Process Automation Archives | Page 27 of 27

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.

Red River Regional Dispatch Center

Located in Cass County, ND, the Red River Regional Dispatch Center (RRRDC) was the first 911 center in the country to consolidate services across state lines (North Dakota/Minnesota). While there are many multi-jurisdictional dispatch centers throughout the US, only RRRDC works with all of the fire, police and emergency response units in two counties in two different states.

Serving the metropolitan community of Fargo-Moorhead, RRRDC handles more than 121,000 emergency calls a year, dispatching responders from:

Two sheriff’s departments.
Seven police departments.
Three city fire departments.
28 rural fire departments.
15 rural emergency medical service providers.
One ambulance service.

According to Renee Lura, Professional IT Services Manager for the City of Fargo and an IT liaison/lead for RRRDC, “In the realm of public safety, sharing resources across agencies allows everyone involved to get more bang for their buck. Multi-jurisdictional agencies allow participants to pool their funding so that they can invest in more sophisticated technology and provide better, faster service to their communities.”

Integration with CAD/RMS/CMS Is Key

Lura notes that in 2009, during the transition from RRRDC’s legacy AS400 CAD/RMS system to the CAD/RMS/CMS from New World Systems, the team looked for an enterprise content management (ECM) system that could integrate with New World to make it easy for staff to access and share reports, photos, warrants and a variety of other scanned or electronic documents.

“Three of the agencies in our consortium were already using Laserfiche independently,” Lura explains, “so the opportunity to benefit from all that internal expertise was a major factor in our purchase decision.” Working with Laserfiche reseller CDI, she notes, was another. “The City of Moorhead and Cass County had worked with CDI for years, and everyone was comfortable with them from the start.”

Ultimately, though, it was CDI’s ability to build a seamless integration with New World that sold RRRDC on Laserfiche. “By integrating Laserfiche with New World, we can share documents across departments and jurisdictions. Anyone with security rights to a certain document can open it by clicking a button in the New World record. It’s easy and intuitive.”

The Laserfiche/New World integration works as follows:

When users look under the Documents tab in New World, they find a Laserfiche button that indicates whether or not there is a corresponding Laserfiche folder.
By clicking on the button, the Laserfiche client launches to the appropriate folder location and users are taken directly to the file associated with the record.
Documents can also be scanned or uploaded into Laserfiche directly from the New World interface.

“Officers, detectives, dispatch and other authorized users all access pertinent information from one integrated interface,” says Lura.

ECM Enhances Security, Mobility and Compliance

Furthermore, because RRRDC uses Laserfiche Records Management Edition, a DoD 5015.2-certified solution that simplifies compliance with records management mandates, new records entering the system are automatically classified and filed into the proper records series.

“We use Laserfiche to manage everything from Wants and Warrants to animal tracking documentation to case notes from officers in the field, and different laws apply to different types of records,” says Lura. “Depending on a document’s metadata, Laserfiche automatically calculates and assigns cutoff and eligibility dates, making it easy for us to manage our records and comply with regulations.”

Lura notes that there are hundreds of users across the 58 agencies the dispatch center serves. “The thin-client solution, Laserfiche Web Access, is great for us because we have so many users spread out over so many different locations,” she says. “In the future, we look to give officers access to Laserfiche from their patrol cars, and Web Access is how other agencies are making this happen.”

Making sure that all the users have the right security permissions to see only the information that pertains to them, Lura says, has been relatively easy. “We’re a Microsoft shop, so it’s great that Laserfiche allows us to use Active Directory-driven security. We came up with a dynamic, matrixed approach that’s easy to administer and update as new staff is hired.”

Workflow Makes Work Easier Across Agencies

The consortium has also benefitted from Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management (BPM) tool that enables agencies to automate document-driven processes. “Different agencies maintain their own workflows, explains Lura. “The system is flexible enough to accommodate the needs of both RRRDC and the various agencies it serves.”

She notes that “automated approval workflows are particularly popular, as are case notification workflows that automatically notify records management staff after an officer has added information into the system.”

For example, the Moorhead Police Department implemented a series of workflow projects to minimize the amount of work involved in finding, completing and approving the paperwork associated with cases.

According to Troy Weber, Information Technology Specialist for the City of Moorhead, “Before we implemented Laserfiche Workflow, our permanent case files resided in a separate set of folders alongside our regular cases. This caused a lot of duplicate searches and errors as users needed to work with two paths because of the different permissions. Workflow now automatically sets permissions when any of the permanent case types are chosen, and the files are stored in the standard folder layout.”

He explains that case files are stored in a series of folders that match up with New World. “Because we needed the layout in Laserfiche to match up with the way New World is structured, our Laserfiche folder arrangement is not as user-friendly as it could be. In the past, our users spent a lot of time browsing to various subfolders when scanning documents,” Weber says. “We resolved this with a simple routing workflow that moves files from the new scans folder to the appropriate case folder based on metadata that was already being entered. This small change has saved a significant amount of staff time.”

