Pandemic Prompts Medical School to Modernize and Streamline with Laserfiche

SITUATION

• Complex processes surrounding procurement, service requests and other business needs lacked consistency and oversight.
• The organization sought a solution to automate business processes and streamline them for staff.

RESULTS

• Automated solutions accelerated key workflows including the timesheet process, which was reduced from one week to less than a minute.
• Digitization and automation initiatives supported staff satisfaction, new hybrid work models, interoperability and compliance across the organization.

SIU Medicine is a publicly assisted medical school and clinical practice with more than 2,000 providers, researchers and staff members across the state of Illinois. Additionally, SIU is home to a world-class scientific research facility. The facility’s more than 100 active projects complement the institution’s mission of optimizing the health of the people of central and southern Illinois through education, patient care, research and community service.

SIU’s multi-pronged approach requires complex business processes for procurement, service requests and other everyday activities. The organization has been using Laserfiche for digitizing records for the past 10 years, partnering with Laserfiche solution provider TKB Associates. Recently, SIU found a need to modernize processes and expand use of Laserfiche to include Laserfiche Forms and workflow.
Pandemic Prompts SIU Medicine to Modernize and Streamline with Laserfiche

“COVID was an opportunity for us to get executive buy-in and automate processes like online timesheets,” said Jennifer Washburn, IT manager at SIU Medicine. “And since then, we’ve had people lining up and really wanting us to tackle their projects.”

Today, the organization has embraced process automation across departments, leveraging Laserfiche as a capture, decision-making and workflow engine. With streamlined processes and automated records management that reclaims time for employees to focus on more value-added work, Laserfiche supports the organization’s goals, enabling SIU to sustain high employee and patient satisfaction.

Responding to Change with Tech-driven Solutions

Like healthcare IT teams across the country, SIU Medicine’s Process Automation Team has navigated three significant challenges in recent years:

  • Staffing and new work models: Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare provider shortage had been a growing concern to public health professionals. Now, the industry must adapt to new hybrid and remote work models.
  • Interoperability: Operating across numerous systems, healthcare organizations need timely and secure access to health data to optimize outcomes for the people they serve.
  • Compliance: The regulatory landscape is increasingly complex, and requires fast and full adherence to avoid poor outcomes, financial penalties and negative attention.

The Process Automation Team’s commitment to continuous improvement has been a boon to the organization’s ability to respond in innovative ways.

“Laserfiche allowed us to tackle problems and solve them in ways that I don’t think would have been possible otherwise,” said Jennifer Washburn, IT manager at SIU Medicine.

Supporting New Work Models

At the start of the pandemic, for example, the organization assigned an estimated two-thirds of its employees to work from home.

“That was a big change with how our organization handled business, and Laserfiche Forms allowed us to help our staff continue to do their jobs from wherever they were,” said Washburn. The team created electronic forms and associated workflows for different types of timesheets in various employee categories.

SIU’s timesheet process was reduced from 1 week to less than a minute.The difference in the automated process was significant. “Previously, the manual processes could take a week or longer,” Washburn said. “Today, it takes less than a minute.”

Today, about one-third of the organization’s employees continue to work from home, using the forms and workflows created in 2020. This initial automation project also sparked a shift in which many departments began to see real value in digital transformation.

The selection of timesheets for a pilot was also strategically successful for the Process Automation Team. “Not only was it a huge efficiency gain for us, but it also introduced every single member of our workforce to Laserfiche Forms,” Washburn explained.

The Process Automation Team has continued to take on new projects with the goal of enhancing the employee experience and empowering users to do the work and research that supports the organization’s mission. Meanwhile, Laserfiche tools like electronic forms, automated workflows and electronic records management also support compliance with internal and external requirements, as well as users’ ability to access data across different systems.

Improving Interoperability across the Organization

SIU Medicine has automated both simple processes such as animal requests — enabling researchers to request animals for research projects, with streamlined approvals and documentation— and more complex workflows that are used organization-wide.

For example, purchase orders are now on Laserfiche Forms. What was once a manual process that involved PDFs being emailed or paper forms being passed from desk to desk is now completely digital and automated.

“We created a Laserfiche form that pulls budget purpose numbers and auto-populates the necessary information from another system, which then brings in the fiscal officer that’s responsible for that budget number,” said Mike Overmeyer, data architect at SIU Medicine. The automated system also helps employees by auto-routing POs that may need to go to multiple officers, or that are rejected by one or more officers. “We also give purchasing the ability to run POs by IT or an administrator, if they need to. It’s conditional, and we’re not putting the onus on the employee to make those decisions or execute those manual tasks that can end up causing delays.”

Washburn said that budget purpose numbers are housed in a separate, legacy accounting system that can be leveraged via lookups from Laserfiche Forms. “Users enter a number and it all pre-populates. They click submit and it’s near instantaneous getting to the next person. The end users are amazed that they can do all of this in one place.”

Feedback has been so positive that the project was expanded to include purchases that are made through state procurement cards. “The intent is now to use it for everything that gets purchased for the school, from paper towels and office supplies to computer or laboratory equipment,” Washburn added.

medical sector can modernize and streamline data with LaserficheSIU also used Laserfiche to expedite the collection of patient information when a local healthcare provider retired. “There was a local practice where the provider retired, and all of their patients were transitioned into our practice,” Washburn explained. “We had to collect release of information notices, so we quickly deployed a Laserfiche form to streamline that process. Our clinical staff just had to enter the patient’s health record number. Our system integrates with our practice management system to pull everything automatically, which significantly reduced the time it would have taken manually.”

SIU Medicine’s IT department also stood up its own Laserfiche-powered system for entering requests. Employees fill out an electronic form to request a variety of IT services, including reports, software installation, or even new processes through Laserfiche Forms. “Prior to using the forms, we would get requests that were very unstructured, and there might be a lot of follow-up questions to find out, for instance, what reports someone needed, or what we could to do provide support,” said Jeff Wilson, IT director at SIU Medicine.

