City of Long Beach Modernizes Citizen Services with Laserfiche

After the recession, the City of Long Beach turned to technology to cut costs — and create innovative ways to improve citizen services. To this end, it produced a three-pronged service delivery plan that would earn it numerous honors as a top ten digital city in the U.S.:
  • Consolidate information and communication technology services.
  • Increase transparency and collaboration across the enterprise.
  • Digitize processes, forms and workflow.

With a shared understanding of the value new technology could bring to Long Beach, the city tasked its technology services department to spearhead a citywide information management overhaul.

IT’s Strategy: Consolidate and Standardize

Long Beach has worked hard to consolidate technology functions while still providing flexibility for departments to run efficiently. For example, in 2009, Long Beach replaced its departmental IBM FileNet system with a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system that could be used citywide.

The city’s ongoing strategy to consolidate services and decrease costs has paid dividends. By implementing Laserfiche, it has cut annual ECM support costs by 50%.

Other cost-saving IT consolidation efforts include:
  • An enterprise-wide online phone system expected to save $165,000 annually.
  • Virtual servers and workstations expected to generate $100,000 in energy and hardware savings over three years.
  • Cluster databases that reduce licensing and hardware fees.

ECM and Open Government

In April 2011, the Long Beach City Council adopted an open government policy identifying transparency as a core function of local government, which has become a top priority for staff and citizens alike.

“Long Beach is dedicated to fostering open, transparent government where everyone in our community can easily participate and engage,” explains City Clerk Larry Herrera. Herrera further notes that the City Clerk’s office uses Laserfiche to help deliver improved, cost-effective service. “Previously, we needed 28 people to answer citizen questions quickly and accurately. Today, with a staff of 17, our customer service is better than ever before.”

As more and more records are added to Laserfiche, information access improves and storage costs decrease. The document types stored in Laserfiche include:
  • City contracts
  • Campaign finance reports
  • Statements of economic interest
  • Council agendas and staff reports
  • Election ballots
  • Sample ballots
  • Voted returns

Long Beach has made all city contracts executed as of 2011 available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink, a read-only public portal. With 24/7 online viewing access, the city simplifies citizen information access and saves time for both requestors and city staff.

Elements of Success

Other departments that have worked to digitize paper processes include:
  • Financial Management
  • Human Resources
  • Development Services

For example, Long Beach began streamlining accounting processes by integrating Laserfiche with its business intelligence (BI) system. This integration streamlines expense research by making images of invoices available to authorized users through the BI interface.

Long Beach citizens, leadership and staff have shown full support for its Laserfiche initiative.

As a result of its collaboration between city leadership, staff and citizens, Long Beach has used technology to position itself as a leader for the future.

3 Reasons to Start ECM Implementation with Accounts Payable

If you’re an organization considering the move to cloud document management, you might be wondering about the differences between self-hosted and SaaS solutions. Some organizations want complete control over their software and hardware. Others prefer lower maintenance costs, pre-configured security features and automatic software updates.

Read on to see how SaaS and self-hosted solutions differ, so you can make a more informed decision on how to deploy a document management system for your organization.

Software as a service (SaaS)

SaaS offers customers access to software over the internet on a subscription basis, with the software hosted by the vendor or another third-party.

There’s no installation required, and resources such as servers or storage capacity can typically be scaled up automatically, or via a quick conversation with the SaaS vendor. On top of that, using SaaS generally means you don’t need to worry about the costs of maintenance, server space or hardware that you’d need if you were maintaining your own solution in-house.

Built-in security is also a particularly attractive benefit of SaaS products. The right vendor will have security controls already in place that are continually assessed, updated and improved to respond to the latest threats. Some vendors can also provide specialized security services to support compliance concerns and industry regulations, so customers have peace of mind that they’re abiding by the rules. Some of these features and services may include:

  • Automatic and on-demand detection of system threats and vulnerabilities
  • Penetration testing and other services that simulate real-world threats
  • Security controls that restrict access to sensitive content and features

Software as a service platforms can also be well-suited for organizations wanting built-in business continuity measures. In many cases data stored in these solutions is replicated and encrypted in real time to multiple sites at different geographical locations, so if disaster strikes in one location, your data is safe and sound in others.

