What’s the difference between wet, digital and electronic signatures?

What do you imagine when you hear the word “signature?” 50 years ago we might all have had the same answer, but today, “ink on paper” isn’t the only option for authorizing a document or transaction.

Here’s what you need to know about the three main signature categories (wet, digital and electronic signatures) and how they facilitate (or impede) business processes.

What is a wet signature?

A wet signature is created when a person physically marks a document. In some cultures this is done by writing a name in a stylized, cursive format (or even a simple “X”) on a piece of paper. Other cultures use name seals to the same effect. In both cases, the word “wet” implies that the signature requires time to dry, as it was made with ink or wax.
Various written signatures.

What is an electronic signature?

Various legal definitions exist for electronic signatures, but the term most generally refers to the acknowledgement or adoption of an electronic message, transaction or document. Some examples include:
  • A typed name at the end of an email
  • A typed name on an electronic form or document
  • An image of a handwritten signature on a transmitted fax
  • A personal identification number (PIN) entered into a bank ATM
  • Clicking “agree” or “disagree” on an electronic “terms and agreements” contract
  • A handwritten but digitally captured signature made on a touch device, such as a tablet or smartphone (sometimes referred to as a “dynamic signature”)
  • A digital signature gathered by an eSign application like Adobe Sign.

What is a digital signature?

Sometimes referred to as a cryptographic signature, a digital signature is considered the most “secure” type of electronic signature. It includes a certificate of authority, such as a Windows certificate, to ensure the validity of the signatory (the signature’s author and owner).

The parties on either side of a digital signature can also detect whether the signed document was altered or changed in any way that would invalidate it. In addition, electronic messages are signed with the sender’s private decryption key and verified by anyone who can access the sender’s public encryption key; this further ensures that both parties are who they say they are and that the content of the message has not been changed or intercepted.
Image showing how private keys can digitally sign messages that can then be read using public key.

Digital and electronic signatures are often used synonymously, but most types of electronic signatures do not have the security features of true digital signatures.

Some common uses for digital signatures include electronic tax forms, applications for business permits and online college applications.

Are different signatures required for different purposes?

The use of wet, electronic or digital signatures is left to the discretion of each party. Since the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN) went into effect in 2000, digital and electronic signatures have held the same legal standing as wet signatures. Nevertheless, some organizations and individuals still prefer handwritten signatures.

The ESIGN act does preserve the right of a party to use or accept wet signatures even if the documentation in question is electronic. It is up to each organization to create its own policy around signatures.

How does each type of signature affect business processes?

Many document-based business processes require signatures, such as the approval of contracts, invoices and employee evaluation forms. Wet signatures tend to slow these processes down because of their dependence on the physical exchange of paper, but even electronic signatures can become impediments when someone fails to sign a document in a timely manner.

Organizations operate at peak efficiency when electronic signatures are incorporated into an automated business process. For example, as the following video shows, if a manager forgets to sign an invoice, an automated system can send her an email reminder after a period of time has passed.

 
One of the fastest ways to get started with incorporating digital signatures into your automated business processes is to use a solution marketplace. These marketplaces offer an extensive range of pre-built solutions, templates and integrations for users of a particular platform. For example, Laserfiche offers an Adobe Sign integration on its marketplace.

Learn how digital and electronic signatures can be incorporated into your contract management process. Download the free guide!
Download the guide to automating contract review and approvals.

 

Colorado Department of Natural Resources

Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) manages a wealth of information across eight divisions, including:
  • Colorado Division of Forestry
  • Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife
  • Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining, and Safety
  • Colorado Division of Water Resources
  • Colorado Geological Survey
  • Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC)
  • Colorado State Land Board
  • Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB)

According to Susan Lesovsky, Application Support Manager for the CWCB, the DNR purchased a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system in 2005 to replace a legacy IBM system that lacked an out-of-the box web interface, optical character recognition (OCR) functionality and the ability to automate business processes. “Our old system was pretty much limited to search and retrieval,” she explains.

She notes that a top priority for implementing Laserfiche was making it easier for citizens to stay informed about government activities. “Ultimately, our customer is the public, and our success is measured on how we provide and process information for them,” Lesovsky says.

