for each of these users.
  • Identify whether or not it is possible to download the software from the Support Site. If not, download the up-to-date software and hotfixes onto a flash drive ahead of time.
  • Make sure your licenses are valid before you begin the installation.
    • Rio installations should have LFDS properly configured
  • Know where the installation guides are and follow them if this is your first Laserfiche installation. Even if you are a pro, it’s good to know where they are so that you can reference them.

Here is a sample Configuration Summary Sheet that you can use to organize your Laserfiche configuration information.

What about licensing and activation?

If you are using Laserfiche Rio, you will receive a single master license for the Directory Server, through which you will generate all licenses required for individual products.

If you are using Laserfiche Avante, you will receive an activation key for each product you are installing; which one you receive depends on the specific product’s installation process. Activation keys and license files can be downloaded from the Support Site.

Make sure that all of your required ports are open. Below is a full list. If necessary, all of these ports are configurable.

If your SQL Server is located on a separate box from the Laserfiche Server you will need to enable TCP Protocol. The default port is 1433 for the SQL Server.

How should I test my installation?

In addition to configuring a production environment, you may want to consider building a development or test environment, where you can test your installation before releasing it into production.

Pros:

  • Develop solutions and refine their functionality.
  • Test your solutions in an isolated environment before going live.

Cons:

  • More virtual environments are needed for a test environment. This means more storage space, hardware, management resources and system downtime.

Thinking about implementing Laserfiche in your organization? Request a free demo here!

Best Practices in Records Management

Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME) functions as an integral part of a well-designed records management program. It has easily configurable components that fit all of your organization’s business needs. Here are some tips and tricks for both Electronic records managers and administrators for ensuring a smooth RME implementation.

Records Manager

The role of a records manager is to manage the records of an organization according to a formal plan. One of the obstacles records managers face is that retention schedules may not provide explicit instructions. This gray area can be used to your advantage by allowing a bit of leeway when setting up cutoff instructions.

A cutoff instruction determines when a record is eligible for cutoff (eligible to enter retention). There are seven different cutoff instructions in Laserfiche, but we will focus on the three most popular:

  • Time-based cutoff: When a retention schedule is triggered based on a time-based cycle period (such as monthly or weekly).
  • Event-based cutoff: When an event on the record (such as employee termination) triggers a retention schedule.
  • Time + Event-based cutoff: Triggered when an event occurs, but the records are only eligible for cutoff after a subsequent time-based cycle period. Basically, this cutoff collects all of the records for which retention was triggered by an event and gives them all the same starting date for future eligibility calculations.

It is a best practice to use either a Time-based or Time + Event-based cutoff. When it comes time for final disposition, all the records with the same cutoff eligibility date will be eligible for disposition on the same date, enabling you to process hundreds of records in one batch instead of one record at a time. Most regulations specify a minimum retention period, so keeping a record a few weeks longer in order to process it with other records should not be a problem.

Reuse instruction definitions

Many records management instruction definitions are similar. For example, there is usually a standardized archive location, general standard retention times for basic handling and so on. Creating generic cutoff, retention and disposition instructions allows you to reuse them across record types and keep the number of unique instructions to pick from to a minimum, making records management much more efficient.

For example, let’s use the following physical retention schedule for a university and convert it to RME.

Rm Best Practices Reuse Instruction

The easiest way to do this is to reuse some of the elements. The color-coded items are the ones that we can group together.

Color-Coded Items

From this we can create two different cutoff instructions:

  • Time-based: Academic Year.
  • Time + Event-based: An event + Academic Year.

We can also create three retention schedules:

  • 1 year, then destroy.
  • 6 years, then accession to “Academic Registry”.
  • 3 years, then destroy.

Laserfiche Administrator

The Laserfiche administrator’s role involves creating, configuring, securing and maintaining the enterprise content management system. Here are some suggestions to make this system easy to maintain, from a records perspective:

  • Determine which documents are records. Not every document is considered a record, so not every document needs to be stored in a records folder.
  • Organize your records series on a broad level, such as by department or by content type and year, and the records folders at a more specific level, such as by month or employee name.