Especially as technology improves with vendors innovating on their platforms year after year, SaaS is proving to be a convenient and cost-effective solution for the modern enterprise.

Self-hosted solutions

Unlike a SaaS platform, where your back-end infrastructure is managed by experienced IT professionals outside your organization, these deployments offer ways for you to take more control of your hardware, software and updates. Organizations in certain industries, such as government or finance, may also be subject to certain regulations that restrict how they can store information, thus preventing them from deploying a SaaS solution for the time being.

However, a self-hosted solution can still be cloud-based, and therefore share some of the advantages of a SaaS platform. Let’s take a look at each of the self-hosted solution types.

On-premises

Before cloud technology systems, on-premises deployments were the de-facto standard for document management. The most notable differentiator for this type of deployment is owning and maintaining hardware, and the need to manually deploy software updates. Here’s a look at advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

  • Ability to purchase the highest-performance or most-specialized machines for your purposes
  • Security that can be configured for your organization, in-house by your own IT staff
  • More control over computing resource usage
  • Capability to increase access points for custom integrations and other add-ons

Disadvantages

  • Top-of-the-line hardware can be expensive
  • Managing backups and associated sites can be labor-intensive and time-consuming
  • Need to spend money and time to upgrade hardware to keep up with pace of technology
  • IT will need to spend time and resources to implement even basic security settings
  • Recurring costs such as maintenance, server rooms and extra electricity usage

Self-hosted cloud

A self-hosted cloud deployment operates in largely the same way as an on-premises deployment with the exception of maintaining your own hardware. In fact, the applications themselves are the same and simply hosted on a vendor’s servers — most of the popular platforms, such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, allow you to run standard computer operating systems on them. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

  • Scalability and flexibility to grow the solution with your business
  • Reduced system downtime after a disruption with built-in security and backup features
  • Hardware infrastructure maintained by experienced IT professionals outside your organization
  • Capability to increase access points for integrations and other add-ons

Disadvantages

  • Costs of renting hardware and specialized support services can add up
  • Implementations aren’t completely configurable as hardware isn’t on-site or owned by you
  • Hardware might not be optimized for your needs (or customizable to do so)
  • IT will need to spend time and resources to implement even basic security settings
  • Recurring costs such as maintenance, server rooms and extra electricity usage

Finding the right solution

The first question you really need to ask is if you need control over the hardware itself. These days, SaaS solutions offer so many valuable benefits, like managed security, disaster recovery and automatic updates that they are a worthwhile choice unless you absolutely need to use your own hardware. Modern cloud applications offer flexibility without any of the hassle setting up hardware or paying for extra space, power or cooling for your server room. They can give your IT team extra time and resources to keep your business running smoothly.

To learn more about a document management solution that can be deployed as either an SaaS or self-hosted platform, take the Laserfiche Cloud product tour.

Hanover County

Located just outside of Richmond, VA, Hanover County serves a population of more than 100,000 residents. During tax season, keeping up the books for the constituency can be a daunting task for the Commissioner of Revenue’s Office, which manages all of the county’s real estate, personal, property and state income tax information.

The department purchased Laserfiche to eliminate paper processes and decrease the time staff spent finding and filing tax records.

It began using Laserfiche as a digital file cabinet and digitized over 85% of its tax documents in the first year.

When the department’s systems administrator, Amy Johnson, attended a user meeting hosted by the county’s reseller, Unity ECM, she saw how other organizations were leveraging Laserfiche’s advanced functionality. She knew Hanover County could use Laserfiche to do more than document search and retrieval.

To take advantage of Laserfiche’s newest features, the county upgraded to Laserfiche Rio and started revamping entire business processes.

Improving Document Approval with Workflow

Even without a background in IT, Johnson quickly began using Laserfiche Workflow to automate important departmental processes.

For example, every year the office completes statutory assessment worksheets to measure the personal property assets of each local business in the county. Before Laserfiche, compiling and processing these worksheets prior to review led to significant printing costs and time delays.

