Mutual Collaboration Society
Buffalo, MN, integrates Laserfiche and GIS to connect citizens and staff
June 6th, 2007 Comment on this article
According to Merton Auger, City Administrator of Buffalo, Minnesota, good government is all about collaboration. After thirty years on the job in this rapidly-growing city of 15,000, he understands that success depends on the free flow of information among citizens, officials and staff. His vision of a paperless office and his goal of promoting effective collaboration led him to investigate digital document management.
Once it had developed a substantial archive, however, Buffalo began to outgrow its initial digital system. In addition to experiencing support problems when the city upgraded its operating system, staff found that the search function became painfully slow when the document database accumulated several years’ worth of records.
MIS Coordinator Chris Shinnick
With an eye toward efficient search and retrieval, as well as integration with the city’s GIS system, Auger and MIS Coordinator Chris Shinnick formed a committee to spearhead the search for a new digital document management system. Shinnick remembers, “We wanted a system that could do a better job of organizing our information, so that we could purge documents to keep them from taking up physical space in our office. We needed to import documents from the previous system, perform full-text searches and save disk space by efficiently storing files. Staff also needed a secure system that would enable the city to share public documents over the Web.”
Shinnick consulted with experts from other cities, many of whom recommended Laserfiche®. After demonstrations from Laserfiche, Fortis® and DocuWare®, Laserfiche was the clear winner. Not only could Laserfiche software meet all the city’s requirements, but its ease of use made it the overwhelming favorite of city staff. The user interface was so straightforward that it made the other options seem difficult and cumbersome by comparison. “The search function in Laserfiche was so much more dynamic than in our previous product,” says Auger.
A few months after purchasing Laserfiche, Buffalo had installed all the features it needed and completed its document conversion. The city then faced the challenge of accommodating all the city staff who wanted to scan documents into the system. Buffalo set up a second scanning station to handle the demand. Now, the city’s administration, finance, utility billing, water/sewer/electric and engineering departments all use Laserfiche, with users in different locations connecting to the same system.
“Laserfiche saves us a tremendous amount of room, and the time savings are incalculable. It’s a perfect interface for the way we do business and the operating philosophy we have.”
—Merton Auger
City Administrator
Implementing a geographical information system (GIS) integration was critical to Auger’s vision of collaboration. In addition to office staff relying on GIS for planning and zoning functions and utility services, field personnel needed access to these documents as well. “Whether it was our street department people trying to locate a storm sewer outlet or our water and sewer department looking for a water shutoff valve,” says Auger, “the bottom line was collaboration and cross-departmental functionality. Laserfiche met these criteria.”
Buffalo’s reseller, Crabtree Companies, Inc., helped the city find just the right tool to set up the integration. Geodoc, developed by Urban Crossroads, Inc., enabled Buffalo to link Laserfiche with its GIS software, ArcIMS™ from ESRI®. Buffalo beta tested the product. “And it worked very well,” says Shinnick. “There wasn’t a lot of room for improvement or enhancement. They’ll continue to make enhancements to it, but for something that came right out of the box, it didn’t function like other beta products—it was already very good.”
Urban Crossroads is now making Geodoc available to users through the Laserfiche Professional Developer Partnership™ (PDP) program, which showcases innovative, third-party solutions to integration challenges. Information about this integration is available through the new PDP Marketplace.
“We have a mobile wireless network here in Buffalo,” adds Auger. “With the Laserfiche/GIS integration, both applications are Web-based so our field crews can access information from their laptops. That really supports the collaboration we need. If a citizen calls in about a broken streetlight or a manhole being plugged, the crew can use the tablet PC in their truck or car, access the database, find the location and fix the problem in real time.
“We also handle some of our Web-based functions for interaction with citizens that way. My philosophy has always been that whatever information we have is owned by the citizens of Buffalo. Basically, we want to get as much information as possible up and accessible for citizens. We also have a very big interest in achieving a paperless office, and that means you don’t exclude anything, except where there are security concerns to prevent access to people with wrongful intent.
“It goes along with our philosophy,” Auger continues, “that citizens should be able to access information any time they want. If they work during the day, they don’t want to get off work and come into our office to access information. They can go to our Website and access information when they want to, so we’re on their schedule. And it cuts down on our desk time, too.
