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SITUATION
• Responsible for clients’ sensitive legal documentations
• Office needed a secure single source of truth that could automate and standardize processes while addressing regulatory requirements
RESULTS
• 450% increase in some business segments
• Client orders processed without having to increase staff at the same scale
• Creation of living trusts reduced from six hours to 15 minutes
Notaría 9 de Mexicali B.C. is a Mexicali-based notarial service under the leadership of public notary Carlos Enriquez de Rivera Castellanos. The office, one of Mexico’s leading legal notaries, provides a wide range of services including real estate transactions, will and estate planning, contract affirmations, new business incorporation, and legal document authentication. Public notaries in Mexico follow a civil law system wherein they are given further-reaching legal responsibilities than their counterparts in the U.S., U.K. or Canada, more akin to a lawyer.
This legal responsibility includes complex regulatory considerations when handling client information. Notary servicers in Mexico are required to submit client information to city clerks, in addition to retaining it for a minimum of five years. Additionally, notary offices are regularly audited by an independent commission, which cross matches stored records with those that are submitted to city clerks.
As Notaría 9 grew, so did the need to efficiently handle large volumes of client documentation in accordance with regulatory requirements. This led Enriquez de Rivera Castellanos to work with digital solutions provider Soluciones Impex, SA de CV, to implement Laserfiche. Since embarking on this digital transformation journey, the firm has more than quadrupled its business while only doubling its staff.
“Carlos has driven a vision for digital transformation at his business and has managed to consolidate all the necessary pieces to make operations more reliable and efficient,” said Guillermo Hernandez, managing director and founder of Soluciones Impex. “Using technology as the main enabler, Carlos has made Notaría 9 into the most advanced notary public in Mexico.”
“Laserfiche has put us ahead of everyone else in this business. I have all of the tools and resources I need thanks to Laserfiche”
— Carlos Enriquez de Rivera Castellanos, Notary Public, Notaría 9 de Mexicali B.C.
“If I didn’t have Laserfiche I wouldn’t be in the same position right now with the benefits I’m able to give to my clients,” said Enriquez de Rivera Castellanos. “We cannot work without Laserfiche.”
Prior to Laserfiche, the office was overwhelmed with managing documentation in a mostly manual fashion. More clients led to an increase in documents as well as increased risk of lost information. The office needed a digital solution that would keep documentation in a consolidated platform that would provide the security and searchability it needed to efficiently serve clients.
Laserfiche addressed those needs, enabling the firm to keep documents for every transaction in a single platform and facilitating the easy retrieval of information. As an added bonus, the office in charge of the public registry in Baja California also uses Laserfiche, making for a seamless transfer of information between the organizations.
“In the beginning, we focused on two main activities: one, to keep all documents for every single transaction inside Laserfiche, and two, to understand in which phase of a transaction that a customer was currently located,” Enriquez de Rivera Castellanos said.
With Laserfiche process automation, the office began to standardize processes, which provided a better understanding of how long each process takes, and where there was opportunity to optimize.
As Notaría 9 evolved, Rivera Castellanos continued to evolve the office’s use of the Laserfiche platform. One of the most forward-thinking Laserfiche solutions Notaría 9 leverages today is its Living Trust process.
In 2022, Mexico reformed the “Reforma a la Ley de Proteccion al Patrimonio Familiar,” a law that encourages families to create a living trust to protect their real estate assets. As a part of this reform, September was deemed “Living Trust Month” and the government mandated that many services related to preparing living trusts be discounted.
“We never used to do a lot of living trusts for our clients over the course of any given year,” Enriquez de Rivera Castellanos said. “Now, everyone waits until September to take advantage of the discount, so we have a full office during this time.”
The Notaría 9 team saw an opportunity to leverage Laserfiche to digitize and automate the living trust creation process. Rather than require clients to submit paper forms, clients are provided a link to a Laserfiche form where they enter their information and attach required documents. Clients can also pay online — from there, a Notaría 9 employee will make an appointment with the client to provide a wet signature as required by the Mexican government. The new process enabled the firm to reduce the Living Trust process from a six-hour in-person visit to a hybrid 15-minute process.
Today, Notaría 9 manages this spike in activity due to the government mandated discounts with ease, while preemptively avoiding the additional overhead each year.
“It’s also easier for the people in my office because they have all the information already completed, and they can just verify it and make the appointment,” Enriquez de Rivera Castellanos added.
The innovative Laserfiche solution has built Notaría 9’s reputation as a digital innovator in the industry, while also building trust with clients government agencies.
As a legal business, Notaría 9 must be conscious of complex regulatory requirements. Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws require robust recordkeeping and document-sharing framework between notaries and their regulatory agency.
Additionally, when client service is related to buying or selling property, Notaría 9 is required to process documents multiple times through Infonavit, or Mexico’s National Housing Fund Institute. Using Laserfiche’s intelligent capture and processing capabilities, the firm has set up a process that automatically routes the information to Infonavit without human intervention.
Beyond government regulators, independent auditors are another consideration for the office. When the Notaries General performs an audit, it requires that the documentation the office sends to the city clerk is identical to the documentation stored within the organization. Laserfiche assists with these regulatory needs through:
Notaría 9’s visionary Laserfiche solutions have enabled significant business growth, allowing the firm to provide an exceptional client experience, while building trust with regulatory agencies. As the firm continues to optimize operations, the Living Trust process serves as a template for other services such as New Business Incorporation, Power of Attorney, and other legal processes.
