Bremer County

Bremer County, IA, faced a problem not unique to modest-sized municipalities: after making a significant investment in a document management system to manage its land records, users had a hard time letting go of the paper. “Scanning files was a very manual process—it took hours to scan and index even small stacks of paper,” remembers Nate Koehler, Bremer County IT Administrator. “Staff would get frustrated and just not use the system at all.”

Besides the already low user adoption rate, the county faced stringent formatting for annual submission of digital copies of its land management records (“fee book pages”) to the state’s County Land Records Information Services (CLRIS) agency—now the Iowa Land Records System (ILR)—utilizing an application provided by the state to upload images. Or at least it was supposed to.

“We were never able to get this integration set up with our old system,” Koehler admits. “We had to pay the ILR an extra $2,500 in fees because we were simply unable to submit our images to the state.”

Agility in Action, Part 1: A New System for Less Than an Upgrade

By January of 2010, Koehler faced a challenge—and a choice. The county was on version 5 of EMC Application Xtender (AX), and it was being phased out by provider EMC/Documentum. So not only was Koehler’s team facing a mandatory upgrade, but also a service agreement renewal. And they were still likely facing $2,500 annually in fees to the state for fee book page submission.

“We were looking at a substantial enough reinvestment to retain our current system that it made sense to start looking at other solutions,” he says.

Koehler researched other CLRIS/ILR-approved systems and discovered Laserfiche via Advanced Systems, Inc. (ASI) based nearby in Waterloo, IA, which had a relationship with the county from servicing its printer and copiers. ASI solutions consultant Steve Lewis showed Koehler how the Laserfiche Quick Fields Zone OCR component could capture and index information from specific areas of land records forms, which could then be used to submit images to ILR utilizing the state’s uploading application.

What’s more, implementing Laserfiche could address all of the county’s information management needs in a single system—at less cost than upgrading its existing system.

Agility in Action, Part 2: Deployment to Six Departments in Two Months

In March 2010, Bremer County purchased a 24-user Laserfiche Avante system with Laserfiche Quick Fields advanced capture, Laserfiche Import Agent and Laserfiche SDK. Just two months later, Laserfiche was successfully deployed to six county departments:
  • Auditor
  • Treasurer
  • Attorney
  • Recorder
  • Assessor
  • Building and Zoning

Each department was equipped with a scan station that Shane Peterson, solutions engineer at Advanced Systems, set up to automatically recognize and retrieve index information based on the standard forms used by each department.

The impact on scanning efficiency was immediate: in the Assessor’s office, four stacks of tax credit forms two feet tall were scanned and indexed within a few days. “Laserfiche Quick Fields automated all our scanning processes in all our departments,” Koehler says.

Agility in Action, Part 3: Six Months of Scanning in Less Than a Week

To illustrate the scale of improvement, Koehler uses the example of Bremer County’s Zoning Department. “Zoning was six months behind on their scanning,” he begins. “It would have taken staff over a month and a half to scan in all those documents using our old system. Instead, using Laserfiche Quick Fields, we were able to get those documents scanned in less than a week.”

At the same time, Koehler adds, staff who had given up on the previous system and scanning in general have warmed up to Laserfiche. “I am starting to see more people getting rid of the paper and using Laserfiche,” he says.

The end result of significantly improved scanning, Koehler says, is the reclaimed staff time. “We can devote the man hours we save from scanning for other projects.”

Agility in Action, Part 4: Integration Saves $2,500 in Fines

By November of 2010, Bremer County was submitting land records’ fee book pages automatically to the ILR, thanks to a combination of Laserfiche Quick Fields, Laserfiche Workflow and a custom integration developed by ASI:
  • When staff in the Recorder’s Office scan land records, Laserfiche Quick Fields automatically retrieves index information from the image utilizing Zone OCR and Pattern Matching.
  • Laserfiche Workflow then sends the image from a processing folder to a completed folder in the Laserfiche repository, where a custom integration exports the image and index information into an XML file.
  • The XML file is then used to send the image to the state.
  • This index information is then searchable by both the county and the state to tie the image to other pertinent index information about the land record.

Koehler says this process is not only more efficient, but more cost-effective, too. “We’re no longer charged $2,500 in fines for not providing the digital documents to the state that was such a problem with our old system,” he says.

Agility in Action, Part 5: Adding the Sheriff’s Office and More

The newest chapter of Bremer County’s information management overhaul has been the 2011 addition of five more named users for the Sheriff’s Office, which will use its own repository to catalogue video, photographs, ticketing, incident reports and other documents. The expanded implementation will include Laserfiche Web Access to enable the county attorney to retrieve information without going to the Sheriff’s Office to request that a detective put files on a disk for the attorney to review.

Koehler notes that with the addition of the Sheriff’s Office comes enhanced document security concerns. “We’ll be utilizing the auto-redaction capabilities of Laserfiche Quick Fields for more sensitive information, but we’re also able to manage the system from a central point of control,” he says.

Laserfiche use, Koehler predicts, will keep growing with each departmental success story. “The remaining three departments that don’t use Laserfiche are seeing how much the other departments love its ease of use and speed, so they’re starting to ask how they can use it too.”

City of Shakopee

When making the case for upgrading Shakopee, MN, to Laserfiche Avante, Carrie Duckett, the city’s Information Technology Coordinator, did her due diligence. “To date, there hasn’t been one Minnesota city that’s purchased Laserfiche and left for one of its main competitors. But in 2010 alone, six of the state’s cities and counties migrated onto Laserfiche from a competitive system.”

She ticks off a few of the benefits that give Laserfiche a leg up on the competition: “First, Laserfiche is easy to use, because it looks and functions like Windows and Google. Second, it’s stable and easy for the IT department to maintain. Third, it has an open API that makes it easy to integrate with our other applications.”

These benefits, Duckett notes, are vital to Shakopee, which has a two-person IT department supporting approximately 125 city staff in nine different departments. In fact, if Laserfiche wasn’t easy to use, maintain and integrate, the city wouldn’t have considered shaking up its approach to enterprise content management (ECM) by upgrading from four concurrent users to a 50-user Laserfiche Avante system.

Leading Up to the Upgrade

“We first implemented Laserfiche in 2005, using it to manage building permits through an integration with our PIMS building permit software,” Duckett explains, outlining how the process works:
  • “We print barcoded permits that our records clerk scans into Laserfiche Quick Fields, which is an automated data capture solution.
  • “Within Laserfiche Quick Fields we have an ODBC connection that connects to the PIMS database.
  • “Laserfiche Quick Fields pattern matches the permit address, permit type and permit ID and automatically archives the document in the Laserfiche repository.”

