One of Mauritus’s leading banks enhanced the customer experience by transforming the account opening process using Laserfiche Forms and an automated workflow.
Laserfiche’s digital transformation model helps Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group go above and beyond by digitizing and streamlining the claims process so customers have the confidence to do more.
Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group uses Laserfiche Forms to make the customer experience as seamless as possible.
A leading manufacturer and supplier of formwork and scaffolding systems, PERI streamlined operations and enhanced the customer experience through an online portal.
The Los Angeles County Development Authority (LACDA) digitally transformed its records management program, incorporating Laserfiche to digitize, centralize and manage the lifecycle of records. Since deploying Laserfiche, the agency has reclaimed significant time for its case workers while boosting its ranking with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to the designation of “high performer”—an improvement that helps secure funding and enables the LACDA to provide more services and programs to more people.
The LACDA is a public agency responsible for providing LA County residents essential programs related to subsidized housing, community development, and affordable housing development and preservation. Serving the most populous county in the United States requires the LACDA to house decades’ worth of records related to hundreds of thousands of cases. These span a wide range, from groups applying for Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) that provide resources to underserved areas, to people in need of Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers and residents of all ages applying for education and training in an effort to build better lives and better neighborhoods.
The LACDA previously stored records in filing cabinets and across various servers and systems. As the number of records grew, the agency identified the need to digitize and centralize them using a Laserfiche electronic records management solution. Laserfiche was also integrated with the LACDA’s property management software, Yardi, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, PeopleSoft, to eliminate the risk of duplicating information or work.
“Case managers don’t need to switch between applications to look up or copy information, they can view all the documents in one place,” says Rosa Chevarin, supervisor for Yardi/Laserfiche support. “They like the one-stop shop feel, and everything is streamlined in their natural workflow.”
Through this digital transformation, the agency made information more available, accessible and usable to authorized users.
“In an agency that manages more than 3,000 public and affordable housing units and assists more than 24,000 residents through a housing choice voucher program within the county, being able to pull up submitted information at a moment’s notice is vital,” says Doug Van Gelder, Manager of Information Technology at the LACDA.
This also enables the agency to:
The LACDA’s new solution exceeds the basic expectations of records management and incorporates automation. Laserfiche automatically files documents with standardized naming and folder structure. Additionally, when a record’s retention period has ended, relevant employees are notified to handle disposition.
“The need for services is always going to be great, and everyone is always going to be busy doing their jobs,” Van Gelder says. “Finding and pulling documents, and making sure records are taken care of in accordance to regulations is time consuming. The new system takes that tedious work away from the case managers, so they can focus on the people they serve.”
Since transforming its records management, the LACDA has gained the ability to automate additional business processes. Agency staff has automated the new employee onboarding process, which previously required a new associate to spend about half of their first day on the job filling out paperwork. The new Laserfiche solution enables the agency to send the new employee a link to all the necessary forms that can be completed before their start date.
“I want to be as digital as possible,” says Van Gelder, adding that there are also plans to rebuild the LACDA’s housing portal to allow people to apply for programs online. The workflow for processing those applications would also be automated using Laserfiche to facilitate quicker response times, better transparency into the process for both the staff and applicant, and less risk for error.
The agency’s newfound efficiencies have proven essential in a time when the LACDA’s programs and services are needed more than ever. The waiting list to receive Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers has about 44,000 people on it, while the agency’s staff is down to about half of what it was a decade ago due to the economic downturn and attrition. “The only way we’ve been able to provide the same level of service with half the staffing is through technology,” Van Gelder explains.
Additionally, over 70 percent of the LACDA’s funding comes from HUD, which regularly audits housing authorities to ensure funding is going toward serving people who need these critical programs and services.
“If a housing authority does not rank well, HUD could potentially take funding back and give it to another housing authority that proves it is helping more people and running more efficiently,” Van Gelder says.
Since the LACDA deployed its Laserfiche records management initiative, it has boosted its ranking and maintained its status as a high performer.
“The need is always going to be greater than the funding, but IT is one of the units within the organization that has the ability to provide productivity enhancements while bringing cost down,” Van Gelder says. “We’ve been able to serve more people with quality services and programming with half the staffing we used to have through these technology solutions.”
Leading public sector organizations use an electronic records management solution to increase efficiency and improve citizen services. To learn more, download the free white paper: “Streamlining the Business of Government.”
Lebanese American University (LAU) is an accredited American university operating in the Middle East with two main campuses in Beirut and Byblos, hospital facilities and an academic center in New York. The university consists of seven major schools and 800 faculty and staff serving approximately 10,000 students each year.
To maintain LAU’s status as a leading institution, the organization’s leadership is always looking for new ways to align its administrative services with student preferences, and reduce bottlenecks during busy enrollment and graduation periods.