Other processes that the organization has transformed using Laserfiche include:
  • Medical provider onboarding
  • Student registration
  • Proof of vaccination collection
  • Program requirements tracking for medical students
  • Animal research laboratory access requests
  • Human resources performance evaluations
  • HR applications for retention bonuses
  • Position change requests
  • Invoice distribution
  • Special event approvals
  • Equipment move requests
  • Equipment inventory count certification

Navigating Compliance and Supporting Staff Satisfaction

During the pandemic, Laserfiche helped SIU navigate the changing requirements for state mandates, including symptom tracking, vaccine verification and more. Now SIU leverages Laserfiche’s robust records management capabilities on a daily basis for compliance with industry and state requirements. All forms and information generated from Laserfiche processes are saved and managed in the Laserfiche repository, supporting information governance practices at SIU.

SIU Medicine - million-plus (or 2 million+) documents in Laserfiche“We have well over 2 million documents in our repository,” said Washburn. “If there’s not an existing folder structure for the area that we’re working in, Laserfiche Forms can create it dynamically. We make sure that everything lands in Laserfiche at the end of the day.”

Finally, the organization’s digital efforts have extended beyond process, productivity and compliance improvements, into staff resilience and satisfaction — which has been invaluable in the current healthcare climate. “Working in healthcare, there’s a lot of pressure and demand, so we are constantly thinking about how our staff is doing and what we can do to make the experience better,” Washburn said. “SIU’s executive leadership has emphasized that staff are more contented in their roles when they feel supported and know what they can expect from their leaders. In the most recent employee satisfaction survey, we were rated highest in staff understanding of their roles and responsibilities, and we ranked steady in satisfaction.”

NWFM Streamlines Accounts Payable to Scale with Growth and Increase Transparency for Investors

SITUATION

• Company expansion led to a need to optimize paper-based accounts payable processes.
• NWFM sought a means to manage invoices digitally and increase transparency between back office and field operations.

RESULTS

• Achieved hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings
• Increased accuracy in invoice processing
• Over 300% increase in invoice capacity
• Increased investor confidence in the company

NWFM is a locally owned, full-service farm investment and property management company based in Yakima, Washington. Established in 2018, the company had initially processed all its vendor invoices manually. However, as NWFM expanded, the amount of paper invoices increased proportionally with its growing operations and client base.

“Originally, we manually processed about 250 invoices a month,” recalled Tim Hull, administrative manager at NWFM. “As a few hundred acres of new land came under our management, I could see a paperwork tsunami coming.”

Recognizing an opportunity to optimize paper-based accounts payable processes and improve back office and field operations, NWFM searched for a digital capture and workflow solution. Due to its reputation as a robust cloud content services platform, Laserfiche was chosen, and NWFM worked with solution provider FreeDoc of Lynnwood, Washington, to design a dedicated, customized accounts payable workflow.

Since implementing Laserfiche to keep up with a rapid growth trajectory, NWFM has achieved substantial cost and operational savings, as well as gained the ability to leverage data and metrics built into Laserfiche to improve transparency and accuracy throughout its operations.
Farmer in the field with a crop

Cultivating a Digital Invoice Processing System

Managing hundreds of acres of farmland across Central Washington, NWFM recognizes the value of automation and technology in its operations for the sake of efficiency and accuracy. Assessing its original invoice processing system, the company identified significant challenges:

  • Area managers working on-site would typically make purchases with local vendors, but the process of tracking purchases and matching them with the correct invoice in a timely manner was prone to bottlenecks
  • Employees had to manually manage documents that could be easily misplaced during the process

“As we took on more farmland to manage, I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle such a big influx of invoices every month,” said Hull. “Laserfiche helped us to create a solution to connect our employees located almost 100 miles away to our central office and resolve many of our major challenges.”

The digital accounts payable system at NWFM routes all electronically imported invoices into a dedicated folder within the company’s Laserfiche repository. Each invoice can be reviewed for accuracy before sending it for final approval and payment processing. Throughout the process, the administrative team can make changes to expense category codes and make notes to the bookkeeper.

NWFM’s Laserfiche system is integrated with FastField purchase order software, which allows area managers to upload pictures of invoices directly to Laserfiche from remote locations. The integration extracts vendor names, ranch names, individual blocks, numerical codes and other relevant information needed for processing and approvals; facilitating the management of clear, categorized information while processing invoices.

This has significantly increased the efficiency of invoice review and finalization. NWFM has gone from processing 250 invoices a month to more than 1,000, with the potential to scale up as the company continues to grow.

“Laserfiche has really proven to be the backbone of many of our processes,” said Hull. “Its cloud-hosted infrastructure and the ability to search for specific words within documents has helped us to form a solid connection between our central office and the ranches we manage — we are able to understand each other more clearly in terms of orders and financial documents.”

In addition to the need to establish a revamped AP system, the NWFM team wanted to give investors located out-of-state the ability to review invoices and financial documents digitally. Rather than continue with the legacy process of storing invoices in filing cabinets, NWFM now has a standardized digital repository and has been able to increase its financial transparency when working with investors, giving them access to invoices in real-time. Built with email import functionality, purchase order integrations and granular access rights, the new AP management system has supported NWFM’s efforts to modernize its operations and position the company for growth.

A Fruitful Digital Transformation

Hull explains that NWFM initially tracked cost savings from the AP automation initiative for the first several months after implementation.

“We happily stopped counting savings after it exceeded $1,000 per month,” he said. “The savings was used to hire a chemical inventory specialist who now tracks inventory movement and returns unused stock. This allowed us to already return $72,000 in unused chemicals this year alone.”

NWFM’s new AP system also enables employees to process invoices while checking the price of products against bid sheets. In addition to the time savings from managing invoices, this process has additionally saved NWFM thousands of additional dollars by enabling the company to catch vendor billing errors, identifying $14,000 in billing errors per year. Leveraging data extracted from its invoice repository, the company is now making more accurate and productive purchasing decisions, and identifying savings opportunities.

