• A growing bank’s acquisitions led to many ways of managing documents.
• Locating missing information resulted in wasted time.
SOLUTION
• Laserfiche helped to centralize information and save time searching for documents.
• Laserfiche automated loan applications eliminated repetitive tasks and accelerated the process.
• Bank employees have immediate document access from any of the bank’s branches.
For this bank, growing from a startup with less than 10 employees to a bank with multiple acquisitions and 250 staff came with a challenge.
“The banks we bought all had different ways of managing documents — some of them used paper files, while others had software in place,” said one of the bank’s assistant vice presidents. “As a result, we spent a lot of time calling other branches to locate missing information.”
Having disparate approaches was a liability to bank operations and client service. New account applications had to be mailed or faxed from branch offices to the main office, resulting in lost documents — and wasted time.
“We wanted a centralized system to house our information,” the AVP said. “We needed something that would be fully functional across all departments and locations.”
The organization found Laserfiche document management software. “We chose Laserfiche for its flexibility. We like that the system can be used by all our employees while still being customized to fit specific departmental needs.”
Streamling Loan Application and Approval Paperwork
“Our top goal was that loan application processing or opening a new account wouldn’t take forever,” said the AVP.
Using Laserfiche, the bank automated the processing of new accounts and loans:
The customer fills out and submits new account paperwork, which can include signature cards, credit card applications and online banking enrollment forms.
A personal banker scans the documents into Laserfiche.
A customer data specialist enters important document metadata into Laserfiche, such as name, account number and Tax ID.
Laserfiche automatically routes the documents to the appropriate department for review and approval.
The department marks the document as approved, rejected or still in process, and the customer receives notification of the decision.
“This process saves time on administrative tasks and provides immediate document access from any of the bank’s branches. For example, if a customer questions a check, the signature card can quickly be found in Laserfiche and a copy of the signature can be instantly retrieved for verification.
“Every department wants Laserfiche,” the AVP added. “They all have different ideas about what they want to do with Laserfiche.”
Why Should My Organization Care about Document Management Software?
Streamlining business processes and increasing efficiency are fundamental concerns for any organization, regardless of its size or industry. By implementing document management software, business leaders can improve organizational efficiency.
Document management software transforms the management of business-sensitive information, making it possible to:
Manage the storage, search, and retrieval of millions of documents, allowing users to access files in seconds.
Share documents with colleagues while protecting confidential information.
Automate time-consuming manual processes like filling in metadata and document naming.
What Does the Best Document Management Software Do?
Document management systems capture paper documents and a variety of electronic files while managing the storage, retrieval, security and archiving of these documents.
The document management process begins with the conversion of paper documents, forms and records to electronic files. This is considered Phase 1 of the Digital Transformation journey.
Conversion eliminates many of the obstacles created by paper: labor-intensive duplication procedures, slow distribution, misplaced originals and the inconvenience of retrieving files from off-site storage.
Document management systems have five basic components:
Desktop, web and mobile apps that make documents easy to locate and edit.
Folder structures to organize, store and archive documents.
Workflow functionality that automates tedious manual processes like filing and approval.
Security functionality to protect documents from unauthorized access or modification.
Learn more about the basics of document management here.
How Can Enterprise Document Management Software Save Time?
A recent PwC study reports that the average worker spends 40% of their time managing non-essential documents. In addition, IDC estimates that employees spend 20% of their day looking for information in hardcopy documents and that, 50% of the time, they can’t find what they need.
The best document management software can help you save time by:
Answering information requests from clients, citizens and auditors immediately.
Cutting time spent copying and distributing documents to staff, branch offices and outside contacts by digitizing file sharing.
Eliminating lost documents that must be recreated and refiled — and spending less time filing them once they’re found.
Establishing a secure, customizable digital repository for business-critical information, making it simple to search and modify files.
By implementing a document management solution, employees can stop spending time handling paper to start spending more time doing the work that matters: serving clients, citizens and students at maximum efficiency.
How Can Document Management Software Help Improve Efficiency?
Every organization relies on repetitive tasks to accomplish business goals. When it comes to standard, document-based processes like hiring and invoice processing, there are many ways a document management system can help your organization work faster and more effectively.
Enterprise document management software can help your organization increase efficiency with business process automation tools that:
Eliminate manual data entry, document naming and document filing.
Provide staff with information they need to quickly make decisions.
Alerts managers about employee action and inaction.
Make unstructured data (e.g. documents, emails, photographs, etc.) accessible, searchable, available and relevant.
Enable employees to share documents quickly and securely with clients.
Get more information about how document management software can help your organization optimize business processes and increase efficiency here.
What is the Biggest ROI in Enterprise Document Management Software?