In terms of approvals, Weber says, “We wanted an easy, paperless way for supervisors to ‘sign off’ on reports. Since this was only for internal purposes, we did not need an actual signature, but we did want to know which supervisor approved the document and when. Further, we wanted the documents to retain the original owner and created dates. Workflow provided an elegant solution.”

He explains, “We added a couple of fields to our template, but did not give users modify rights to them. One of the new fields is an approved field that only supervisors can modify. When populated, the workflow enters the logged in user’s name into the ‘supervisor’ field, along with the current date and time.” He further notes that this solution has given users the ability to search for documents based on a given supervisor’s approval.

Weber says that the Moorhead Police Department has found the software to be flexible and easy to configure. “Laserfiche Workflow has enabled us to transform useful digital document storage software into a full business automation solution,” he says.

From Lura’s perspective within RRRDC, “With everything it offers, from the New World integration to the business process automation and records management, Laserfiche allows the agencies in our consortium to save money each week on clerical tasks like filing. We find more and more ways to use the software every day.”

Stewart Enterprises: Using ECM Software for Disaster Recovery

Mitigating Documents During Disaster Recovery

“With cemetery records, record-keeping is literally eternal,” says Brian Pellegrin, IS Business Support Manager at Stewart Enterprises, Inc.

In the past, when people passed away, contracts from funeral homes and cemeteries were permanently added to the millions of pages of records in each of the company’s regional storage centers.

Although Stewart Enterprises initially considered implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) solution in 2005, it failed to anticipate that its documents might incur damage. Unfortunately, when Hurricane Katrina struck later that year, the company’s New Orleans Records Management Center was hit and tens of thousands of documents were submerged for over a week.

“The hypothetical doomsday scenario became a reality for our organization,” says Pellegrin. “Unfortunately, we were not as forward-thinking at that time as we are now. Rather than accepting an initial ECM proposal for $175,000, we spent $1.5 million recovering and restoring our documents.”

Setting a Document Standard

Despite the loss, the disaster gave the organization the forward velocity it needed to go digital with Laserfiche ECM. “When implementing a new functional area, as soon as I put the Katrina pictures up, everyone is on board,” says Pellegrin. “When you talk about buy-in, it isn’t a hard sell.”

As a direct result of Hurricane Katrina, the company first digitized the records in its New Orleans Records Management Center. Before implementing ECM enterprise-wide, Pellegrin started discovery by physically walking through various company facilities and taking stock of employee processes, paper piles and organization structure—a preliminary step he recommends for anyone beginning a Laserfiche project.

“The sheer volume of documents involved in digitizing a record center astonished me,” he says. “Walk through a variety of departments and ask yourself, would it would be beneficial to management to see the documents and to have real-time tracking for every step in this process?”

These discoveries allowed Pellegrin to seize the opportunity to standardize records management across the company by upgrading to Laserfiche Rio. He rolled out digital archiving to the company’s other records centers in Miami, Dallas and Orlando, as well as individual facilities and corporate offices in 25 states and Puerto Rico.

Configuring Laserfiche Rio across multiple departments and integrating Laserfiche Quick Fields with the company’s contract number system and reporting systems transformed Stewart Enterprises’ Laserfiche ECM system from a simple disaster recovery plan to a flexible, yet central, point of control.

“We’re not looking at an individual person or process, we’re thinking enterprise-wide,” he says of the company’s IT strategy. “What we have noticed as a result of implementing Laserfiche is not only a more efficient process, but a structured workflow that can be implemented nationwide.”

Centralizing Contracts

Because Stewart Enterprises juggles different regulations on its contracts and facilities for every state in which it operates, Pellegrin sought a standard workflow that could track and store documents in compliance with these regulations while still offering fluid access to documentation when adjusting a client’s file.

Laserfiche Rio allowed the company to greatly restructure the contracts workflow. Using the Laserfiche SDK, Pellegrin configured Laserfiche Quick Fields to draw information between the company’s .NET point-of-sale applications and Laserfiche. This integration, along with standardized scanning methods and better quality control, led to much faster processing:
750 field employees now image documentation as .TIFF files onto a national network drive using Canon scanners.

Laserfiche Import Agent then transfers those documents from the drive into the Laserfiche repository automatically, day and night.

Laserfiche Quick Fields runs a real-time SQL search against the company’s account receivable contract system based on individual contract number. Laserfiche Quick Fields then indexes each document by geographic location, sorts and routes it to separate workflows depending on values identified in the SQL lookup.

Users across the regional centers and corporate headquarters can route, process and update contracts using Laserfiche Workflow and Laserfiche Snapshot.