She also notes that the city has long used Laserfiche to manage council agenda packets and other miscellaneous items, some of which are made available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink, a browser-based thin client that provides read-only access to public information.

The desire to upgrade the system came last year, when the police department hopped on the Laserfiche bandwagon. “In October 2010,” Duckett says, “the police department started using Laserfiche for evidence photos, and we integrated Laserfiche with the PD’s case management system, to enable officers to automatically open photos that pertain to specific cases.”

Jennifer Boudreau, Shakopee’s Police Records Technician, explains that one way the PD leverages the integration is to track graffiti, making it easier for officers to identify all instances of a tagger’s work so the city can recoup clean-up costs.

Boudreau notes that in the past, search options were limited. With Laserfiche, officers can search photos by case number, but they can also search based on the metadata associated with each photo. This makes it easier to discern patterns that might not have otherwise been apparent.

Now that Shakopee has upgraded to Laserfiche Avante, the police department is looking forward to scanning all case files into the system. “Right now, case documents are contained in a paper file, which eliminates collaboration and the ability to work on the case at the same time as someone else,” says Boudreau. “As a result, we end up doing a lot of photocopying, which wastes paper. It can also get confusing to have so many copies of the same document floating around, because you never know which is the most current, complete version.”

Further, she explains that Laserfiche will be able to store more than copies of paper documents; where applicable, electronic case files will also contain audio files, squad car video and so on.

Since the Upgrade

Less than a month after implementing its 50-user Laserfiche Avante system, Shakopee has already brought the finance department onboard. It now uses Laserfiche Quick Fields to scan barcoded accounts payable documents into the repository, where they’re instantly searchable from the desktop.

“With the upgrade to Laserfiche Avante, which for us included the ‘Barcode and Validation’ and ‘Real Time Lookup and Validation’ packages, we can now use the pattern matching feature in Laserfiche Quick Fields, which automatically creates the folder structure in Laserfiche,” explains Duckett. “This creates a more efficient and seamless process for the users who scan documents into the system.”

She adds that once the police department starts using Laserfiche for its case files, it will use Laserfiche Quick Fields for its scanning, as well.

The next department to start using Laserfiche will likely be HR, which wants to use the system to digitize employee records and automate the hiring process using Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management tool that automatically performs specified actions (such as document routing) based on organizations’ unique business rules.

According to Duckett, this is just the beginning. “We hope to have every department using Laserfiche by this time next year.”

Additional Integrations

With the case management integration well underway, and the integration with the city’s PIMS building permit software already in place, Shakopee has big plans for linking Laserfiche to additional city applications. “Next, we plan to integrate Laserfiche with GeoLink, our GIS/mapping application,” says Duckett. “When you click on a land parcel, you’ll be able to launch Laserfiche and pull up all the documents associated with that particular piece of land.”

This functionality will be useful for multiple departments, including:
  • The police department, which will use it for crime mapping.
  • The fire department, which will be able to quickly retrieve building plans during emergencies.
  • The public works department, which will gain easy access to sewer information.

She goes on to explain that the city is also looking to integrate Laserfiche with JDE, Shakopee’s finance, payroll and HR software. “By integrating these two systems—and taking advantage of Laserfiche Workflow—we’ll be able to simplify the payment cycle with electronic invoices and purchase orders that can be automatically routed through the approval process. Once we digitize our HR records, we’ll be able to automate the hiring process as well.”

From Duckett’s perspective as an IT professional, the best thing about the planned integrations is how easy they’ll be to set up. “Because Laserfiche is used across so many cities and government entities, there are a lot of proven, pre-built integrations available to us at no additional cost.”

Laserfiche Avante = Affordability

In terms of cost-effectiveness, Duckett also appreciates how affordable it was to upgrade to Laserfiche Avante. “If we’d stayed with a concurrent user system and simply purchased the additional functionality and users we needed, it would have cost us $40,000 more than the upgrade to Laserfiche Avante,” she explains. “Plus, our named users now have 24/7 access to information, which is important from a productivity standpoint.”

She concludes, “Although it’s early in the implementation process, we’re starting to see financial and efficiency savings in the finance, building and police departments. Once we extend Laserfiche to all city departments and start creating workflows, we expect to save a lot more on paper and printing costs, and we also expect to greatly enhance employee efficiency.

“It’s our goal to have Laserfiche installed on every desktop in the city. We envision that it’ll be used as often as our email client, providing instant access to records, streamlining business processes and allowing us to move data across multiple platforms.”

How Franklin County Deployed Laserfiche Enterprise-Wide

SITUATION

• Needed to make information more accessible to those who needed it
• Safeguarding sensitive data and compliance with recordkeeping requirements is a high priority

RESULTS

• Centralized documents and records
• Strengthened information governance across the organization
• Simplified the audit process

Ed Yonker joined the Franklin County IT department in 2004, after spending many years in the banking industry. “Government is a different world,” he explained. “Because of its size and structure, it’s a lot harder to implement new technology and get everyone on the same page.”

With approximately 150,000 residents, Franklin County comprises 52 different departments, including the Commissioners’ Office, Human Resources, Human Services and Risk Management, to name just a few. Yonker noted that these departments “operate like 52 separate businesses under the same umbrella.”

In this kind of environment, it’s especially important to establish enterprise-wide IT standards to promote consistency and cross-departmental collaboration, Yonker said. However, it’s often difficult to find technology that’s agile enough to meet the needs of many different departments and flexible enough to adapt quickly and cost-effectively to changing conditions.

“It’s hard to convince all the different departments that they can all use the same system,” said Yonker. “Because of that, we didn’t start out thinking Laserfiche was going to be enterprise technology. But after the enterprise content management seed was planted in one department, suddenly all our departments wanted to know more.”

The Beginning: Going Digital in the Commissioners’ Office

Franklin County worked with Laserfiche solution provider ICC Community Development Solutions to implement Laserfiche, with the county’s earliest adopters being in the Commissioners’ Office. “We had some younger commissioners come in, and they were more familiar with technology and the benefits it could have for Franklin County than previous commissioners had been,” explained Jean Byers, deputy chief clerk in the Commissioners’ Office. “They selected Laserfiche for its instant search capabilities, as well as the fact that we could install it directly on the computers already in use.

“We immediately realized tremendous benefits from Laserfiche,” she added. “Documents that used to take days to find became available with the click of a button. It used to take hours to find specific text within meeting minutes that were hundreds of pages long, but with Laserfiche it only took seconds.”

Laserfiche also made it easy to share documents with colleagues, and due to its intuitive interface, Laserfiche quickly became popular with both management and staff.