“Laserfiche has put us ahead of everyone else in this business. I have all of the tools and resources I need thanks to Laserfiche.”
— Enriquez de Rivera Castellanos, Notaría 9
SITUATION
• Mackenzie District Council needed an ECM system to support efficient service delivery
• Data security and recordkeeping requirements were top priorities
RESULTS
• Expanded use of Laserfiche from an electronic filing cabinet to a source of truth and workflow orchestration engine
• Integrations with core technologies such as the district council’s ERP enable automated solutions and increased efficiency
• Additional integrations and automated solutions will continue to enhance the employee and customer experience
Mackenzie District Council is one of New Zealand’s 53 district councils, responsible for providing services and managing issues ranging from local infrastructure and building consents to emergency services and food safety. With this broad range of duties, the district council relies on a core group of systems to enable its staff to deliver services efficiently, while keeping data secure and addressing recordkeeping requirements.
“We’ve got a handful of core systems that sit at the heart of our ecosystem,” said Chris Clarke, general manager of Information, Engagement and Community at Mackenize District Council. “One of those is our ERP and of course there’s Office 365, and I would put Laserfiche right up there with those systems. We deal with a lot of confidential information and we have complex recordkeeping requirements, and now it is becoming our workflow orchestration engine. It’s one of the essential tools that all of us use on a daily basis and could not function without.”
When Clarke assumed oversight of the district council’s IT department, the organization performed an assessment of its existing tech stack, revealing significant opportunity for improvement. “Internally, at the time, Laserfiche was perceived as an electronic filing cabinet,” Clarke explained. “But we realized that there was untapped potential for process automation and automated workflows.”
The team got to work on establishing Laserfiche as the district council’s source of truth for recordkeeping, and integrating it with the ERP for a critical solution that the entire organization used: time off requests. “Holiday and leave forms were the first thing we automated because everyone takes leave, and lots of people in the organization have to process leave,” Clarke said. This deceptively small project made a big impact, transforming what once required downloading paper forms, signing them and attaching them to emails for processing, into a task that now took mere seconds.
“When we first rolled it out, people were skeptical of whether it actually worked, because it seemed too easy,” Clarke added. “All they had to do was two clicks, and they couldn’t believe that was the case.”
IT has now set its sights on transforming the rest of the organization’s workflows, taking a thoughtful approach to change management and prioritization.
“What we’re trying to do is change the perception that Laserfiche is another piece of business software that you just need to use because of recordkeeping requirements,” Clarke said. “It’s about winning hearts and minds, and getting things done. People are starting to think about Laserfiche now as a tool that helps with work, as opposed to yet another system to be wrestled with.”
Clarke and his team have set their sights on systematically transforming the way the district council manages its records, with the goal of leveraging Laserfiche to automate the records management lifecycle, including retention schedules and disposition.
“We’re doing a taxonomy review to assess our existing recordkeeping, and working through licensing, security, roles, etc.,” said Zane Woodfield, ICT manager at Mackenzie District Council. “One of the things that I like about Laserfiche is that we are creating a technology demarcation point-slash-security boundary from all other stuff that’s in the cloud. Now that we have set up Microsoft Entra SSO authentication and some of the foundational pieces with Laserfiche, we feel secure and safe enough to do more.”
Laserfiche’s robust security and compliance tools also support the Mackenzie IT team’s mission to innovate while addressing data safeguards and critical recordkeeping needs.
“For us to impact the organization’s records and processes, we have to have confidence that the audit trail is there; we have to have confidence that the information is going to go to the right people. We have to have all of that confidence in place — and we do with Laserfiche.”
— Chris Clarke, IT General Manager, Mackenzie District Council
“Having the right local support in place has also been a critical part of our success,” added Clarke. “Laserfiche is a very capable and flexible product, but that can bring with it some complexity to ensure the system is configured to meet our specific business needs. Our local partner, ifTHEN, has taken the time to understand our business and our process requirements, and as a result has been able to assist us to configure Laserfiche in a way that delivers the optimum solution to our needs. Without their experience and insight, we would not have been able to effectively utilise many of the more advanced features which are now adding value to both our staff and customers on a daily basis.”
Mackenzie District Council’s IT department has laid a strong foundation for transformative change, and team members are excited to realize the potential for Laserfiche across the organization. Along with their Laserfiche solution provider, ifTHEN Limited, the team feels confident that their Laserfiche initiatives will be a gamechanger for all departments and those they serve.
“We’re just about to embark on a project where we go out to the business and get everyone’s wish list,” Clarke said. “We know that list will be large, but we are hyper focused on the things that really make a difference and give us the biggest bang for our investment, as we’re dealing with public funds.”
One significant project on the horizon is implementing a public portal to make it easier for the public to interface with the district council. Currently, the council’s website hosts downloadable forms that must be scanned or reuploaded for processing, but the IT team hopes to replace those “dumb forms” with Laserfiche Forms. “We’re working through public iterations of forms that will truly transform the customer experience,” Clarke said. “We’re really excited about that.”
Additional integrations on the roadmap will bring even more possibilities for automated solutions, including an integration with the district council’s GIS and building consent management systems to help streamline the building consent process. As the district council and IT continue to uncover new efficiencies with their Laserfiche projects, the future looks bright.