With Laserfice:
  • An integration between Laserfiche Quick Fields and the department’s AS/400 database has the eliminated cumbersome, upfront manual data entry.
  • Laserfiche Workflow automates the entire records approval process. New worksheets are immediately searchable in Laserfiche from managers’ desktops, allowing staff to quickly review worksheets and better serve customers.
  • With Laserfiche Snapshot, an image capture tool, the office has eliminated redundant printing of records. “Snapshot seems like a minor thing, but it was a huge benefit for us because we don’t have to print paper anymore,” says Johnson, estimating that the system saves the office from printing about 15,000 pages a year.

Automating Records Management

The county also relies on Laserfiche as an automated backbone for records management and retention. With paper, each staff member dedicated at least one day a week to sorting records for filing. Laserfiche has eliminated the need for this rotating position by automatically filing and storing approved documents by type and name for the six-year retention period.

“Everything we do is linked onto a foundation based on Laserfiche Records Management Edition, which allows us to log our records according to state records management standards,” says Johnson.

Getting Buy-in

Johnson says that upfront planning with every employee involved in the process has eased the office’s transition to digital document approval. When she began using Laserfiche Workflow, Johnson invited all the managers responsible for approving documents, along with the division manager, to join her as she drew out the process on a piece of paper. The group discussed every step together and determined how the managers would prefer to approve worksheets in Laserfiche.

“Time spent diagramming upfront will more than pay itself back later. Because we took the time to evaluate our documents, we ended up eliminating a lot of junk in our paper files,” notes Johnson. “It’s also really important to give staff ownership over the process.”

Tapping into the Laserfiche User Community

Beyond her work at the county, Johnson is also a leader of the Laserfiche User Group in Virginia, a consortium of Laserfiche users that holds quarterly meetings to foster the exchange of ECM knowledge. The group has grown to include more than 100 members throughout the state.

“The user group is so beneficial for networking and talking with other users. It’s a great place to hear about the lessons that other users have learned,” says Johnson.

Additionally, Johnson cites the annual Laserfiche Empower conference, reseller support and technical white papers as invaluable resources for improving her skills in using the software.

“Our implementation is so successful because of the community. Laserfiche listens to feedback and uses it to shape its next release. Everyone’s so approachable and helpful, and that makes it easy to like the product,” she says.

Gaining Top Value

Adopting new software functionality as it becomes available has helped Hanover County gain top value out of its ECM system. With these new tools, the county is truly leveraging the power of its constituent data in digital form to help transform the way county business is accomplished.

“Laserfiche is the one tool on your desktop that actually does what it’s supposed to do and what you ask it to do,” notes Johnson. “It’s one of my favorite parts of my job.”

Jackson County

Located in the scenic southwest corner of Oregon, Jackson County is home to a growing population of more than 200,000 residents—a growing population that in recent years has produced both a higher demand for services and more public records. Like many local government offices, Jackson County was flush with paper documents and short on storage space.

Additionally, the county must store and organize most of its departments’ records in complex records structures according to state and federal laws for records retention. With paper records, enforcing retention schedules while ensuring staff could still find and retrieve records involved tedious manual steps for staff across the county.

“There was a complicated system of filing with colored labels on the folders,” says Devin Goble, Programmer Analyst for Jackson County’s IT department. “Complying with retention meant staff had to look through each folder on the shelves, a very time-consuming process.”

Even though the county knew its departments needed an enterprise content management (ECM) system, skepticism toward digital content—and new IT projects—was strong among employees.

“It was a hard fight to get ECM implemented in the county. People were thoroughly entrenched in their paper processes,” says Goble.

To offer a valuable solution to staff, Goble led a search for an ECM system that could satisfy many different users’ needs and eliminate manual paper processes.

Laserfiche appealed to the IT department because it offered a well-supported feature set with a solid, built-in records management component. After hearing the positive experiences of other cities and counties using Laserfiche, Goble was assured that his IT department could structure Laserfiche in a way that would win over skeptical departments.

Warranting a Transparent Records Management Solution

Although many departments wanted a solution to their paper problems, the county worked with Laserfiche solution provider CDI to begin its Laserfiche implementation in the Sheriff’s Office in 2011. The diverse types of records handled by law enforcement staff offered the perfect testing ground for an improved records management process. Felony records, for example, must be retained by the department for ten years, while records managers can destroy certain types of warrants after five and others after ten. Keeping track of different retention schedules while making paper documents easily accessible to clerks was difficult for the department.

