Laserfiche Throughout City Government Makes HTE Integration a Success
May 23rd, 2007 Comment on this article
Bob Trammel, IT Director, City of Bakersfield
Shortly after I came to work in Bakersfield, the IT division installed Laserfiche in the city. I had already installed it in a city where I was previously employed, so I was very familiar with advantages of the program. That was eleven years ago, and today thousands of citizens use it to access public documents over the Web. We use Laserfiche in all 19 city departments and that’s part of what makes our integration with SunGard® HTE so successful.
One great example is the way the integration works for the Bakersfield Department of Public Works Graffiti Unit and the Bakersfield Police Department. When someone calls in with a complaint about graffiti in the city, the goal is to get it off the street within 24 hours. The crew that removes the graffiti starts by taking a picture of it. Then they either paint over, sand blast or power-wash the graffiti, depending on the surface. The crew carries a portable color photo spectrometer on the truck to compute the color behind the graffiti, so they can match it if they have to paint the surface. They match the color and mix the paint right in the field. When the paint’s dry, you can’t even tell any graffiti was there and it’s pretty frustrating for the graffiti taggers.
Integration Brings Results
Using Laserfiche in all departments means that the integration really helps the city achieve results. We first integrated Laserfiche with the HTE Work Order module. In the Work Order system, the crew records their location, how much paint it took and how much time it took to remove the graffiti. That ties back into our payroll system for the labor costs and the purchasing and inventory system for the cost of the paint. Then the crew attaches the photograph of the graffiti to the work order, storing it as a JPEG in Laserfiche. When you click on the work order in HTE you can bring up the photograph.
Then the Bakersfield Police Department goes through the records and reads the graffiti. They’ve found that graffiti taggers frequently use the same language all over town. So everywhere they find that signature “tag,” they record it into the template as well. When they arrest the culprit, and in most cases it’s a kid, they search in Laserfiche for all the pictures that show that tag. Then they go back into the Work Order system and print out the cost of cleaning up all those instances of graffiti. The city files a civil lawsuit against his parents for the cost of the cleanup. That’s a pretty good deterrent when you consider that the bill could add up to six figures for all the graffiti over the years.
Prior to using Laserfiche this way, the city found itself in the situation of most cities—they could arrest a tagger and frequently the overcrowded courts would let the perpetrator out on probation until the next arrest. The civil suit is a much better deterrent. We had a kid who was tagging plate-glass windows with a glass cutter. Every time he did that the bill could run as much as $5000 or $6000. He could sometimes do twenty or thirty windows a night. When his parents got hit with the bill, he got hit with a curfew. Adults who tag face even more severe consequences. One man lost his business in a suit.
Uniformity: A Key to Success
A big key to our success is using Laserfiche throughout the city, not just in a single department. We use a common folder structure for all departments. Within the folder structure, each department has its own folder. Within that folder are three more: Public—for everything the department puts out for the public to view, Department Access—available only to departmental staff, and City Access—available to any city employee. Any document that needs to be retained because of public records requirements should be put into Laserfiche.
There’s no need to limit Laserfiche to a single department or use. Sure, it’s great for public records but why stop there? Our human resources department puts performance evaluations into Laserfiche. The structure of Laserfiche enables you to provide security for these documents. For example, the fire department has a HazMat folder that only their personnel have access to, so the locations of hazardous material won’t become public knowledge. But it’s available in Laserfiche to the fire crew 24/7, so they can know any potential danger at a fire site.
We’re planning on expanding our installation in the future. We’re continuing our integration with HTE. We just finished bringing code enforcement online so that department can store pictures of code violations in the system. Our finance department is looking forward to storing invoices in the accounts payable section by next fiscal year. They already “cold-load” auditing reports, storing them in Laserfiche instead of printing them out on paper, which means they’re searchable, so people can find them easily. We’re also looking at integrating our GIS system with Laserfiche.
Once you’ve done an integration, you really find that there’s nothing to it. For example, you turn the code on in HTE, you tell it the name of the template field you want it to read (such as the work order number) and it searches Laserfiche for the proper value. We’ve realized enormous benefits from integrating HTE and Laserfiche. That’s why we anticipate even more success in the future.