“We’ve done the foundational work, so we feel we’re at the beginning of our journey in terms of leveraging the benefits,” Clarke said. “Who knows where it will take us? One of the things that I see which is encouraging is that Laserfiche continues to evolve. We don’t know what the future holds, but I’m confident that Laserfiche will be on that journey with us.”
Transforming business operations goes beyond digitizing content and managing documents. Important business processes need to be completed in a timely manner, and eliminating the manual processes that slow them down is critical to their success. That’s where process automation comes in. Process automation technology improves operational efficiency by streamlining any business process.
Join us to learn how process automation, as part of an enterprise content management system (ECM), saves organizations time and money, enables staff to complete more strategic, valuable work, and improves the customer experience – no matter the business or industry.
In this webinar, we’ll discuss how ECM’s process automation features can help your organization:
SITUATION
• Needed to replace a legacy enterprise content management (ECM) system
• Sought a more robust, easier to use platform with advanced integration and automation capabilities
RESULTS
• Common forms and workflow platform shared across schools, sites and departments
• Standardized and automated key processes, including Position Control, the Head Injury Protocol, Student Cumulative Folders and Choice Program applications
• Boosted efficiency and enhanced responsiveness
• Able to better allocate personnel and budget to focus on student outcomes
Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) has been recognized as the No. 1 ranked school district in America with over 10,000 students. These high standards extend throughout all of the district’s operations, from enrollment and academics to hiring and IT processes.
“We’re in the heart of Silicon Valley, and with that comes some high expectations,” said Derek Moore, chief technology officer (CTO) at PAUSD. “With the improvements that we’ve made in our technology and processes, we’ve also raised the bar for ourselves.”
This constant evolution led the district to assess legacy systems and processes, to ensure the highest level of efficiency in operations, with the lowest amount of friction to users. Key to the district’s continuous improvement has been Laserfiche, with which PAUSD replaced a legacy enterprise content management (ECM) system. Laserfiche’s ease of use, adaptability to the district’s Mac OS environment, and advanced integration and automation capabilities were the major differentiators that drove PAUSD’s decision.
Today, with support from PAUSD’s Laserfiche solution provider ECS Imaging, Laserfiche has become a core component of the district’s tech stack, helping to integrate and orchestrate data and processes across the organization and support the district’s mission to keep the focus on students and student outcomes.
“Laserfiche is our Swiss Army knife,” said Moore. “If one of our business systems doesn’t have a solution that meets one of our needs, we fill that gap with an integration with Laserfiche. Whether we need to do a form to augment some other process or figure out how to input data — Laserfiche is our answer.”
Since implementing Laserfiche, PAUSD has integrated it with core pieces of the district’s technology infrastructure to enable more seamless process and information flow. Key integrations include Infinite Campus, the district’s student information system (SIS), as well as ERP, active directory, and single sign-on integrations.
“Laserfiche is the automation engine behind a lot of the tools or applications that we’re using which don’t have a good user interface to do the things we need to do,” said Joshua Hung, business systems analyst at PAUSD.
In addition to connecting formerly disparate sources of information and enabling automation of key workflows, Laserfiche has helped to create a culture of continuous improvement and process automation at the district.
“Laserfiche has facilitated better communication between departments and between people,” Moore said. Mapping out processes to validate or question each step has strengthened teams’ understanding of how or why actions are taken. “It’s really helped define our organizational processes in a way that I don’t think anyone in the organization understood. We’ve got a whole list of departments and processes that touch Laserfiche, from our student services to human resources, to our business office and our educational services. Laserfiche has been the backbone.”
One critical process that helped to get teams excited about Laserfiche-driven improvements was the Head Injury Protocol. Because head injuries — from minor bumps to serious blows — can have serious health implications, the process of reporting them requires significant documentation and multiple notifications to be distributed internally and externally.
Transforming the legacy, paper-driven process with a Laserfiche solution meant that documenting these events were now a lot less manual and less time-intensive, but also reported with more accuracy and accountability.
Because of the integration between Laserfiche and Infinite Campus, a staff member can now enter a student number into the Laserfiche form and the necessary information populates the form — parents’ contact information, parents’ email addresses, etc. From there, the staff member simply answers the required questions and submits the form. The principal then approves it, and the information is distributed to the nurse’s office, risk management, legal services, and the child’s parents.
Transformation of the Head Injury Protocol inspired various teams to realize the power of Laserfiche solutions. “It’s a really fun place to be,” Moore said. “Our users are bringing ideas to us, and we’re able to evaluate and prioritize projects. We’re thinking about our pain points as an organization and how we can create Laserfiche Forms processes to solve them.”
Building on the initial success, PAUSD began creating more standardization around other processes that require the alignment of multiple departments, approvals and systems.
“Our entire organization’s staff is very competent and wants to be empowered to do the job themselves,” Moore said. “That’s where Laserfiche fits in. We help by building small pieces for them or helping to standardize a process. Laserfiche empowers them to complete the tasks that they’re charged with without requiring a lot of tech team intervention.”
A complex yet critical process at the school district, Position Control is one such process which enables the district to track hiring and monitor costs related to various positions. Previously a paper form that was physically passed from stakeholder to stakeholder, the process is now digital and automatically routed in Laserfiche, leveraging an integration with the district’s ERP system. “The Laserfiche process ensures that we are fulfilling the necessary roles from an HR hiring perspective, to the business fiscal department, making sure there’s budget allocated for it,” Moore added.