The Evolution of an Enterprise Standard

As Laserfiche took root in the Commissioners’ Office, other departments began to take notice. With their focus on compliance and prudent financial management, both the Fiscal Office and the Controller’s Office deployed Laserfiche shortly after the success in the Commissioners’ Office.

“Laserfiche is great for accounts payable functions and auditing. For AP, instant document retrieval speeds and simplifies the review and approval of invoices. And with electronically stored documents, employees can quickly and easily pull the files needed to satisfy an auditor’s request, with no need to spend hours digging through file cabinets. That’s a pretty impressive efficiency boost right there.”

Ed Yonker, CIO (retired), Franklin County

Yonker notes that rolling Laserfiche out to additional departments was an easier sell than other system expansions because there was buy-in from the top right from the start.

“Whenever county purchases exceed a certain amount, they need to be approved by the commissioners,” he explains. “Because the commissioners were already very familiar with the value of using Laserfiche, they never hesitated to give the go-ahead when other departments wanted to get on board.”

The next departments to raise their hands and ask for Laserfiche were Human Services, which was particularly excited about Laserfiche from a disaster recovery standpoint, and Human Resources.

Digitizing Human Resources

The first thing the HR department did after implementing Laserfiche was to start scanning personnel files into the system and develop a folder structure that separated employees’ employment records from their confidential medical records and discipline files.

A few of the benefits of this digital transformation include:
  • Reduced paper consumption: The department used to photocopy hundreds of thousands of pages of job applications a year for review by elected officials; today, officials have access to everything they need in Laserfiche.
  • Reclaimed time from searching for information: Laserfiche’s search capabilities makes it easy for staff to find the information necessary to do their jobs, along with fulfilling ad-hoc requests from directors for material from an employee’s personnel file for various purposes.
  • Higher staff productivity: “Doing more with less” is a familiar adage for local governments, and Franklin County is no exception. The county’s Laserfiche system accelerates processes and eliminates manual tasks so that staff can focus on the work that matters.
  • Reduced document storage space and cost: The county was able to remove a large 1,500 file-capacity cabinet in addition to five other standing file cabinets, allowing for more space for staff.
  • Easier audits: Digital files and a standard folder structure streamline audits for the county and enable the HR department to easily show compliance with recordkeeping mandates. The department no longer has to stop work on all other projects in order to organize for the audits.

In addition to managing personnel files in Laserfiche, the HR department has also added recruitment documentation and union and arbitration files to the system, which has led to quicker resolution of grievances.

“Franklin County is a forward-looking organization— which is reflected in their use of Laserfiche,” said Sandy Hess, sales operations manager at ICC Community Development Solutions. “By implementing an enterprise-wide system of record, the county has been able to preserve and protect the information that’s important to the county, while enabling staff to operate in a streamlined, responsive way that today’s employees and citizens appreciate.”

Laserfiche Rolls Across the Enterprise

With some technologies, organizations hit a tipping point for enterprise adoption. For Franklin County, that tipping point for Laserfiche was the implementation in HR.

“After HR deployed Laserfiche, everybody started to ask for it,” Yonker recounts. “People saw how successful the HR implementation was, and they began to talk about what the benefits for their departments could be.”

As Laserfiche was adopted by more and more departments, the types of content stored in the system grew more and more diverse:
  • Emergency Services uses Laserfiche to manage notes from its 911 calls and cases.
  • Franklin County Jail stores inmate records and requests in the Laserfiche repository.
  • Planning, which is tasked with fostering the proper growth of communities within Franklin County, manages new development records with Laserfiche.
  • Open Records, with its goal of making government transparent to County citizens, makes plans, drafts and studies stored in Laserfiche available to the public.
  • Real Estate manages audit reports and past voting results using Laserfiche. It is also able to respond to 13,000 queries a week in a fast and efficient manner thanks to Laserfiche’s ability to email digital documents.

Although the IT Department had not initially planned to implement Laserfiche as the county-wide standard for ECM, it’s now grateful to have that consistency in place. “We got rid of a couple departments’ antiquated imaging systems in order to move them onto Laserfiche, which makes my staff more efficient because it only has to administer the one ECM system. It’s also easier from a user training perspective, since everybody’s using the same thing,” Yonker said.

4 Ways to Drive Collaboration Among Departments

A company with internal strife among departments is like a person who constantly trips over his own feet. Progress is nil, and the potential for self-destruction is almost comical. Glassdoor is an employer review site that reveals the best—and worst—companies to work for. Employees at low rated companies frequently mention “poor communication” and “disorganization” in their reviews, which are key indicators that collaboration is lacking. Not coincidentally, several of these companies have also been rated poorly by their customers. Here are four ways an organization can drive interdepartmental collaboration, which can ultimately improve customer service.

1. Focus on the Main Goal

In BOOM!: 7 Choices for Blowing the Doors Off Business-As-Usual, authors Kevin and Jackie Freiberg point out that firefighters, police forces and other first responders rarely get caught up in “tribalistic” or fragmented behavior when working together because there is no confusion as to what their goal is: saving lives. Collaboration comes a lot easier when every department realizes and works toward a shared goal. It’s no longer about every department for itself—it’s about working together to accomplish the larger enterprise mission.

2. Start from the Top

A culture of collaboration ultimately begins with the leadership team. According to leadership development consultant Susan Cucuzza, collaboration can turn into competition when it isn’t managed well. “Because collaboration consists of interdisciplinary groups trying to come together, intended collaboration can turn into whose idea is better, whose solution should be followed and who is smarter,” says Cucuzza. Having departmental leaders step up to oversee collaboration is a great start. Cucuzza argues that even informal or unofficial leaders can be a huge help in determining who needs to be involved, helping everyone understand the benefits of collaborating and identifying the overall goal.

3. Whiteboard the Collaborative Processes

A large part of understanding how departments fit together to achieve the organization’s mission is knowing what and how a department contributes to a process. Several companies that have gone through company-wide system updates strongly suggest “whiteboarding” their processes, or gathering teams and departments together to understand multi-department tasks. Extensively “whiteboarding” every process was helpful for two reasons:

  1. With the entire team in the room, everyone was able to see how every role contributed to each process.
  2. Everyone involved had a chance to provide input on how to make the process better and to officially agree on how new processes would work.

Of course, it isn’t necessary to wait for a system overhaul to get to know the departments around the organization. Bringing teams together is a proactive way to give departments the opportunity to learn about each other and discover:

  • What other departments do.
  • What tasks require which departments.
  • How departments support each other.
  • What pressures, roadblocks and barriers other departments face in carrying out the enterprise mission.