To that end, the DNR upgraded to Laserfiche Rio in 2009. According to Lesovsky, “Laserfiche Rio has allowed us to increase the transparency of information to the public, and it’s done it in such a way that we don’t have to worry about connections or cost.”

In particular, she describes the benefits of upgrading to Laserfiche Rio as:

Laserfiche Rio Enables Citizens to Cut through Red Tape

Lesovsky notes that Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper recently called for every department in state government to reduce red tape. Good government, he says, is characterized by “efficiency, effectiveness and elegance.”

“As one of only two recommended content management systems for the state, Laserfiche epitomizes all three E’s,” Lesovsky says.

She explains how easy it is for citizens to access documents such as the CWCB’s meeting documents:
  • The current year’s materials are available on the Board’s website in a table that provides direct links to PDFs stored in Laserfiche.
  • Archived materials are accessible through a custom search box (created using the WebLink Designer) on the lower right side of same page or through this link.
  • The custom search box is limited to three fields (title, date range and document type) to streamline access and reduce user confusion. (Custom search components have been included throughout the CWCB’s website to help direct the public’s search for Board-related documents.)

Colorado’s Decision Support Systems website also includes custom search boxes throughout its Website, such as the one at the top of this page that searches according to document type and a few other parameters, while a set of “Google-like” search results based on document type displays below thanks to an encoded URL string.

“We used the WebLink Designer to create custom searches because we noticed that our users would get overwhelmed when presented with a long list of templates and fields,” says Lesovsky. “Each custom search focuses on a particular program area or topic and uses a limited set of search criteria within the associated template.”

Quick, easy and efficient searches support Hickenlooper’s goal of driving the “three E’s” into government operations. Lesovsky explains, “In the past, people had to come to our offices to request information. Laserfiche WebLink provides a simple and elegant way for the public to get immediate access to the information they need whenever they need it.”

Integrations Make ECM “Mission-Critical”

By integrating Laserfiche WebLink with other software applications, the DNR has been able to make information even more accessible. For example, by integrating Laserfiche with ESRI ArcGIS, staff can click on a stream and retrieve associated court documents, while public users can quickly access information associated with flooding and flood hazards in the state.

To see the public-facing integration in action:
  1. Visit Colorado’s Flood Decision Support System page
  2. Click on the Flood DSS Map Viewer.
  3. Agree to the disclaimer.
  4. Click the Documents tab in the top menu.
  5. Enter your search criteria in the pop-up window. For example, select:
  6. Group: Historical Flooding.
  7. Document: Historical flood photographs.
  8. Type: Photographs.
  9. Hit the search button.
  10. A new window displays the results (produced on-the-fly by an encoded URL string) in a grid format.

It’s the integrations with applications like ESRI ArcGIS that make Laserfiche “mission-critical.” According to Lesovsky, “When you integrate Laserfiche with business-specific systems, you embed it into your existing workflow processes and it becomes integral to how you operate.”

ECM Enables Electronic Forms Processing

Laserfiche Rio has been a particularly effective ECM solution for the DNR because different divisions can configure it to meet their unique needs. For example, the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) uses Laserfiche to enable an eForm application that provides an interface for oil and gas operators to enter and submit permit forms and supporting documents. There are currently six active forms and three in development.

According to Ken Robertson, Application Developer for the COGCC, “Uploaded files are stored in our production web server. Once the operators submit the form to our internal server, we export the attachments to Laserfiche.”

He explains that the public can view the files directly from the production web server or wait until the files are imported to Laserfiche and use Laserfiche WebLink to access them. Furthermore, he outlines how the COGCC has used the Laserfiche SDK to create customized Laserfiche scripts and programs.

Robertson says, “For those attachments still sitting in our production web server, we created a Windows service to check queued files in the Web server every 15 minutes and use the Laserfiche Toolkit [SDK] for .NET to import files to the Laserfiche repository server. In the meantime, we also collect the Laserfiche reference numbers in our attachment table so that system (eForm) can provide a Laserfiche WebLink download page for users to view the attachments.”

He notes that there is a separate application that allows oil and gas operators to upload well logs, which are imported into Laserfiche using Laserfiche Import Agent, a tool that captures and processes electronic documents. Scanning staff members use Laserfiche Quick Fields to index other types of electronic documents.