The updated, expedited process extends to the IT team, which is now automatically notified when people are hired so that accounts and access can be set up immediately. “We want to make the new employee feel welcome,” Moore explained. “We’re onboarding them with a good experience and making sure they have everything they need so they’re ready to go on day one.”
As PAUSD builds a more automated future, Moore and his team understand the importance of being digital-first. One large step the district took toward this goal was to digitize all student cumulative folders, which contain students’ permanent records, including personal information, enrollment, academic records, and other relevant information. The IT team built a Laserfiche form and workflow to input, tag and sort all student documents into the correct places.
“We can say at this point that all of our active files are electronic,” Moore said. “Some information comes in as paper if it starts in another district, for instance, or it may be a doctor’s note that needs to be scanned in. But it’s scanned in via a Laserfiche form.”
This digital-first approach is also evident in the processes that collect information externally, as in PAUSD’s Choice Programs process. PAUSD Choice Programs offer parents and students options beyond their assigned neighborhood school, providing diverse learning environments for different interests and needs.
The district enables parents to fill out a public Laserfiche form, which is routed to staff members who validate the information through an integration with the SIS. The workflow also pulls additional data into the form that needs to be evaluated.
“These lookups save reviewers a lot of time, because instead of clicking to five different pages where the information exists, it’s all there on that one page,” said Hung. Additionally, the Laserfiche form enables the district to collect accurate data from the outset, eliminating the time-consuming data cleaning that used to be inevitable in the legacy process. “We also created a notification process with Laserfiche, to make sure that parents and students receive the right notifications for the specific lottery programs they are being accepted to. Our staff can just click a button that sends out notifications as part of the business process; it’s made it a lot less stressful.”
The IT team continues to innovate the organization’s many processes and procedures that make up PAUSD’s operations. One of the best parts of using Laserfiche for this innovation, the team says, is that they know they are not alone.
“We go to the community events to connect with other Laserfiche users, and we communicate about what challenges they’ve run into, or what new processes they are trying,” Hung added. “We learn from them, and we can pass on what we’re doing, too.”
As the district grows, the technology team is confident in its ability to support the student-centric mission of the organization. Through digital solutions, PAUSD can prioritize the programs and budget items that are going to have a positive impact on student outcomes.
“We’re still adding people and adding positions, but what we’re not talking about adding is people to simply process paperwork or process data,” said Moore. “We’re more focused on how we can better use people and budget to serve students.”
SITUATION
• 2,000 staff responsible for individuals across nearly two dozen facilities
• Needed a way to streamline information management
RESULTS
• Saved considerable costs by no longer paying for physical storage or shipping files between facilities
• Increased accuracy while mitigating lost or outdated information
Spanning facilities across the state, the Idaho Department of Correction (IDOC) represents nine prisons, five community re-entry centers, and seven district probation and parole offices. Its mission is to “create a model correctional system that provides equitable access to programming and opportunities that reflect a community experience, foster connection and restore victims of crime.”
With a litany of documents, different business systems and overall legality playing major roles at the Department of Correction, IDOC needed a “system of systems” to support its complex information management needs.
Laserfiche fulfilled many of IDOC’s initial requirements, and today the organization continues to work with Laserfiche and solution provider MCCi to leverage its integration, forms and automation capabilities to streamline information flow and improve workflows while finding new ways to better serve its thousands of staff and the people in their care.
Housing approximately 8,000 incarcerated individuals, IDOC is accountable for managing people convicted of felony offenses and sentenced to prison, probation or a period of “retained jurisdiction.”
IDOC also oversees approximately 24,000 individuals on probation/parole, and supervises those living in the state’s communities, offering education, treatment and re-entry services to assist in lowering relapse behavior.
About 2,000 staff are employed at IDOC spanning its three divisions (Prisons, Probation and Parole, and Management Services), with roles including security positions such as correctional officers, and non-security positions such as teachers, human resources, mental health clinicians and more.
IDOC’s complex operations require the organization to house information in multiple Laserfiche repositories, the main ones being human resource files, investigation files, policies and SOPs (standard operating procedures) that are public and available to staff.
To facilitate the efficient flow of information throughout the organization as well as with external providers, IDOC has built a solution that leverages a Laserfiche API integration with its internal client management system (CMS). Because the CMS is only available to staff on the internal network, IDOC uses the API to enable external providers to submit data through Laserfiche Forms, which then get reviewed by our providers internally.
“The value provided by this integration is huge for us,” said Cassie Lint, project manager at IDOC. “With this integration we’re able to save staff time by automating notes and data entry, plus assist our external IDOC partners by enabling auto-filling of publicly available information on forms as they are filling them out.” Meanwhile, as data is submitted to IDOC, Laserfiche helps to standardize the input, making the data easier to find, use and report on.
The approach to continuous improvement has also led IDOC to digitize its medical records for management within Laserfiche repositories. “We are working with multiple departments to make sure documents are imported correctly and have the correct metadata attached to them, so that when they get filed into the client and resident management files, they are easily relocatable by OCR text or the metadata associated with those files,” said Lint.