Following the success of its AP system, NWFM has plans to establish satellite offices to further localize invoice processing in a more distributed strategy. This puts invoice processing closer to the ranch managers who make the purchases and generate the purchase orders. As the company continues to expand, Laserfiche has proven its effectiveness as a scalable solution.

“Organizing invoice and purchase order information by project or by ranch and block for review would have taken me weeks,” stated Hull. “Now I have it all at my fingertips.”

Don’t Miss Your Connection: Secrets to Connecting Data with iPaaS

What is iPaaS?

In the modern workplace, employees jump from application to application to complete daily tasks. Sometimes, if apps aren’t integrated properly, employees are left with an extra step of transferring information manually between applications to keep processes moving.

While integrations like APIs and pre-built solutions have been around for quite some time, they come in many forms, and are not always standardized. These integrations combined can create a digital ecosystem that is functional, but possibly not the most efficient or organized. This is where an iPaaS, or integration Platform as a Service, steps in. It coalesces ad-hoc webs of individual integrations — pre-built solutions, APIs, and other connections an organization utilizes — into a centralized hub that brings everything together.

As part of our mission to enable digital transformation for organizations the world over, Laserfiche is now bringing the robust set of ECM, process automation and records management features it is known for to iPaaS platforms through a strategic partnership with Boomi.

How does iPaaS work?

We all know how difficult airline travel can be with just one or two connections. Navigating unfamiliar airports and locating the right gate, not to mention the possibility of delays and cancellations can be stressful, exhausting and at its worst leave us so lost that we miss our connection completely.

Now consider your average enterprise organization, with its employees making dozens if not hundreds of connections between applications daily, far more than your average flight. Establishing and maintaining this many connections can be a formidable business challenge, especially for organizations that are short on IT resources.

iPaaS is designed to lessen these pressures on IT by standardizing how applications are integrated into an organization, and subsequently making it easier to automate business processes and share data across multiple applications with increased transparency and consistency.

What are the benefits of iPaaS support for Laserfiche?

As a true enterprise content management system, Laserfiche excels at managing the entire lifecycle of an organization’s content, including documents, spreadsheets, contracts, and scanned images. Consequently, Laserfiche can serve as a backbone for mission-critical line-of-business applications across your organization. In addition, its process automation capabilities can kickoff everyday processes from invoice matching to employee onboarding.

Through a strategic partnerships with Boomi, organizations can now easily connect Laserfiche’s leading enterprise content management system and process automation feature set with all the other applications they run on, creating more seamless business processes for employees and saving them time from having to manually re-enter information as they move it between systems.

For organizations looking to integrate Laserfiche further into their digital ecosystem, these partnerships mean reduced complexity, faster ROI, opportunities to do things they couldn’t do before, and quickly connect Laserfiche with mission-critical systems such as Workday, Epic, Netsuite, ESRI, ServiceNow, and many more.

How can Laserfiche customers get started with iPaaS?

Customers looking to start their journey with iPaaS and other integrations can explore over 140 Laserfiche connectors, including an integration with Boomi, on the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace.

Questions about our partnership with Boomi? Email boomi@laserfiche.com.

Not a Laserfiche customer yet? Check out our homepage for information on product benefits, solutions and more.

Prosper Scales Town Services with Laserfiche

SITUATION

In 2020, the Town of Prosper created a continuous process improvement program based on lean practices. As a part of this effort, the town aimed to eliminate paper-driven processes and manual tasks across various departments in order to meet the demands of the town’s growing population.

SOLUTION

The IT department began by replacing the paper applications for the town’s boards and commissions with a Laserfiche form. After experiencing Laserfiche’s ease of use, the department expanded with more electronic forms for the municipal court and the public works departments.

RESULTS

In addition to reduced opportunity for error and a streamlined staff experience, the time the public works department spends on the water equipment readings process has been cut by 75% or more. The department estimates it has saved more than 100 hours annually by re-engineering the process.

The Town of Prosper is a fast-growing suburb with small-town charm, located 30 miles north of Dallas at the crossroads of U.S. 380, Preston Road and the Dallas North Tollway in Collin and Denton Counties. Prosper sits on 27 square miles and is home to more than 35,430 people. A home-rule municipality, governed by a council-manager form of government, the town has full-time fire and police departments, including its own dispatch service. As the Town grows to its projected build-out population of 70,000 residents, Prosper’s vision is to remain a “Place Where Everyone Matters.”

Prosper is a town within Texas’s Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area that has experienced tremendous growth in recent years. With a projected build-out population of 70,000 — double its current population — the town’s IT department has had the foresight to prioritize increased efficiency, implementing processes and solutions that will help the town scale with growth and continue delivering high quality public services.

As a part of this effort, IT has leveraged Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) in various departments as a channel for process modernization and efficiency. The town started by replacing the paper applications for the municipality’s boards and commissions with a Laserfiche form. After experiencing Laserfiche’s ease of use, the department expanded with more electronic forms for the municipal court and the public works departments.

“We’re utilizing Laserfiche for what it’s good at, which is routing information, filing it into a system that makes it easy to search, easy to retrieve and easy to maintain with retention guidelines,” said Leigh Johnson, director of information technology at the Town of Prosper. “Anywhere that we can get a department to start using it more we’re trying to do so.”

Johnson’s vision puts digitization and centralization at the forefront, reducing opportunity for human error while providing a streamlined staff and citizen experience when interacting with the town’s information. Laserfiche supports this vision, as the town continues to explore new ways to leverage Laserfiche’s robust records management, electronic forms and integration capabilities.

Supporting Town Services Through Process Modernization

The Town of Prosper recently implemented a continuous improvement program with the ultimate goal of maintaining a high quality of service to the town’s growing population. This initiative led the IT department to explore opportunities for new efficiencies within existing technologies and processes.