Your organization generates large amounts of paper and electronic documents. Traditional methods of storing paper and electronic records require a great deal of effort to manage, distribute and find those documents. As your business grows, so do files, and so does the time and effort required to manage them.
Document management software simplifies business processes by allowing instant access to information, greater collaboration within and among departments and offices and enhanced security for files and records.
Learn how document management software can help your organization recapture lost hours, reduce overhead expenses and increase profitability—download The Document Management Buyer’s Guide today!
“Our municipal website is like having City Hall open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” says Deputy Clerk Maryanne Fair. “My office is only open from 8:00 A.M. until 5:00 P.M., but even after hours, people can still find what they need.”
The city customized Laserfiche with a file tree structure broken down into nine main entries covering different departments in City Hall. Each of those was then broken down again into folders for each department. According to IT Director John Presley, this file structure makes information easier to find for casual searchers, as curious residents searching city documents account for a lot of the traffic on the site.
City Clerk Phil Goodwin says, “Basic research questions have gone down by as much as two-thirds because people are already finding the info they need on their own.”
Freedom from FOIA Requests
Freedom of Information Act requests used to be an unpleasant subject around the offices of O’Fallon City Hall. FOIA requests, as they are better known, can be vexing for the city clerks who must respond to them. When submitted by laypersons in the community, they can be poorly worded and difficult to understand and respond to. When professionals file FOIA requests, they can be tedious and complex tasks requiring dozens—even hundreds—of hours to fulfill.
So, when a couple of attorneys filed a FOIA request for documents related to an O’Fallon construction project last year, the request looked like it would take two staffers a month each to fulfill. Then one of those staffers suggested sending the attorneys to the city’s Laserfiche WebLink public portal instead.
That was the last staff heard of that FOIA request.
“We sent them an email about Laserfiche WebLink and they did the rest,” Presley says. “They found everything they needed right there. It turned out to be a tremendous time saver for us—and for them.”
Presley points out the cost-effectiveness of having documents available through the Laserfiche WebLink public portal. “That FOIA request would have taken two staffers a full month to fill without Laserfiche WebLink,” he says. “With Laserfiche WebLink, the attorneys could search our documents themselves, which saved us thousands of dollars for just that one request.”
FOIA requests have dropped by at least 50 percent since the Laserfiche WebLink portal has been available, and a lot of the traffic comes from contractors doing business with the city, Presley says. They can submit RFPs much more quickly using Laserfiche WebLink because they can call up old contracts and cut and paste much of the perquisite text.
An Eye to the Future
The public is clearly responding to the increased access to government records. City Hall staffers are getting emails from potential FOIA filers saying they already found what they needed on Laserfiche WebLink, Presley says.
It’s not just O’Fallon residents and businesses benefitting.
“With the volume of usage we’re seeing, Laserfiche WebLink has paid for itself tenfold in staff time savings,” he says. “Now staff can concentrate on their primary role of running the city instead of running around and pulling documents for FOIA requests. FOIA used to be a real unpleasant word around City Hall. Now the subject doesn’t even come up.”
The site’s popularity has prompted O’Fallon to start planning to integrate the city’s GIS application with Laserfiche, opening public access to a vast store of government maps.
A records management strategy is vital to the life cycle of your organization’s information. At an organizational level, a records management strategy governs how information is created, stored, shared, tracked and protected.
Electronic records management (ERM) software simplifies the application of this strategy, helping to manage the life cycle of business records without interfering with your line of business. A records management application supports the automatic enforcement of consistent, organization-wide records policies, simplifying compliance with federal, state and industry regulations.
What are some best practices for managing electronic records?
Once you’ve decided to make the switch to an ERM system, there are four important points to consider.
1. Develop an information governance strategy
Before switching to electronic records, it is essential to design a comprehensive information governance strategy. An information governance strategy explores the breadth of content an organization manages, how content is organized and who should have access to it.
A good governance structure:
Enables staff to work in the most efficient and effective way possible by giving them access to information when they need it.
Outlines which user groups have access to which record types, simplifying the actual application of appropriate security within the ERM system.
Takes into account any state or regulatory requirements for record access or retention.
“Records management is a critical component in information governance, and organizations need information professionals who can incorporate records retention and management principles into all storage media architectures, automated systems and emerging technologies,” says Allen Podraza, Director of Records Management & Archives for the American Medical Association.
2. Evaluate certified records management systems
When switching to an ERM system, you may want to look at systems that are certified, particularly those certified to meet a set of requirements outlined in the Department of Defense (DoD) 5015.2 standard. The Department of Defense has rigorous requirements for ensuring that records are properly organized and managed. The DoD 5015.2 standard outlines requirements for managing classified records and includes requirements to support the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Privacy Act and interoperability.