The benefits IDOC has experienced have been immediate. “We no longer have to pay for physical storage, shipping of the files between facility locations, documents getting lost or even misfiled — even digitally,” she added. “OCR enables us to search on text recognition. If a document is misfiled, we can still locate it and re-file it. In physical files, if something is in the wrong folder, we may never find that information.”
Digitizing medical records in Laserfiche also eases the process when clients move to different facilities, which previously required the transport of boxes to different locations, which introduced additional cost and the risk of misplaced or unauthorized access to information.
“Laserfiche enables us to restrict portions of client files to only those who have the appropriate permissions to access,” Lint said. “We utilize forms for access requests and integrate with our IT support system to create tickets as needed once access requests have been approved.”
As IDOC looks ahead, there are numerous plans for broadening Laserfiche’s use. The first will be implementing records management with IDOC’s documentary repository systems. IDOC is currently in the discovery phase of determining the record custodians and retention requirements to better manage document lifecycles.
“It’s important to not host information and documentation that is out of date,” Lint said. “Not only is that documentation no longer valid or useful, but it could also be returned for a subpoena or e-discovery or a public records request. It could increase risk of litigation or misunderstandings, or discovery of information that is no longer pertinent to the client or resident.
”Laserfiche will help IDOC to automate the processes around records management lifecycles, which are dictated by federal, state and local government recordkeeping requirements.
IDOC continues to look for new ways to innovate processes and information management. As part of its 2024-2027 Strategic Plan, it aims to leverage technology to reduce manual data collection burden on staff and increase time savings.
Lint explained that she sees opportunity in potentially working with local counties to integrate their Laserfiche environments with IDOC’s, enabling better communication and minimizing duplicate data entry, or the need to fax or email documentation.
Additionally, IDOC has plans to replace an in-house built web application — that requires a special database — with Laserfiche, creating even more efficiencies and cost savings. “We can take advantage of the API integration with our client management system, and reduce the amount of support and technical requirements that the in-house web application needed,” Lint said.
Ultimately, Lint sees in Laserfiche a system that takes care of the many manual and granular tasks that IDOC employees should not have to spend time on — instead, they should be focused on the mission of creating safer communities and increasing the success of the individuals under IDOC’s jurisdiction.
“Laserfiche enables us to develop processes so they’re super easy to relate to and use, and then have the back-end load take care of all the heavy details that the end user doesn’t need to know or interact with,” Lint said. “It just takes that burden off employees. And Laserfiche makes that easy to do.”
SITUATION
• Proactively responding to Royal Commission recommendations, the Archdiocese needed modern methods to enhance and streamline information management.
RESULTS
• Used Laserfiche technology to digitize and preserve historical documents
• Safeguarded the Archdiocese’s rich history while seamlessly integrating contemporary records for future efficiency
Located in Western Australia, the Catholic Archdiocese of Perth is a nearly 200-year-old religious organization with strong roots in the community. It consists of 110 parishes, 26 agencies and organizations, and about 70 schools. The Archdiocese is based in Perth, the capital city of the State of Western Australia.
As a large and historic religious community, the Archdiocese manages a vast flow of information across its many services. To improve its processes, proactively safeguard its community by following Royal Commission recommendations, and streamline operations, the Archdiocese partnered with Laserfiche to implement a secure and robust records management system.
Odhran O’Brien serves as the Director of the Archives and Information Governance Office, whose mission it is to oversee, preserve and make accessible the archives and digital information throughout the Archdiocese. When O’Brien was appointed in 2016, he and his team of seven individuals discovered the organization was managing information, particularly digital information, in inconsistent methods, that do not follow industry best practice. “Previously, information was siloed, and people could not access information from other departments. We felt we needed a high-level strategy to change that and bring the organization into the future,” said O’Brien. As a result, they created an Information Governance Strategy, focused on managing the Archdiocese’s digital information in a consistent manner across all its many agencies, parishes and organizations.
O’Brien and his team set to work right away finding the technology that could safely handle and store the information they planned to include within a records management system, some from nearly two centuries ago. Having worked with workplace technology provider Ricoh Australia for over a decade, the Archdiocese team partnered with the organization to find and implement the perfect solution. Laserfiche’s capabilities made it the obvious choice. “We’ve got records dating back to the 1840s. We’ve got sacramental information (information about people getting baptized and various sacraments within the church), but also all the business records of the organization, again, going back to the 1840s,” O’Brien shared.
The Archdiocese was able to easily and quickly use Laserfiche’s technology to digitize the abundant mix of historical documents and archive them within Laserfiche’s records management system. Additionally, they implemented a way for contemporary records to feed into the same system, enabling all documents to be organized and stored together in one, secure location.
Since turning to Laserfiche, the Archdiocese has experienced numerous benefits, especially when it comes to having one designated home for all information across the organization. “The primary benefit has been the fact that we now have a single source of truth for our 200 employees in our major administration center,” said O’Brien. “We’re also using automation throughout our 110 parishes. So, all the inquiries they receive for religious services, education and charitable requests are automated, allowing them to serve the community much more efficiently than they ever have in the past.”
O’Brien highlighted the significant benefits Laserfiche has brought to the Archdiocese and the community it serves: “Digitizing our information has not only enhanced our administrative creativity but also greatly increased our efficiency. What used to take weeks to find can now be accessed in real time.
