By Randy Staton, Information Technology Specialist, Sheridan Books, Inc.

Sheridan Books, Inc. is a print shop that employs more than 300 people in two offices, in Chelsea and Ann Arbor, Michigan, near Detroit. I split my time between the two offices, where about 40 of us use Laserfiche.

I attended Laserfiche Advanced Training last fall to learn how to get more out of the Laserfiche system. We had already been using it for about a year to scan the job tickets we create whenever we get a new print job. A lot of people in the company, including customer service reps, need to look at those, so they view them with WebLink™.

It’s a great improvement over dealing with paper. Having offices in two separate cities made sharing paper records a hassle. And we had a whole warehouse of job tickets, so we saved a tremendous amount of space when we moved to Laserfiche. There were about ten years’ worth of job tickets that we’ve just about finished scanning.

More recently, we had a request from our accounts payable department to use Laserfiche for our invoices. Up to that point, we had only used Laserfiche for the job tickets—we hadn’t set up templates to search with. So I signed up for the advanced Administrator and Quick Fields™ training.

At the training, I was impressed by the amount of information provided and even more impressed by all the things that Laserfiche could do. Between what I learned there and a little bit of research that I did on my own, I’ve found new ways to use Laserfiche that really benefit the company.

We still use Laserfiche to scan those job tickets, but now we also scan our invoices. We enter the invoice number into Quick Fields and link to our SQL customer database, so we pull all that customer information into Quick Fields, too. It’s very exciting to complete that invoice piece and be able to automate so much of the process.

In the future, we plan on using Laserfiche for the accounts receivable and human resources departments. Now that I’m more comfortable with the security features, we can set it up to handle the kind of confidential information that HR manages. It’ll make a big impact on the company over the next year or two.

I really got a lot out of the administrative training—they really take you from start to finish on how to set up and manage the system, how to set permissions and how to set up user accounts. Learning how to set up users and how to lock things down and do audit trails will be very useful when we bring HR onboard, because we’ll need to know what people are accessing. The Quick Fields training was really good, too, because I learned more about linking databases and we do that now.

For anyone considering going through Advanced Training, I’d say absolutely do it!

Posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 3:52 pm under UserNews. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.