Records Management

  • In addition to making your records retention easier to apply, organizing your records in this way imposes a limit on how many records can be stored in a particular folder. For example, there is a limited number of records that can be stored in the folder corresponding to the month of May in the year 2011. This will prevent your system from infinite growth, which could negatively affect performance.
  • Use Laserfiche Workflow to route your records to the correct storage location in the Laserfiche repository based on either the field values Laserfiche Quick Fields extracts from them or the field values a user manually enters during scanning. This alleviates users from having to remember where different types of documents are stored in Laserfiche. It also saves the records manager from having to manually store each document themselves. Simply configure Laserfiche Workflow to start when you update one of your metadata fields and it will automatically name and store your records for you.
  • Implement transparent records management (TRM). TRM allows records managers and general users to have their own repository views and still have access to the same content.

Records Management3

  • In the above screenshot the records manager’s folder structure is on the left and the user’s folder structure is on the right. The records manager’s folder structure is functional and allows him to store all of his records in a way that will maintain compliance with the published retention schedules and aid the administrator in setting up security. The user’s folder structure is more logical and provides an intuitive way to find content. In order to make TRM possible, Laserfiche Workflow automatically stores the original documents in the appropriate location in the overall records management structure while creating shortcuts in other folders that general users have access to.
  • Automatically create records management items, such as cutoff instructions and retention schedules, from an Excel spreadsheet with the Records Series Setup Utility.

If you’d like to learn more about records management best practices, download the free, complete guide to records management.

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How MW Industries Automated the Request for Quote (RFQ) Process with Laserfiche Forms

Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Jason Pennell, Information Systems Manager, Economy Spring

MW Industries is headquartered in Chicago and is comprised of 21 divisions located throughout the US. The company is one of the world’s premier manufacturers of industrial springs, fasteners, machined parts and flat-stamped spring-related products that are used in the automotive and healthcare industries.

Economy Spring is based in Southington, CT and is one of the divisions of MW Industries. Economy Spring has been using Laserfiche for more than 15 years taking advantage of the powerful scan and retrieve functionality to store and share all incoming documents received by letter, fax or email.

Economy Spring processes around 700 requests for quotes (RFQs) each year. This process was inefficient and processing a quote took up to a week or longer at times. Employees had to wait for hours before receiving paperwork through interoffice mail or delivery. Information needed for a quote was gathered haphazardly over many days. The customer service representative (CSR) and engineers spent a significant amount of time walking to pick up, deliver and find paperwork. Economy Spring needed to reduce quote time and lower labor costs. Also, quotes generated faster had a greater likelihood of being selected as the winning bid.

Thus, management directed Economy Spring’s IT department to design and implement a solution that would automate the RFQ process and provide flexibility for streamlining additional business processes down the line. Thus two years ago, after working with the VAR, Economy Spring expanded its use of Laserfiche to include Forms because it has both the power and flexibility to meet its current needs and address future projects.

Automating the RFQ process with Laserfiche Forms reduced the quote processing time to just one to two days. Economy Spring plans to reduce that time to under 24 hours with future enhancements to the process.

Legacy Process

Before Laserfiche, a CSR entered all RFQs received via email into the Infor VISUAL manufacturing ERP system. The email and attached drawings were printed and delivered by interoffice mail to the engineering department for quoting. Each engineer would arbitrarily take one of the packets to quote. Often, the engineer needed information from one or more floor departments to help prepare the quote.

The engineer would walk the packet to the floor department who reviewed it and added the required information before walking it back to him. The engineer would repeat this process until all information was collected and compiled. Finally, the engineer would create a quote in the ERP system and place the packet back into interoffice mail for delivery to the CSR. The CSR then notified the customer of the new quote via email and filed the packet into a filing cabinet.

Current Process

Laserfiche Forms transformed this manual, paper heavy process into a fully automated, paperless process.

95% of RFQs still arrive via email. The CSR enters the RFQ into the ERP system and generates a quote number. He enters that quote number into a Laserfiche form which auto populates the customer information and part numbers to be quoted from the ERP system. The CSR drags any supplemental documents such as email correspondence or drawings into the form before submitting it.

The quote package is saved in the repository in a dynamically generated folder structure. An email notification is automatically sent to the team of engineers about a new RFQ awaiting their review.

One of the engineers takes ownership of the quote by selecting his name in the form. If he has all the information needed to provide the quote, he can do so immediately. Otherwise, he selects one or more floor departments (up to eight) that can provide more information to help with the quote. Depending on his selection, Laserfiche Forms dynamically displays the required form data, providing each worker with just the information that he needs to fill out.