“For example, by using Laserfiche, our Safeguarding Office has noticed that their small team of four people, serving tens of thousands in our community, can streamline workflows and improve accessibility to information. This efficiency not only allows the team to provide accurate, up-to-date information to stakeholders, clients, and the community but also frees up hundreds of hours per year for important safeguarding support with the Perth Church community.”
Laserfiche has also streamlined how the Archdiocese handles a wide range of inquiries, from religious sacraments to school enrollments and charitable support. O’Brien noted, “Laserfiche enables us to quickly and accurately direct individuals to the services they need, whether it’s for homelessness support or financial relief.”
Laserfiche provides nationwide accessibility, enabling historians, scholars and family members across Australia to easily request and access ancestral heritage and stories. This improved access accelerates research, supports publications, and enriches family trees. O’Brien added that since implementing Laserfiche’s search functionality, his office and small team have successfully fulfilled hundreds of requests each year.
Looking forward, the Archdiocese plans to expand its successful use of Laserfiche to other areas within the organization. One major aspect will include automation. “We’re hoping that a number of our large parishes and charities’ service and information requests will be completely automated through Laserfiche. So, they’ll be able to use all the services they provide, whether it be community services or simply religious services. People will log on to a website, access Laserfiche Forms, and those processes will go through automatically,” said O’Brien.
The Archdiocese also has plans of broadening Laserfiche’s reach in general and to include mobile options, such as an app, within the next two years. O’Brien shared, “We certainly hope we’ll move to a cloud-based solution so it can be implemented more widely. Currently, Laserfiche is implemented across both the Archdiocese of Perth and one of our neighboring archdioceses. So, that’s roughly an area the size of Spain or France. We’re hoping that we’ll continue to be able to expand that out further.
”The Archdiocese is committed to staying at the forefront of technology, with Laserfiche integral to its future plans. “What excites me most about our ongoing Laserfiche project is its potential for the future,” O’Brien said. “Embracing AI ethically and further automation in an easy UI and UX for staff, volunteers and stakeholders will enable us to enhance our services and more effectively support the community we are dedicated to serving.”
SITUATION
• Hundreds of records created weekly
• Storage requires complex compliance requirements
• Manual processes led to bottlenecks, errors and delays
RESULTS
• Standardized transparent records management enabled faster document retrieval and enhanced regulatory compliance
• Laserfiche automated workflows accelerate processes and increase productivity enterprise-wide
Orano is a recognized international operator in the field of nuclear materials. The company’s offerings include products and services throughout the entire fuel cycle, including the design, certification and production of casks, as well as the associated transport, with the highest level of risk control.
The company records every aspect of operations, resulting in the creation of hundreds of records weekly, including technical files, purchase orders and contract-related documents. Meanwhile, all documentation goes through constant review and approval, and everything must be stored in accordance with regulatory compliance requirements.
“Because we’re in the nuclear industry, document oversight is extremely important — so we undergo lots of audits and have to be able to find data,” said Gloria St. Denis, records management consultant for Orano. Fortunately, the complex information infrastructure and processing involved with Orano’s daily operations is made simpler with Laserfiche, the company’s records management and forms processing solution. “My background is in records management, however, Engineering is my biggest client at the company. They want to do things that make their life easier. And for a lot of that, there is Laserfiche.”
Since implementing Laserfiche, St. Denis estimates that information management and automated business processes have been made between 10-50% more efficient. In some cases, the impact has been even greater.
“Laserfiche has saved us from a lot of issues and errors,” she added.
Laserfiche serves as the content repository for some of Orano’s most important information. The standardization that Laserfiche has provided solves a number of information management headaches for St. Denis and the organization, such as:
Due to the sensitivity and importance of the company’s products and services, the organization requires all information that is defined as a record to be held in dual storage. This includes the Orano Policies and Procedures System (PoPS), which Laserfiche keeps up to date with the latest versions of documents.
“We use transparent records management to manage PoPS, so that those who manage the procedures and policies can see the history of the information, but the rest of the organization only sees the latest and greatest version,” St. Denis explained.
Beyond PoPS, Orano uses Laserfiche to manage information and streamline processes in other areas of the business, including:
Simple online forms now enable employees to submit a new record, to which a standard template and metadata are applied. Additionally, Laserfiche’s OCR capabilities support the system’s abilities to provide the information that people need with a simple text search.
“Laserfiche does a great job of OCR,” St. Denis added. “It captures all the information we need from the documentation, making it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.”
As a result, staff can now find any engineering record, design record, purchasing record or any other customer or vendor documentation in just a few keystrokes, regardless of the information’s origin. To make information searches even easier, St. Denis has set up customized webpages and search forms using Laserfiche.
“With a transparent records management strategy, we’re going beyond thinking of Laserfiche as just a place to put electronic documents,” St. Denis said. “We organized and standardized everything. That made it simpler.”
St. Denis has also introduced process automation to streamline the flow of information and accelerate reviews and approvals.
One of the most impactful Laserfiche solutions has been the Approved Suppliers List (ASL), which was previously managed through a Word document. “We built a Laserfiche Forms process in front, and within 15 minutes, that approved supplier is on the Approved Suppliers List,” St. Denis said. The previously manual, cumbersome process typically took between two to three weeks. “These automated processes enable us to communicate certified suppliers to our organization quicker. Ultimately, we can get back to the client sooner.”
Process automation also extends to the Approved Supplier Maintenance process, better enabling the organization to maintain traceability of documents and any changes, while still supporting the integrity of the ASL.