Laserfiche’s Records Management Edition, a DoD 5015.2-certified records management solution, allowed the IT department to separate what Goble calls the “nuts and bolts of records management” from general document use. Using Laserfiche’s transparent records management approach, the department was able to customize content management based on staff members’ job functions and easily organize the same documents in different ways for records managers and deputies.

For example, the four types of warrants handled by the department all require two separate retention schedules. When a warrant is received and scanned into the department’s digital document repository, Laserfiche automatically puts every warrant in its own record series folder, allowing records managers to view warrants in a batch by type or year and purge them at the appropriate time.

At the same time, Laserfiche establishes a separate folder structure for deputies and clerks that lists individual warrants by warrant type and warrant number. Because deputies are usually searching for more granular information within a specific case or a subpoena, Laserfiche automatically organizes documents so that deputies can easily find the detailed case information within a record.

It’s a best of both worlds solution: records managers can easily find and filter warrants based on disposition schedules while, at the same time, deputies can access individual warrants without knowing anything about records naming conventions. Everyone can work with law enforcement documents in the manner they prefer.

“Laserfiche’s transparent records management tools allow us to create a second view of the data in as many places as we need to. Records managers see it in one way. Clerks see it in another way. In some cases, others in the Sheriff’s hierarchy can see it in a completely different way,” says Goble.

Furthermore, an integration between Laserfiche and Tiburon, the department’s CAD/RMS system, pulls relevant names, place and incident dates from the police records upon scanning. Laserfiche Quick Fields auto-populates this information as metadata within the warrant file. Laserfiche Workflow then routes the warrant through the transparent records management filing process, eliminating the time-consuming, manual data entry and document routing steps for staff.

Streamlining Information Management

Laserfiche has also completely automated the department’s civil jacket process, which once included tedious data entry by records managers.

For civil cases, deputies compile an envelope of documents called a civil jacket that includes court documents and other records related to an incident when a subpoena is served. When these envelopes are scanned into the document repository, Laserfiche automatically fixes the civil jacket number to comply with the state’s records policy and forwards the documents to clerks for quality assurance.

“We take that act of moving data around and complying with retention policies out of users’ hands as much as possible. In some cases, users never have to touch the documents after they scan them. Laserfiche does all the rest,” says Goble.

Eliminating manual steps helps staff focus on getting their jobs done instead of tracking down and organizing paper. Temporary staff can complete scanning tasks without needing to be trained on document retention parameters, and records managers aren’t burdened with data entry. Laserfiche’s automation tools also eliminate the security risk of records being moved out of their records series.

“Not only do users not have to worry about where things go, they can’t change the filing structure even if they want to. This structure is locked in place by policy,” says Goble.

Furthermore, the Sheriff’s Office can directly push documents to the District Attorney’s office using Laserfiche WebLink, an online Web portal that provides read-only access to documents. High-profile cases often require transferring thousands of pages of records to the DA. With WebLink, the Sheriff’s Office can upload select documents to the online portal and give DA staff secure access to the information, eliminating costly printing and shipping expenses and streamlining litigation.

Building Enterprise-Wide Enthusiasm for ECM

The initial implementation was so successful that the skeptical end users have started evangelizing Laserfiche to other departments. Goble says he is fielding questions from other departments about records management and Laserfiche all the time.

“It’s nice to give users something solid. Now that our staff has had a chance to see what the product can do for us, they’re getting excited about it,” says Goble.

In addition to using Laserfiche for other documents like purchasing records and contracts for the Sheriff’s Office, IT has expanded ECM to the County Assessor’s Office. The department uses Laserfiche to scan and store historical deed cards, 100-year old property assessment jackets and current personal property returns for local businesses. The county’s Human Resources department has also started integrating Laserfiche with its Oracle ERP system to manage personnel records.

Using Laserfiche Workflow and Laserfiche Quick Fields to automate as much of the capture and indexing process as possible went a long way in showing the value of the application to multiple departments. Goble says that setting up a system that requires as little user interaction as possible was key to expanding ECM into an enterprise application.