Prior to Laserfiche, these records centers contained vaults full of filing cabinets and shelves of manila folders that a contract research team mined during contract retrieval requests. With this system in place across all facilities, the company has already scanned more than 30 million pages from its document centers into Laserfiche’s digital repositories, repurposing filing cabinets into valuable real estate and saving thousands in paper costs. Now the company can scan, monitor and check the quality of its financial transactions, such as deposits, to better ensure compliance with each state’s regulations.

Enterprise-Sized Gains

Unlocking critical contract information from paper forms brought an unprecedented level of enterprise visibility to the company, which Pellegrin lauds as Laserfiche’s main asset. When Laserfiche Workflow creates a permanent record for storage, it also makes the contracts available for real-time access to over 1,000 employees nationwide via a Laserfiche WebLink Web portal.

Now, users ranging from executive vice presidents to customer service representatives can research the contracts and their indexes and status information with the click of the Laserfiche icon on their desktop. “Giving real-time, simultaneous access to a variety of functional areas and hierarchies brought immediate value and efficiency to our organization,” explains Pellegrin.

For example, read-only access to contracts for the company’s audit department has eliminated travel costs during audits. The audit group may perform a facility audit without the facility knowing about it, right from their own computers.

“Laserfiche has allowed us to not only standardize our processes, but to easily monitor them as well. We now have access to empirical data about employees indicating efficiency, accuracy and completeness on a real-time basis,” notes Pellegrin.

Stewart Enterprises truly leverages the full scale of Laserfiche Rio, using it for everything from conversion and storage of microfilm records to streamlining and enhancing internal audit processes across the entire company.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche, I was virtually in the dark with respect to ECM. I didn’t have the slightest idea of the impact this one system could have throughout the organization. We’re changing the culture of our company in a span of three to six months at each record facility.”

5 Convincing Reasons to Automate Accounts Payable

When paper is used to manage invoices, AP might as well stand for “annoying process.” At best, hardcopy invoices cause a brief interruption in your day—at worst, they get lost on someone’s desk and you have to contact the vendor for a new copy.

Below are five telltale signs your AP process needs to be digitized and automated.

1. Lack of Autonomy

Process-Walking — Tracking down an invoice or PO shouldn’t require the involvement of 10 different people.

Tracking down the status of an invoice or purchase order (PO) feels like a days-long game of telephone. An employee inquires about an order, you defer to an employee in accounting, she asks the senior accountant…and eventually an answer arrives.

In a manual AP process, only the person with the document in hand knows its status. However, when an organization uses a document management system, any authorized user can view the status and activity of that document. With the added benefit of automation, employees can receive instant email notifications when an invoice requires attention—no searching required. The ability to independently locate and receive documents saves time and effort for you, your employees and your AP department.

2. Busy Work Blues

A department head’s goal is to manage people, not paper. But when you have to scan, fax or walk every document to the AP department, you have less time to devote to your employees.

By converting all AP paperwork into digital files (or better yet, having them start off in a digital format), organizations avoid the nuisance of shuffling invoices and POs from desk to desk. Additionally, an automated AP system can calculate totals, cross-reference invoices with PO numbers and send notification emails to everyone involved in the process. The busy work is still getting done, but you don’t have to do it.

3. Turnaround Time Terrors

The time you spend routing and signing documents affects your employees’ productivity as well as your own. Anyone who submits a PO knows it could take days before the vendor even receives the order. You want your team to get what it needs to work, but that goal becomes more and more distant with every paper document that lands on your desk.

Instead of impeding projects, an automated AP process expedites the time between ordering and receiving. Not only does it eliminate the need to physically route documents, it also reduces the need for manual data entry, calculations and quality control. A document management system, for example, can extract information from an electronic PO or invoice and store it in a repository. Reduced manual transcription means reduced chance for data entry errors and processing delays.

4. Too Many Idiosyncrasies

Not every PO follows the same path from employee to vendor. POs typically require sign-off from different approvers depending on the dollar value of the order. Remembering who needs to sign what type of PO does not contribute to a quick and effortless process.

Another useful function of document management software is the conditional routing of documents. This type of system can determine, based on the information provided in the PO, whose approval is required. Once these conditions are established in the system, it can run thousands of times without error, giving you one less detail to remember about the AP process.

5. Finger Pointing Problems

Signing paperwork is quick, but when an important document goes missing it pulls you away from work indefinitely. In the worst-case scenario, the invoice never resurfaces and those involved start to blame each other for its disappearance.

Document management software prevents this scenario in three major ways:

It electronically stores documents, eliminating the risks associated with tangible files.
It tracks user activity so you can see who has viewed, edited or approved a file.
You can establish user-based security rights to prevent unauthorized people from using—or destroying—electronic files.

Through these measures, you’ll always know who has handled an invoice or PO at every stage of the AP process.

Want to learn more about the strategic advantages that can be gained by implementing an AP automation solution? Check out this infographic and see how process automation can help your organization gain a strategic advantage and tackle the challenges of invoice processing.