Laserfiche Forms issues a simultaneous request to all of the specified departments to provide the requested information. Sometimes, a service cannot be performed in-house and must be performed by an off-site vendor. If that is the case, the engineer selects which department will contact the outside vendor to get pricing – either Engineering or Purchasing.

The floor departments review the engineer’s request in Laserfiche Forms and add all of the requested information.

The forms are then routed back to the engineer, who can either ask for more information and send back the form, decide that this part is a no quote, or provide a quote. The engineer and floor departments can go back and forth as many times as needed, with all comments tracked in the form.

Once the engineer has all the information needed to provide the quote, he creates it in the ERP system and signifies completion by filing out the “quote created date” field in another form.

Once a quote is created, the CSR is notified instantly by email. If a quote is over a certain dollar value, it is first reviewed by management. Otherwise, it goes directly to the CSR. The CSR reviews the quote and notifies the customer.

At any time during the process, the engineer can decide that the part is a no quote, which means that it is not something that the organization can manufacture. If that is the case, the CSR is notified by email and can in turn, notify the customer.

Benefits

Automating the RFQ process in Laserfiche Forms resulted in the following benefits for Economy Spring and MW Industries:

  • The win rate for every RFQ has increased from five to six percent to 13-15% since the company that quotes first has a larger chance of winning the bid.
  • The time to generate a quote has decreased from over one week down to one to two days.
  • All information pertaining to a quote can be viewed by anyone at any time. No time is lost searching or walking to find and gather information.

Since this project, Economy has partnered with OneSource Document Solutions to implement additional business process improvements by using Laserfiche Quick Fields, Workflow and Connector that have resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in savings.

Laserfiche use at Economy Spring has increased and the software is now used by most of the 180 employees. As a result of this successful initiative at their Economy Spring division, MW industries has been starting to deploy Laserfiche throughout its 20 other divisions nationwide.

According to Jason Pennell “Laserfiche is as critical to Economy Spring as its ERP product.”

 

Why You Need to Care About DoD 5015.2

It’s said that the wonderful thing about standards is that there’s so many of them. But when it comes to records management, one in particular stands out: Department of Defense 5015.2 (DoD 5015.2).

Formally known as Design Criteria Standard for Electronic Records Management Software Applications (you can see why most people call it 5015.2), the standard is recognized not only in government, but also in the private sector, writes David Roe in CMSwire. “By being certified, records management solutions can assist corporations to achieve compliance and reduce risk by enabling them to control how and for how long enterprise content is retained. It also ensures destruction of that content when this time has elapsed.”

DoD 5015.2 Background

DoD 5015.2 came about in the early 1990s following Congress’s investigation into the Gulf War Syndrome, a debilitating illness affecting many soldiers who fought in the war, according to the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) Records Management Application (RMA) website. This mean DoD officials had to produce millions of records from Operation Desert Storm. “Congress concluded that the Defense Department did not do a good job of managing the records and as a result, many of the needed records had been destroyed or lost,” JITC notes.

Congress ordered the Defense Department to improve its records management capabilities, so the DoD created a task force in 1993, including representatives from several military branches and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The task force published its report, specifying functional requirements and data elements for an electronic RMA, in 1995, and later developed into a testable and measurable design criteria standard by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

In 1998, NARA endorsed DoD 5015.2, which meant that federal agencies other than the DoD could adopt it as a baseline standard for records management. NARA noted, though, that this was not an exclusive endorsement—meaning it could endorse other protocols as well—and that more was required than just the standard itself. “DoD 5015.2-STD defines only a baseline set of requirements for automated records keeping,” cautioned John W. Carlin, then Archivist of the United States. “There are a number of additional questions that must be resolved in order to satisfy all the established requirements for managing federal records. Each agency must address some of these questions to fit their own environment.”

What is the purpose of DoD 5015.2?

The purpose of having DoD 5015.2 is so users have some assurance that products support records management in a standardized way as they work toward compliance with the 2012 NARA/OMB Managing Government Records Directive, OMB 12-18. That mandates that all permanent records be managed in digital format by 2019, as well as calling for management of email in electronic format by 2016.

