When you spend most of your day processing paperwork, it can be difficult to feel that you’re making a difference in society. But thanks to an integrated document management solution from Laserfiche^®, staff at the Pinellas County, Florida, Juvenile Welfare Board (JWB) have significantly reduced the amount of paper that crosses their desks—leaving them with more time to support the agenciesm that serve the county’s disadvantaged residents.

Working with R&S Integrated, a Laserfiche reseller based in Lakeland, Florida, JWB installed Laserfiche to manage and store accounting and personnel records, as well as documentation related to board meetings. The new system helps staff locate information far more quickly and easily than in the past, as well as reclaim office space previously used to store paper.

As with most Laserfiche installations, staff kept finding innovative ways to use the new system to improve their job performance. But when JWB decided to use Laserfiche to reinvent the way social services agencies apply for board-distributed funds, R&S realized that it wasn’t just dealing with paperwork anymore. Instead, it was helping these agencies evaluate—and improve—the services they provide to disabled people, single mothers and disadvantaged children.

“It’s a great public service for us to help JWB streamline the application process the agencies follow,” says Robert Porter of R&S. “We feel good about helping those agencies—which are dedicated to helping needy families—eliminate time-consuming paperwork.”

JWB feels good about the job Laserfiche is doing, too. File boxes filled with documents, spreadsheets, photos and hand-written notes have been converted into easily-searchable PDF files, which are linked to JWB’s Website via a customized, password-protected intranet connection developed by R&S. Using this technology, the agencies can instantly access and complete numerous checklists and forms online, and can easily attach supporting documentation when needed. Once complete, the forms are archived in Laserfiche.

JWB also uses Laserfiche to manage its library of documents related to each agency’s service mission. Using Web Access™, the agencies can retrieve these documents, as well as add new documents to the library.

Around sixty social services agencies, from the YWCA to Big Brothers Big Sisters, depend on the JWB and its $52 million annual budget to fund their social services initiatives. However, with social services funds in short supply, JWB must ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent wisely, and that’s where one of JWB’s most important innovations comes into play.

JWB’s online Agency Self-Study Efficacy Tool (ASSET) is a collection of nineteen groups of questionnaires, application forms and documentation request forms agencies must complete every three years. “It’s more than an application process,” explains Pat Gehant, JWB’s director of IT. “It’s a process we use to strengthen an agency, in the sense that ASSET allows the agency to learn how effectively it’s doing its job.”

ASSET is a simple name for a complex series of forms agencies must complete to demonstrate the effectiveness of their service delivery. Now that most of the agencies complete this process online, however, it’s become significantly easier. Even for small agencies, the application process was previously quite lengthy and generated boxes of documentation, from spreadsheets and Microsoft^® Word^® files to photos and facsimiles. For larger agencies, such as the YWCA, completing the process took months and generated so much paperwork that hand trucks were necessary to transport it.

All of this paperwork was then hand-delivered to JWB reviewers, who examined files page-by-page to make sure they were complete. To verify the accuracy of the information the agencies provided, the reviewers had to transport the paper files back into the field to check them against the agency’s actual facilities. Because agencies were required to submit up to six copies of each document for different reviewers to examine, JWB provided each agency with $1500 to cover duplication costs.

“The agencies no longer have to make multiple copies of documents, which involved hours—or even days—of photocopying documents and organizing them in binders,” says Gehant. “Then, we’d have to go to the agency’s headquarters and perform a site assessment while carrying around all that paper. We’d literally get aches and pains from doing it. Now, we receive the documents electronically, and we can easily transfer them to CD and hand it to the reviewers. The reviewers take their laptops to the site and have instant access to the documents on their computer screens.”

ASSET may sound relatively straightforward now that it’s up and running, but it took considerable ingenuity to develop. R&S first used one of its own software products, called OpusDoc^®, to convert scanned images of the ASSET forms into a single, compound document. R&S then applied SmartForms^® technology to the new file to make it easier for agencies to access it online.

The beauty of this system, as R&S’s Porter explains, lies in the fact that different types of documentation are accessible in a single PDF file: “Because Word documents, Excel^® spreadsheets and image files are in the same PDF, agencies no longer have to manage pages and pages of separate forms.”

Ambitious as the integration process may sound, the finished product is an elegant system that has eliminated the hours previously spent filling out forms by hand, copying information from one document to another, making photocopies and transporting documents from one location to another. The project has also provided R&S with a flexible middleware program that can be used again if another client wants to automate collaborative business processes in a similar way.

“Although the project was only half the size of some of the projects we’ve worked on, it was equally challenging, given the systems we had to bring together,” Porter says. “But now that we’ve built it, we can use it in other installations as well.” In fact, Porter believes that the JWB project represents the type of integration that’s becoming increasingly common as clients discover more innovative ways to use their Laserfiche systems.

There are other advantages to using ASSET and the custom programming that supports it, both Gehant and Porter agree. The agencies now have an online application portfolio that other government offices and funding sources can review. For example, the Pinellas County License Board can refer to ASSET when certifying childcare facilities funded by JWB. The agencies can also upload extensive information about their services to the JWB Website for increased exposure. “These charitable agencies can use the JWB Website as their own. It’s a helping hand JWB extends to the agencies, and more and more are taking advantage of it,” Porter notes.

It may seem surprising that agencies praise a system that’s ultimately used to evaluate their performance, yet many do. The YWCA of Tampa Bay, for example, derives a significant amount of its annual budget from JWB funding. Previously, when the YWCA had to complete the application process, staff had to assemble multiple boxes of documents. Thanks to ASSET, those boxes have been replaced by a single CD, making the process far quicker and easier.

“ASSET is a significant improvement over all that paperwork,” says Patti Bacha, the YWCA’s director of human resources and operations. “ASSET helps us make sure we deliver quality service to the people we are supposed to be serving. As a result, JWB is helping people more effectively.”

Tags: county IT, WebLink

Posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 3:01 pm under County Government, Government Newsletter, State and Local Government. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.