InvestmentNews Study Shows the Payoff of Advisor Technology for Financial Services

Right now, RIAs are busy formulating their business plans for 2015. In the area of advisor technology, investment decisions have become increasingly complex: what kind of technology is needed, can current technology simply be upgraded—should new technology be purchased at all? To help advisors answer these questions, InvestmentNews performed a study on the effects of investing in technology for advisory businesses. According to the study, firms that integrated a variety of technologies and displayed an innovative and progressive attitude toward technology had higher revenues, profits, AUM, and number of clients than those who limited their technological investments.

What Types of Advisor Technology Are Used?

In the study, the technology ‘innovators’ were identified as using up to six software solutions on a daily basis. The most commonly used advisor technology applications are:

CRM
Financial planning
Account aggregation
Document management
Portfolio management
Portfolio rebalancing

Each of these technologies provides unique opportunities for efficiency, compliance, data accuracy and better customer service—but trying to manage so many distinct applications with siloed information can be just as inefficient as having no software at all.

The real benefit comes when these technologies can share data and talk to each other. When integrated, these technologies not only provide faster data and better insights to the advisor, they can automate entire processes with workflows—leaving more time for the advisor to focus on clients.

What Daily Processes Are Improved by Technology?

One of the most common processes that financial advisors automate is the opening of new accounts. Without technology, this can be a tedious process. Forms have to be filled out, mailed for signatures and checked for errors repeatedly until the new account can be finalized.

With integrated technologies, this process looks much different. By implementing CRM, document management software, forms filling software, and electronic signatures, the time required to open a new account can take minutes instead of weeks.

Through the use of these software applications, advisors opening new accounts experience the following benefits:

Software auto-populates electronic forms, reducing processing time and errors resulting from manual entry.
Forms are e-mailed to account holders for e-signatures, eliminating paper and courier costs.
Compliance review and approval processes are automated with workflows, allowing advisors to start booking revenue sooner.

This method of processing new accounts not only saves time, but records an audit history of every action taken at every step.

These efficiency and compliance benefits are not limited to the opening of new accounts. Virtually any data or document-driven process can be automated, including the creation of a blotter, storing client communications, social media archiving, AP processing, HR onboarding and document filing.

Why Adopt Advisor Technology Now?

A combination of factors including increased audits, changing recordkeeping requirements, the rise of mobile devices and social media and the vast potential for efficiency gains are driving advisors to shift their attitudes toward technology.

Those who realize these benefits are surging ahead in this competitive industry and allowing technology to take care of the back office. Now they can dedicate valuable time and effort to more important tasks, such as client and talent acquisition, money management, financial planning and client relationships.

To learn more about the benefits of adopting technology in your business, read our new whitepaper, “Technology Strategies of Top-Tier RIAs,” which summarizes the data from the InvestmentNews Research Study and outlines the practices of these top performing RIAs.

How the Canadian Seed Growers Association Automated Seed Crop Certification

Contributed by: Doug Miller, Operations Manager, Canadian Seed Growers Association

The Canadian Seed Growers Association (CSGA) processes between 16,000 to 18,000 fields a year to certify crops of 2,000 different varieties and more than 50 different species. Inspecting these crops at the correct stage of maturity each summer has traditionally involved 200 inspectors from 40 different offices of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency over a three thousand mile territory.

Recent budget cuts by the Government of Canada meant that CSGA had only 18 months to replace federal government inspectors with third-party inspectors from the private sector. To effectively manage this major change, the CSGA automated its 109-year-old postage- and paper-based process with Laserfiche.

Legacy paper-based process

Before Laserfiche, the seed crop certification process in Canada involved the following steps:

The CSGA office mailed pre-printed application forms to 3,500 seed growers throughout Canada, ranging from family farms to multi-national biotechnology companies.
Seed growers completed these application forms and mailed them back to CSGA.
CSGA appraisers then reviewed the crop inspection applications for incorrect or missing information.
CSGA summer staff members then entered data from the paper application forms directly into a database and printed out three copies each of the personalized crop inspection report forms.
These crop inspection reports were then mailed across Canada to 200 seed crop inspector supervisors.
After their inspections, seed crop inspectors would complete the paper inspection report, give a copy to the grower and mail a copy back to the CSGA office.
When seed crop inspection reports arrived back at the CSGA, they were manually sorted by:
- Language (French and English)
- Crop kind (approximately 50 per year)
- Pedigreed status
- Variety (approximately 2,000 per year)
After sorting, the crop inspection reports were manually reviewed and appraised by CSGA appraisers for compliance with certification standards.

This slow, postage- and paper-based process had negative impact on seed growers. On average, it would take 10 to 15 days for a completed inspection report to arrive at CSGA. With crops harvested soon after inspection, there was an ongoing risk that growers would not be aware of required corrective actions prior to harvest. This could prevent CSGA from certifying the seed crop and cost the grower thousands of dollars in the reduced value of the harvested non-certified seed.