The biggest benefit of processing permits and well logs with Laserfiche is time. Robertson says, “We used to shuffle files from one person to another until they were approved, and then we scanned everything into the system. Having the operators upload their attachments to their documents saves an average of 15 minutes of scanning and indexing time for our staff, not to mention the time saved on data entry.”

He goes on to explain that having everything available electronically at the beginning of the process allows multiple people to work on the same forms simultaneously, further reducing processing time.

“Not only do we save time,” Robertson says, “but the approval process is now more transparent for the public.”

Lesovsky adds, “Laserfiche is powerful, flexible and easy to work with. Even though all our divisions use the same system, we can all use it a little differently.”

Looking Ahead

Lesovsky is particularly excited to use Laserfiche to harvest data across organizations. She explains that the CWCB has already conducted a feasibility study and has a grant in place to make it happen.

“Colorado State University has an ECM solution other than Laserfiche but a healthy collection of water information. The Colorado Water Resources Development & Power Authority and the Colorado River Water Conservation District currently use Laserfiche, with repositories of useful water documents. By hooking our systems together and using common metadata, we’ll be able to search for information across all four entities and gain a more complete picture of accessible water information in the state.”

She says that the DNR is also working on integrating Laserfiche and SharePoint. “Most of our divisions use SharePoint for their external websites. Right now, people have to conduct separate searches if they want to find content stored in both Laserfiche and SharePoint. What we’re looking to do is enable searches that return results from both systems at the same time.”

All in all, she says, “Laserfiche Rio is a great tool. The bottleneck now is just finding the time to make it do everything we want it to do.”

City of Lakewood, CO

Back in 2001, staff from the planning and public works department at the City of Lakewood, CO, created the Digital Archives Group (DAG) to find more efficient ways to manage 30 years’ worth of maps, plats and plans. Members from the Planning and Public Works, Community Resources, the City Clerk’s Office Central Records Division and the IT department participated in DAG.

Led by Stormwater Quality Coordinator Alan Searcy, Central Records Administrator Sharon Blackstock, and Imaging Technician Greg Buchanan, DAG evolved into an ad hoc governance committee, setting recordkeeping and retention policies for each department, as well as standardizing document indexing for interdepartmental use. “My goal in the beginning,” says Searcy, “was to get as much ‘buy-in’ as possible for our fledgling imaging program. Working together on interdepartmental projects is a proven recipe for success in Lakewood.” The Digital Archives Group is a prime example of that fact.

DAG initiated the purchase of Laserfiche in 2001 from Colorado-based reseller Phil Landreth of S. Corporation, with several departments sharing the cost. “Laserfiche was the most user-friendly solution we looked at, and we knew that was going to be very important,” Blackstock says. “Laserfiche also had a very strong presence in cities around our size (population: 145,000), so we knew that support for local government operations was in place.”

Although Laserfiche was first used only by the Engineering Division and the City Clerk’s Office, it eventually spread to other departments. As new departments joined in the project, they sent representatives to DAG meetings.

Initially, Laserfiche was used for archiving permanent records and closed case files. After a couple of years, the finance department became the first to manage active records with Laserfiche by scanning sales tax returns. More active records management followed as Laserfiche use began spreading to DAG members’ departments. Eventually most of Lakewood’s 10 departments adopted Laserfiche, each relying on DAG’s training and best practices to scan and manage their own records.

“With every new project, people really welcome our support and suggestions. We all listen to each other and are willing to hear new ideas,” Buchanan says. “At the same time, people don’t just say, ‘I’m going to do this’ and call up IT—DAG helps define the project and gives the go-ahead.” The City Clerk’s Office created Buchanan’s position as Imaging Technician in 2002 to facilitate Laserfiche projects by assisting departments in training users and developing and managing scanning projects.

Today, DAG’s goals are being met—long-term records are being archived and protected, concurrent retrieval of imaged records is possible, and storage space for maps, plats and plans has been reduced. What’s more, interdepartmental cooperation has resulted in a citywide sense of pride and ownership of Laserfiche.

Breaking Down Silos to Build an Agile Enterprise

IT Software Services Manager Tom Charkut credits DAG with addressing the training element in the early days “in a way IT just couldn’t.” But by 2005, Charkut says, “There were so many departments using Laserfiche that it just made sense to centralize the software maintenance and support.” IT took over Laserfiche system administration in 2006, as well as the software maintenance costs.

