How Less Can Be More: Digitizing K-12 to Streamline Operations Management

CATIC is one of the largest title insurance companies in the United States. The organization has been a trusted resource for policy-issuing attorneys, insured lenders and homebuyers, and other members of the real estate community for over 50 years.

The organization offers a number of services, including underwriting consultation, title information products, legislative and case law reporting, release tracking, flood compliance and more. CATIC’s approach is one of continuous improvement, constantly looking to improve efficiency in operations to maintain its strong reputation for high-quality service.

Using continuous improvement methodologies and the Laserfiche content services platform, CATIC has digitally transformed many of its processes.

Benefits include:

Like many organizations, CATIC previously relied on manual, paper-heavy processes. Unsatisfied with the status quo, CATIC Senior Operations Analyst Chris Cooper had a vision to optimize the way the organization managed information. He and his team sought out a platform that would support more efficient, automated processes.

This search led to Laserfiche, which satisfied CATIC’s requirements for a system to centralize content and support information governance — while opening doors to workflow automation, which wasn’t available with the legacy system. Following continuous improvement practices, Cooper saw the opportunity to improve:

CATIC partnered with Laserfiche solution provider Accelerated Information Systems (AIS) to implement Laserfiche — starting with migrating content from the organization’s legacy system.

The first workflow the CATIC and AIS teams automated was for the company’s CATICTrac service, which tracks, obtains and records the appropriate documents needed to clear liens. The automated process eliminates the need for clients to submit paper forms, which can be cumbersome, error-prone and lead to delays. Instead, clients submit an electronic Laserfiche form, which automatically routes information to the appropriate personnel for review and approval.

After the initial success with CATICTrac, Cooper and his team expanded the use of Laserfiche into other areas of the business, including records management, claims and compliance.

Digitizing records and automating records management processes was an impactful initiative that had a profound effect across the enterprise. By centralizing content in Laserfiche, CATIC created a robust information backbone for the organization that is searchable and accessible, while maintaining the granular access controls needed to support information governance. When policies are filed, they are now immediately available for processing, rather than the next morning as was with the legacy system.

This also streamlined the policy request process when stakeholders needed to pull policies, for example for finance to recognize revenue; if a claim was ever filed against the policy; or if a modification needed to be made to the policy. Requests to pull policies previously resulted in wait times of around 11 days, which have been shortened to six. The first-time quality of information pulled has also increased by more than 10%. Finally, the entire initiative has simplified activities for stakeholders, who pull an average of 150,000 policies per year.

In claims, the goal was to simplify and standardize the process, cutting down wait and processing times while increasing the quality and capacity for claims. Using Laserfiche, Cooper automated the process and reduced the number of steps to process a claim from 27 down to 11. The processing time for a claim is now 50% more efficient, with a 5% boost in, first time quality. The elimination of paper in the process also saved CATIC over $25,500 per year.

CATIC isn’t stopping there, however, and is currently pursuing an integration between legal management solution CounselLink and Laserfiche that will make the process even more efficient. Today, claims are filed through Laserfiche Forms, which allows claimants to input necessary information and upload supporting documents. Laserfiche then sends the supporting documents to CounselLink. “Phase two is about eliminating keystrokes,” Cooper said. “With the integration, all of the data entry that claimants are putting on the notice of claim form will be pushed into CounselLink, because paralegals are currently rekeying that data.”   

Cooper’s continuous improvement approach has been embraced internally, too, within the compliance department. Each year, employees must acknowledge that have read and agree follow company codes and policies, which is now done through a Laserfiche form.

“We launch this project every year, and every year we make changes,” Cooper said. “This is probably the most picture-perfect example of continuous improvement. Every year it gets more and more efficient.”

The previously paper-driven, manual process would take about 60 days, while today it takes just 15. The Laserfiche form has cut down the amount of time employees need to spend with the document, making it 90% more efficient.

As a result of these systematic improvements, CATIC saves over $325,000 annually, while also supporting information governance and compliance practices and policies and enhancing the customer and employee experience.

Cooper continues to make updates to existing processes and find new areas to improve efficiency and productivity across the organization. “With new Laserfiche processes, as more work comes in the door, we now have the ability to increase units completed or throughput,” Cooper said. “And the whole industry has moved toward focusing on profitability per unit. So, we’re able to also facilitate growth without having to hire more staff.”

Cooper is also working to use Laserfiche’s process automation capabilities to sync information from an FTP site daily so he doesn’t have to do it manually. “The bot is like a personal assistant,” he added.

“Laserfiche is something I felt that I could be great at, but also could help me to help others be great,” Cooper said. “I see that as a powerful tool. I enjoy making processes better and I feel Laserfiche is the most powerful thing I’ve encountered, where I could achieve my own personal goal of helping others achieve their goals.”