Current Laserfiche process

In 2013, CSGA transformed this outdated process with Laserfiche and a Laserfiche – LincDoc integration.

Presently, applications for crop certification arrive at CSGA in one of two ways:

30% of all applications are now submitted online through an electronic form created in LincDoc.
- Once submitted online, the application form is automatically saved in the Laserfiche repository where it awaits review by a CSGA appraiser.
- With the help of the Laserfiche SDK, CSGA created an appraisal module to expedite application review. This module allows appraisers to make annotations and minor corrections, which then get passed directly into Laserfiche and the CSGA database.
The remaining applications are still paper. Those are scanned upon receipt with Laserfiche Quick Fields and are processed through the same appraisal module described above.
- Once Laserfiche Quick Fields processes the applications, summer staff members use a module created with the Laserfiche SDK—a rapid data entry screen—to do data entry. This module uses zoom fields like in Laserfiche Quick Fields.

csga4 — Click image to view larger in new window.

Once the applications have been submitted and reviewed by appraisers for incorrect and missing information, Laserfiche Workflow kicks in.

This workflow is actually a Laserfiche Workflow business process that contains an “Accept or Reject the Application” Business Process Step activity. This activity has a due date of two days, after which the status is changed from “On-time” to “Past-due.” There are also instructions provided for seed crop inspectors on how to accept or reject the applications.

A Deadline activity is used to enforce the due date specified in the Business Process Step.

If applications are not reviewed within two days, an email is sent to inspectors notifying them that the application must be reviewed immediately. Instructions are also changed to reflect the urgency of the request.

Seed crop inspectors use Laserfiche Mobile for iPad or Laserfiche Web Access to view the applications.

The lead inspectors/coordinators can open applications and accept or reject them by changing the value of the “Inspection Status” field. They must also designate a specific inspector and select the inspection date.

Once applications are accepted, growers are notified by email. If an application is rejected, the grower is also notified and the application is moved to a “Rejects” folder. If, for some reason, an application is neither accepted nor rejected, it moves through a third branch of the workflow called “Non-Conformance.” If an application passes through this branch, I get notified by email and, as Operations Manager, can address the issue.

Here is a screenshot of the entire Laserfiche Workflow process:

csga10 — Click image to view larger in new window.

If applications are accepted, inspectors perform the seed crop inspections. As part of the inspections, inspectors verify isolation distances, previous land use history and parent seed genetic identity tags. They also count difficult-to-separate weeds and other crop kinds, genetic off-types and other varieties that are observed in representative counts throughout the seed field.

Once inspections are finished, inspectors complete the inspection reports on their iPads, using LincDoc Mobile.

This crop inspection report form is then submitted directly into Laserfiche, triggering another Laserfiche Workflow business process. This business process is very similar to the one described above except that it routes crop inspection reports for review and appraisal to the CSGA employee who is qualified to appraise that specific kind or pedigreed status of crop. Seed growers are issued a pedigreed seed crop certificate or are notified immediately if their field requires corrective actions to meet CSGA certification standards.

As part of this process, inspection reports are linked to the initial application in Laserfiche.

All of the archived files have retention applied to them automatically with Laserfiche Records Management Edition.

Advantages of Laserfiche

Implementing Laserfiche at CSGA to re-build the seed crop certification process has resulted in the following benefits:

Seed crop certification applications are now processed up to ten times faster.
Postage costs have been reduced.
All seed growers, variety distributors and developers have instant, online access to the required current inspection and certification status information through the Laserfiche Client, Laserfiche Web Access or Laserfiche Mobile. This allows them to obtain the information exactly when they need it.
With the present Laserfiche process, lag time between inspection report submission by inspectors and grower notification of inspection results has been reduced from 10 to 15 days to just two.
Business processes at CSGA have not only been automated, but streamlined and optimized as well. Just because paper flowed in one way, doesn’t mean that the electronic data must flow in the same way. When we need to change any steps in the present process, the underlying workflow can be changed in just ten minutes.

Business process automation is just one feature of a document management system like Laserfiche. Get help researching the many useful functions of document management with our free guide today!

3 Steps for Optimizing Business Processes

What’s better? Processing a document digitally or with paper? If both methods take the same amount of time and effort—the answer is neither.

Optimizing a business process requires more effort than simply purchasing new software. It requires taking a critical look at an organization’s operations and minimizing the resources required to get things done.

This blog post will outline three steps to optimizing your organization’s business processes.

First, let’s establish what kinds of business processes we’ll be discussing:

Document-based business processes

Every organization, whether it provides education to students or wine to consumers, relies on repetitive tasks to accomplish its “big picture” goals. Contract management, invoicing and hiring are just a few examples of processes that keep businesses moving. The tasks that fall under each process must be handled attentively and consistently—no matter how menial they may seem.

contract_mgmt1 — Contract management is one example of a repetitive process that keeps an organization’s operations moving.