Unless an organization provides services to the United States Department of Defense or one of its components, it is not typically required to meet the DoD 5015.2 certification. However, an ERM system that has been certified to meet stringent requirements for organizing file structures — and reliably preserving data — likely offers some of of the best tools available for properly maintaining records.
3. Ensure the electronic document can be legally presented as an official record
Before you switch to an electronic system, you must ensure that the electronic document can be legally presented as the official record. To meet state regulations, it is often important that the ERM software is compatible with a wide range of hardware components, such as optical, tape and magnetic-based WORM (write once, read many) storage.
Depending on where you live, the requirements may differ. For example, state agencies in California are required to maintain records “created or stored as an official record” using a trusted system.
A trusted system must:
Utilize both hardware and media storage methodologies to prevent unauthorized additions, modifications or deletions during the approved life cycle of the stored information.
Be verifiable through independent audit processes ensuring that there is no plausible way for electronically stored information to be modified, altered, or deleted during the approved information life cycle.
Write at least one copy of the electronic document or record into electronic media that does not permit unauthorized additions, deletions, or changes to the original document and that is to be stored and maintained in a safe and separate location.
4. Track the actions taken on the document
To form a complete record of organization-wide activity, the ERM system should track every action taken on each document throughout its life cycle, including what information was added and deleted. These reports should not only track each action, but also when and by whom it was performed.
These reports can be run regularly or on an as-needed basis. This whole process can also be automated and reports emailed to the appropriate people on a schedule.
An ERM system can generate system-wide reports on user logins, audit activity, document modifications and more.
Continue Your Journey
Fast track your digital transformation with the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace
Compare top enterprise content management (ECM) vendors on G2
Laserfiche offers records management features as part of a robust enterprise content management (ECM) system. Check out the G2 Grid® for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and compare top vendors on the market.
An Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system enables organizations to securely manage content and information throughout its lifecycle. It enables unstructured information — such as Word documents, PDFs, emails and scanned images — to be securely stored and made accessible to authorized users.
From commercial supply chains to contract management, HR processes to government administration, the driving force behind implementing an ECM solution is to do business more efficiently. By eliminating dependence on paper documents and organizing unstructured information according to business needs, organizations can simplify and streamline work.
Top 5 Elements of ECM
Listening to our customers over the years, we’ve found consistent goals for implementing ECM. Customers commonly rely on ECM to:
Decrease dependence on paper and streamline business processes.
Drive better customer service and increase productivity.
Reduce organizational risk.
Leading ECM solutions, including Laserfiche, accomplish these goals and more. Here are 5 key elements of an ECM solution:
1. Capture documents digitally
Managing an organization’s content begins with the capture and importing of information into a secure digital repository. This can be any kind of document that is created, captured, stored, shared or archived, including:
Invoices from vendors.
Resumes from job applicants.
Contracts.
Correspondence.
Research reports.
A few methods of capturing these documents include:
Using electronic forms to make documents digital from the point of creation.
Scanning paper documents to be filed in a digital repository.
Managing natively digital content, including Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, photos and videos.
Automatically filing and categorizing documents from servers, shared devices and network drives.
Traditional methods of capturing documents require a great deal of effort and expense. Capturing documents in a digital repository eliminates many of the obstacles created by paper: labor-intensive duplication, slow distribution, misplaced originals and the inconvenience of retrieving files from offsite storage.
Classify and search for documents based on metadata
Organize documents within a flexible folder structure.
The benefits of enterprise content management go far beyond document storage. An ECM system also reduces the time, cost and complexity associated with managing documents that require retention schedules, throughout their life cycle, assisting in efforts to bolster regulatory compliance.
3. Retrieve documents, regardless of device or location
Once an organization’s records have been securely stored, you can:
Identify specific words or phrases within document text, metadata, annotations and entry names.
Use preset search options to search by document creation date, the names of users who checked out documents and other metadata.
Enterprise content management software helps eliminate time spent searching for information, enabling employees to answer information requests from clients, citizens and auditors immediately. More than that, staff have instant access to the information required to make better decisions about issues that can your organization’s bottom line.
4. Automate document-driven processes
Automation helps organizations eliminate manual tasks — such as photocopying or even drag-and-dropping digital documents — to achieve greater results with fewer resources. Some ECM systems have digital automation features that can:
Automatically route documents to the right people at the right time.
Alert staff members when documents require their attention.
Recognize errors before they cause delays or make staff redo work.
Every day, businesses need purchase orders signed, records archived and employee vacation requests approved or denied. Automation moves these critical documents through the necessary steps of review and approval, in the order specified. The end result is processes that are more cost-efficient, streamlined and error-free.
5. Secure documents and reduce organizational risk
With strengthening compliance restrictions in a wide range of industries, organizations are increasingly using ECM systems to optimize records management practices and protect against risk. An enterprise content management system must provide customizable security settings to allow organizations to protect information from unauthorized access or modification. These settings should allow you to:
Restrict access to folders, documents, fields, annotations and other granular document properties as needed.