“I’m more proud of our users than anything else. We’re really happy to see the expansion that we’ve been able to do with Laserfiche,” notes Goble.

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), based in Austin, helps develop the state’s higher education plans, approves degree programs and provides advice on education activities to the State Legislature and Governor’s Office.

Central to achieving THECB’s mission of promoting access to quality higher education is its Loan Program Operations (LPO), which disburses state financial aid funds to Texas universities and assists with student loan collections and litigation for the State Attorney General’s Office. As the gatekeeper for state-appropriated financial aid, LPO handles more than 1.5 million documents each year—a number that’s grown steadily as cuts to state scholarship funds have driven more loan applications to the department’s College Access Loan and B-On-Time incentive programs. In 2011 alone, the agency disbursed over $143 million worth of funds to students.

“For cases that go on to become loans, it’s a very paper-intensive process,” explains Debbie Whitis, Manager of LPO Operational Support Services. “Every single piece of information related to a student loan, from electronic applications, paper sources and screenshots, must be documented and archived according to state retention guidelines.”

Although LPO had a document management system in place, the legacy system couldn’t handle the high-volume processing needed to handle the growing volume of loan applications. As a result, it needed rebooting at least eight times a day.

On average, the agency was losing 19 cumulative hours of staff time across its departments every day—wasted effort that cost the LPO $76,000 each year and generated customer dissatisfaction.

“If a debtor called to inquire about their loan status and the system was down, we couldn’t give them a real-time answer,” explains Whitis. “Staff still had to manually fill in field classifications, and our process wasn’t very transparent.”

Stretching the IT Investment

LPO began searching for a new enterprise content management (ECM) system that would cut out inefficiencies and save staff time. When reseller MCCi showed the organization Laserfiche Avante’s flexible, customizable administration and workflow tools, the agency was convinced that Laserfiche could easily reduce its bottlenecks, track documents throughout the loan record lifecycle and make information readily accessible to many different users at once.

Whitis was impressed that so many of Laserfiche’s key functionalities aligned with LPO’s checklist of requirements, including Laserfiche’s ability to:
  • Monitor activities occurring within the department in real-time.
  • Support a complicated routing structure for LPO and provide transparency at each step of the loan process lifecycle.
  • Generate performance quotas and productivity statistics.
  • Offer snapshot printing, scanning and conversion of diverse content formats.

Even with this wide range of features, Laserfiche still offered an affordable price point. “Laserfiche was the most cost-effective solution and best value we found,” says Whitis. “When you’re paying with tax dollars, value is important.”

Furthermore, Laserfiche’s ease-of-use ensured a smooth implementation when turnover in LPO’s IT department reduced the project’s technical support. Using Laserfiche’s free user education materials along with her knowledge of ECM system implementation, Whitis was able to teach herself the ins and outs of the entire Laserfiche system.

“I was able to learn the system simply by using the white papers, customer presentations and everything else that is available on the Laserfiche Support Site,” explains Whitis. “The information really is readable and digestible for Laserfiche users.”

Eliminating Redundancies and Building Transparency

Armed with these education materials, Whitis started the implementation by sketching her ideas for improving the loan process out on paper. She then brought those ideas to life using the Laserfiche Workflow Designer, a business process configuration tool, to build complex, automated document routing and archiving procedures and data queries to third-party systems.

In total, Whitis created 29 different workflows that process and route the diverse types of content the department receives, streamlining many steps in daily activities, especially for the agency’s Operational Support Services (OSS) department.

Some of the benefits realized include:
  • Enhance information capture. Using Laserfiche Snapshot, a multi-functional document capture tool, the department can capture and record all loan documents like IVR (interactive voice response) payments, call sheets and loan changes directly from third-party systems, such as the agency’s Loan Management System, in a central repository.
  • Streamlined payment processing. For captured documents like checks, Laserfiche Workflow uses information on the check to query client data like social security numbers from the agency’s other databases and links that information to the check. Workflow then routes the document among the necessary departments at each step of payment review and processing.
  • Transparent records management. To archive a document according to litigation requirements, Workflow extracts information such as the borrower’s last name from the document, and automatically creates the proper retention folders for the document.
  • Centralized control. In the Laserfiche Workflow Administration Console, an advanced performance and reporting interface, Whitis can now monitor all system activity in real-time and research bottlenecks affecting the productivity of the team.