Other processes have simplified and accelerated collaboration across the enterprise, even across global regions. The Shipping Release process requires multiple sign-offs on multiple documents — with an average of three signatures per document. Previous to automating, employees would physically walk forms around or send them through email; when signatories were in different countries, delays were not uncommon. “We were able to get the average time it takes to do a shipping release from three business days down to one to two hours,” St. Denis explained.
Similar efficiency gains have been seen in the processes for:
Using Laserfiche’s intelligent capture, transparent records management, and complementary process automation capabilities, Orano has seen the benefits of faster information retrieval, enhanced regulatory compliance, and increased productivity across the organization.
For St. Denis, Laserfiche has augmented her ability to support the organization’s business goals. “I love that I — as a records professional — can create solutions and there is a lot less involvement required from IS/IT,” she added.
SITUATION
• 19 offices spread across 14 geographies
• Needed a workflow engine to power automated processes for the company’s divisions that have diverse requirements and regulatory needs
RESULTS
• Saved time and money streamlining approval processes while freeing up resources to provide better client service
• Created better consistency, efficiency and collaboration by standardizing core processes
• Saved over $150,000 and 100,000 hours to date
Entrusted with the management, fiduciary oversight and administration of in excess of $170 billion of assets under administration, and $25 billion under management, Stonehage Fleming is serious about accuracy, security and service.
The firm has 19 offices spread across 14 geographies, and prides itself on all operations being in precise alignment with clients’ financial goals. This requires highly coordinated systems and teams — whether they are client-facing, in the middle office or back-office.
To achieve this level of efficiency, the Stonehage Fleming IT department is constantly optimizing business processes to ensure they stay ahead of staff, advisor and client needs. A big part of this optimization has been the adoption of Laserfiche as a process orchestration engine and backend information hub.
“We have over 800 staff who start Laserfiche Forms processes across three divisions of the company,” said Gert Bester, IT business systems manager at Stonehage Fleming. “These range from client onboarding to risk and compliance, to appointments and resignations. Everything we can think of — whether it involves integration, or it is a simple or complex solution — Laserfiche can do it.”
Prior to using Laserfiche to automate workflows, the IT team built many of its processes in Microsoft Dynamics Business Central but found it difficult to customize and maintain.
“Laserfiche is very user-friendly and easy to navigate, plus it gives us so many options when it comes to process design,” said David Knight, IT project manager and business analyst at Stonehage Fleming. “With Laserfiche, we simplified our forms templates as well, so we went from around 70 different templates down to three. That makes any changes and testing that needs to be done a lot simpler and faster.”
This discovery prompted the organization to move all automated workflows — which encompassed about 200 projects — to Laserfiche. While Stonehage Fleming’s Family Office and Investment Management divisions rely on Laserfiche for core processes, today, the company’s Group Services division is the heaviest Laserfiche user, as it supports all other parts of the company through core processes including:
With too many workflows to list, plus over 100 projects currently in production, Stonehage Fleming has been able to streamline operations that have direct impact on the bottom line, as well as the company’s ability to provide high quality client service.
To further cut down manual data entry, Knight, Bester and the IT team have built API integrations between Laserfiche and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, DocuSign, RiskScreen, Twilio, multiple third-party databases and the company’s website and proprietary data warehouse. The connections enable the automation of the creation of certain data, and eliminate the need for manual verification and other mundane, repetitive tasks.
Today, the team estimates that Laserfiche has saved over $150,000 and tens of thousands of hours, while they continue to collect data on efficiency gains in other areas.
“We are also replacing some built-in processes, which were slow and heavy to maintain, with modern, fully integrated and user-friendly Laserfiche Forms, improving back office and front office efficiency,” said Bester.
Stonehage Fleming’s most successful Laserfiche digital transformation project to date has been the Business Development process, which involves the onboarding of clients or potentials client to any particular product offering.
Onboarding is triggered by a client relationship manager and involves a number of automated tasks that are now managed by Laserfiche workflow, such as the creation of a bank account with Stonehage Fleming’s own treasury or an outside entity. Also required are a multitude of approvals, streamlined with Laserfiche as well. “The gains for us are in the templates that sit within the workflows,” Knight said. “Laserfiche pushes all data into those templates and it’s ready to be signed off very quickly.”
“We have increased consistency, efficiency and collaboration by standardizing the main Business Development process across 11 offices,” Bester explained. “The result has been more visible and transparent results on Stonehage Fleming’s expected revenue stream.”
“We’ve seen over 8,000 of these processes run within the first few years of using the solution, and the amount is increasing year on year,” Knight added. Additionally, Annual Financial Statement Reviews and the Economic Substance process require complicated and lengthy approvals which were previously executed via email. These emails were manual reminders to staff to review sets of financial data and get back to an accountant within a certain amount of time.
“They were taking a lot of manual effort — from the emails to the signing and uploading of documents,” Knight said. “Today, there’s none of that. The whole process is truly automated; there’s no need to chase colleagues anymore, no lost emails or mixed-up versions. Even the storage process is automated.”
“Once all parties review the information, Laserfiche generates the resolution statements or minutes, which are uploaded with the workflow to DocuSign,” Bester said. “Then all documents are saved back into Laserfiche. Maintaining the custodian data (in Business Central) is done via APIs, so none of our users have to manually re-enter that information back into any system.”