“From the moment I started digging into Laserfiche, I thought ‘This is really slick,’” Johnson said. “I learned about forms and workflow, and we decided at some point that we needed to be utilizing it more and get some training on it.”

The IT department tapped the town’s Laserfiche solution provider, MCCi, for support and training on the platform, which inspired new ideas and opened doors to more advanced solutions.

One of the first Laserfiche-driven process improvements was done in collaboration with the town secretary, who wanted to modernize the way people applied to be on one of the town’s boards or commissions. Like in many municipalities, Prosper’s application was previously done on paper and the process was entirely manual.

“Any place we can eliminate inefficient processes, whether they are paper or otherwise, is going to benefit us,” Johnson explained.

The new process allows applicants to fill out a digital Laserfiche form on the town’s website. Applicants attach their resumes; information is filed in Laserfiche and assigned a retention schedule, lessening the burden of managing paper records hidden in a filing cabinet.

When COVID-19 arrived, the IT department saw an increased need for digital forms to help decrease foot traffic to Town Hall. Building on their knowledge of Laserfiche forms, the team built several new forms, including:
  • Hearing requests
  • Attorney document submittals
  • Jury summons response

“Laserfiche became our go-to, because it was existing platform and we knew how easy it was to build a form with minimal training,” Johnson added.

Expanding Digital Transformation Across Town Departments

After their experience with creating some helpful Laserfiche forms for the town secretary and municipal courts, the IT department was ready to take on a more complex challenge. The team identified a legacy process that the public works department used daily to collect readings from equipment (such as water meters) at public works facilities throughout the town.

Previously done using a stack of paper comprising a sheet for each facility, the process involves field workers who drive out to each site to take readings from the equipment and note the relevant numbers by hand.

“Employees would then go back to the office and transcribe the information into what I called a ‘dirty log,’ which is basically another piece of paper where numbers could be erased and redone, mustard or coffee could be spilled on it,” Johnson said. Numbers were then transferred into a “clean log,” which could be kept as record and shown to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) during audits. “There were so many opportunities for numbers to be input incorrectly, and it was very time consuming.”

With support from MCCi, the Town of Prosper IT team reimagined the process using Laserfiche, which made the readings available to supervisors back in the office in real time. The new process involves equipping field workers with tablets and enabling them to enter readings digitally into a Laserfiche form. The forms presented a list of facilities and, depending on which facility the field worker selected, the form would dynamically change fields for different types of readings. Field workers electronically sign the form, which would also automatically be geotagged with the location of the facility.

“The public works department wanted another way to verify that a person was at the facility, so that if there was ever any question about it, we would have that signature and geotag,” Johnson said.

Field workers then move onto the next facility and repeat the process. If a supervisor in the office notices an anomaly with any of the information entered, they can immediately notify the field worker to take another reading.

“Before, they have even gotten back to the office before a supervisor could notify them that something looked off, so we’re saving more time and fuel as well,” Johnson added. “As they submit the numbers, they are written to an SQL database. We also file the forms in Laserfiche by month. When TCEQ comes out to do the audit now, instead of having to look through a file folder, we’ve got all the forms filled out, timestamped, geo-tagged, signed, and we know we went out there and did readings as we’re required to do. It’s much more efficient, and it’s updated in real-time.”

In addition to supporting the auditing process, the new equipment readings form has reduced the opportunity for error by eliminating 75% of the legacy process’s manual data entry. Johnson also estimates that the new process saves at least two hours per week in manual transcription, all of which results in huge efficiency gains for the public works department.

Today, the IT department is working on integrations to create even more connectivity and efficiencies.  An integration between Laserfiche and the town’s enterprise permitting and licensing system, for example, will enable the planning department to streamline records management by auto-filing paperwork related to permitting and licensing into Laserfiche. The human resources department, too, has embraced a digital approach to managing content and exploring new solutions.

“We went from having just one form for the boards and commissions application to creating dozens,” Johnson said. “We are growing so fast — we have lots of new employees starting, which has been the trend in recent years. So we’re not slowing down; we can’t slow down. There’s so much growth. Residents are very engaged and they demand a lot. Laserfiche is an example of one of the ways we can use technology to scale our services.”

Laserfiche Supports F&M Bank in Growing Assets from $7.6 to $11.7 Billion

With economic uncertainty being the new normal, the demand for reliable financial institutions has risen tremendously. F&M Bank is one institution that has been able to maintain its customer trust for the past century, seeing significant growth particularly in recent years. Now with 25 branches across Los Angeles, Orange, and Santa Barbara counties, F&M’s expansion has led to more information management needs, technology demands and regulatory compliance requirements.

The bank initially implemented Laserfiche as a document management system and quickly expanded its use organization-wide. F&M’s experience using Laserfiche as a document management system was the foundation for the bank’s expanded usage of Laserfiche for process automation.

“What started as a way to scan and search for information is now a fully integrated enterprise content management solution,” said Morgan Wheeler, business intelligence manager and vice president at F&M Bank. “We have roughly 90 different active workflows running to the tune of about 1,500 times per day. We have about 60 different production forms, and nearly every single bank employee uses Laserfiche as part of their job.”

As F&M grew and workplace needs evolved, the bank sought a business process automation solution to create more efficiency and connect with its core banking system for a seamless employee experience.

The bank turned to Laserfiche, and its Laserfiche solution provider CDI for support in leveraging the platform’s business process automation and integration capabilities. F&M integrated Laserfiche with its core banking system and deployed automated workflows that have sped up processes such as financial certification and loan applications, helping the organization to scale. Meanwhile, Laserfiche’s robust governance tools support compliance with regulatory requirements.

“At the close of 2019, the bank had $7.6 billion in assets, and we have now reached $11.7 billion,” said Wheeler, adding that there was a period during the onset of COVID during which F&M’s assets grew more in 100 days than the institution did in its first 95 years of operation (1907-2002). “Laserfiche has been a critical component in our growth.”