By automating and centralizing information access with Laserfiche, the agency can now process documents within a matter of milliseconds versus hours. Laserfiche Snapshot alone has helped the OSS department reduce its document processing times by up to 24 hours and eliminate 66% of its staffing expenses, a total of $15,000 in savings.

With Laserfiche Workflow, LPO can ultimately ensure that every step of the loan record cycle is transparent and that documents are saved in a searchable format, even as multiple users interact with the document.

“Changes to the document remain consistent no matter where the document goes,” says Whitis. “I love the fact that I can go into the Workflow Designer and find exactly where a document is. We can resolve an issue in a matter of minutes or within a couple of hours. Before, it was just a shot in the dark.”

Gaining Enterprise-Wide Buy-In

LPO managers and directors also love Laserfiche’s time-saving reporting tools. Prior to Laserfiche, managers could spend two full days compiling statistics about their teams’ productivity and quotas for the Assistant Commissioner of Business and Support Services. Using Laserfiche Audit Trail, an enterprise risk management tool that tracks user activity, managers can now generate performance reports on their staff with the click of a button.

To bring managers and staff up to speed on Laserfiche, Whitis committed to several onsite demos and trainings on searching, reporting and data capture.

“People here had been married to our old system for the duration of their careers,” notes Whitis. “But when they saw Laserfiche’s capabilities compared to our old system, they were impressed. They really took ownership of the software in their daily processes when we gave them a voice in how it works.”

This ownership translated into greatly increased staff productivity, especially during peak processing seasons. Even though the number of loan applications has increased by 12% since LPO started using Laserfiche, the agency has decreased its error rate to a mere two percent with the system. In just the first year of using Laserfiche, LPO estimates that it has reduced about 30% of its overall operating expenses.

In the future, the department plans to expand its Laserfiche system to handle the litigation documents it files with the state court. Using Laserfiche Quick Fields, a high-volume indexing tool, LPO will automate the costly, time-consuming manual indexing of legal files.

Whitis says that what makes Laserfiche so attractive to state agencies—and other organizations—is its flexible architecture. From document capture to automated workflows to reporting, Whitis praises how easily Laserfiche has accommodated LPO’s evolving business needs.

Computerized Management Services

For Computerized Management Services, a medical management company that focuses on meeting the needs of radiologists, technology paves the path to a profitable future.

“Because we’ve never lost a customer and have extremely low employee turnover as well as strong long-term relationships with all of our key suppliers, we have the means to invest in the technology necessary to build a world-class infrastructure to meet the future needs of our clients,” says President Tom Brajkovich.

This forward-thinking approach led the company to implement Laserfiche enterprise content management back in 2006. “There’s a lot of miscellaneous paper associated with medical billing, a lot of non-standardized communications coming from patients, payers and providers,” Brajkovich explains. “We knew that digitizing the paper and automating associated processes would make us more efficient.”

Prior to implementing Laserfiche, Computerized Management Services housed its paper archives in bankers boxes at offsite storage lockers, making it difficult for staff to find older documents. Files that had yet to be reviewed for coding and billing purposes were kept in filing cabinets, creating bottlenecks when documents were misplaced and limiting the management team’s visibility into the company’s overall workflow.

To facilitate access and improve productivity, the company now uses Laserfiche to process, manage and store four main document types:
  • Reports and face sheets from providers.
  • Explanation of benefits forms (both paper and electronic) from payers.
  • Credentialing documents from providers.
  • Internal training documents.

“We’re constantly scanning, uploading and processing information,” Brajkovich says.

Documents are processed and stored using Laserfiche Quick Fields 8, a high-volume capture and processing tool, and Laserfiche Workflow 8, a business process management tool. These tools eliminate the need for manual data entry and filing by:
  • Automatically extracting metadata from documents.
  • Auto-populating index fields.
  • Creating new folders.
  • Auto-filing documents.