The City of Lakewood’s IT staff of 27 supports more than 1,000 city employees. “We’re a small team with big shoes to fill,” Charkut admits. Filling big shoes with different sizes and styles, he says, requires an agile development philosophy.

According to Charkut, one key component to solving the diverse but often overlapping information needs of Lakewood’s business units was using the Laserfiche SDK and its Microsoft-standard .NET API to integrate with legacy business applications. “Since Laserfiche was an enterprise-wide system,” he says, “we needed to figure out how to integrate it with our other line-of-business systems.”

A recent example is an integration between Laserfiche and Planning and Public Works’ new building permit system. “The user will be in the permit system, and using the permit number, he’ll click on a ‘documents’ button we developed that shows him the documents in Laserfiche,” he explains. “If he needs to email those documents, then we send URLs linking to those documents using Laserfiche Web Access. Laserfiche gives us the ability to arrange the information so it’s at the user’s fingertips.”

The user, Charkut notes, never leaves the permitting application. What’s more, the additional content is referenced from its single, centralized Laserfiche repository. Similarly, integration with the city’s GeoSmart GIS application geo-enables searches for employees across various systems whether it’s for code enforcement cases or service requests from residents, as well as for any documents—including plats, plans and forms—already in Laserfiche.

“For us, Laserfiche integration has helped break down silos,” Charkut says. “It’s all about decentralized capture, centralized storage and an enterprise library.”

What a Transparent Web We Weave

Now, as the city maps out an overhaul of Lakewood’s web strategy, Laserfiche is one of the ingredients. “Our web strategy in the past has been a patchwork of stuff. Just last year we said, ‘We have to do something about this—we’re getting 5,000 hits a day,’” says Charkut. “Part of our plan is to promote government transparency through the use of web self-service, including access to records contained in the Laserfiche system.”

Lakewood also finds itself in the middle of an electronic records management inventory and assessment, where consultants are actually suggesting new and future uses of Laserfiche. Building on DAG’s solid support foundation and Lakewood IT’s agile, integrated web strategies, the city is now assessing whether and when to upgrade to Laserfiche Rio, with its scalable, flexible user and module licensing—as well as its unlimited servers—to meet the needs of more and more departments, business processes and users, both internally and externally, from a single enterprise application.

“We are evaluating the ROI of Laserfiche Rio,” jokes Charkut. “We will assess that model on a 7- to 10-year timeframe.”

Upcoming Laserfiche Projects
  1. Employee Relations for employee benefits and claim management.
  2. Finance for sales and use tax applications management.
  3. Planning and Public Works to manage planning case documents from submittal to archival.
  4. Municipal Court for case file management.
  5. Utility crews and inspectors of right-of-way and buildings to access plans, records and other information stored in Laserfiche from the field.

County of Essex

“What started as a niche application in the County Clerk’s Office has now become an enterprise infrastructure investment,” says Wendy St. Amour, Essex County’s IT Manager.

The county implemented Laserfiche back in 2000 because “managing paper records in an organization of our size was an arduous, time-consuming and expensive task. Complying with a myriad of new government regulations and increasingly less physical space made it even more difficult,” explains St. Amour, adding that manual workflow processes were inefficient and time consuming.

She notes that the county “makes a point of making the right decision upfront,” and that based on a combination of good references from other municipalities, user-friendly technology and an affordable price, Laserfiche won the RFP process.

Initially implemented in the County Clerk’s Office, Laserfiche immediately began providing benefits.

Mary Brennan, the county’s Director of Council Services/Clerk, explains, “As the county clerk, it’s my job to respond to requests for information. With Laserfiche, I never have to venture down into the dreaded basement vault to search for and retrieve records. By giving me a way to find documents quickly, Laserfiche has saved a tremendous amount of time over the years.”

Evolution of a Shared Service

What started as a solution for the County Clerk’s Office soon spread—not just to additional departments such as Engineering and Finance, but to seven municipalities within the County as well.