4. Communicate More Effectively with Tech Tools

Conference meetings aren’t always the best way to communicate, and emails aren’t always the best method to exchange ideas. An enterprise content management (ECM) system can facilitate interdepartmental communication and collaboration by:

  • Capturing documents and automatically filing them, making it easier for everyone—regardless of department—to find the right information.
  • Providing versioning control so everyone references—and edits—the current copy of a document.
  • Automating notifications to remind team members of upcoming deadlines.

There’s no room for overly competitive departments bickering with each other in today’s competitive landscape. When departments cooperate to achieve organizational goals, tasks are completed faster and more efficiently, which can ultimately translate to a better customer experience.

Many business processes, such as employee onboarding or A/P, require interdepartmental collaboration. How can you improve these processes so that departments are in sync? Download the free guide How to Diagram Your Business Process and get started!

Solving Tax Season Headaches

SITUATION

• Manual processes took too long, and information was too hard to find in a legacy document management system.
• As the business grew, it needed a new solution that would reclaim time to spend with clients.

SOLUTION

• Immediate savings of 20,000 per year from not having to hire part-time clerks for tax season.
• Reduced tax preparation time, saving thousands of hours per year that can now be directed toward client service.

For a leading total wealth management and financial planning firm, tax season regularly meant doubling staff due to the sheer volume of work — and paperwork.

But as the business steadily grew, the firm had also outgrown what its chief operating officer called its “Stone Age document management system.”

In one attempt at a solution, the firm developed a proprietary and non-SQL based system, which was an add-on module for the firm’s tax preparation software, “purely for storage,” the COO said. Data transfer to PDF was difficult and error-prone, and “we were essentially scanning to create a back-up for the actual physical file. But that was unreliable — we lost data once, and it had no security or audit trail of any sort.”

From Paperless to Purposeful: An ECM Vision Takes Shape

Eventually, the firm’s files — containing 10 years of data — were simply too big to manage and too hard to find. “We’d already added a scanning clerk and a designated file clerk, but it was quickly becoming an operational nightmare, with more staff to manage and more documents getting misplaced,” the COO said, adding that the firm needed to reassess its vision for digital transformation to go beyond simply going paperless. “We first looked into Laserfiche in 2006, but back then, we weren’t looking at ECM in terms of business process automation or any bigger-picture operational improvements. We just wanted to get rid of the paper.”

The firm began to see how integral a content services platform was to not only keep up with, but also anticipate, the organization’s projected growth. “We looked at a few solutions, and they all did things in their own way. Only Laserfiche offered the flexibility to develop our own folder structures and templates — and we’d be able to change them depending on requirements without calling in a consultant, the COO added. “Plus, we required that Laserfiche integrate with our Microsoft Dynamics CRM and [our] tax software, as well as send Microsoft Office documents directly to Laserfiche. We wanted everything to mesh together. Other systems either didn’t integrate, or if they did, it was going be complicated and expensive.”

Laserfiche Workflow Saves Thousands of Hours Per Year

With a looming tax deadline, the organization focused its initial deployment of Laserfiche on the tax preparation side of the business, beginning with a substantial backlog conversion of paper files. “It took around 30 days to deploy, customize and integrate the system,” the COO said. “We had one day of training for full-time staff. And it took me 30 minutes to train the part time staff on how they’d be using Laserfiche.”

The ease of deployment was significant based in no small part on Laserfiche’s ability to mirror the firm’s familiar paper filing structures. The firm set up Laserfiche as the single source of truth: Tax worksheets were automatically sent to Laserfiche with a single click from Microsoft Office programs, while Laserfiche also collected all forms from the tax software.

A Laserfiche Workflow automatically routes files between staff and clients. “A file used to ‘jump’ between seven sets of hands, from client meeting to the client delivery,” the COO said. “File clerk to front desk staff to preparer to checker to scanner to processor to mail clerk — and back to the file clerk.

“Now, using Laserfiche Workflow, the front desk sets up the appointment and creates the file for the preparer, and it’s just ‘click’ the field, ‘approve,’ ‘approve,’ ‘approve,’ all the way through the process. If something isn’t approved, it is sent back automatically with a ‘sticky note’ on the document in Laserfiche. Nobody has to leave their desk, and I can monitor the whole process and see where everything is so I know what’s getting done. It just raises the level of efficiency and accountability,” the COO added. “Instead of people getting up and moving files from cabinets, it ‘jumps’ by itself.”

And benefits went beyond removing the burden of manual routing from staff. “Operationally, we had the best tax season ever, especially for me since I could monitor every detail of the business and everyone’s performance from my screen,” the COO said. “We made our ROI in the first year alone. But the biggest savings was the preparers’ time — at least 10 minutes for every hour. When you add that up, that’s literally a thousand hours our staff can spend working with more clients.”

Expanding Deployment, Saving More Clicks with Image-enablement Integration

Solving Tax Season Headaches“We’re taking things step by step,” the COO said. “One thing we’ve learned from this process is that in order for the transition to a totally paperless environment to be successful, users have to accept it and want to use it. Laserfiche has the flexibility to make that happen.”

From an operations standpoint, the COO explains, they are very satisfied. “Laserfiche is easy to maneuver and to develop and change.”

Hanover County

Located just outside of Richmond, VA, Hanover County serves a population of more than 100,000 residents. During tax season, keeping up the books for the constituency can be a daunting task for the Commissioner of Revenue’s Office, which manages all of the county’s real estate, personal, property and state income tax information.

The department purchased Laserfiche to eliminate paper processes and decrease the time staff spent finding and filing tax records.

It began using Laserfiche as a digital file cabinet and digitized over 85% of its tax documents in the first year.

When the department’s systems administrator, Amy Johnson, attended a user meeting hosted by the county’s reseller, Unity ECM, she saw how other organizations were leveraging Laserfiche’s advanced functionality. She knew Hanover County could use Laserfiche to do more than document search and retrieval.

To take advantage of Laserfiche’s newest features, the county upgraded to Laserfiche Rio and started revamping entire business processes.

Improving Document Approval with Workflow

Even without a background in IT, Johnson quickly began using Laserfiche Workflow to automate important departmental processes.

For example, every year the office completes statutory assessment worksheets to measure the personal property assets of each local business in the county. Before Laserfiche, compiling and processing these worksheets prior to review led to significant printing costs and time delays.

With Laserfice:
  • An integration between Laserfiche Quick Fields and the department’s AS/400 database has the eliminated cumbersome, upfront manual data entry.
  • Laserfiche Workflow automates the entire records approval process. New worksheets are immediately searchable in Laserfiche from managers’ desktops, allowing staff to quickly review worksheets and better serve customers.
  • With Laserfiche Snapshot, an image capture tool, the office has eliminated redundant printing of records. “Snapshot seems like a minor thing, but it was a huge benefit for us because we don’t have to print paper anymore,” says Johnson, estimating that the system saves the office from printing about 15,000 pages a year.