For a company that receives thousands of documents a day from more than 100 locations in California and Arizona, this automation results in a big productivity boost. It also makes it easy for employees to retrieve documents by conducting simple field and text searches.

Processing EOBs with Laserfiche

Further enhancing productivity, Computerized Management Services uses Laserfiche to manage the explanation of benefits (EOB) forms that most insurers still send in paper format.

“We use Laserfiche Quick Fields to convert paper EOBs into usable data, and Laserfiche Workflow to facilitate EOB processing,” explains Denise Van, Vice President of Operations.

Via document shortcuts, the company uses Laserfiche Workflow to route EOBs to the appropriate client teams for processing. Client team personnel work with dual screens, so they’re able to view a document on one screen while performing data entry into the company’s CPU billing software on the other.

Although CPU and Laserfiche aren’t yet integrated, the Laserfiche Entry ID for each document is logged in each patient’s record in CPU so that it is easily retrievable. After the EOBs have been processed, Laserfiche Workflow removes the EOB shortcuts from the client team folders. Laserfiche Workflow then archives the EOBs by date of service.

Laserfiche Workflow Automation Accelerates Coding

Computerized Management Services also uses Laserfiche in conjunction with A-Life, its computer-assisted coding system.

When the company receives new information from a client site, it imports it into Laserfiche using either Laserfiche Import Agent, which captures electronic faxes, or Laserfiche Snapshot, which converts electronic documents into TIFF images. Documents are then processed by Laserfiche Quick Fields and exported to A-Life. Once documents have been coded in A-Life, Laserfiche Workflow archives the documents.

The biggest benefits of Laserfiche, however, are felt when the company can’t use A-Life. “If a facility changes the format of its reports or face sheets, it takes time to reprogram A-Life,” says Brajkovich. “When that happens, Laserfiche takes over.”

According to Van, employees need a mere 24 hours to complete the coding process in A-Life. When done on paper, the process takes 5-10 days. When used as the company’s “coding back up,” Laserfiche enables staff to complete the coding process in 48-72 hours.

“Laserfiche helps us solve problems,” says Van. “If we had to code on paper every time a facility changed its format, we’d lose a lot of time.”

The coding process in Laserfiche works as follows:
  • Documents are imported into Laserfiche using Import Agent or Snapshot.
  • Documents are processed by Laserfiche Quick Fields, metadata is applied and Laserfiche Workflow moves document shortcuts to the Coder folder for processing.
  • The coding manager assigns work and Laserfiche Workflow moves the folder to the assigned coder.
  • The assigned coder codes the document using the preview pane in Laserfiche, adding coding metadata to the Laserfiche template.
  • Laserfiche Workflow then moves the document to the billing team, which exports it to CPU for processing.
  • Once the completion criteria have been met, Laserfiche Workflow archives the documents.

“Laserfiche Workflow is a wonderful tool,” says Van. “We rely heavily on it.”

The Key to Going Digital

Brajkovich and Van stress that Computerized Management Services’ success with Laserfiche is the result of a phased approach to implementation and training. They first worked with Laserfiche reseller JPI Data Resource to configure the system to their specifications, and then they trained their staff.

“We didn’t roll out everything at once,” says Brajkovich. “Implementing the capabilities of Laserfiche slowly allowed us to make sure that adjusting to the new system didn’t slow us down.”

Initially, staff learned how to use Laserfiche to search and retrieve digital documents. Once the company rolled out Laserfiche Workflow, Brajkovich and Van took a train-the-trainer approach, working with key staff from the data processing and client teams to ensure that they were comfortable with the system and able to show their team members how to perform their various tasks.

Today, as always, the company is in the process of improving its workflows. “Continuous improvement is important to us,” says Brajkovich. “In order to ensure that we offer truly exceptional service to clients in the heavily nuanced field of radiology, we constantly look for ways to fine tune our processes and our use of technology.”

Loudoun County

For Loudoun County, VA, keeping up with the demands of a rapidly expanding population is a challenge, even with a healthy economy. In fact, residents of Loudoun County enjoy the nation’s highest median household income at well over $100,000 a year. In addition, Loudoun County ranked in the top 3% of all counties nationwide for per capita income.