Electronic records management software enforces organization-wide records policies and reduces the cost of regulatory compliance. Records management systems let organizations centrally, securely and electronically manage their records. This kind of software lets records managers track and store records in a variety of formats, including:
·         Imaged documents
·         Electronic documents generated by programs (e.g., Microsoft Office)
·         PDFs
·         Scanned and digital photographs
·         Audio and video files
·         Output from legacy systems
·         Physical records stored offsite

Other incentives for improving electronic records management include a 2010 requirement that U.S. agencies move to the cloud when possible, other initiatives to streamline business processes and prepare for audits, and concerns about security. Having all federal agencies supporting DoD 5015.2 makes it easier to perform such overarching tasks as populating metadata in records.

“DoD 5015.02-STD marked the beginning of the transition from paper-based systems to electronic-based systems to manage records,” writes JITC. “DoD 5015.02-STD made it possible to transfer records management responsibility from the file room to the front office, from the hands of a few, to the hands of virtually all employees.”

Now on Version 3, DoD 5015.2 includes features such as establishing requirements for managing classified records, as well as requirements to support the Freedom of Information Act, Privacy Act, and interoperability. In particular, Version 3 was endorsed by NARA as meeting the agency’s criteria for transferring permanent electronic records to it.

Vendors certify their products against DoD 5015.2 through JITC’s software testing program for the standard. After they pass, their products are put onto a list. DoD organizations can purchase only the records management products that are on this list.

Other opportunities for record management

All that said, DoD 5015.2 isn’t a panacea. It has been criticized by some as being overly complex and unwieldy (well, it is a government standard) and outdated.

“Why is it assumed that what may be required and workable for Defense will also be viable for the civilian federal government?” writes Ron Layel, a records management contractor for NASA, noting there are several examples where the 170+ functional requirements in 5015.2 are either irrelevant or over-engineered, particularly for civilian agencies.

But as we also know, the wheels of government standard development tend to grind pretty slowly, so chances are we’ll have DoD 5015.2 Version 3 with us for some time to come. And knowing a DoD-certified system has been tested against the DoD’s rigorous standards provides reassurance to records managers at thousands of organizations across a wide variety of industries.

Unless you work for the State Government of Victoria, Australia, or the United States Department of Defense or one of its components, you are not required to select a records management system that meets the specifications of either standard. However, the downside of not complying with recordkeeping requirements on organizational reputation and value highlights the importance of investing in a records management system that helps ensure an organization’s information assets are safe and well-managed.

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Texas A&M University System: Shared Services for Increased Efficiency

Texas A&M University System is one of the largest university systems in the United States. Coordinating, managing and archiving documentation is an intensive task for such an organization—yet the university system has found an efficient way by offering Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) as a shared service through its central IT office.

One of the university system’s members, Texas A&M AgriLife, adopted Laserfiche in 2008. Texas A&M Health Science Center (TAMHSC) followed shortly after. While the individual deployments cut paper-related costs, saved filing cabinet space and secured content in repositories, the university system as a whole was not leveraging those benefits across the entire institution.

Texas A&M University System’s central IT office was determined to break down silos through implementing a shared services model, so that all schools and departments could efficiently leverage ECM knowledge and resources, and eliminate the need for individual departments or schools to purchase their own software.

Texas A&M Health Science Center adopted Laserfiche ECM in 2008 to streamline contract management.

Implementing a Shared Service

While individual schools and departments within Texas A&M University System had implemented Laserfiche for various reasons (AgriLife sought secure storage for records after enduring a flood, fire, collapsed roof and hurricane; TAMHSC wanted to combat costly contract management inefficiencies and eliminate file cabinets), users experienced similar benefits: increased efficiency and accuracy, improved records management, reduced costs and business continuity.

Texas A&M University System’s procurement office provides shared services so that schools and departments can share documents, file structures and workflows, building on each other’s efforts. Shared services also consolidate IT functions from several system members to one location, reducing costs and time spent on maintenance.

To that end, in 2010 a committee selected Laserfiche as the preferred vendor for a new shared ECM system to avoid hardware and software purchases at the department level, reduce costs by eliminating redundant systems and make it easier to share data, file structures and workflows between schools and departments.

“By providing a feature-rich implementation at an affordable price point, Texas A&M is able to make available economies of scale and document sharing that individual departments could not approach by themselves,” explains Judith Lewis, Senior IT Manager at Texas A&M. “This is value delivery at its best.”

