Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group uses Laserfiche Forms to make the customer experience as seamless as possible.
A Johannesburg-based engineering company digitally transformed occupational health and safety incident reports, helping with compliance, communication and changing how the mining industry does business.
The school district used Laserfiche to process payroll without any delays during Hurricane Harvey, when employees needed it most.
Dedicated to the care of children with autism, Learning ARTS shares data about patients with their parents and behavior specialists in real-time to enhance care and programming, thanks to Laserfiche.
Offering Laserfiche records management as a shared service increased efficiency and enhanced countywide collaboration.
A leading manufacturer and supplier of formwork and scaffolding systems, PERI streamlined operations and enhanced the customer experience through an online portal.
New Beginning Children’s Homes Transforms Foster Care Placement and Services
New Beginning Children’s Homes—an Arkansas-based nonprofit dedicated to providing long-term, family-style living to children in the foster care system—began a digital transformation initiative to expedite and better personalize services. Using Laserfiche to digitize and automate many of the manual, everyday tasks required in caring for children in the foster care system, the nonprofit reduced inefficiencies and communication delays across a child’s entire support team.
Powering Faster Placement with Electronic Forms
New Beginning first implemented Laserfiche to streamline its referral program. By using Laserfiche Forms to digitize the paperwork required for placement inquiries, New Beginning now enables Department of Health Services (DHS) caseworkers to submit a complete profile of a child’s background to the organization.
Automated workflows assist staff in quickly evaluating and matching children with the right foster environment. Both caseworkers and foster parents of new placements are instantly notified via email.
“By knowing a child’s background in advance and being able to prepare for their arrival, we are in a better spot to serve them,” says Joseph Rocko, Director of Residential and Community Services at New Beginning.
New Beginning also used Laserfiche Forms to transform a 52-page intake packet that often used to arrive from DHS months after a child’s placement. Now, collecting the information electronically and automating the packet’s review process greatly reduces delays and manual data errors. These improvements enable New Beginning to facilitate rapid action, communication and service delivery among multiple agencies, caseworkers and foster families from the start.
“All of these things have helped to reduce the amount of time we’re spending emailing back and forth, making calls to and from the caseworkers, attempting to touch base with our foster homes to talk with them about the children we’re looking to place,” Rocko says. “Just about any process that took more than two phone calls to make, we made that into an automated process in Laserfiche in one click—simple edit, done.”
Powerful Service with Server-Less Cloud Systems
By implementing a Laserfiche cloud solution, New Beginning benefited from scalability. The organization also automated other critical forms-based processes, like employment applications and monthly summaries, to ensure quality care is provided throughout a child’s stay.
Previously, New Beginning’s staff and foster parents spent hours processing over 60 handwritten pages of weekly case notes. With digital forms, parents can now complete case notes in a matter of minutes, and administrators spend just 40 minutes each week filing case documentation. Laserfiche instantly sends new documentation to a child’s therapists, DHS works and attorneys, forming a complete, accessible and accurate snapshot of a child’s experience in foster care and insight into areas for immediate follow-up.
“By having Laserfiche implemented and having these pre-fillable forms for these families, we have found that 100 percent of the efforts that go into documentation have been reduced,” says Rocko. “Our families are able to turn that time and focus more on the family unit.”
Benefits
“The crazy thing about implementing Laserfiche was that we knew we could save time and be more efficient; however, we never realized the other cost savings that would come with it,” says Rocko. “Best of all though, our parents can now spend more time being a supportive family for the children that come into our care. Instead of hours pushing paperwork, they spend a fraction of the time with the electronic forms.”
Want to learn more about transforming case management with Laserfiche? Click here to get a personalized demo.
Oakwood University transformed student services by replacing its legacy document imaging system with Laserfiche to increase efficiency, reduce paper use and eliminate ineffective manual processes. By automating rudimentary processes with Laserfiche, the university has reclaimed staff and student time and redirected it toward student success.
Adopting a Culture of Automation on Campus
Oakwood University is a private, historically black university located in Huntsville, Alabama. The university, which services nearly 1,800 students, aims to provide the kind of education that will prepare students for the workplace. In order to achieve its mission, the university made it a priority to adopt a culture of automation to meet the expectations of today’s tech-savvy students.
“One of the strategic goals that the Oakwood University leadership team has been working toward is developing a culture of automation on campus,” says Oakwood University interim CIO Anthony Walker. “We are actively working to update manual, paper-driven processes. These updates will enable us to operate as efficiently as possible, ensuring the best possible experience for current and prospective students.”
In order to transform into a modern campus, Oakwood University assessed its technology and determined that it would need to replace a legacy document imaging system since it lacked the ability to automate processes. The university then turned to Laserfiche to improve efficiency, reduce paper use and eliminate ineffective manual processes.
Streamlining the Graduations Clearance Process
One of the first processes automated with Laserfiche was the graduation clearance process. Like many universities, in order to graduate from Oakwood, students need to obtain graduation clearance. This involves obtaining signatures from their advisor, the registrar and other university staff which previously took months. Students had to carry a paper form to multiple locations around campus to obtain all the necessary signatures. Students would have to start this process months in advance in order to graduate on time.
By redesigning the process using Laserfiche Forms instead of paper forms, Oakwood University reduced processing time from months to just a few weeks and increased transparency throughout the entire process. Additional benefits include:
Servicing Students at the Highest Level
Since adopting Laserfiche, Oakwood University has capitalized on an automated approach to student services.
“By leveraging process automation, the university has automated rudimentary tasks, allowing staff members to serve students in a quicker and more efficient manner,” Walker explains.
Some of the student-facing processes that have been enhanced through automation include:
“Oakwood University now has a holistic view of each student’s academic history, allowing professors to create a plan of action based on data if a student starts to fall behind,” says Walker. “This is a critical component in ensuring student success.”
In addition, Oakwood University also provides an opportunity for students to become gold certified in the Laserfiche technology. This training—that would typically cost thousands of dollars for future employers—give students a leg-up in the competitive job market, as well as higher paid work opportunities on campus to support the Laserfiche system.
“Not only is Laserfiche enabling us to provide personalized support and guidance for each individual student, but it’s also allowing us to help students achieve tangible, professional success,” says Walker. “Our mission is to prepare students for their professional future, and Laserfiche is helping us achieve this.”
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.