The rapid growth of the population—coupled with the high expectations of high-income residents—has led to an increasingly high demand for public services. As a result, the county must constantly look for new and innovative ways to support high priority initiatives.

Turning to Technology

Loudoun County’s IT department is in charge of the efficient implementation of technology to improve county services to its citizens. Comprised of more than 90 IT professionals serving over 3,000 government employees across 32 departments, the IT department determines information system needs and provides equipment, software, maintenance, repair, training and other services for the entire enterprise.

Bill McIntyre, Division Manager of Enterprise IT, leads the team responsible for the software and systems that serve employees across the county, including the internet and intranet, e-mail, Webcasting and customer relationship management (CRM). “We take care of the technology that every user can take advantage of,” McIntyre says. “Our Laserfiche content management system definitely falls into that category.”

However, content management wasn’t always viewed as an enterprise system. Before implementing Laserfiche Enterprise Content Management in 2007, Loudoun County had three departments using different document imaging systems.

Going Enterprise

When the Controller’s Office started looking for a replacement for its old document imaging system, the IT department realized that implementing a true enterprise content management (ECM) system—one that could be used in all county departments—would cut down on the need for support and enable employees across the county to benefit from the ability to digitize their content and automate their business processes.

“In the past, there were a lot of overlapping systems. From a support, maintenance and cost perspective, we knew that standardizing on one ECM system was our best move,” explains McIntyre. “With only one system to oversee, we could develop the deep expertise that would enable the county to make the most out of its investment in ECM.”

After working with Unity Business Systems, a Laserfiche reseller, to implement Laserfiche in the Controller’s Office as well as Building & Development, Loudoun County’s IT department realized that it needed someone in-house to run point on the Laserfiche project. The department hired Gopal Kanneganti, Senior Imaging Systems Analyst, to join McIntyre’s enterprise team.

“It was important to us to ensure that we had someone on our team who would be responsible for Laserfiche. If you tried to add that task to people’s existing responsibilities, it could be easily pushed to the side,” McIntyre says.

Managing Change

McIntyre and Kanneganti then set out to educate their colleagues across different departments about the value of Laserfiche ECM. Although McIntyre claims that he and his team “are just a bunch of geeks and nerds who don’t know anything about marketing,” they took a picture-perfect approach to promoting the value of the new system across Loudoun County.

He explains, “We started by attending leadership meetings and presenting the capabilities of Laserfiche to department leaders. In particular, we targeted departments that were very paper-based and that would see the benefits of digitizing the paper right away.”

Two departments that sprang immediately to mind included Environmental Health and Family Services, both of which had records rooms that were so full of paper the floors were buckling.

“The need for ECM was there,” says McIntyre. “After we attended their staff meetings and they heard about what Laserfiche could do, they knew that this system would give them a way out of their predicament.”

The Enterprise Team’s strategy was to get Laserfiche into these departments quickly, so they’d see immediate value. This approach paid off, and today McIntyre says the team no longer needs to “sell Laserfiche internally. Everyone wants it.”

In fact, Loudoun County is looking to bring on a second Laserfiche administrator to assist Kanneganti and accelerate deployment across the enterprise. “When we looked at a reasonable pace for one person to roll out Laserfiche to the rest of the county, we realized that it would take 24 years!” McIntyre says. “We’re getting funding for the second position starting in fiscal 2013, and the new systems analyst will be coming on board in July.”

McIntyre notes that the IT department will be busy rolling out three new systems over the next year:
  • Enterprise-wide: An Oracle ERP system.
  • Assessor’s Office: iasWorld appraisal software from Tyler Technologies.
  • Tax: A new tax software system from PCI Systems.

“When we were searching for these new systems, we made it a mandatory requirement that they would all be able to integrate with Laserfiche,” says McIntyre. “Laserfiche is our enterprise solution for content management. We’re not going to move forward with any system that is incompatible with it.”

To date, Loudoun County has implemented Laserfiche in ten departments, including:
  • Assessor’s Office
  • Building & Development
  • Management & Financial Services (Controller’s Office)
  • Environmental Health
  • Family Services

“There are 30 departments across Loudoun County, so we’re just getting started,” McIntyre says.