“Since we purchased Laserfiche in 2000, all seven of the municipalities in Essex County have implemented the software,” says Brennan. “The Municipality of Leamington was actually included in our RFP. The others saw the success we were having, heard similar success stories from other municipalities and decided that Laserfiche would be beneficial for them, too.”

At first, the municipalities maintained and administered their own Laserfiche systems. Over time, however, they began to understand the advantages of sharing, including the ability to leverage economies of scale, take advantage of a wider knowledge base and gain access to additional ECM functionality.

Brennan explains that Essex County dipped its toe into the shared service pool by jointly purchasing and using Laserfiche WebLink as a public information portal together with all seven of its lower-tier municipalities. The online portal provides residents with access to government material such as:
  • Agendas
  • Bylaws
  • Meeting minutes
  • Historical documents
  • Studies requiring public consultation

“Laserfiche WebLink is great because all interested stakeholders can easily view public documents with the click of a mouse,” Brennan explains. “Plus, it saves our staff the work of converting documents to PDFs and manually posting them on our website.”

St. Amour notes that, with eight organizations using Laserfiche, the knowledge base staff amassed was substantial. “The ability to share knowledge and expertise with each other has proven to be very beneficial. That, coupled with the cost savings of sharing one enterprise system, gave us the confidence to upgrade to Laserfiche Rio.”

After consulting with MC Imaging Technologies, Essex County’s Laserfiche reseller, the county and its lower-tier municipalities all agreed that purchasing and deploying Laserfiche Rio as a shared service was the best way to empower employees and capitalize on everything the software has to offer.

“The ability to use unlimited servers is what made our expansion to Laserfiche Rio possible, because each lower-tier municipality uses its own server while taking advantage of the additional functionality Laserfiche Rio offers, such as Laserfiche Workflow,” says St. Amour.

“By taking a shared-service approach, we can develop a process once, and with a few small changes, eight different organizations can benefit from it,” she adds.

Enterprise Efficiency in Action

St. Amour notes that the county and its municipalities benefit from integration between Laserfiche, ESRI ArcGIS and Geocortex, an interactive mapping tool. Cathy Paduch, GIS Technician for Essex County, explains, “The integration allows staff to access documents associated with any spatial asset simply by clicking on a point on a map. This saves time and eliminates the need to store documents in multiple locations.”

Imagery supplied by the county is leveraged by many departments in local municipalities and is also available for public consumption over the web. Residents can take advantage of an interactive map to locate schools, recreational buildings, municipal institutions, hospitals, churches and police and fire stations—along with associated documents available via Laserfiche WebLink. Paduch notes that protected information such as property tax information is only available to staff.

Mike Sherwood, GIS Technician, adds that the custom script the county created dynamically searches Laserfiche and returns a list of the number and type of documents associated with any given location. “We don’t have to do any maintenance on the GIS side to keep the integration working,” he says.

Although designed and administered by county employees, staff across all seven of Essex’s municipalities benefit from the integration. “It allows all levels of staff from administration, emergency services and engineering departments to easily locate documents,” Paduch explains.

St. Amour adds, “The ease and efficiency of being able to track down and locate multiple documents associated to spatial data within the map interface is a great time saver.”

Looking Ahead

Although Essex County has only recently implemented Laserfiche Rio, St. Amour says that the county’s priority is automating business processes using Laserfiche Workflow. “Our first priority will be to automate our agendas; then we’ll take a hard look at how we can make our accounts payable and HR processes more efficient.”

Overall, implementing Laserfiche ECM as a shared service across the county and its lower-tier municipalities has enabled Essex to leverage economies of scale, gain access to additional ECM functionality and decrease the amount of time staff spends on manual tasks such as filing and finding paper documents.

“We’ve already realized a significant ROI from using Laserfiche,” says St. Amour. “Now that we have Laserfiche Rio, we can’t wait to start reaping the benefits of business process automation!”

Chesterfield County

With a history dating back to the 1600s and a growth rate of three percent a year, Chesterfield County, Virginia, has no shortage of records to manage. So with its Laserfiche system working perfectly, why would the county change it? To keep up with the ever-changing demands of managing information, of course. The challenge came in successfully migrating to Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME).