“Students these days are digital natives, and they like to transact with us on their preferred devices, which are their phones,” says Camille Abou-Nasr, Assistant Vice President for Information Technology at LAU. “We needed really to automate all the processes that students carry out with the Registrar’s Office, and to do it in a manner that is plausible and really encourages them to do these kinds of transactions with us.”
Starting with the Admissions and Registrar’s Offices, the university used Laserfiche Forms to provide students with online access to transcripts and academic records. With on-demand digital access, academic advisors across student enrollment, recruitment, advising, student retention, outreach and student aid programs can now immediately review, approve or follow up with students in days instead of weeks.
Due to Laserfiche’s ease of use and open integrative capabilities with core systems like Banner and SharePoint, the university quickly expanded its initial mobile forms solution to other campus departments such as Student Development, Legal and Facilities Management. With a campus-wide solution, the university can truly enable students to submit any academic or administrative form online and get their results quickly.
Mobility has also benefited busy executives in the Facilities Management department, who oversee the numerous campus facilities. They can now use iPads to access and approve budget allocations in Laserfiche while traveling abroad.
“There is one platform where you can do document management, you can do forms, and you can do business process automation,” said Abou-Nasr. “It’s scalable.”
“Through mobility and document management, we were able to achieve our goal to go green, to make our services more accessible and deliver our services in a faster manner,” says Abou-Nasr.
Click here to learn more about using Laserfiche to enhance student services.
The Town of Okotoks is the largest town in Alberta, Canada, and provides services to over 30,000 residents. The city operates 20 different business centers that are each responsible for their own document filing. Prior to using a document management system, the city battled isolated information gathering and collaboration, leading to delays in public service delivery and data entry errors.
“The town was looking for a more streamlined solution with a central filing location, easier searching capabilities for the employees and everybody on a broad spectrum,” says Sheila Andrew, HR/Corporate and Strategic Administrator for the Town of Okotoks.
Using Laserfiche’s combined electronic forms, workflow and records management capabilities, the city jump-started an enterprise-wide digital records initiative. One central document repository provided a single point of access for information across the city and standardized each department’s disparate document filing and archiving methods.
The system quickly evolved from just a document storage system. It’s now the town’s primary tool for improving future and ongoing operations. Using Laserfiche Forms, the municipality implemented over 150 forms-based processes for numerous activities, including:
Using metadata, federated search and digital document access, employees across city departments can instantly find and collaborate on the information they need to deliver faster public services.
“We’ve gotten great feedback about how quickly approvals are happening now and the ease of access to forms,” says Andrew. “We only have one location to find forms, instead of lots of different places where people were saving PDFs or filing them.”
Staff collaborates more quickly and in a more transparent manner on documents and requests.
New Zealand’s Hurunui District, with a population of approximately 11,000 spread across 18 towns, offers a rural lifestyle filled with rich culture. Its local government authority excels at developing a sense of community, partnership and well-being.
Hurunui District Council knew that building a strong IT infrastructure was essential to providing the best customer service. The Council began searching for a new solution to replace its legacy document management system (DMS) when the requirements for records management at government organisations changed. The growing amount of information generated proved too much to efficiently handle, control and retain.
According to Scott Linton, the Council’s Information and Technology Services Manager, the Council focused on finding a system with:
Laserfiche provided a versatile enterprise-wide solution. “Being New Zealand’s seventh-largest district by land size, we needed a system with the capability to connect our multiple offices,” explains Linton. “We were really impressed at how easy it was to implement Laserfiche and connect our main office with five satellite locations. It was up and running in no time!”
Three months before the Hurunui District Council put Laserfiche in place, its legacy DMS broke down. “We were worried about what to do with all of our information, but Laserfiche Quick Fields allowed us to quickly migrate the contents of the legacy system into Laserfiche,” says Linton.
The Council used Laserfiche Quick Fields to back scan its records. More than half a million documents were imported directly into Laserfiche from their legacy system using Laserfiche Import Agent and Laserfiche Workflow. “Laserfiche Quick Fields helped to accelerate the process, prevent manual errors, save staff time and produce greater productivity,” Linton says. “In fact, we wouldn’t have been able to do the conversion manually. It would have overwhelmed us.”
The Council is now preparing to transfer approximately 800,000 files from its group drives to the Laserfiche repository.
Laserfiche’s versioning functionality was an important selection criterion for the Council. “We use versioning to improve service delivery and regulate our information management,” explains Linton. “We use versioning with our Consents documents and it prevents information from getting lost, tracks changes and maintains different versions for different purposes.”