These document-based processes are imperative to business operations, but in some cases they’re more of an Achilles’ heel than a blueprint for success. Do any of your everyday tasks feel more burdensome than productive? Keep one in mind as we go through the phases of business process optimization.

Phase 1: Identify

Once you determine which business process needs an overhaul, the first step is to list out all the key components of the process. These should be fundamental, unchangeable aspects of the process. To identify key components, ask yourself these questions:

What is the goal or desired outcome of this process?
When does the process begin and end?
What activities move the process forward?
What departments and/or employees are involved?
What information is being transferred between steps?

For instance, the following questions should be answered in the case of employee hiring:

What is the goal or desired outcome of this process? To hire a qualified candidate for the job.
When does the process begin and end? It begins when an application is received and ends with the decision to hire or reject.
What activities move the process forward? Application reviews, interviews, approvals and rejections.
What departments and/or employees are involved? HR and the applicable department managers.
What information is being transferred between steps? Applications, resumes, cover letters, interview dates/times and notes from reviewers.

Note that the answers don’t address how the process is done, only what is done.

Phase 2: Rethink

This phase should address your unique methodology and reveal potential areas for improvement. Think about every step that is involved in the business process you’re analyzing, then ask the following questions:

How much paper is used in this process?
How many copies of the same document are made?
How many man hours are required to complete the process?
Of those hours, how many are spent doing redundant or extraneous work?
Where does the process stall and why?
When do errors occur?

Compare these answers against your key components list. You’ll realize tasks that seem essential, like photocopying a document for every department manager, don’t actually align with the process goal. You’ll also realize that correcting an error is only essential if an error is made—eliminate the error, and you eliminate an extra task that does nothing to drive the process forward.

Let’s look at another example. RMS, a medical device manufacturing company, answered the above questions and found that its document management processes were inefficient. Important information for each order was compiled in a large folder and hand-delivered between departments across a 155,000 sq. ft. shop. RMS threw out the book (literally) and starting using business process automation (BPA) tools to digitize orders and automatically route them to the appropriate departments at the appropriate times. This cut order processing time from 8-10 weeks to 72 hours and saved over 200 hours of staff time annually.

The intention of business process optimization is to reduce or eliminate time waste, resource waste, unnecessary costs, bottlenecks and errors while achieving the goal of the process. But until you know how this can be accomplished, you’re stuck in dreamland.

Phase 3: Automate

Repeat unnecessary tasks, and workflow stalls. Repeat successful tactics, and business flourishes. Once you’ve separated the essential from the non-essential in your business process, it’s time to apply a solution. But if this is your first experience overhauling a document-based process, you might feel daunted by the possibilities. You could even worry that you’ll make more mistakes if you alter the process than if you just leave it alone.

As a matter of fact, alleviating this concern over human error is precisely what BPA tools are designed to do. By allowing the software to “automate” tasks, organizations can manage processes faster and with fewer errors. You can read more about automation and see some concrete examples here.

9c82c2857c441df5a0bf0ad9bfd96a8e429030e7 — **Business process automation** (BPA) tools optimize operations for organizations in a wide range of industries.

Of course, not all automated workflows perform the same. How can you design the fastest, easiest and most cost-efficient business process possible?

Next step: Learn from the best

By repeating the best practices of other organizations or departments, you can demonstrate tangible ROI and avoid a lot of guesswork. Most importantly, you’re better equipped to convince your coworkers that change is not only possible, it’s practical.

For an overview of how process automation can help your organization streamline operations, watch our webinar, ECM 101: An Introduction to Process Automation Capabilities.

To learn more about how process automation software can help you automate routine tasks, such as data entry, routing information between parties, organizing documents and more, check out our process automation buyer’s guide.

What Is Business Process Automation?

What does business process automation mean?

Business process automation (BPA) is the use of technology to automate repeatable, day-to-day tasks. BPA accelerates how work gets done by routing information to the right person at the right time through user-defined rules and actions. Thus, organizations can leverage this technology to streamline processes such as employee onboarding, accounts payable, contract management and more.

Why is business process automation important?

It isn’t just about replacing paper with PDFs—business process automation aims to make processes more cost-efficient, streamlined, error-proof and transparent. With automated processes in place, organizations save time and ensure best practices are implemented to improve overall operational efficiency.

What business processes should you automate?

Almost any business process you can think of can be enhanced in some way by automation. Still, some processes are better suited for automation than others. When assessing candidates for automation, you want may want to take a closer look at processes that are:

Consistent across the organization.
Repeatable.
Require little room for error.

What are some examples of business process automation?

Below are three common business processes and how organizations drove positive change through automation:

HR Onboarding

Texas A&M University’s College of Engineering wanted to keep its commitment to increase student enrollment, but needed to hire new employees to manage this potential influx of students while keeping costs down. Their legacy HR onboarding process, however, was paper-driven and time-intensive. If the college was going to meet its goal, it needed to eliminate inefficiencies and streamline employee onboarding.