“Just storing things digitally isn’t enough. The information we store needs to be functional digital assets within wider business processes, and that assumes not only automation but integration.”

— Morgan Wheeler, Business Intelligence Manager and Vice President at F&M Bank

Increased Efficiency and Accuracy in the Financial Certification Process

One process F&M has reimagined to achieve impressive efficiency is financial certification, which previously required tremendous amounts of manual tasks to coordinate dollar amounts with all of the branches, emailed spreadsheets between managers and departments, and validation against historical information.

“For our branches, it means counting cash, teller drawer amounts, vault and cash center amounts — and we have all these different accounts, cash in transit, night-drops, merchant services … it’s a high-volume, complex activity,” Wheeler explained.

The bank deployed a Laserfiche solution that allows all departments across all branches to enter information about their accounts in a Laserfiche Form, which is prepopulated with information about what their financial position should be. The form calculates the difference and routes it to the bank’s finance and accounting department, and through proper approvals.

“The Laserfiche process has streamlined how we present our financial figures each month,” Wheeler said. “These figures are audited both externally and internally.”

The new process has saved the bank an estimated 700 hours per month of employee time, while providing a more transparent, prescribed procedure for certification. After the solution was deployed, employees were able to better utilize their time on value-added activities.

Overnight Process Deployment With Flexible Forms and Workflow Tools

As a bank deeply embedded in its community, F&M acted quickly during the COVID-19 crisis when information about the Payment Protection Program was released. It was an opportunity to help people when they needed it most — and the team had the tools to deliver with Laserfiche.

“There was very little guidance on how the payroll protection loans were supposed to go out,” Wheeler said.  “When the dust settled, F&M Bank issued more than $1 billion in PPP loans to the local community.”

The executive team assembled to map out how the bank would receive applications and distribute the money, and the F&M team stayed up all night creating a Laserfiche Form and PPP Loan application process.

“Within a matter of days we were funding loans. The nimbleness of Laserfiche Forms and workflow, plus SQL allowed us to build out an application process for those PPP loans literally overnight. I was not only impressed by F&M as an institution, but I was also impressed with our ability to create literally something out of nothing.”

— Morgan Wheeler, Business Intelligence Manager and Vice President at F&M Bank

Applicants began seeing their loans funded in a relatively short time frame, underscoring the bank’s commitment to its community, especially in a time of need.

Today, most of the bank’s loan processes involve Laserfiche, including the Loan Document Draw process: When a client asks for a loan, Laserfiche helps the bank centralize the process and effectively prepare the pieces of content that need to be gathered for the final document draw when the final loan agreement is drawn up for client signature. Having a strong presence in the commercial real estate industry, F&M has streamlined the collection of loan documents — which can be hundreds of pages long — in order to help ensure accuracy and speed.

Delivering on Innovation and Compliance

As an institution regulated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Reserve Bank, and California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI), F&M’s standardized compliance processes continue to pay dividends for the organization and its clients.

In today’s uncertain economic conditions, F&M has also leveraged its technology to build stronger business resilience. The bank’s team worked closely with Cities Digital to build a resilient infrastructure that allows the bank to confidently handle unplanned network events, and gracefully failover for planned upgrades and maintenance. “Due to the cooperative effort of Laserfiche, Cities Digital and our IT team, Laserfiche regularly achieves 99.99% uptime during business hours,” Wheeler said.

F&M’s use of Laserfiche has evolved along with the bank, empowering staff to innovate the way they do business while remaining compliant with industry regulations, and protecting client information and assets.

“Laserfiche is a critical way in which we deliver to our auditors, to our community, to our employees and, most importantly, to our clients.”

— Morgan Wheeler, Business Intelligence Manager and Vice President at F&M Bank

Learn more about how to invest in a Laserfiche solution today.

University San Francisco

Streamlining Student-Centered Processes at Colegio Alemán

Colegio Alemán Alexander von Humboldt A.C. is a network of three German-language schools based in greater Mexico City. Serving 3,000 students, the organization is one of the largest German educational institutions outside of Germany. In order to serve its growing student body, the organization found the need to reimagine the ways in which it provided core student services, such as enrollment, re-enrollment and scholarships.

The Colegio Alemán team seized the opportunity to digitize and automate key processes using a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system, which enabled them to create electronic forms to capture student information digitally, and automate workflows to streamline document processing. The team started by creating a better experience for students and their families with the re-enrollment process, and has since built on their success by continuing to optimize and automate other key activities throughout the organization.

“We’ve experienced many benefits from automating our workflows using Laserfiche, we’ve found that what we need to do, we can do in the Laserfiche platform.”

—Victor Valverde López, technology manager at Colegio Alemán

Reimagining Re-enrollment

After managing many time- and resource-intensive re-enrollment cycles, Colegio Alemán Administrative Manager Ema Medina brought a challenge to the organization’s leadership: “We couldn’t continue the way that we were doing the re-enrollment process,” Medina said. “Parents had to come to the school with lots of paperwork, documents that we needed signed, and in the best-case scenario, it would take an hour or more to get through with all of the steps involved.”

The Colegio Alemán team worked with Apoint Mexico, a Laserfiche solution provider, to implement Laserfiche with the goal of reimagining re-enrollment as a digital, automated process that would save time for parents and administrative staff. In the new process, a Laserfiche form collects the necessary information from parents — because this is the re-enrollment process, parents only need to confirm and update information as needed. They can review the contract with the school, provide an e-signature and even pay tuition with the new Laserfiche-powered automated process.

“One of the most important parts of our Laserfiche implementation was the ease of integration,”said Valverde López. “It was easy for us to integrate our Laserfiche process with our ERP, Intelisis, which enabled us to streamline the activities — from inputting student information to payments. And with records management, our documents are organized and classified in such a way that it’s easy for administrative staff to find information.”