The credit union model is based around the needs of members, and providing personalized service that retains and grows the membership base. Recent years have brought on a number of factors — such as economic and technological disruption — that have resulted in major changes to members’ needs and expectations.

Luminus Financial, a credit union headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, with over 6,000 members, has navigated the vicissitudes with its members as its north star. With a membership that expects more digital offerings, the credit union is strategically innovating its operations, incorporating technology and business process automation across the organization.

“Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, we were already planning to lower our physical square footage in Ontario — becoming more virtual is in our roadmap,” said Adam Kirilo, vice president, operations and finance at Luminus Financial. “Laserfiche helps fulfill those needs with backend work and helps staff complete transactions that were historically done in person. We’re doing it much more easily in a more virtual environment today.”

A merger with another financial institution in 2015 sparked the need for an electronic records management system that would digitize all member documentation. Since then, the Luminus team has uncovered new efficiencies from having Laserfiche as its system of record, as well as building multiple automated workflows to support the increasingly virtual environment.

“As a credit union, we have lots of documentation for each of our members,” Kirilo said. “A typical long-term member can have upwards of 10,000 pages dedicated to them due to mortgages, loans or new accounts — and each type of document has a different retention obligation. From the get-go, our goal has been to get all of that documentation digitized and easily searchable, to make our staff’s jobs easier and so we can be more efficient in serving our members.”

That vision for digitization extended beyond going paperless, however. The Luminus IT team, working with Laserfiche solution provider Document Direction, also aimed to transform manual processes with Laserfiche — seeking to eliminate cumbersome, repetitive tasks through automation.

Member onboarding was an obvious target, as the process requires:

In Luminus Financial’s member onboarding solution, credit union employees gather the necessary member information and input it into a Laserfiche form, which is routed to another employee to review before the PDF is sent to the member for signature through DocuSign. The signed document comes back to Luminus and is automatically filed into the organization’s repository as well as into the core banking system.

“Laserfiche has revolutionized our ability to manage documentation and processes,” said Kirilo. “We have uncovered significant new efficiencies and reclaimed time from dealing with inconsistent information and manual processes.”

The team built on this success by automating the wire transfer request process, which has similar requirements.

“Wire transfers — specifically the instructions for them — can be very complicated, because a lot of them come from different countries from around the world,” said Tyler Ferris, manager, accounting and business intelligence at Luminus Financial. “For that reason, our staff collects the documents from the member up front and enters the necessary information into a Laserfiche form.”

Once the form is submitted, a PDF is generated and sent for signature before Laserfiche routes the document through the wire processing department. “Those employees get a Laserfiche Forms task saying that there’s a new wire transfer,” Ferris described. “They are able to see certain details, view the signed form in the repository, and once they process the wire transfer, they get a PDF receipt which they upload to the Laserfiche form. All information is kept together in the repository in the member’s folder, with the relevant metadata applied.”

“For wire transfers, for instance, sometimes our compliance team will need to review transfers over a certain dollar threshold,” Ferris said. “They can easily search between specific dates, for amounts or between amounts — all based off the wire transfer metadata.

“Audits are easy to administer for us; we don’t have to move documents to a different system,” he added. “It depends on the audit and who is conducting it, but we can provide a login to a repository that does not contain our members’ personal information, and revoke access when the audit is over. Or we’ve also done audits where we collect all the documents needed in a folder and upload them through a secure portal of a third party as required.”

The Luminus Financial team has seen a lot of success optimizing processes across the organization, including completely back-office processes that simply make everyday tasks a lot easier to manage. One such process that which allows board members to vote on motions virtually — a result of in-person board meetings coming to a halt during the pandemic. Executive management members can upload a document, send it out to the board for approval or for a vote, and then each board member can log into Laserfiche Forms and submit their vote.

The process, which used to be done via email, was cumbersome and lacking in standardization. “We wanted to automate it so we’d be able to provide a list every month, make sure motions were approved or voted on, and also put in the minutes for the meeting,” Kirilo said. “Also, the system needed to be able to retain that record in a secure manner, rather than sending it through email.”

The breadth of processes the team has been able to automate is also a testament to the usability of Laserfiche: “It’s very low-code,” Ferris said. “I picked it up very easily. Laserfiche provides great documentation and resources, and it’s easy to learn, especially when you understand how your organization’s data flows and where it needs to go.”

Today, every Luminus employee touches Laserfiche daily in some capacity, including:

The team’s digitization and automation efforts have laid a strong foundation for upcoming initiatives. Looking into the future, the credit union aims to create an omnichannel experience for members that continues to deliver high quality services in an efficient matter, no matter what channel through which a member prefers to interact with the organization.