In addition to accomplishing the original goals, the shared system provides:

  • Consistent framework to support compliance
  • Risk mitigation through disaster recovery capabilities
  • Ability for different departments and system members to leverage the cumulative accomplishments of their colleagues
  • Internal and remote access to electronic documents
  • Reduced printing and physical paperwork, minimizing requirements for physical file space

Two other campus-wide communities in addition to central IT are intimately involved with the Laserfiche shared services offering: a steering committee of senior management representatives who evaluate and promote best practices and appropriate conventions for Laserfiche; and a user community of practice that provides input and training for the end-user community.

Other customers of Laserfiche shared services include the Texas A&M University Office of the President, Prairie View A&M University and Texas A&M University – Kingsville.

Laserfiche automatically classifies reports and their contents, facilitating easy file management and the ability to search through keywords to retrieve information. Account processing and purchase processing are faster and records management is more efficient and secure, allowing Texas A&M to adhere more closely to state compliance requirements and institutional procedures.

“In addition to the Laserfiche talent, our IT department brings a broad skill base to support a shared services offering,” Lewis adds. “From application development and administration, risk and policy assessment and project management to networking and infrastructure services, our IT department is able to provide the level of support that an enterprise shared service demands.”

Interested in learning more about how higher education institutions use a single ECM system to manage information across multiple administrative departments? Click here to download a free strategy paper from the Center for Digital Education, “Adopting Enterprise Content Management with Shared Services.” 

HR Automation at Texas A&M’s College of Engineering

Texas A&M University’s College of Engineering is consistently ranked among the nation’s best public programs. Amid a constantly changing marketplace, the college remains rooted in its mission to provide the world with top engineering graduates.

Texas A&M University’s College of Engineering’s “25 by 25” initiative prompted the school to examine many of its processes so that it could handle an influx of students.

The school has more than 15,000 enrolled students and is currently working on an initiative deemed “25 by 25,” in which it aims to increase enrollment to 25,000 students by the year 2025.

“Our dean looked at the current economic and employment conditions and determined that we must grow our enrollment numbers to meet the large demand for engineering graduates,” explains Ed Pierson, the college’s CIO. “The goal is to increase accessibility to engineering education at all levels and deliver that education in a cost-effective manner. Educational institutions’ budgets are always tight, so doubling our staff along with the enrollment growth wasn’t an option.”

This meant that the school needed to hire additional staff to handle the growth, but also needed to ensure efficient business processes such as those surrounding employee onboarding were in place to keep costs down. To do so, the school deployed Laserfiche ECM to reengineer some longstanding HR processes, encourage new ways of thinking and increase efficiency.

Texas A&M University’s College of Engineering’s “25 by 25” initiative prompted the school to examine many of its processes so that it could handle an influx of students.

On Board With 25 by 25

Texas A&M University System offers Laserfiche ECM as a shared service through its centralized IT office, so the College of Engineering implemented it to reengineer paper-driven processes such as employee onboarding.

Onboarding new employees used to require an in-person meeting between the potential employee and a business administrator, the completion of paper documents and physical routing of those documents to relevant departments. Christopher Huff, Network Systems Administrator for the college, and the IT team, department representatives, and the HR and payroll offices gathered to reengineer the process with Laserfiche, which pushed everyone involved to acknowledge all the parts of onboarding that they found cumbersome, that were taking too long, or that were unnecessary.

Laserfiche Forms eliminates the need for an in-person meeting during the onboarding process.

The HR department has automated employee onboarding with Laserfiche Forms and Laserfiche Workflow, eliminating the need for an in-person meeting, paper documents and physical routing. This has shortened the amount of time the process takes by about 45 minutes per employee and enables staff to easily search and retrieve employee records.

HR automation has additional implications beyond onboarding, as the Department of Public Safety (DPS) occasionally audits the college to make sure it keeps proper documentation of criminal background checks.

“We create shortcuts to the requested documents and place them in a special folder that the DPS has access to,” Huff says. “We don’t want to show the auditors all confidential information about employees, which is why we use folders with shortcuts. After the audit is concluded, we simply delete the shortcuts folder. The original documents are never actually touched.”

Laserfiche Workflow automatically files employee records, making it easier to retrieve them during audits.