When COVID-19 hit Mexico in 2020, the Colegio Alemán team was grateful to have a process in place for parents to re-enroll their students online. Now that the staff has returned to the office, however, parents still prefer the online process. “For me, the biggest benefit has been the improvement in our customer service,” Medina said. “The parents are very happy with this process and they tell us all the time. And having all of our documents in a digital platform — it’s such an important tool.”

“Today, parents don’t have to physically go to the school to re-enroll; they don’t have to print a single page. They can do the entire process from their house, from their offices, wherever they are. It takes about five to 10 minutes — the contract, the payment, everything. It’s saved us time and money, but the most important thing is that our parents are happy because they don’t lose one to three hours doing this process.”

—Victor Briseño Candela, CFO at Colegio Alemán

Building on Digital Transformation Organization-wide

The parents and employees’ satisfaction with the new re-enrollment process led the Colegio Alemán team to continue digitally transforming other student-facing processes. Naturally, the new student enrollment process was a prime candidate for automation. “The new student process is very important,” Briseño Candela explained. “Today, we have an enrollment form for new students, so parents can give us information, all the documentation, and it’s all saved in the Laserfiche repository.”

Additional processes that the Colegio Alemán team have automated include:
  • Scholarship requests: Families can provide financial information, which is automatically routed to the relevant personnel to review and make a determination.
  • Bus transportation process: Colegio Alemán provides bus transportation for nearly 2,000 students per school day. This process streamlines the collection of authorizations from parents that their children can take the bus, and updated addresses to support efficient pick-up and drop-off.
  • Vendor registration: Vendors that work with Colegio Alemán provide legal and fiscal documents through this process, which automates validation and document classification.
  • Employees’ children enrollment: Colegio Alemán employees can enroll their children through a special enrollment and approval process.
  • Teacher benefit discount: School teachers can submit a form to receive discounts for different materials and services.
  • Legal or parent meeting attendance: A simple but important process allows Colegio Alemán staff to keep record of who attended meetings.

“Any school district or network of schools operates with a lot of different systems. Laserfiche has helped us to pull information from all of these systems that normally operate independently, so that we have more visibility into the data that we have.”

—Víctor Valverde López, technology manager at Colegio Alemán

A Digital-First Future

The team at Colegio Alemán continues to automate processes and move toward a digital-first approach to student services. As Colegio Alemán started with more student-facing processes, the organization’s future plans include assessing back-office processes for additional efficiencies.

“Ultimately, we want to implement a dashboard for our process data in Laserfiche,” Briseño Candela said. This will enable even more optimization moving forward, allowing the organization’s leadership to identify process bottlenecks or spot trends that can help them make informed decisions when resource planning.

“A lot of our current Laserfiche processes are communication between the school to our different publics — our parents, our associates, our teachers,” Briseño Candela said. “The next step is to use Laserfiche for our internal processes, to be more efficient in our day-to-day work. It’s our social responsibility not to print so much paper. And it is also our responsibility to be efficient with our time to support the people working in administration, as well as the parents. We want to create a good experience for everyone involved.”

To learn more about how Laserfiche drives digital transformation, schedule a consultation today.

Putting Customers First in Claims Processing

The focus on customer experience was one of the core drivers in the process automation strategy for MSIG Hong Kong (MSIG), embracing customer needs in light of a shifting technological landscape and major disruptions. The company sought to phase out legacy systems and increase efficiency for its claims submission service, requiring a highly adaptable content services tool to do so.

Since implementing Laserfiche for claims in 10 different product lines, the MSIG claims team can now manage all claims in a centralized platform, allowing staff to focus on more important claim assessment tasks. By investing in digital transformation for the organization’s EASY Claims System, MSIG has been able to differentiate itself in Hong Kong’s highly competitive insurance industry. The organization’s EASY Claims system has received wide recognition in Asia’s insurance landscape, as well as won MSIG a number of industry awards, including a Laserfiche Run Smarter award in 2019.

“Laserfiche is the catalyst for our users and customers to improve their day-to-day work experiences,” said Alan Yue, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at MSIG.

Seeking a means to respond to customer needs and enable staff to transition to remote working arrangements during periods of instability during the COVID-19 pandemic, Laserfiche has also helped MSIG successfully achieve business continuity, maintaining a high level of operational efficiency and customer service through dedicated portals.

Putting Customers First

Providing general insurance solutions for more than 100 years, MSIG Holdings (Asia) Pte. Ltd. has a history of combining global and local best practices in the organization’s customer-focused approach, believing that the relationship between insurance companies and customers should be based on trust. This commitment to customers led the organization to reassess its reliance on manual legacy systems for process management. MSIG recognized that customers are embracing more digital solutions, presenting an opportunity to make correspondence with clients more seamless and efficient, as well as reengineer the IT infrastructure.

“As a core part of our business, the claims system is one of the most important parts of the MSIG customer journey,” Yue said. “We realized that the entire process was actually quite paper-driven, making it the perfect candidate to digitalize and automate.”

MSIG initiated a business transformation program known internally as “Transformer” in 2017. Laserfiche was chosen as MSIG’s core digital transformation solution with the goal of automating manual and paper-based core business processes, targeting the customer claims submission platform as a starting point. Eventually named EASY Claims, the system improved both operational efficiency and service with a focus on the customer experience. The platform supports self-service submissions, as well as provides transparency of claims status to MSIG customers.

Within the first three months of launch, EASY Claims significantly improved efficiency at MSIG, automating over 100,000 tasks that previously required manual user input. Additionally, the number of clients submitting claims via the new system has increased by up to 80%. This has streamlined and simplified the claims submission process for customers, aligning with shifting technological expectations and improving response times.

The EASY Claims system also improved the experience for staff processing customer submissions. Originally, acknowledging a newly submitted claim could take two days. Today, it takes fewer than 15 minutes. This translates to a savings of more than 200 work days a year for the claims processing staff organization-wide. The property claims management team specifically was able to save 57 days a year through the EASY Claims system.