Monitor system login and logout, document creation and destruction, password changes and more.
Protect sensitive metadata by controlling access to information within individual folders, templates and fields.
Leading ECM solutions enable line of business departments to manage user access independently — which means sensitive HR information stays within the HR department, while private financial information stays within the finance department, even if the information is stored in the same repository.
What are some use cases for ECM?
An ECM can assist your organization in a variety of ways. Below are a few examples:
Accounts payable:Capture information from invoices and purchaser orders (POs), automate invoice matching and flag mismatches between invoices and POs.
Customer and client services: Provide secure, anytime access to documents customers and clients need with online portals hosting digital documents.
Remote and off-site work: Give those working from home or in the field the tools, content and services they need to do their jobs effectively.
Staffing and recruiting: Streamline approvals, paperwork, and everything else involved in bringing in new talent to your organization.
Information governance: Bolster your efforts to keep information secure and in compliance with a set of powerful records management tools.
Customer Spotlight: Learning Arts
Learn how Learning Arts, a company dedicated to the care of children with autism, leveraged ECM to share data about patients with their parents and behavior specialists in real-time to enhance care and programming.
Browse customer reviews of Laserfiche on G2
Get insights from real customers on why Laserfiche is a top choice for organizations looking to further their digital transformation with ECM.
As you can see, an ECM can help streamline a wide variety of processes. Below are some resources to help you continue exploring solutions to your business challenges.
Schedule a personalized Laserfiche demo
Most ECM platforms include a few of these 5 key elements, but category leaders — like Laserfiche — provide a complete ECM solution, helping your organization dramatically improve business processes. See first hand how Laserfiche can be your solution and schedule a demo.
Discover powerful solutions on the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace
Some of the more robust ECM systems, including Laserfiche, offer marketplaces for process templates you can use to jumpstart digital transformation initiatives. To learn more about the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace, watch the video below:
Explore Laserfiche’s 4 Steps to Innovation
Also be sure to check out the below infographic “Laserfiche 4 Steps to Innovation” to see how Laserfiche users can not only deploy solutions quickly, but get involved with a larger community of innovators.
Evaluate and shop for software more effectively with our buyer’s guide
Records management involves more than safely filing documents. Here are three top records management challenges organizations are facing today.
Making records easily accessible
Making records easier and faster to locate can be a challenge for most organizations, and especially large enterprises.
Organizations can simplify records searches by:
Digitizing records for viewing on computers, tablets or smartphones.
Applying metadata to records, so that they are instantly searchable by record type.
Use saved searches so it’s faster to locate the types of records you frequently search for.
Digitizing records and storing them in an ECM repository makes information easily accessible on computers, tablets or smartphones.
Complying with retention schedules
Organizations have a wide range of records retention schedules to comply with based on their industry and the types of records they deal with. Regulatory agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the US Department of Labor — among others — can impose strict fines on organizations that fail to follow the rules.
Auto-file newly created records according to industry regulations and corporate policies.
Set schedules for the retention, transfer and archival of records based on record type.
Group records in a series based on retention and disposition schedules.
Laserfiche can automatically retain, transfer and archive records based on the record type.
Preparing for audits
Organizations are frequently subject to audits as they manage records lifecycles. They need to prove to regulators that they retain records in compliance with retention schedules. An ECM system can bolster an organization’s efforts to prepare for an audit, with features that allow them to:
Monitor system events, such as login and logout, document creation and destruction, password changes and more.
Log user actions taken on smartphones and tablets.
Generate audit reports that specify what users changed within a system and when.
For example, investment advisory firm Hanson McClain easily prepares for audits by using Laserfiche records management tools to track the creation, deletion and modification of the documents stored in the repository. Even if a document is deleted, IT can still locate it, find out who deleted it and restore it in the repository.
Laserfiche can track every interaction with documents stored in the repository, including document creation, deletion and modification.
Managing risk for an entire organization can be challenging, but with a solid strategy and the right tools, you can be ready for whatever comes your way.
Headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Human Resources & Emiratisation aims to create a work environment characterized by efficiency, high quality and social integrity.
Established in 1971, the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Human Resources & Emiratisation (formerly the Ministry of Labour) has over 1,200 employees to serve and manage the UAE labour force. The ministry’s office used massive file cabinets to store all staff-related documentation, resulting in long document search and retrieval times.
These issues prompted the ministry to look for a digital solution to help organize its documents, maintain security and reduce retrieval times. In addition, the ministry wanted a system that would meet its archiving needs while allowing it to provide optimal customer service.
Ease of Use Contributes to Staff Buy-In
The Ministry of Human Resources & Emiratisation had relatively simple selection criteria; it wanted a solution that could meet its requirements and was easy to use. That is exactly what it found with Laserfiche.