The school also integrated Laserfiche Forms with a database of the college’s departments, which enables departments to automate and create forms for a variety of other processes ranging from course approvals to leave requests.

Changing Mindsets and Growing ROI

The Texas A&M University’s College of Engineering demonstrates how a longstanding institution can leverage Laserfiche ECM to reengineer processes and create a culture of efficiency. In collaboration with business units, Huff and the IT team help identify inefficiencies and reimagine how a process could work better and an on-campus Laserfiche user group meets frequently to share and showcase solution designs.

IT has worked with select employees, deemed “superstars,” to reengineer their own processes with IT guidance and oversight.

Huff has also taken note of significant measurable results. “IT is usually seen as a spender of money, but dollars invested in information technology can have a positive return on investment,” Huff says. “The reengineered onboarding process saved about 45 minutes per new employee. Because we’ve hired over 3,400 employees in a little under a year, we equate this time savings to be about 2,600 working hours, or slightly over $100,000 in soft savings. This allows our employees to invest the time saved into other job duties.”

eBook: Document Management Software: The Buyer’s Handbook

An Easy-to-Follow Guide to Evaluating Document Management Solutions

Whether your organization is evaluating document management software for the first time or looking to replace a legacy system, this buyer’s handbook will provide you with everything you need to start your research.

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Download your free copy today!

Inside this guide, you’ll find:

  • An Introduction to Document Management Solutions
  • A Needs Assessment for Your Organization
  • A Guide to Creating Your Own Cost-Benefit Analysis
  • An Introduction to Mapping Your Current Processes

Reviewing available electronic document management software isn’t about finding the one with the best features and offerings; it’s about finding the solution that is the most applicable to your organization’s current and future needs.

In addition to the guide, you’ll also receive BONUS worksheets:

  • Understand Your Organization’s Records and Risk Management Factors
  • Evaluate the Functionality of Different Document Management Software

Download your copy today!

eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Electronic Records Management

Everything You Need to Know to Make the Case for Electronic Records Management

When it comes to protecting your organization from risk, records managers are on the front lines. This free eBook outlines everything you need to know to handle an unexpected audit, improve ongoing compliance and reduce time-consuming tasks around records storage and retention.

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Inside this electronic records management guide, you’ll get:

  • 4 essential questions that every records manager should ask when deciding which records to keep.
  • Assessment worksheets for evaluating the status of your existing records management program—and prioritizing improvements.
  • 5 steps to implementing electronic records management from an experienced records manager.

Get your FREE copy by filling out the form!

D.L. Evans Automates Compliance and Records Management

SITUATION

• Needed an electronic document repository to store scanned documents
• Paper-driven operations were becoming overly expensive and time-intensive to manage

RESULTS

• Estimated $1 million in annual savings
• Enhanced employee experience
• Foundation for an optimized omnichannel experience for customers

D.L. Evans Bank is a century-old organization with over $3.2 billion in assets and dozens of branches across Idaho and Utah. As a true community bank, D.L. Evans offers a variety of personal, business and investment services while maintaining a simple mission: Help people.

To remain responsive to customer needs while addressing the banking industry’s ever-changing compliance requirements, D.L. Evans has built a strong digital ecosystem that includes Laserfiche as a key component. Laserfiche acts as the bank’s information backbone and main processing system, integrating with its core applications to support growth and scale. 

“We’re a $3.5 billion-in-assets institution today, up from $175 million around 25 years ago — a big part of that has been possible because of Laserfiche,” said Gerardo Munoz, D.L. Evans’ SVP IT director.

“Over time, our use of Laserfiche evolved from document management to a business-critical system,” said Munoz. “Every process can be refined and automated, and Laserfiche was able to help with that.”

As a part of this evolution, the bank leverages Laserfiche’s integration tools to connect Laserfiche to other core systems including its eSignature application, core banking software, CRM and loan origination program. Munoz and his team even use Laserfiche Connector as an integration tool to bridge applications for operations that do not use Laserfiche at all.

“Our Laserfiche repository has over 80 million documents in it, so it’s as critical to us as our core banking system,” Munoz said. “Laserfiche is the second-most critical application that we use in our institution.”

Beyond the time and cost efficiency gains, D.L. Evans counts Laserfiche as a trusted system due to its robust records management capabilities. As a financial institution, the can’t afford to make mistakes with its record management procedures, which are heavily regulated by FDIC rules.