In addition to Laserfiche’s integration and workflow capabilities, Stonehage Fleming has benefited from the security tools that support the company’s strict information governance practices. “Due to regulatory requirements, client information in certain regions can only be viewed by specific offices — everything must be put in blocks or silos,” Bester said. “Oftentimes, compliance will need to see a user or investigate who has accessed that information, so Laserfiche Audit Trail has been quite handy. We have also built our own GDPR system module with Laserfiche workflow.”
Today, the team continues to optimize existing processes and develop new solutions to meet the needs of the business and its clients.
“We have an ever-growing list of business requirements coming in, for which we have also built an innovative solution with Laserfiche Forms that is used to gather requirements,” Bester said. “We have also accelerated the adoption of Laserfiche across the company by improving the workflows running in the background, while also making the business more independent by developing forms to manage metadata without any input from IT.”
Ultimately, the IT team aligns its work with Laserfiche with Stonehage Fleming’s values, which are focused on excellence, integrity and embracing the behaviors that make families harmonious and successful.
“Laserfiche enables us to provide better service,” Bester said. “When clients request information, we make it easier for our staff to retrieve that information. Instead of requiring the company to acquire more resources to do the work, we’re looking at ways to do more automation, so that the middle office can provide more support to the front-office team. In turn, our front office can better support our clients.”
SITUATION
· Accounts payable relied on manual tasks and data entry
· Looming e-invoicing mandate required the digitization of purchase orders, payment terms and credit notes
RESULTS
· Integrated Laserfiche with SAP ERP to digitize both internal and external invoices and automate invoice processing
· Reduced average cycle time from 72 hours down to 10 minutes
· Improved traceability and compliance, inventory management and sustainability
In 2019, Colombia joined a host of other countries in mandating e-invoicing — an electronic billing approach that requires the digitization of purchase orders, payment terms and credit notes. E-invoicing requirements are becoming more and more common across the globe, with the goal of providing governments a more efficient means of auditing and tax and customs enforcement.
In order to accommodate the coming requirement, the agroindustrial company Monómeros sought a new document management system (DMS) with business process management (BPM) capabilities. “We saw that the versatility and capacity that Laserfiche had as a BPM tool would allow us to keep control of our documents, plus there was traceability that would comply with Colombia’s laws and archival standards,” said Esteban Echeverria, IT superintendent at Monómeros. “Laserfiche is not only a tool that will allow us to keep control of documents, maintain traceability and comply with the rules and archival standards of Colombia, but it also provides a platform that will allow us to automate business processes across the company.”
With Laserfiche process automation and records management, along with an integration between Laserfiche and SAP, Monómeros fulfilled the country’s e-invoicing requirements while also accelerating the accounts payable (AP) process.
Today, the company’s AP cycle has been cut down from an average of 72 hours to just 10 minutes — a 99.77% improvement in efficiency.
Monómeros is a large agroindustrial company with an important role in supplying the necessary fertilizers for some of Colombia’s most important crops, including potato, coffee and palm. With a history dating back to 1967, the company has undergone a number of modernization initiatives for a more efficient, agile enterprise.
Accounts Payable (AP) is one area where the organization has seen tremendous impact. With thousands of invoices needing to be processed per month, manual tasks — such as data entry, inventory management, and data verification — can delay critical operations at any organization, causing missed deadlines and challenges in vendor and customer relations.
At Monómeros, the invoicing process relied on manual tasks and mailing invoices between staff and geographic locations.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, invoices had to be manually assigned to each analyst and physically sent to them to be managed in our ERP,” said Carlos Daniel Machado, head of accounts payable at Monómeros. “Cycle times from when invoices were received reached up to 72 hours. We needed to optimize the process and reduce cycle time.”
On top of this, the Monómeros team needed to consider the e-invoicing requirements that would become compulsory for businesses in 2020. This perfect storm led them to Laserfiche, which was implemented with support from Colombia-based Laserfiche solution provider Gestech.
“Laserfiche offered a balance between all of our considerations, including cost, functionality, business process management (BPM) capabilities, a good user experience and local support with Gestech,” said Echeverria.
The goal was to digitize and optimize the process to increase efficiency and reduce costs; improve visibility and control; and strengthen business relationships.
To tackle the challenge, the Monómeros and Gestech teams created a Laserfiche workflow designed with four stages and integrations with the company’s SAP ERP software.
The process not only applies to external invoices, but also to internal ones having to do with reimbursing employees.
“In the case of employee reimbursement, they file their request through a Laserfiche form and attach all necessary documents, and that generates a digital filing through Laserfiche in a matter of seconds,” said Machado.
With this solution, Monómeros has been able to reduce the average cycle time from 72 hours down to 10 minutes. With an average of 1,500 invoices per month, Monómeros has seen a huge impact on overall time and cost savings. As added benefits, Monómeros has improved traceability and compliance, inventory management and sustainability.
“Not only have we been able to improve compliance practices and optimize processes with Laserfiche process automation, but we have also enhanced customer service and their overall experience.”
Carlos Daniel Machado, Head of Accounts Payable, Monómeros
“We are now working on an integration between Laserfiche and our vendor bill reception process. Every business process that needs to be automated or integrated with our content we see as in the scope of Laserfiche’s capabilities. This makes us excited for all of the future possibilities.”