City of Boynton Beach, FL
September 4th, 2004 Comment on this articleIf you managed a 101 year-old city which had to keep employee records for 50 years after they terminated or retired, would you stick with paper…or even microfilm? This was a question which the Human Resources department of Boynton Beach recently asked themselves. The answer was a resounding NO–there had to be a better way!
Boynton Beach is a city of 50,000 citizens in south Florida’s Palm Beach County. Its 800 full and part-time employees work in diverse departments, such as police, fire-rescue, utilities, public works, library, recreation, parks and many office and customer service areas.
The City Human Resources department chose Laserfiche document imaging software to maintain all employee records, including hiring documents, evaluations, training and benefits forms for the active, terminated and retired employees. Carol Cheek, Human Resources Coordinator, explained, “Since we get thousands of documents every month, we knew it was time to consider the conversion of our paper records to electronic computer files. We really had to be more efficient in filing, safeguarding and retrieving our records.”
Almost every day, the HR department receives public records requests for copies of employee files. Previously, someone would have to stand at a copy machine, making copies and redacting non-public information. Depending on the size of the file, this could take more than an hour for each request. Laserfiche helped trim the response time for a recent request for 28 files (approximately 500 pages each) from a week to less than three days.
“The Human Resources staff loves Laserfiche. With the old, paper files, we would have to get up from our desks and go to another part of the office to look through a large electronic rotating file,” said Ms. Cheek. “Now the records are stored on a shared database and HR staff members can find the requested documents by typing a few keystrokes on their own desktop computer.”
In the past, whenever anyone came into the office to look at a file, a staff member had to sit with them to make sure no documents were added, changed or removed. “Now we redact non-public information in Laserfiche and copy that file to a Public Access computer. From Laserfiche, we designate security levels allowing the person making the public information request, to only browse and read documents. The visitor can work alone and no one has to be concerned that the file contents will be changed in any way,” said Ms. Cheek.
R&S Integrated Products and Services installed Laserfiche NLM (Network Loadable Module)/Windows for 10-users in the Boynton Beach HR department. The Compaq rack mount system runs on a Novell network. The Fujitsu 3093EX scanner is controlled by a Kofax 9250 card. Future plans include the transfer of terminated and retired employee files to CD-ROMs (compact disks).
For the transition, R&S Integrated Products and Services completed a mass scanning and indexing job for active and retired employee records with Laserfiche document imaging software. More than 250,000 documents were processed and then transferred to the City network. The HR department now maintains the ongoing scanning and indexing.
R&S Integrated Products and Services is using Document Shuttle© to customize Laserfiche with OCR (optical character recognition) for Forms to allow automated indexing of handwritten information from documents. The City of Boynton Beach has redesigned their employment application so critical information, such as a name, address, position applied for, etc. can be scanned and the Laserfiche database will be automatically populated with the information.
Ms. Cheek said the HR staff was impressed with Laserfiche’s flexibility and ease of use right from the start. “We didn’t want just technical people to be able to use it-we wanted everybody to be able to look up information.”
“For his presentation, our dealer asked for samples of documents we would be scanning. We gave him samples which were different sizes, colors and quality and he based the presentation on these actual documents. We knew immediately that Laserfiche would suit our needs. Some computer programs are pretty complicated, but this one is simple and straightforward. Laserfiche meets our expectations perfectly.”