The initiative has created the opportunity for ongoing optimization. In 2022, MSIG introduced Zero Touch for Helper insurance plan claims. Zero Touch is MSIG’s digital solution for claims assessment, enabling customers to submit their claims form, supporting documents and contact details online. The system then checks the customer’s claims history, policy validity and claim payment amount. For eligible clinical or dental expenses claims, payments are settled in just two working days. MSIG is planning to add Zero Touch to more products, creating a more seamless customer experience across product lines.

Along with facilitating claims submission for customers and acknowledgement in the backend, the automated process has helped save 12 days a year during the claims finalization stage. In terms of improved staff efficiency, MSIG has increased overall productivity by 1.4 times per hiring cycle within the Claims department alone. As a team with a significant amount of customer facetime and interaction, the Claims department’s increased productivity has improved both employee and customer experience.

In 2022, MSIG Hong Kong honored over HK$356 million, with a claims ratio of 92.9%, seeing a consistent increase for three consecutive years. The organization also reduced the number of complaints received by 50% in two years.

“Claims is only the beginning of our digital transformation. Since implementing Laserfiche, we are looking at expanding to multiple channels, underwriting teams and core business processes to digitize and automate as well,” said Yue.

Enhancing Customer Service During COVID-19

Even during major disruptions, it is important for companies to carry out vital processes and services to customers — especially in the context of insurance where clients may be working through sudden, unexpected incidents. As the platform that powers the EASY Claims system, Laserfiche has helped to ensure a high level of customer service and a user-friendly, customer-oriented interface. The platform removes friction from the process of filing a claim, with intuitive features such as a “save-as-draft” function that enables customers to retrieve incomplete forms at any time using an email link, and smart suggestions that provide basic information and documents that customers will need to make a claim before they fill out the form. Customers can also receive SMS messages, email confirmations and tracking numbers to stay informed of the status of their claims.

The system has also been a scalable solution for MSIG to continue providing services to customers with minimal interruptions.

In accordance with government recommendations, MSIG was able to successfully initiate a work-from-home arrangement for all staff in the Hong Kong office less than one week after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the city. As Laserfiche automates key steps in claims submission and processing, MSIG staff can focus on pertinent tasks without needing to be in the office. From the customer perspective, claims can be submitted as normal, even during the height of the pandemic.
Establishing a digital infrastructure that supports automation early on has enabled MSIG to enhance the quality and scope of service and gain recognition as a provider of general insurance, as well as build long-term business continuity and resiliency.

“Laserfiche has helped us to develop a system in line with our commitment to our customers and staff,” Yue explained. “We can put their health and safety first while responding to current challenges and planning for the future.”

Investing in the Future

Recognizing that the insurance industry has historically relied on legacy processes, MSIG looked to digitize its claim service, rebuilding it to address both staff and client needs. With core business processes established between 10 to 20 years prior, the firm had an intimate knowledge of its users’ needs, refreshing a part of its business that focused heavily on customer and employee input. Working with Laserfiche to develop a nimble IT strategy, MSIG has been able to improve the customer and back-end experience within the claims process without disrupting day-to-day operations.
“Both business and technology landscapes have experienced so much rapid change and development,” said Yue. “These are the primary driver for MSIG’s digital transformation program, equipping us to anticipate our future needs as well as our customer expectations.”

Experiencing unprecedented and unanticipated changes in 2020, the EASY Claims System has proven itself to be highly adaptable, highlighting the need for digital transformation at MSIG. With claims as an obvious starting point, MSIG is looking to expand Laserfiche to other departments and processes. The organization is preparing to introduce claims process tracking for customers, allowing customers to track their claims in real time through the MSIG app or website — further enhancing visibility and continuing to build trust with customers.

“We now have a way to differentiate ourselves within Hong Kong’s insurance marketplace,” said Yue. “Laserfiche has helped users throughout the company to identify opportunities to improve day-to-day work. The sky is the limit.”

To learn more about how Laserfiche drives digital transformation, schedule a consultation today.

Santa Monica’s Digital First Approach

The City of Santa Monica, California, leverages Laserfiche to provide better services at a lower cost and with lower friction to constituents.

Transcript

Santa Monica is a city of 8.3 square miles. 93,000 residents and about 1800 staff members. We’re a full service city. We have our own utilities, our police, fire traffic, even our federal airport. First, we got a great beach and we have a lot of technology, a very complex environment with probably over 300 applications that we utilize. So I came to the city about five years ago.

Laserfiche was already in our environment. I saw an Opportunity to leverage tools like Laserfiche more extensively to help digitize our environment. And the game changer for us was when Laserfiche came to us and talks about an integration with DocuSign. And so we implemented that. One of the big benefits is that it’s in sustainability.

We no longer use as much paper as it. And in the past three and a half years, we estimated you’d saved over 180000 hours staff time. That integration when the pandemic hit, we had to quickly and become a virtual workplace. We had made the city workforce completely mobile with technology. We had created a user experience that was the same whether you were virtually working or face to face on site.

And we had done all this not because we were anticipating a pandemic We did it because we wanted to enable flexibility and Work-Life Balance for our staff. What we were able to do very quickly was to pivot and have 80% of our staff teleworking with all the tools they needed in 36 hours. Part of that was we had workflows already in place which utilized these Most people don’t think of government as being frictionless.

This matter of fact, most people consider the government a main source of friction But why does it have to be that way? Can we see a way to provide better services at a lower friction, at a lower cost to our constituents? If we can use the same tools that any other organization uses, it’s just thinking about things different.

I see Laserfiche as one of our key platforms that we can leverage and simplify our environment, but also give us greater capability within one system to do more. I’m Joseph Cevetello, and I’m using Laserfiche to empower the people of Santa Monica.