Automating Records Management

The county also relies on Laserfiche as an automated backbone for records management and retention. With paper, each staff member dedicated at least one day a week to sorting records for filing. Laserfiche has eliminated the need for this rotating position by automatically filing and storing approved documents by type and name for the six-year retention period.

“Everything we do is linked onto a foundation based on Laserfiche Records Management Edition, which allows us to log our records according to state records management standards,” says Johnson.

Getting Buy-in

Johnson says that upfront planning with every employee involved in the process has eased the office’s transition to digital document approval. When she began using Laserfiche Workflow, Johnson invited all the managers responsible for approving documents, along with the division manager, to join her as she drew out the process on a piece of paper. The group discussed every step together and determined how the managers would prefer to approve worksheets in Laserfiche.

“Time spent diagramming upfront will more than pay itself back later. Because we took the time to evaluate our documents, we ended up eliminating a lot of junk in our paper files,” notes Johnson. “It’s also really important to give staff ownership over the process.”

Tapping into the Laserfiche User Community

Beyond her work at the county, Johnson is also a leader of the Laserfiche User Group in Virginia, a consortium of Laserfiche users that holds quarterly meetings to foster the exchange of ECM knowledge. The group has grown to include more than 100 members throughout the state.

“The user group is so beneficial for networking and talking with other users. It’s a great place to hear about the lessons that other users have learned,” says Johnson.

Additionally, Johnson cites the annual Laserfiche Empower conference, reseller support and technical white papers as invaluable resources for improving her skills in using the software.

“Our implementation is so successful because of the community. Laserfiche listens to feedback and uses it to shape its next release. Everyone’s so approachable and helpful, and that makes it easy to like the product,” she says.

Gaining Top Value

Adopting new software functionality as it becomes available has helped Hanover County gain top value out of its ECM system. With these new tools, the county is truly leveraging the power of its constituent data in digital form to help transform the way county business is accomplished.

“Laserfiche is the one tool on your desktop that actually does what it’s supposed to do and what you ask it to do,” notes Johnson. “It’s one of my favorite parts of my job.”

Jackson County

Located in the scenic southwest corner of Oregon, Jackson County is home to a growing population of more than 200,000 residents—a growing population that in recent years has produced both a higher demand for services and more public records. Like many local government offices, Jackson County was flush with paper documents and short on storage space.

Additionally, the county must store and organize most of its departments’ records in complex records structures according to state and federal laws for records retention. With paper records, enforcing retention schedules while ensuring staff could still find and retrieve records involved tedious manual steps for staff across the county.

“There was a complicated system of filing with colored labels on the folders,” says Devin Goble, Programmer Analyst for Jackson County’s IT department. “Complying with retention meant staff had to look through each folder on the shelves, a very time-consuming process.”

Even though the county knew its departments needed an enterprise content management (ECM) system, skepticism toward digital content—and new IT projects—was strong among employees.

“It was a hard fight to get ECM implemented in the county. People were thoroughly entrenched in their paper processes,” says Goble.

To offer a valuable solution to staff, Goble led a search for an ECM system that could satisfy many different users’ needs and eliminate manual paper processes.

Laserfiche appealed to the IT department because it offered a well-supported feature set with a solid, built-in records management component. After hearing the positive experiences of other cities and counties using Laserfiche, Goble was assured that his IT department could structure Laserfiche in a way that would win over skeptical departments.

Warranting a Transparent Records Management Solution

Although many departments wanted a solution to their paper problems, the county worked with Laserfiche solution provider CDI to begin its Laserfiche implementation in the Sheriff’s Office in 2011. The diverse types of records handled by law enforcement staff offered the perfect testing ground for an improved records management process. Felony records, for example, must be retained by the department for ten years, while records managers can destroy certain types of warrants after five and others after ten. Keeping track of different retention schedules while making paper documents easily accessible to clerks was difficult for the department.

Laserfiche’s Records Management Edition, a DoD 5015.2-certified records management solution, allowed the IT department to separate what Goble calls the “nuts and bolts of records management” from general document use. Using Laserfiche’s transparent records management approach, the department was able to customize content management based on staff members’ job functions and easily organize the same documents in different ways for records managers and deputies.

For example, the four types of warrants handled by the department all require two separate retention schedules. When a warrant is received and scanned into the department’s digital document repository, Laserfiche automatically puts every warrant in its own record series folder, allowing records managers to view warrants in a batch by type or year and purge them at the appropriate time.

At the same time, Laserfiche establishes a separate folder structure for deputies and clerks that lists individual warrants by warrant type and warrant number. Because deputies are usually searching for more granular information within a specific case or a subpoena, Laserfiche automatically organizes documents so that deputies can easily find the detailed case information within a record.

It’s a best of both worlds solution: records managers can easily find and filter warrants based on disposition schedules while, at the same time, deputies can access individual warrants without knowing anything about records naming conventions. Everyone can work with law enforcement documents in the manner they prefer.

“Laserfiche’s transparent records management tools allow us to create a second view of the data in as many places as we need to. Records managers see it in one way. Clerks see it in another way. In some cases, others in the Sheriff’s hierarchy can see it in a completely different way,” says Goble.

Furthermore, an integration between Laserfiche and Tiburon, the department’s CAD/RMS system, pulls relevant names, place and incident dates from the police records upon scanning. Laserfiche Quick Fields auto-populates this information as metadata within the warrant file. Laserfiche Workflow then routes the warrant through the transparent records management filing process, eliminating the time-consuming, manual data entry and document routing steps for staff.

Streamlining Information Management

Laserfiche has also completely automated the department’s civil jacket process, which once included tedious data entry by records managers.

For civil cases, deputies compile an envelope of documents called a civil jacket that includes court documents and other records related to an incident when a subpoena is served. When these envelopes are scanned into the document repository, Laserfiche automatically fixes the civil jacket number to comply with the state’s records policy and forwards the documents to clerks for quality assurance.

“We take that act of moving data around and complying with retention policies out of users’ hands as much as possible. In some cases, users never have to touch the documents after they scan them. Laserfiche does all the rest,” says Goble.

Eliminating manual steps helps staff focus on getting their jobs done instead of tracking down and organizing paper. Temporary staff can complete scanning tasks without needing to be trained on document retention parameters, and records managers aren’t burdened with data entry. Laserfiche’s automation tools also eliminate the security risk of records being moved out of their records series.

“Not only do users not have to worry about where things go, they can’t change the filing structure even if they want to. This structure is locked in place by policy,” says Goble.