Chart showing employee onboarding process before and after automation.

Automating HR onboarding with Laserfiche enabled the College of Engineering to hire more than 3,400 employees in a little over one year. Since its initiative’s success, other departments at Texas A&M have also began reengineering their own processes, sharing that successes campus-wide and creating a new culture of collaboration and innovation to make processes more efficient.

For more information on how your organization can find similar efficiencies, check out our guide to HR automation.

Accounts Payable

The City of Boca Raton’s accounts payable process relied heavily on paper invoices and copies being manually routed. Sometimes paper copies would be misplaced or delayed on someone’s desk, leading to unpaid invoices and upset vendors. Chasing down paperwork and answering phone calls from vendors was taking up employee time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Leveraging business process automation, the city was able to track all its invoices from the moment they were received to final payment. The city significantly reduced processing errors while boosting customer satisfaction as a result of a faster and more efficient process.

For more information on how your organization can use business process automation to better manage invoice processing, check out our guide to accounts payable automation.

Contract Management

To continue its mission in keeping families out of poverty, non-profit organization Heifer International needed to increase efficiency and facilitate easier collaboration across its teams and partners worldwide. With documents built up from decades of work and hundreds of contracts requiring review per project, Heifer needed to centralize information and streamline contract management processes to help more people, faster.

By acquiring and deploying a system that could effectively automate processes, Heifer enabled its team members to collaborate on a worldwide scale on projects that help families, from Arkansas or Nepal. Legal contract reviews are streamlined, expediting the execution of projects including delivery of food and supplies. After its success implementing business process automation, Heifer continued to identify more back-office operations that could be made more efficient, freeing up resources for program initiatives.

How do I automate my business processes?

Most business process automation is done using a software platform. Choosing the right one can be a challenge, but once you do the rest is quite easy. Most have a low-code interface to help you design out how you want the process to work.

Then, once your process is created, you choose how it is triggered and what it outputs, such as a process that starts when you fill out a form and ends when you get a confirmation email. To that end, it is usually beneficial to have a process automation platform that is included in a robust document management solution, that includes a repository and forms functionality. Having process automation capabilities and the features that support them within the same software is far more convenient than having to bridge the connections with other solutions.

What is the difference between RPA and BPA?

Despite sounding similar, business process automation (BPA) and robotic process automation (RPA) are in practice quite different. RPA usually allows you to program a rudimentary software robot, or “bot” to perform basic data entry or other repetitive tasks to save time, usually using the same graphic user interfaces (GUIs) that users do. On the other hand, many BPA automations may be standalone or work on the backend of other software, outside a user interface, to retrieve information as needed.

While a bot may be easy to train by recording a human doing a repetitive task, a BPA solution may require more strategy and planning to implement effectively. Still, in many cases a BPA will likely cover a wider variety of uses cases and provide more end-to-end solutions. In fact, many BPA solutions may use RPA, but only as part of its broader functionality.

For an even deeper dive into the differences between RPA and BPA, check our our blog post here.

Customer Spotlight: Sky Telecommunications

Learn how the HR department at leading telecommunications company Sky was able to deliver more efficient services for its 25,000 employees by leveraging automation.

Browse customer reviews of Laserfiche on G2

Get insights from real customers on why Laserfiche is a top choice for organizations looking to streamline processes.

Continue your journey

Laserfiche has plenty of resources to help you find the right process automation platform and learn how to get the most out of the one you choose.

Discover Laserfiche’s 4 Steps to Innovation

Also be sure to check out the below infographic “Laserfiche 4 Steps to Innovation” to see how Laserfiche users can not only deploy solutions quickly, but get involved with a larger community of innovators.

Download the Process Automation Buyer’s Guide

You can also download our free resource, The Process Automation Buyer’s Guide for more background on what to look for in a process automation platform and how to procure the right solution:

Explore the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace

See how a robust process automation platform like Laserfiche can speed up the deployment of your solutions with process templates found on the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace. Visit the site to browse and download pre-built workflow templates for many everyday processes, including contract management, onboarding, front desk sign-ins and help desk requests.

Compare digital process automation vendors with G2

You can also check out the G2 Grid® for Digital Process Automation (DPA) to compare top vendors on the market. G2 is a website that collects and offers millions of business software reviews.

G2 Grid® for Digital Process Automation (DPA) Software

How the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma Created a Paperless Human Resources Department

Contributed by: Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma

With more than 350 employees, the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma is one of the largest employers in Payne County, OK. Prior to implementing Laserfiche, we had to deal with inconsistent personnel files and paperwork being constantly misfiled or lost. Laserfiche completely revitalized our human resources department and made it almost completely paperless. With twenty-five different workflows running in our HR department, we’ve used Laserfiche to automate everything from employee onboarding to employee separation.