Laserfiche has helped minimize FDIC violations by standardizing how records are kept and updated; for example, retention rules notify compliance officers when a policy document needs to be updated and versioning enables policy reviewers to know if they are working with the most up to date copy of a document.

Auditing has also been streamlined. Whenever the FDIC requests a records audit, D.L. Evans’ team is able to promptly retrieve and present the electronic documents and files in question. “Laserfiche has brought audit time down from four weeks to two,” explains Munoz. “This is actually a bigger improvement than it sounds because as we’ve grown, we now have twice as many loans to audit.”

Transforming the Employee Experience

In addition to making information easier to access, Laserfiche has enhanced the employee experience by standardizing and automating review and approval. Furthermore, integrations eliminate much of the manual data entry and application switching that waste employee time and cognitive energy.

“Just about every process needs some level of automation,” said Munoz. “The fact that automation can standardize procedures and processes is a major reason to do it. Using Laserfiche to do that has helped us save time and money, as well as prevent a lot of mistakes.”

The bank recently reimagined the loan process, starting with vehicular loans, using Laserfiche. The integration between Laserfiche and Meridian — the bank’s loan origination program — allows many of the previously manual tasks associated with loans to be entirely managed through a Laserfiche form and automated business process. 

A Laserfiche form reads information directly from the loan application program and creates the loan packet, routes it through approvals and files everything in a centralized location.

This process also leverages a Laserfiche-DocuSign integration, enabling customers to submit signed documents that are automatically filed in the correct folder in Laserfiche, eliminating that task for loan officers.

“Rather than hire more loan processors, we are trying to automate the process so we can be more proactive,” Munoz said. “It also gives our loan officers better visibility and trackability into all activities.”

Similar automations are used to create new accounts, where information gathering and routing is managed by Laserfiche. As a result, bank employees can spend more time on the activities that require a human touch, such as customer service.

Another process that sounds deceptively quick and easy, but in reality can require multiple manual steps, is that of replacing a lost or stolen credit card. To accelerate these activities, the bank built a solution on an integration between Laserfiche and its CRM, 360 View. This enables representatives to easily create a service ticket in the CRM to start the replacement process for a customer. When a customer reports a lost or stolen credit card, a representative uses Laserfiche to automatically populate the service ticket with the customer’s information and then route the ticket to the appropriate reviewers and approvers. The improvement has reduced processing time by 66% — from six weeks to two weeks.

Laserfiche has also played an important role in mergers, as the bank is able to easily bring documents and data into their systems from acquired organizations. In one merger, Munoz explained, the bank avoided a $50,000 cost and monthslong wait to have a professional services firm convert and import documents.

“It took me two hours to write a workflow and the documents were converted in a week,” he said.

A True Community Bank

While most of the bank’s Laserfiche initiatives are considered back-office solutions, D.L. Evans customers directly benefit from the increased efficiency. “Laserfiche helps us be more productive and provide faster responses to our customers,” Munoz said.

The customer experience continues to be a guiding light for the D.L. Evans team, which was all-hands-on-deck during the COVID-19 pandemic. The bank’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan process was developed over a weekend, and staff — including the entire executive team — were trained on how to process PPP loans in a matter of hours.

“We even had our CEO processing PPP loans,” Munoz said. “Everything worked seamlessly and was processed through the proper channels. Afterward, all the documentation was there, and customers were satisfied.”

Thanks to the IT team’s quick response with Laserfiche and the entire staff’s commitment, D.L. Evans was the largest PPP provider in the state of Idaho.

Today, the bank provides other forms of community service, including its scholarship program. Students can submit a Laserfiche form for D.L. Evans’s Education Pays program — a drawing which rewards high-performing students with laptops — or its Scholarship Program, which awards thousands of dollars each year to high school seniors to attend any accredited college, university or trade school in the U.S.

Looking to the future, D.L. Evans is committed to creating a more cohesive, omnichannel experience for its customers. Laserfiche initiatives on the horizon include creating a self-service customer portal of Laserfiche Forms, enabling quicker and easier, 24/7 access to various services.

“All things considered, Laserfiche saves us about $1 million every year since we’ve implemented it,” says Munoz. “Laserfiche has never been one of those products that just sits on the shelf and doesn’t get used.”

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