Furthermore, the Sheriff’s Office can directly push documents to the District Attorney’s office using Laserfiche WebLink, an online Web portal that provides read-only access to documents. High-profile cases often require transferring thousands of pages of records to the DA. With WebLink, the Sheriff’s Office can upload select documents to the online portal and give DA staff secure access to the information, eliminating costly printing and shipping expenses and streamlining litigation.

Building Enterprise-Wide Enthusiasm for ECM

The initial implementation was so successful that the skeptical end users have started evangelizing Laserfiche to other departments. Goble says he is fielding questions from other departments about records management and Laserfiche all the time.

“It’s nice to give users something solid. Now that our staff has had a chance to see what the product can do for us, they’re getting excited about it,” says Goble.

In addition to using Laserfiche for other documents like purchasing records and contracts for the Sheriff’s Office, IT has expanded ECM to the County Assessor’s Office. The department uses Laserfiche to scan and store historical deed cards, 100-year old property assessment jackets and current personal property returns for local businesses. The county’s Human Resources department has also started integrating Laserfiche with its Oracle ERP system to manage personnel records.

Using Laserfiche Workflow and Laserfiche Quick Fields to automate as much of the capture and indexing process as possible went a long way in showing the value of the application to multiple departments. Goble says that setting up a system that requires as little user interaction as possible was key to expanding ECM into an enterprise application.

“I’m more proud of our users than anything else. We’re really happy to see the expansion that we’ve been able to do with Laserfiche,” notes Goble.

Florida League of Cities

With the mission of shaping legislation and promoting cooperative action among Florida’s municipal governments, the Florida League of Cities represents over 400 cities, towns and villages throughout the state. The organization, based in Orlando and Tallahassee, serves as the primary provider of critical services for member organizations, including insurance plans, pensions, loans, legal consultation and policy research.

As its membership base grew, the League faced an influx of documents and service needs that its previous document management system, Alchemy, couldn’t handle without instability issues. To build a stable, long-term content management plan for the whole enterprise, which houses 16 departments and 170 employees, the League turned to Laserfiche ECM based on its widespread use among Florida governments.

“We selected Laserfiche because of its reputation as an industry leader,” says Chris Noyes, Business Systems Analyst for the League. “Laserfiche was chosen not only for its reputation and ROI, but for the stability and scalability it would provide our internal operations.”

In fact, purchasing Laserfiche prompted the organization’s IT department and business units to collaborate on new, more efficient ways of structuring business processes.

“For the first time in years, we have directed significant resources into dissecting our existing processes and reengineering them to fit new business conditions using Laserfiche. It has forced us to rethink how we do business—in a positive way,” says Noyes.

Initiating Change in Insurance Units

The League initiated partnerships between IT and business units during its first Laserfiche deployment in the worker’s compensation claims department, which handles more than 180,000 documents from doctors, providers and the state every year.

The IT department started by mapping out the entire claims process into large-format flowcharts and then hosted inter-department meetings where IT staff and business heads worked together to identify antiquated paper processes, identify business goals and create a strategy for improving the flow of claims information.

Within six months, this collaborative effort resulted in a completely reengineered claims processing cycle. Instead of manually passing multiple copies of documents around the office, claims adjustors and clerical staff now use Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management tool, integrated with a backend SQL database to automatically route claims to the right adjustors in both the Orlando and Tallahassee offices.

“We’ve gained efficiencies by creating a centralized intake department. The printers are silent and there isn’t an army of personnel moving documents between cubicles,” explains Noyes.

The claims department saved 3,400 labor hours in just the first year of using Laserfiche and reduced a process that once took up to 24 hours to complete to just a few hours. With files in a central location, the department’s special investigations team no longer needs to rifle through the contents of CDs and DVDs and can work more proactively during insurance fraud investigations.

The League’s Property and Liability Claims Center, comprised of statewide field members who assess losses from natural disasters, also implemented Laserfiche to automatically push property claims received by phone to claims adjustors in the field through a completely paperless process.

An integration between Laserfiche Web Access, an online version of the Laserfiche digital document repository, and the League’s risk management software automatically links claim files, bills and state forms together in an online portal that’s quickly accessible by field members.

“In the event of a regional disaster, Laserfiche Workflow promptly notifies our response team and coordinates claim information between our offices and field staff,” says Noyes. “We know immediately if a member has incurred a loss and can act upon it quickly, greatly improving customer service.”

The Property and Liability Claims department is now routing more than 55,000 claim documents a year and has reduced printing expenses by 80%, saving more than $9,000 in operational costs.

With these time and cost savings, insurance staff in the Worker’s Compensation and Property Claims Centers can redirect their efforts to adjusting claims instead of performing back-office tasks like printing faxes and alphabetizing checks. Claims staff are collaborating more quickly with other departments, like underwriting, finance and risk control—the League’s ultimate goal.

Laserfiche + Great Plains + iPads = Automated Mobile Accounting

When other business units realized what interdepartmental document collaboration and Laserfiche’s ease-of-use had achieved for the insurance groups, suddenly everyone wanted to get in on Laserfiche Workflow, says Noyes.

“Laserfiche Workflow is easy to understand even if you don’t have a lot of technical skills. It’s a tool that helps logically show how information can flow efficiently through the organization. You start seeing light bulbs go off in people’s heads,” he explains.

The League’s Finance department requested a more streamlined solution to its check printing and invoice approval process. Clerks were spending 30 hours a week just matching checks with supporting documents generated from multiple applications.

Using Laserfiche’s integrative abilities, the IT department combined Laserfiche Workflow with Great Plains, the department’s ERP system, the League’s Microsoft CRM system and RightFax faxing software to streamline this process. Laserfiche acts as integrative middleware that updates member information between the databases and pushes customer information through the approval process, from the arrival of fax documents to the printing of a check or invoice.

The IT department also connected Laserfiche with the Apple iPad, giving management the ability to review and approve invoices off-site. Staff can simply access their desktop remotely and open Laserfiche to view files. In the future, the IT department plans to migrate the department onto Laserfiche’s iPad app, an app that allows employees to securely create, upload, view and act upon content from wherever they are.

The department has saved over 500 labor hours using this Great Plains and Laserfiche Workflow integration. Instead of relying on staff to pass information back and forth, Laserfiche now automatically routes 800 invoices a month, significantly improving check turn-around time for vendors and customers.

“Laserfiche Workflow handles our manual processes while also adding value, security and accountability to the process,” says Noyes.

Accounting staff has enthusiastically embraced the solution, which Noyes credits to Laserfiche’s integrative capability. Because Laserfiche works with, not against, applications that users are already familiar with, IT was able to create solutions that didn’t burden staff with learning an entirely new system.