Public Records and Process Automation Power the County of Newell’s Digital Business Strategy

Located in Alberta, Canada, the County of Newell is known for its central location and dynamic and diverse economy. Recent years have brought growth to the region, including Amazon’s first renewable energy investment in the country — a 80MW solar project expected to produce enough energy to power more than 18,000 Canadian homes for a year. The Newell County government is committed to the area’s progress, continuously improving processes with an eye toward its vision statement: “to encourage and support sustainable growth and quality of life.”

This commitment recently drove a number of transformative efforts at the county, including the digitization and automation of business processes that employees and residents use on a daily basis. The county, a Laserfiche customer since 2004, has been going through processes strategically, optimizing steps using a lean project management methodology.

“We strategically approach everything that we do,” said Roberta Fernell, director of information technology at the County of Newell. “Every process or system we introduce, we want to understand how it fits, and where we may need to adjust to make some improvements. That’s why we did an organization-wide implementation of Laserfiche.”

Reimagining Records Management

Working with Laserfiche solution provider Inspiris, the County of Newell achieved a strategic priority by digitizing and centralizing information in Laserfiche. The Laserfiche platform became the foundation on which departments could build automated processes and integrate with other systems to streamline information flow throughout the organization.

“Digital transformation is a journey, an evolution in how our organization works, operates and moves forward to better serve the public,” said Joanne Wells, records management technician at the county. Departments that now use Laserfiche include:
  • Administration
  • Agricultural Services
  • Corporate Safety
  • Enforcement
  • Engineering Services
  • Finance
  • Fire Services
  • Fleet Services
  • Human Resources
  • Information Technology
  • Municipal Services
  • Planning and Development

The centralization and digitization of records has also supported the county’s commitment to open government, and compliance with Alberta’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIP), as well as the federal Access to Information Act and Privacy Act. The county website’s public portal removes the burden from county staff who previously had to manually pull records, which could cause delays.

“I receive a lot of internal requests for information,” said Ariana Nielsen, executive assistant at the county. “And the search capabilities of Laserfiche allow the public to find information on their own without having to wait for a response.”

Plus, Fernell added, the visibility into what documents are being downloaded enable county staff to gage what the public is interested in: “This information gives us insights into the hot topics — we might find, for instance, that we should do an educational campaign on social media because we see high interest on something particular. We’re leveraging our information in a connected way that can inform other areas of the organization.”

Reclaiming Time in Accounts Payable

As the county assessed the potential for further improvements, accounts payable came up as one process that touched multiple departments but heavily relied on manual tasks. The county re-engineered the AP process, capturing invoices digitally in the Laserfiche repository and using a Laserfiche workflow to automate the routing of information to various departments for reviews and approvals.

This transformation increased visibility of invoices across the organization, enabling the county to accelerate payments and more accurately determine cash flow. Laserfiche integrates with the county’s financial management software, Diamond, as well as its CentralSquare asset management system to create a seamless experience for employees who interact with the AP process.

“The AP process in Laserfiche is efficient and great time saver,” said Emerson Pankratz, the county’s accounting clerk. “It is very easy to enter new invoices into the system and get them to the appropriate person for coding and approvals quickly. Also, Laserfiche’s ability to recognize duplicate invoices helps stop duplicate payments and duplication of efforts.”

“We not only reduced our inaccuracy and our opportunity time — or the time that should be reduced to improve process performance — but we increased our value-added time, or the tasks we do that actually add value to the process, by 27%.”

— Roberta Fernell, director of information technology at the County of Newell

Simplifying the COR Audit Process and Enhancing Employee Experience

As the county’s success with digitization and automation projects spread, the county’s IT team began leveraging a lean methodology to prioritize projects that would have the highest impact.

The organization undergoes a Certificate of Recognition (COR) audit each year to maintain its recognition for developing health and safety programs that meet the standards established by the Alberta government. A previously arduous audit process led the county to reassess its health and safety training documentation, a critical process for the county, which requires all employees to be educated on occupational hazards, preventative measures and best practices.

“For the COR audit, we have to be able to deliver on-demand what they need,” Fernell said. “They need to know that people have received the training required to be competent in their roles, and that we as a county government are keeping them safe by providing that training.”

The IT team built a Laserfiche Form and set up document templates that enable employees to get certificates into the Laserfiche records repository with minimal data entry. The transformation resulted in a reduction of information inaccuracy — from a 58% inaccuracy rate down to below 10%. The county also built notifications into the workflow so that HR employees had visibility into the process — and Laserfiche reporting tools enable managers to view the time it takes to complete the progress, opening up further opportunity for optimization.

While the county used to see about 100 documents related to health and safety training recorded in Laserfiche per year, it now sees about 100 per quarter, thanks to the team’s optimization efforts. The end-to-end process time was also reduced from 135 days to 5.2.

“Staff members want to be recognized for the training they’ve taken,” Fernell said. “And managers need to know what training their staff has taken, or what training they need to take — to help support health and safety in the workplace, and to resource plan.”

County-wide Digital Transformation Continues

The County of Newell continues to strategically optimize processes and integrate systems with Laserfiche with the aim of providing the best possible employee and citizen experience. Major business processes that have already been automated include:
  • Accounts payable approvals
  • Corporate safety
  • Training documentation
  • County of Newell Water Project registration
  • Pre/post trip process
  • Performance reviews
  • IT change requests
  • Gravel haul cards
  • Inspections
  • Fire permits

The IT team also has significant Laserfiche projects on the horizon, including HR onboarding and offboarding, equipment rentals, expense claims and development permits.

“What impresses the County of Newell is the versatility of Laserfiche. Not only does it effectively manage county documents, applying records management, but it also offers efficiencies in the processing of documents, ways to transfer/share data between systems and methods to electronically capture data to be used for reporting and analytics.”

—Roberta Fernell, director of information technology at the County of Newell

“Laserfiche has totally changed how we operate, and how we think about operating,” said Matt Fenske, chief administrative officer at the county.

To learn more about how Laserfiche drives public sector digital transformation, schedule a demo today.