The Council actively uses versioning to manage Resource Consents documents, adding, revising and replacing throughout the year. “It was difficult to organise when we didn’t have a centralised storage location. We didn’t know which document was the newest one, staff members constantly worked on wrong versions and the name of the documents kept changing. It’s been really useful to our staff so we will move forward and implement it with Building Consents documents as well,” Linton says.
The Laserfiche check in/check out process has helped to ensure that:
The Building Consents Department issues permits to ensure that any building work within the district is lawful, safe and sustainable. Documents about each property, including applications and details, need to be well-maintained and organised so that staff can provide excellent customer service.
“We are currently automating 120,000 Building Consents, Resource Consents and License’s documents using Laserfiche Workflow, which is pulling metadata from the old database and transferring it into the Laserfiche database,” says Linton. “Doing a manual transfer would have been a nightmare.”
Using Laserfiche’s abilities, the Council organised its metadata information as fields and then determined which fields to apply to the documents to enable the most efficient search for users. Laserfiche Workflow then assigns a template of predetermined fields to the documents, automatically pulls the information from the old database and fills out the metadata for each document.
“Each property has its own folder that contains an average of 40-50 pages on the details. Overall, we have around 10,000 folders, so we have tens of thousands of documents that need to be identified and placed with the correct property,” Linton explains. “We applied a Laserfiche template with metadata information such as the building type, number, property ID, evaluation number and address. Laserfiche Workflow then automatically identifies, filters and files the documents in their correct folders.”
According to Linton, “We want to continue expanding Laserfiche as an enterprise-wide, back-end control centre. We want our staff to experience a faster and easier search for documents — it shouldn’t be time-consuming to gather information about a property. With Laserfiche, they will be able to search for a property name or the ID and get the results in seconds.”
The Hurunui District Council is looking forward to expanding and extending its Laserfiche implementation. “We are looking to bring in Laserfiche Mobile for building inspectors and compliance officers when they are at on-site visits. We’re also considering implementing Laserfiche Forms to further streamline workflows,” Linton says. “The capabilities of Laserfiche are endless. We haven’t found anything we can’t do with Laserfiche!”
With over 22,000 students, Linn-Benton Community College is one of the largest community college systems in Oregon.
A growing student population placed increased demands on the college’s Enrollment Services division, which processes around 15,000 applications each year. In order to keep up with the demand, the college needed to expedite transcript review and find an efficient way to inform students about their course options and graduation goals.
“Before Laserfiche, it took us about six to eight weeks to complete a transcript evaluation,” says Amy Sikora, Assistant Director of Enrollment Services. “We would get transcripts in from the students, and then they would just sit there unless the student filled out an online request form asking us to evaluate them.
“We had students calling us all the time asking if we received their transcript or if we evaluated their transcript,” Sikora adds. “It was a really clunky process.”
The college worked with Laserfiche solution provider CDI to implement a Laserfiche solution for an online transcript evaluation service that:
By applying this process to class petitions, transfer credits, course refunds and more, staff can stay in constant communication with students about their options.
“Students are communicated with every step of the way, which is great because it saves us a ton of phone calls,” says Sikora. “Staff like it because it just does everything for them. It helps in many different ways—for students going into special admissions programs, and even bypassing placement testing can be really beneficial for students.”
Benefits include:
“The goals were to reduce the time that it takes to evaluate transcripts, keep everybody notified and just have the process flow better,” said Sikora. “Laserfiche solved all those things for us.”
The Alabama Department of Mental Health provides critical services to over 200,000 patients annually at hospitals and clinics across the state. With medical archives dating back over 150 years, the agency must manage patient data in a manner that enables staff to easily and quickly find the information they need.
“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act asked all organizations, such as ours, to demonstrate meaningful use for information and have electronic health records to keep funding with Medicare and Medicaid,” said Cindy Shrum, Director of Information Systems. “We want to maintain our Medicare or Medicaid funding, but having an electronic records management system is also just easier. We’re able to get the information when we need it.”
Upon the recommendation of the State of Alabama, the agency selected Laserfiche as its records management solution. Laserfiche’s ease of use and competitive pricing meant the department could more productively use federal funding to create an agency-wide records management system for patient records.
The department partnered with the state, which was already using Laserfiche, to procure the software; this partnership also shortened implementation time and improved data sharing. The department has since digitized all medical records at Bryce Hospital, the state’s oldest and largest inpatient psychiatric facility.
“We’ve got them organized so you can see the physical history, the summary, and the progress notes,” Shrum says. “What I like about Laserfiche is that in just three clicks, we’re in the electronic health record. For a clinician, especially our doctors, that time matters to them.” Benefits include:
These financial and operational improvements have ultimately enabled the Alabama Department of Mental Health to provide better quality health care and a greater volume of patient visits. “We started out small, but the potential is unlimited,” Shrum says.