“The more you can integrate Laserfiche with your existing applications, the happier and more productive your users will be. Laserfiche allows for so many different methods of hooking into your existing systems, whether they are off-the-shelf or custom-built,” explains Noyes.

Merging IT Requirements with User Acceptance

In total, over 155 employees across the League use Laserfiche and the organization manages two digital repositories that house over 10 million pages from various departments. With Laserfiche, the League has reclaimed 700 square feet of office space, allowing the organization to add more staff and service more customers as business grows.

“Potential costs savings are everywhere, and the business process analysis combined with the Laserfiche toolset can greatly increase productivity,” says Noyes. “You can translate a single solution that you come up with into an interoperable process across your organization.”

IT approaches every implementation as an opportunity to learn a department’s business needs and to create solutions that employees are comfortable learning and using. The result is a collaborative mindset that empowers staff to discover their own innovative ways of configuring Laserfiche.

For example, Noyes says finance staff brainstormed a new method for indexing and routing their annual renewal packets. Their solution ended up reducing the task from a two-week project into a four-hour activity.

“Through the business process discovery, departments have come together, collaborating like never before. Technology Services is now a partner with the other business units, giving the non-technical folks more ownership of the tools they use every day. We’re not just a service utility anymore.”

Noyes says the League plans to use this collaborative spirit to thoroughly evaluate more business processes and continue to deploy Laserfiche across the enterprise. IT also plans to provide more iPads with the Laserfiche Mobile app to staff to power mobile content management.

“We have just scratched the surface to uncover the potential uses of Laserfiche within our organization,” he concludes.

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), based in Austin, helps develop the state’s higher education plans, approves degree programs and provides advice on education activities to the State Legislature and Governor’s Office.

Central to achieving THECB’s mission of promoting access to quality higher education is its Loan Program Operations (LPO), which disburses state financial aid funds to Texas universities and assists with student loan collections and litigation for the State Attorney General’s Office. As the gatekeeper for state-appropriated financial aid, LPO handles more than 1.5 million documents each year—a number that’s grown steadily as cuts to state scholarship funds have driven more loan applications to the department’s College Access Loan and B-On-Time incentive programs. In 2011 alone, the agency disbursed over $143 million worth of funds to students.

“For cases that go on to become loans, it’s a very paper-intensive process,” explains Debbie Whitis, Manager of LPO Operational Support Services. “Every single piece of information related to a student loan, from electronic applications, paper sources and screenshots, must be documented and archived according to state retention guidelines.”

Although LPO had a document management system in place, the legacy system couldn’t handle the high-volume processing needed to handle the growing volume of loan applications. As a result, it needed rebooting at least eight times a day.

On average, the agency was losing 19 cumulative hours of staff time across its departments every day—wasted effort that cost the LPO $76,000 each year and generated customer dissatisfaction.

“If a debtor called to inquire about their loan status and the system was down, we couldn’t give them a real-time answer,” explains Whitis. “Staff still had to manually fill in field classifications, and our process wasn’t very transparent.”

Stretching the IT Investment

LPO began searching for a new enterprise content management (ECM) system that would cut out inefficiencies and save staff time. When reseller MCCi showed the organization Laserfiche Avante’s flexible, customizable administration and workflow tools, the agency was convinced that Laserfiche could easily reduce its bottlenecks, track documents throughout the loan record lifecycle and make information readily accessible to many different users at once.

Whitis was impressed that so many of Laserfiche’s key functionalities aligned with LPO’s checklist of requirements, including Laserfiche’s ability to:
  • Monitor activities occurring within the department in real-time.
  • Support a complicated routing structure for LPO and provide transparency at each step of the loan process lifecycle.
  • Generate performance quotas and productivity statistics.
  • Offer snapshot printing, scanning and conversion of diverse content formats.

Even with this wide range of features, Laserfiche still offered an affordable price point. “Laserfiche was the most cost-effective solution and best value we found,” says Whitis. “When you’re paying with tax dollars, value is important.”

Furthermore, Laserfiche’s ease-of-use ensured a smooth implementation when turnover in LPO’s IT department reduced the project’s technical support. Using Laserfiche’s free user education materials along with her knowledge of ECM system implementation, Whitis was able to teach herself the ins and outs of the entire Laserfiche system.

“I was able to learn the system simply by using the white papers, customer presentations and everything else that is available on the Laserfiche Support Site,” explains Whitis. “The information really is readable and digestible for Laserfiche users.”

Eliminating Redundancies and Building Transparency

Armed with these education materials, Whitis started the implementation by sketching her ideas for improving the loan process out on paper. She then brought those ideas to life using the Laserfiche Workflow Designer, a business process configuration tool, to build complex, automated document routing and archiving procedures and data queries to third-party systems.

In total, Whitis created 29 different workflows that process and route the diverse types of content the department receives, streamlining many steps in daily activities, especially for the agency’s Operational Support Services (OSS) department.

Some of the benefits realized include:
  • Enhance information capture. Using Laserfiche Snapshot, a multi-functional document capture tool, the department can capture and record all loan documents like IVR (interactive voice response) payments, call sheets and loan changes directly from third-party systems, such as the agency’s Loan Management System, in a central repository.
  • Streamlined payment processing. For captured documents like checks, Laserfiche Workflow uses information on the check to query client data like social security numbers from the agency’s other databases and links that information to the check. Workflow then routes the document among the necessary departments at each step of payment review and processing.
  • Transparent records management. To archive a document according to litigation requirements, Workflow extracts information such as the borrower’s last name from the document, and automatically creates the proper retention folders for the document.
  • Centralized control. In the Laserfiche Workflow Administration Console, an advanced performance and reporting interface, Whitis can now monitor all system activity in real-time and research bottlenecks affecting the productivity of the team.

By automating and centralizing information access with Laserfiche, the agency can now process documents within a matter of milliseconds versus hours. Laserfiche Snapshot alone has helped the OSS department reduce its document processing times by up to 24 hours and eliminate 66% of its staffing expenses, a total of $15,000 in savings.

With Laserfiche Workflow, LPO can ultimately ensure that every step of the loan record cycle is transparent and that documents are saved in a searchable format, even as multiple users interact with the document.

“Changes to the document remain consistent no matter where the document goes,” says Whitis. “I love the fact that I can go into the Workflow Designer and find exactly where a document is. We can resolve an issue in a matter of minutes or within a couple of hours. Before, it was just a shot in the dark.”

Gaining Enterprise-Wide Buy-In

LPO managers and directors also love Laserfiche’s time-saving reporting tools. Prior to Laserfiche, managers could spend two full days compiling statistics about their teams’ productivity and quotas for the Assistant Commissioner of Business and Support Services. Using Laserfiche Audit Trail, an enterprise risk management tool that tracks user activity, managers can now generate performance reports on their staff with the click of a button.