Buffalo is currently in the process of getting the fire department onboard with the system. The city plans to arrange for laptops for the volunteer firefighters so they can log onto the system and realize the full benefit of the GIS integration. “Our plan,” says Auger, “is to push the system out to every department, so they have access to the information they need. Again, it’s all about collaboration.”
Auger, who is directly accountable to the city council, has been preparing agendas electronically for years, using Adobe® Acrobat®. Now he automatically enters those documents into the Laserfiche repository, so citizens and councilors can access them within the same folder structure they use to access all the city’s documents. Auger notes, “As a management practice, we scan almost everything and our people have been instructed how to use a central scanner.” That practice enables Auger to include handwritten or other non-digital supporting documentation with the council agendas.
Since the city installed Laserfiche, Shinnick has noticed positive changes in the way Buffalo conducts business. “Previously, a couple of people might be designated to ‘file’ documents,” he says. “Now each department is becoming more involved in the storing of this information and is taking an interest in it. They know that how they put the information into Laserfiche will determine how they get it out. It eliminates the problem of one person arbitrarily making decisions about where something gets filed because they don’t understand how the filing in each department functions.” Shinnick also notes that the Laserfiche solution has added to staff’s productive time, in some cases eliminating the need to hire new personnel or the need to go off-site to look for a document.
“Laserfiche has saved us a tremendous amount of time, money and space,” says Auger. “All of our property records are electronic, for example. All the building permits and planning and zoning information for particular parcels are stored in the Laserfiche repository. Our office would have to be about three times its current size just to store them, if we hadn’t adopted digital document management in such a big way.
“Yesterday, when someone called with a permit request, all our staff had to do was call the document up from the desktop and ask where to email it. When you do a simple search it comes up so fast—it saves so much personnel time. You used to have to go to the file, find the document, copy it—it could have taken hours. What’s more, a lot of times staff doesn’t even have to be involved—citizens can perform those searches themselves. I don’t even think we know how much time it’s saved us.”
Most valuable to Auger is the quick access to information from anywhere in the city for both staff and citizens. The staff and citizens of Buffalo love the system. “Just yesterday,” recalls Auger, “someone called the office asking for information about a building permit, and he happened to work for a nearby city of 40,000. Our front-desk staff was able to quickly email him a scanned document. He wrote back, ‘That’s really awesome—we can’t even do that where I work!’”
Buffalo’s Deer Lake Orchard produces a bountiful harvest each fall.
Auger finds Laserfiche especially useful when addressing city finances. “It really helps me when the council does the auditing of the bills,” he says. “Before, I had three large file folders full of paid claims, and if they wanted to question something I’d have dig through the whole file to find what they were looking for. It could take the whole hour we had set aside for the review just to find the right document. Now I just open the digital archive on the computer and I can locate the proper file right away. We have two large screens in the room we use for auditing, so I can bring it up on the screen for them to look at. It saves a tremendous amount of time.”
Shinnick is particularly enthusiastic about the Laserfiche Quick Fields™ bar code feature. “We’ve implemented that solution with our finance office so they can scan in paid invoices. It reads the voucher that gets attached with the details of what’s been paid and it automatically files it. They can just throw a stack of these things into the scanner and the system will scan them all, file them appropriately and fill in the template fields. It’s so quick and easy! It’s a tremendous tool for them.
“It didn’t take much to get that mechanism in place, either. We just had the company that supports our finance software add some bar codes to the bottom of the check stub voucher so that Quick Fields could read it.”
Buffalo plans to increase the already-sizable role that Laserfiche plays in its municipal planning, workflow and recordkeeping. Says Auger, “We’re going to be even more successful in the future and make the system even more accessible. I want to market the system so that citizens know it’s there. In order to be relevant to people, we have to do business the way they do it with their bank, or wherever they order online. Government has to be as relevant as anyone else, or more so.
“Laserfiche saves us a tremendous amount of room, and the time savings are incalculable. It’s a perfect interface for the way we do business and the operating philosophy we have.”
Tags: GIS, integration