Ahmad Al Nasser, IT Director at the ministry, explains, “We started the pilot, did it for 2-3 months, found it suitable, well defined and easy to use, and then purchased the solution.”
When there is change, resistance from staff is often expected. However, according to Al Nasser, “Our staff were very happy and satisfied with Laserfiche from the start.”
From an IT perspective, Al Nasser says, “The beauty of Laserfiche is the ease of implementation and configuration. We expected requests and changes, but surprisingly there was little need for modifications. Once things were set up in the beginning, it suited the users’ requirements and only minor questions came up. Those were accommodated quickly.”
Tackling HR, “the Heart of the Organization”
The HR department is responsible for managing all employee files in the HR archive room. Before implementing Laserfiche, new documents had to be physically inserted into existing employee files. There were complaints of lost documents and long retrieval times, which formed barriers for effective internal processes.
One of the first tasks was to capture and index documents for the 1,200 ministry employees, and electronically archive all the employee files. The original plan was to outsource the process of scanning the documents, then manually entering up to 14 index fields.
However, the ministry’s value-added reseller (VAR), Mazroui and Partners, recommended using Laserfiche to automate document capture and indexing. After documents are scanned in, Laserfiche reads document barcodes to automatically retrieve and add necessary metadata from the in-house HR database.
Laserfiche also simplified the ministry’s records management practices by automating the process of purging pertinent portions of files after a specific interval. When the expiration date for a document approaches, the HR office is notified through email, alerting it of the task to delete the relevant documents. Upon approval, the system then purges said document.
Immediate Benefits
Laserfiche makes it easy to manage employee records.
Using Laserfiche has allowed the Ministry of Labour to digitize the entire employee registry in-house instead of outsourcing the work. This will result in estimated savings of AED 700,000 over three years.
In addition, there has been an increase in the security of the organization’s physical files as well as strengthened disaster recovery procedures.
With servers based in Abu Dhabi and physical records in Dubai, the ministry’s data is not all in one location. Employees now have access to both hard and soft copies of documents. In the event of any data loss, documents are easily recovered due to regular backups of the ministry’s Laserfiche repositories.
Finally, the biggest savings can be seen in document search and retrieval times. Employee documents are found with one click and folders are quickly updated, reducing access times from half an hour to seconds.
Al Nasser recalls, “In the past, it would take HR two to three days to find a document, but within minutes I received a call telling me that the document was in my email.”
From an HR officer’s point of view, the auto indexing and exporting of files to the HR repository “is just magic.”
Ministry-Wide Rollout
Ahmad Al Nasser accepts a Laserfiche Run Smarter Award from CEO Chris Wacker at the Laserfiche Empower 2015 Conference.
What began as a pilot program in the human resources department has now expanded into the IT, administration, finance and legal departments, contributing to improvements in contract management and client services. Plans are in place to roll out Laserfiche across the entire Ministry of Labour in the coming year.
Aside from digitizing its documents, the ministry hopes to automate many of its current business processes, including the procurement process, which is currently one of the more paper intensive operations.
Al Nasser explains, “Laserfiche can help a lot with business process re-engineering. It’s a very easy and straightforward solution, which can make a big change in the organization.”
• The London Borough of Tower Hamlets embarked on a Digitisation Programme that prioritised digital information over paper, and automated workflows over manual activities. The goal was to use technology to stay ahead of residents’ needs, and deliver services with great efficiency at low cost.
SOLUTION
• Tower Hamlets Council began capturing information digitally in the Land Charges Service using Laserfiche, with metadata attached that enabled the borough to develop an automated way to process and keep new records.
RESULTS
• The digital-first approach streamlined content capture and archival in Land Charges, Planning and Building Control services, enabling faster decision making that was key in preparing for the 2012 Olympic Games, and creating significant cost savings in these services.
The London Borough of Tower Hamlets is one of the U.K.’s most culturally vibrant and diverse areas. Formed in 1965, the borough also includes a number of London’s famous attractions including the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Columbia Road Flower Market and Billingsgate Fish Market. The attractions of Bangla Town bring in thousands of tourists every year, and the area has won praise and recognition for its parks and open spaces. For centuries, the borough has welcomed and been home to many immigrants in Britain. Today, some 49% of residents are from black and minority ethnic (BME) communities; 33% are of Bangladeshi heritage, and there are also sizable Somali, Caribbean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian and Pakistani communities.
For centuries, the Tower Hamlets area was a key location within Britain’s port industry. Today, it has been transformed into one of London’s fastest growing and most densely populated boroughs. The population in the borough has doubled in the past 30 years, and is predicted to rise by almost 100,000 by 2031. Tower Hamlets Council is responsible for managing the area’s growth and development while continuing to provide residents with high quality services.