Job application

The employee onboarding process begins when a job requisition is submitted electronically through our Microsoft SharePoint approval system. Once this requisition is approved, the HR assistant sends it into Laserfiche with Laserfiche Snapshot. Laserfiche Workflow then routes this document into a special requisition folder in Laserfiche.

The HR assistant posts this job description on our Website. Potential employees apply for the position by filling out an electronic employment application created with LincDoc – software that creates electronic forms.

LincDoc is fully integrated with Laserfiche, so once a candidate submits the employment application, it is automatically saved in the “LincwareApplications” folder in the repository with the appropriate template automatically applied.

A large number of the fields in the template, such as “Name”, “SSN” and “Tribal Affiliation” are also populated automatically through the Laserfiche/LincDoc integration.

Laserfiche Workflow monitors the “Applications” folder and automatically routes incoming applications to the appropriate hiring manager for consideration based on the value of the “Approving Manager” field. Here is a screenshot of this workflow:

A shortcut to this job application is also placed in the requisition folder to await a hiring selection.

The hiring manager is able to communicate with candidates during the entire application review process by changing the value of the “Applicant Status” list field. Candidates receive an e-mail notifying them of every status change. Some of the status updates a manager can select are:

Does not meet minimum qualifications.
Application received after closed.
Manager declined.
Selected for hire.

Here is an example of an e-mail notification that is sent when the status is changed to “Manager declined”:

Employee onboarding

Once a hiring manager decides to hire an employee, the application is routed to Human Resources to complete the remainder of the onboarding process. HR maintains communication with the hiring manager throughout the hiring process by updating the “Applicant Status” field. Some of the different statuses they can choose from are:

Offer accepted.
Drug screen and background check completed.
New hire orientation scheduled.
Hired.

Here is an example of a notification e-mail that is sent when the status is changed to “New hire orientation scheduled”:

Throughout the process, every action taken on the document by Laserfiche Workflow is tracked in a special “WFhistory” multi-value field.

As the application moves through the various steps in the onboarding process, it also physically moves through the various folders in the Laserfiche repository.

Once an applicant’s status is changed to “Hired”, Laserfiche Workflow notifies Payroll, Purchasing and IT by e-mail to begin distribution of company resources in preparation for the employee’s start date.

Laserfiche Workflow also:

Finds all other job applications that the applicant has in Laserfiche for other positions and sets their status to “rescinded”.
Finds all of the other job applications for this particular position and sets their status to “Manager declined”. This automatically notifies the candidates by e-mail that the position has been filled.

Another workflow performs an inventory of the requisition folder to check if the new employee has any missing documents.

If there are missing documents, HR is notified by e-mail.

If no documents are missing the new employee’s documents are converted to recruitment documents and moved to a pending hire folder where they await an employee number.

As soon as HR assigns an employee number and fills out the “Employee ID” field, all of the documents are moved to a brand new active employee folder where an “HR-Employee Folder” template is assigned.

Another workflow scans the inactive employee record series to determine whether the new hire is a previous employee with an existing employee file. If it locates one, it automatically moves all documents back to the active employee folder.

Here is a screenshot of our active employee folders:

Employee document management

In addition to new employee documents, all other HR documents are stored in Laserfiche as soon as they are received. Some of the different document types are:

Personnel Action Notices (PANs) – forms that contain any change to an employee’s record or status.
Direct deposit forms.
Employee evaluations.
W4s.
I9s.
Benefits enrollment.
Worker’s compensation forms.
Discipline forms.
Certifications.
Leave donations.
Medical return to work letters.
Incident drug screens.
Garnishments.

All of these documents are either created electronically and sent to Laserfiche with Laserfiche Snapshot or scanned onto the network, imported into Laserfiche with Import Agent and immediately shredded. They are also assigned the “HR-Employee Files” template.

Laserfiche Workflow finds each new document, determines its type and routes it to either Payroll or Benefits as needed. Workflow also performs a database lookup to automatically populate the metadata. Here is the main workflow that processes our incoming employee documents:

Employee separation

In addition to employee onboarding, Laserfiche Workflow also manages employee separation. Once HR staff submits a separation PAN, Workflow scans the repository for all documents for that employee, terminates them, and files them in our inactive employee record series to keep on file per the retention schedule for each document type.

Here is a section of our separation workflow:

Benefits of Laserfiche

Implementing Laserfiche in the HR department has resulted in the following benefits at Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma:

We have eliminated 80 cubic feet of filing cabinets.
Authorized users can access any active employee file onsite from a Web browser or offsite via authorized VPN access.
The workflow which checks for missing documentation saved us 300 hours a year of employee time.
There is now clear and constant communication between everyone involved in the employee onboarding process including the hiring managers, job candidates and HR staff.

You can learn more about paperless processes in HR by downloading the free guide to HR automation

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