For IT maven and Laserfiche Administrator Michael Wells, the system is always evolving. He recalls the conversion from paper to document imaging. “The original motivation was to get rid of paper and to allow sharing of documents internally.” In 2001, the IT staff installed Laserfiche in five pilot departments. “All of those departments are still happy users,” says Wells.

Laserfiche has certainly simplified life for Kevin Payne, Chesterfield’s Acting Accounts Payable (A/P) Manager.

“It’s made the biggest difference you could imagine. A/P spends a lot of time going back to look at invoices for auditors, our own research or for other departments. It’s made our lives so much easier because we can access the invoices from our PCs—we don’t have to spend hours searching in the file room.”

Laserfiche has made the Chesterfield HR team’s life easier, too. Jeannie Harper, Chief of Administrative Services, loves Laserfiche’s search capability. And it’s not just a matter of time saved.

Harper uses Laserfiche when she looks into a personnel situation. “Our HR system is good, but it’s easier for me to get the information I need from Laserfiche. I can look at the personnel action form to see the signatures and the notes I made. All those supporting documents aren’t in the HR system.”

It’s hard to imagine tampering with such success, especially since the HR department had built into Laserfiche the complex security model it had labored to create on paper. HR staff relied on Laserfiche’s solid template fields and strict auditing to allow appropriate access to users.

But in 2005, the county had to address an important component of records management: the retention cycle. That’s when Wells supervised the installation of Laserfiche RME, integrating the program with the county’s existing records management model.

Changing the way the county managed records was an ambitious project. Creating a new folder structure to serve new records-management needs would change everyday procedures, and meshing a new system with the established security structure seemed like an insurmountable challenge.

Chesterfield County found that combining Laserfiche RME with Laserfiche Workflow created an ideal solution. Staff used Laserfiche RME to manage the records retention schedule, assigning access restrictions and creating shared folders to replicate the existing security structure. Using Laserfiche Workflow, they then copied records to the shared folders.

The first step in migrating to the new system was to recode the application that created a template for empty records. Chesterfield’s IT department then created an application to copy existing records into Laserfiche RME using the new template. Finally, the team planned out a records series in Laserfiche RME.

To implement the process, the scanning staff froze all additions and changes to records. The conversion application created and renamed files and copied the template data from the old system. Wells says that in the future, staff will develop techniques to flag new documents rather than freezing additions and changes.

Huge as the task seemed, after 30 days, staff had successfully migrated most of the records. Department liaisons and HR personnel who had used the old system barely noticed the interface had changed. And Chesterfield’s Scanning Coordinator Nancy Pearse has noticed an improvement in security.

“Nothing can be added or taken away—Laserfiche keeps everything where it’s supposed to be.” She especially appreciates the time saved with the automated retention schedule, because previously, she had to manually delete records.

Routing documents with Laserfiche Workflow has been an added benefit for Pearse. “We always know where documents are in the approval process. The email piece has also been very useful for us—if someone needs a document, I can just email it directly from Laserfiche.”

County employees can donate their leave time to seriously ill coworkers or those with illness in their families. Laserfiche Workflow has put an end to scrambling to meet deadlines for the leave donation program.

“HR scans the donation forms in, and the status field triggers the workflow,” says Jeannie Harper. “When payroll deducts the leave from the proper party and changes the status, Laserfiche sends a notification and moves the document to the appropriate folder, based on the fiscal year. It’s great because we typically get requests right at the deadline—with a paper system, we might not be able to make it.”

Harper expects retention schedules to change again. As will technology, no doubt. But Chesterfield County will be ready. Laserfiche Administrator Wells looks forward to more integrations in the future. And he’s off to a good start.

He points to the integration of A/P with the overall accounting system as a particular success. Staff members barcode invoices and input the codes into the mainframe. When the invoices are scanned in, a batch job populates the template fields and moves the invoices to the proper location.

Wells has also integrated Laserfiche with the county planning department’s GIS system. When Planning installed Laserfiche, its GIS system already included hard links for each land parcel to PDF files on a shared network. “Our reseller and our engineering department devised a program that changes all those links to Laserfiche WebLink search links. Now, users click on a parcel to bring up a Laserfiche WebLink window with all the pertinent information.”

In the future, Wells envisions providing citizens with web access to the most frequently requested documents. Currently, the county is adding more storage to prepare for future use of drive space. When asked how he measures the county’s success with Laserfiche, he asks, “You mean, other than the number of departments clamoring to be put on the system?”