In 2007, the council embarked on a comprehensive Digitisation Programme, which began with a vision to bring Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) functionality to the council’s functions and processes.
Initially, many of the council’s services were heavily paper-based and inundated with on-site and archived documents. Searching for the correct documents became increasingly difficult and indexing all documents seemed impossible. The Land Charges Service was managing 15,000 paper files by hand — using a typewriter to register Land Charge entries on index cards. Information requests would routinely take the target turnaround time of 10 days. The Building Control Service had 1,500 boxes of 50,000 unscanned files — 3 million pages and 100,000 drawings. And the Town Planning Service was housing 400,000 paper files dating back to 1948.
“We had a ton of information held with a storage company,” says John Pulman, ICT client officer at the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. “Plus we had racks of storage internally, just filled with folders.”
In addition to needing a way to digitise this information, the council also required a solution that could easily integrate with a land management system that was already in place.
“Laserfiche really did meet all of our requirements and more,” explains Louis Du Preez, the IT project manager for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets when the project began. “It’s simple and flexible, and the integrations are extremely easy to do.”
The team worked with Laserfiche solution provider Global ECM Solutions to implement a digitalisation program in Land Charges. The previously paper-based departments were able to successfully capture information digitally using Laserfiche, with metadata attached that enabled the borough to develop an automated way to process and keep new records.
“With the council, Laserfiche was a bit of a pioneer,” says Pulman. “It opened the door to more flexible, paperless work, and the device agnostic/location agnostic setup that really fit into a digital workflow.”
Improving productivity with geo-spatial searches
Going beyond information storage, the borough launched an initiative to automate a number of business processes, including Building Control applications registration, monitoring of works and construction completions — which helped to eliminate time-consuming administrative tasks.
“It was great to have the peace of mind of knowing that with Laserfiche, you can start with a very small system and upgrade it to an enterprise-wide solution — and can still integrate with all the state-of-the-art software solutions at any time,” says Du Preez.
The Land Charges Service had a goal of automating geospatial searches which, before Laserfiche, felt impossible. All geospatial indexing was still being performed manually with a typewriter. Searches for information regarding a property often surpassed the turnaround time of 10 days since paper requests had to be manually sent to relevant departments.
In order to automate the search process, 15,000 files, each representing an area with a polygon drawn using ESRI GIS, were captured into the borough’s land management system, and scanned and indexed into Laserfiche. The automation shortened the search time from days to hours.
“Laserfiche is able to do what our other document management systems couldn’t,” Du Preez adds. “Large files can now be broken down electronically into smaller files that cover smaller geographic areas. The capturing became easier to do and information is now easily accessible to the users.”
Being able to perform automated and accurate geo-spatial searches helped Land Charges become more efficient, saving staff time and frustration. This same efficiency was applied to the Planning Service as well. All planning decisions from 1948 onward were captured by Laserfiche, which made for quicker access to planning decision histories and in turn, helped the borough streamline proposal review for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Integrating Laserfiche and Land Management
In the Building Control Service, 3 million pages in 38,000 files were scanned and indexed — some dating as far back as 1895 — eliminating 1,500 boxes taking up 40 square metres of office space. At the same time, Building Control decisions from as far back as 1986 were made available digitally.
In 2008, Laserfiche was integrated with the borough’s land management system, enabling all of the critical documents generated from the land management system to be directly stored into Laserfiche. The seamless integration meant that documents no longer had to be manually transferred, and town planning case files can now be viewed outside of internal servers through Public Registers or by external viewing folders, making service delivery to the public much more efficient and effective.
Internally, security rights are granted to appropriate staff allowing access to information such as drawings, emails and Microsoft Office format files directly from Laserfiche. Data accessibility has been improved and information can flow seamlessly across the service.
The Building Control team also used Laserfiche Workflow to automate administrative tasks, such as metadata entry and updates. Eliminating these small manual activities prevented errors, saved staff time and allowed for greater productivity.
By streamlining business processes, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets is now more transparent, and accessibility to information about local land charges has greatly improved. Automation of business processes has elevated staff morale through more efficient ways of working and collaboration. According to Philip J. Price, the project manager and business process consultant for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets at the time, “standardisation of actions that came from the business process analysis facilitated culture change in the workplace and our staff really feel more empowered.”
A Smarter Working Strategy
Like many other local governments, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets has seen a squeeze on budgets in recent years, however, over the past decade, Laserfiche-driven digitisation and automation initiatives have saved the borough a significant amount of money. The organisation had been working to adopt a more paperless, remote working environment, including an ability to work from home, before COVID-19 hit the country, but the pandemic kicked that initiative into high gear.”