To bring managers and staff up to speed on Laserfiche, Whitis committed to several onsite demos and trainings on searching, reporting and data capture.

“People here had been married to our old system for the duration of their careers,” notes Whitis. “But when they saw Laserfiche’s capabilities compared to our old system, they were impressed. They really took ownership of the software in their daily processes when we gave them a voice in how it works.”

This ownership translated into greatly increased staff productivity, especially during peak processing seasons. Even though the number of loan applications has increased by 12% since LPO started using Laserfiche, the agency has decreased its error rate to a mere two percent with the system. In just the first year of using Laserfiche, LPO estimates that it has reduced about 30% of its overall operating expenses.

In the future, the department plans to expand its Laserfiche system to handle the litigation documents it files with the state court. Using Laserfiche Quick Fields, a high-volume indexing tool, LPO will automate the costly, time-consuming manual indexing of legal files.

Whitis says that what makes Laserfiche so attractive to state agencies—and other organizations—is its flexible architecture. From document capture to automated workflows to reporting, Whitis praises how easily Laserfiche has accommodated LPO’s evolving business needs.

Computerized Management Services

For Computerized Management Services, a medical management company that focuses on meeting the needs of radiologists, technology paves the path to a profitable future.

“Because we’ve never lost a customer and have extremely low employee turnover as well as strong long-term relationships with all of our key suppliers, we have the means to invest in the technology necessary to build a world-class infrastructure to meet the future needs of our clients,” says President Tom Brajkovich.

This forward-thinking approach led the company to implement Laserfiche enterprise content management back in 2006. “There’s a lot of miscellaneous paper associated with medical billing, a lot of non-standardized communications coming from patients, payers and providers,” Brajkovich explains. “We knew that digitizing the paper and automating associated processes would make us more efficient.”

Prior to implementing Laserfiche, Computerized Management Services housed its paper archives in bankers boxes at offsite storage lockers, making it difficult for staff to find older documents. Files that had yet to be reviewed for coding and billing purposes were kept in filing cabinets, creating bottlenecks when documents were misplaced and limiting the management team’s visibility into the company’s overall workflow.

To facilitate access and improve productivity, the company now uses Laserfiche to process, manage and store four main document types:
  • Reports and face sheets from providers.
  • Explanation of benefits forms (both paper and electronic) from payers.
  • Credentialing documents from providers.
  • Internal training documents.

“We’re constantly scanning, uploading and processing information,” Brajkovich says.

Documents are processed and stored using Laserfiche Quick Fields 8, a high-volume capture and processing tool, and Laserfiche Workflow 8, a business process management tool. These tools eliminate the need for manual data entry and filing by:
  • Automatically extracting metadata from documents.
  • Auto-populating index fields.
  • Creating new folders.
  • Auto-filing documents.

For a company that receives thousands of documents a day from more than 100 locations in California and Arizona, this automation results in a big productivity boost. It also makes it easy for employees to retrieve documents by conducting simple field and text searches.

Processing EOBs with Laserfiche

Further enhancing productivity, Computerized Management Services uses Laserfiche to manage the explanation of benefits (EOB) forms that most insurers still send in paper format.

“We use Laserfiche Quick Fields to convert paper EOBs into usable data, and Laserfiche Workflow to facilitate EOB processing,” explains Denise Van, Vice President of Operations.

Via document shortcuts, the company uses Laserfiche Workflow to route EOBs to the appropriate client teams for processing. Client team personnel work with dual screens, so they’re able to view a document on one screen while performing data entry into the company’s CPU billing software on the other.

Although CPU and Laserfiche aren’t yet integrated, the Laserfiche Entry ID for each document is logged in each patient’s record in CPU so that it is easily retrievable. After the EOBs have been processed, Laserfiche Workflow removes the EOB shortcuts from the client team folders. Laserfiche Workflow then archives the EOBs by date of service.

Laserfiche Workflow Automation Accelerates Coding

Computerized Management Services also uses Laserfiche in conjunction with A-Life, its computer-assisted coding system.

When the company receives new information from a client site, it imports it into Laserfiche using either Laserfiche Import Agent, which captures electronic faxes, or Laserfiche Snapshot, which converts electronic documents into TIFF images. Documents are then processed by Laserfiche Quick Fields and exported to A-Life. Once documents have been coded in A-Life, Laserfiche Workflow archives the documents.

The biggest benefits of Laserfiche, however, are felt when the company can’t use A-Life. “If a facility changes the format of its reports or face sheets, it takes time to reprogram A-Life,” says Brajkovich. “When that happens, Laserfiche takes over.”

According to Van, employees need a mere 24 hours to complete the coding process in A-Life. When done on paper, the process takes 5-10 days. When used as the company’s “coding back up,” Laserfiche enables staff to complete the coding process in 48-72 hours.

“Laserfiche helps us solve problems,” says Van. “If we had to code on paper every time a facility changed its format, we’d lose a lot of time.”

The coding process in Laserfiche works as follows:
  • Documents are imported into Laserfiche using Import Agent or Snapshot.
  • Documents are processed by Laserfiche Quick Fields, metadata is applied and Laserfiche Workflow moves document shortcuts to the Coder folder for processing.
  • The coding manager assigns work and Laserfiche Workflow moves the folder to the assigned coder.
  • The assigned coder codes the document using the preview pane in Laserfiche, adding coding metadata to the Laserfiche template.
  • Laserfiche Workflow then moves the document to the billing team, which exports it to CPU for processing.
  • Once the completion criteria have been met, Laserfiche Workflow archives the documents.

“Laserfiche Workflow is a wonderful tool,” says Van. “We rely heavily on it.”

The Key to Going Digital

Brajkovich and Van stress that Computerized Management Services’ success with Laserfiche is the result of a phased approach to implementation and training. They first worked with Laserfiche reseller JPI Data Resource to configure the system to their specifications, and then they trained their staff.

“We didn’t roll out everything at once,” says Brajkovich. “Implementing the capabilities of Laserfiche slowly allowed us to make sure that adjusting to the new system didn’t slow us down.”

Initially, staff learned how to use Laserfiche to search and retrieve digital documents. Once the company rolled out Laserfiche Workflow, Brajkovich and Van took a train-the-trainer approach, working with key staff from the data processing and client teams to ensure that they were comfortable with the system and able to show their team members how to perform their various tasks.

Today, as always, the company is in the process of improving its workflows. “Continuous improvement is important to us,” says Brajkovich. “In order to ensure that we offer truly exceptional service to clients in the heavily nuanced field of radiology, we constantly look for ways to fine tune our processes and our use of technology.”