Kevin Payne puts it this way: “I would definitely say that this has been the best enhancement to any A/P process that we’ve done—I’ve been here 5 years, but I’ve heard the same thing from people who have been here for 20 years. It’s a great product.”

Technology Making an HR Impact

With space at a premium, a room full of paper was a luxury the City of Denton could not afford. The city’s HR department had 15 five-drawer file cabinets crammed into 300 square feet of space. “One of the major issues was searching for documents. So many times a file had been pulled and we couldn’t find it,” says Technology Services Manager Mary Collins. To solve the problem, Denton staff began searching for a digital document management system.

“We had a directive from our city manager to look at document imaging,” says Collins. “We looked at a number of products over a long period of time, and the technology changed during that period.”

Denton tested Laserfiche in the city manager’s and attorney’s offices. In addition to the success experienced in those departments, the support Denton got from its reseller, DocuNav, made Laserfiche the city’s choice.

HR Implementation

Implementing Laserfiche has had a dramatic impact on Denton’s HR department. Staff now finds information in a fraction of the time it once took. Sarah Mabel, HR assistant for records management, notices major differences in handling open-records requests:

“We used to have someone do that as a full-time job. Now I’ve taken it over and I estimate that filling open records requests takes somewhere between eight and 13 percent of my time.”

Employee Records Management

When it comes to managing employee records, Denton’s integration of Laserfiche with its JD Edwards®(JDE) Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) has proven crucial. With nearly 8,000 applications received each year, the paperwork used to pile up.

“HR doesn’t have to type in all the index information,” says HR Operations and Training Specialist Sally Cavness. “Laserfiche pulls it in from JDE, we assign the documents a specific number and the program uses this number as a guide to fill in the blanks by retrieving it from JDE.”

In addition, HR integrated Laserfiche with its online application process. “The City of Denton has developed a user-friendly process that dramatically increased the HR department’s effectiveness and efficiency. We now have an online job application process that includes the civil service exam registration,” notes Cavness.

Automating the Hiring Process

Jesse Perez, HR technician for selection and placement, explains, “Whenever there’s a vacancy, we enter the employee requisition into the HRIS system. We then set up an appropriate folder in Laserfiche, which is where all the images and the application are scanned. Each supervisor is assigned a unique login and password for access to the intranet.”

With Laserfiche, applicants can update their information as needed over the web. In addition, the system can pull candidate information from what’s already stored in the system.

The selection process is automated from the initial application submission to the creation of a new personnel file:
  • HR receives applications electronically via the web.
  • The system populates the HRIS with pertinent information and sends the applications to Laserfiche.
  • Supervisors can view applications remotely via Laserfiche WebLink.

“By eliminating the need to shuffle paperwork back and forth between the supervisor and the HR department,” says Cavness, “we’ve eliminated the risk of losing applications.”

Saving Staff Time

Because Laserfiche is integrated with the city’s payroll software, HR employees can now search for documents by name or employee ID. In addition, redaction capabilities have eliminated the cumbersome process of manually blacking out files.

Laserfiche has saved time and effort for city staff.  “As a city,” says Cavness, “we have buildings that are very, very widely spaced. Previously, supervisors might have to come all the way across town to look at paper applications. Being able to view applications from their desks is a tremendous time saver.”

Cavness continues, “Previously, it could take up to two weeks for a new application to get filed. Now that process is normally completed within a day.”

Sarah Mabel sums up the feelings of her HR coworkers. “When Laserfiche first came to the department, as with any new program, we were a little scared of it—we had that kind of mentality. Now, not a single person in our department can live without it. I love it.”

Enterprise-wide Applications

The city’s success with Laserfiche goes beyond HR:
  • The library uses it to track memorial donations.
  • The fire department uses it to access scanned map books and building footprints from their trucks.
  • The city secretary’s office has scanned thousands of documents, including city council minutes, ordinances and resolutions dating back to the 1900s.
  • The engineering department manages easements, ordinances, contracts and a variety of other documents with Laserfiche.

In addition to these processes, the city looks forward to expanding Laserfiche to the building inspection and police departments.

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.

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.”