“Even before COVID, we were reducing our office space enormously, and that’s continued to be the trend,” Pulman says. “Having this more paperless environment with more digital workflows in Laserfiche supports more flexible working. In the new working environment, offices are not where paper files are stored. You can just connect to work from whatever computer you are on. Modern workplaces have a device agnostic/location agnostic setup — Laserfiche workflow really enables that vision.”
With government cut-backs and councils looking for ways to do more with less, digitising Land Charges, Planning and Building Control services has helped the borough cut down on costs, become more efficient and provide better public services.
“Laserfiche has really played a fundamental part in our smarter working strategy. Across the board, all of our information is now easily accessible, which allows information to be viewed through various internal and external means and they are now only constricted by rights and no longer by technology limitations. Laserfiche helped overcome this,” says Price. “The Laserfiche ECM solution allowed us to raise efficiency while lowering costs. … I strongly feel that Laserfiche has had a profound impact on the organisation and it can continue to adapt with our Council’s evolving ECM strategy. It is truly a complete solution.”
An international engineering company headquartered in South Africa, the DCD Group is comprised of 12 business units in four different divisions: rail, mining and energy, marine and defense, with some companies in the group having been in operation for over 100 years. As a highly respected industry leader, DCD is always looking for innovative ways to provide top engineering services.
Dawie Marais, General Manager Support Services, had a vision to find an enterprise content management (ECM) solution that would eliminate administrative lags, improve the efficiency of business functions and add true value to the company. “It just made sense from a cost, support and maintenance standpoint to choose one ECM system that has flexible business process management tools that could be deployed in all our departments,” explains Marais.
Having one comprehensive solution like Laserfiche meant that we only have one system to oversee. We could cut down on the need for support, eliminate the extra time spent on overlapping systems, increase staff’s productivity and allow information accessibility throughout the enterprise—it was the most cost-effective choice.
Streamlining HR, saving $150,000 per year
The same contract employee may be re-hired up to four times a year at DCD’s Marine Division, depending on the amount of projects and the different skills needed at specific stages of each project. Over a short period of time, DCD’s contract staff can fluctuate between 300 and 2,500 employees, with most contracts lasting 90 days or fewer. Each year, 2,000 to 5,000 contracts are processed.
The huge amount of records associated with hiring and managing this temporary staff created a time-consuming and difficult administrative workload for HR staff. “Before implementing Laserfiche in our HR department, onboarding a new employee took 45 minutes,” Marais says. “Now, it only takes 15! Having Laserfiche has empowered our staff and made their work so much more efficient. They no longer have to search through stacks of employment records just to find something—all the files are now digitized.”
By using Laserfiche Forms and Laserfiche Workflow, the HR department was able to reduce the steps in the onboarding process for both staff and applicants.
The need for printing multiple paper documents was eliminated as applicants can use Laserfiche Forms to enter their information on a computer at the HR office.
Populated forms are directly routed into the Laserfiche repository by Laserfiche Workflow.
For new contracts, new folders are automatically created. For re-hired employees, existing folders are located and automatically updated, reducing the risk of errors and centralising the data.
To simplify change management and improve staff adoption, HR staff continued work from their existing human capital management system. Laserfiche is integrated into the back-end to help minimise time-consuming and manual administrative work.
Employee records are digitised and scanned into Laserfiche, freeing up physical storage space.
Authorised personnel are granted appropriate access to employee records, improving the flow of information.
With Laserfiche, we speed up our employment process, saving at least $150,000 a year and reducing administrative work by 50%,” Marais explains. “HR staff at DCD Group feel empowered by Laserfiche—it lifts a lot of pressure off our staff. There were minimal disruptions during the implementation since we could retain the familiar user interface; there were no additional username and passwords to remember; employee records are all scanned, making searches simple; and all employee details are now secure and in one, easy-to-find location.
Making purchase requisition paperless from start to finish
Before implementing Laserfiche, purchase requisition at DCD Group was a paper-based process, where employees manually searched for expense codes and descriptions before filling out each request by hand. This process was prone to mistakes; hand-written requests were difficult to read, and there were a lot of easily damaged paper documents. The approval process was also time-consuming, as the employees had to physically track down the appropriate manger to get approval.
Using Laserfiche Workflow and Laserfiche Forms, DCD Group succeeded in making the entire purchase requisition process paperless, increasing efficiency and productivity. Thomas Matthee, Manager Systems Development and Implementation, adds, “Laserfiche simplified the purchase requisition process. Staff used to have to run around trying to find the right person for authorisation. Sometimes the managers just weren’t available and there were times where the requests didn’t even get looked at or they got lost. Now, everything is transparent.”
The new, streamlined purchase requisition process works as follows:
Requests are now made through Laserfiche Forms, where departments and expense codes can be easily selected through drop-down lists, reducing administrative work and minimising errors.
Laserfiche Workflow sends the appropriate manager a notification of the request and directly routes the populated forms for approval.
Once approved, the workflow will automatically route the request to completion.
Matthee notes, “I would estimate a minimum of 15 minutes per requisition is saved by using Laserfiche, boosting staff productivity. Employees now spend less time on administrative tasks, and they don’t have to file extra paper work or worry about lost documents. With Laserfiche, automating business processes is so easy.”
Producing efficient and compliant project documentation
For the manufacturing process in the mining and rail sectors, mandatory certifications are done through the submission of data packs, which contain testing information, documents, welding certificates, drawings, and quality assurance information. It was a constant challenge to manage the data packs, which could involve anywhere from five to 50 boxes—all ordered by date and free of duplication.
Before we implemented Laserfiche,” says Marais, “the administrative work involved was a nightmare to handle. It was difficult to keep track of the versions of the documents and also the duplications. And once we’d organised the paper documents, we’d have to send all of the boxes over to our clients. There was too much room for error and damage during the whole process.
He explains that DCD Group needed to find an ECM solution that would meet the company’s stringent quality assurance standard while decreasing the administrative burden placed on employees. “Today, all data packs are submitted electronically, which increases document security while decreasing costs. We also have a check in/check out process where only one copy of the most up-to-date document is stored in the Laserfiche repository and only one person can update it at a time,” says Marais. “By digitising and automating this process, we’ve improved productivity and boosted staff morale.”
Driving efficiency across the organisation
Marais particularly appreciates that Laserfiche is not limited to one department. “Laserfiche’s deployment flexibility made it easy for us to implement it in multiple departments, including Human Resources, Sales and Marketing, Quality Assurance, Scheduling, Project Management, Planning, Buying, Finance and Maintenance,” he says. “At DCD Group, we believe it is important not to chase technology but to find a technology that truly adds value to our company. With Laserfiche, we continue to increase our overall operational efficiency and gain more value from the system.”
Here on the ECM Blog, we talk a lot about the roles and responsibilities of records managers—but not all organizations actually have records managers. In the case of human resources (HR), maintaining employee records often falls on the HR department itself.
HR professionals shouldn’t spend too much time acting as records managers, yet it’s crucial to comply with government and company policies regarding employee files. How can HR professionals balance compliance with the core responsibilities of HR? The key lies in three words: Transparent Records Management.
Here’s why managing employee records is difficult and how Transparent Records Management can be used in organizations without a dedicated records manager.
The Challenge of HR Records Management
Records management is the practice of filing, retaining and destroying company records in accordance with government and industry regulations.
The challenge is that most employees aren’t thinking in terms of records management when they create and use documents. Regular employees organize documents based on their daily needs, not the rules of retention and destruction set forth by the IRS, state governments and so on.
For example, an HR professional might prefer to organize her files by employee name. She creates a new folder for each new employee and keeps it in a file cabinet. But within each employee’s file is a mixture of documents—each with different records management requirements. Imagine how time-consuming it would be to search through every employee file for W4s during tax season or manually locate records that are ready for disposition.
A first step toward better records management is implementing enterprise content management (ECM) software, which allows organizations to store records in an electronic repository. This solves the problem of manually sifting through cabinets of employee files, but it does not change the way an HR professional organizes employee files—arranging them by employee name is still the most logical approach for an HR professional. Fortunately, there’s a way to retain this file structure and still make records management easier for HR.
Transparent Records Management to the Rescue
Transparent Records Management allows the same ECM repository to be viewed in two different ways. For HR, one view can display employee records by employee name while a second view displays employee records by record type: applications, insurance documents, tax documents and so forth.
“Records management” view on the left; “regular” view on the right.
This ability to arrange the same repository of employee files in two different ways is key to efficient HR records management. Regular HR employees can access a folder structure relevant to their jobs while a designated HR administrator sees a folder structure designed for records management.
The important thing to remember here is that transparent records management provides two views of the same repository, not two separate repositories. The “regular” view actually contains shortcuts to the original documents. This means that if a document is edited in the “regular” view of the HR repository, that change is reflected in the “records management” view as well—sort of like The Matrix. This function of transparent records management prevents unnecessary duplication of documents and ensures information consistency.
“This process saves time on administrative tasks and provides immediate document access from any of the bank’s branches. For example, if a customer questions a check, the signature card can quickly be found in Laserfiche and a copy of the signature can be instantly retrieved for verification.
Like many other local governments, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets has seen a squeeze on budgets in recent years, however, over the past decade, Laserfiche-driven digitisation and automation initiatives have saved the borough a significant amount of money. The organisation had been working to adopt a more paperless, remote working environment, including an ability to work from home, before COVID-19 hit the country, but the pandemic kicked that initiative into high gear.”
