Cliff Thomas, Imaging Systems Analyst, City of Wichita, KS

After the City of Wichita had been using Laserfiche for about four years, staff from the IT department met with police records staff to discuss new ways of using our system to provide more innovative public service. We decided to start by putting traffic accident reports online.

When Wichita citizens are involved in traffic accidents, they are required to send copies of the accident reports to the state Registry of Motor Vehicles and supply their insurance companies with the case numbers. Insurance companies then request copies of the reports so they can use them to settle claims.

We were already using Laserfiche WebLink™ internally to retrieve documents, so we thought we could integrate it with a third-party payment solution that would enable citizens to purchase copies of the reports online. The big question was whether we’d be able to set up a payment system that could tell our document imaging system to release an imaged file.

The programming solution turned out to be relatively easy using the Laserfiche Integrator’s Toolkit™, particularly because Laserfiche was already integrated with our public safety software program. Basically, we use the case number of the report to set everything in motion, and it works beautifully.

We’ve had the system up and running for about three years, and most citizens prefer to pay $16 online rather than come to city hall. Our happiest customers are the insurance companies. They love how the system saves them both staff time and messenger costs.

Using the accident report model, we’re looking at automating other city business as well. Once we sort out some issues with the payment system vendor, we plan to use WebLink to enable citizens to pay traffic tickets online. We also want to use the system for pet licenses and garage sale licenses. Our attitude is, Why should people have to come to city hall when they can pay their two dollars online for a printable garage sale license in PDF format?

We’re happy to post our ideas and some of our code in the Laserfiche Code Library. The Code Library is a great place to learn from other users. For example, we’re in the process of putting our metropolitan area planning documents online, and we are also looking to put engineering project plans online. We’ve been looking at the solution from a pure WebLink standpoint. We really needed to focus the search capability to a particular set of features within the repository because of the way we’re storing those documents. We’d love to hear from other users who have experience with this process, particularly in returning PDF files.

Since installing Laserfiche, our document imaging system has grown by over 9000 percent. That points to Wichita sharing a long future of continued success with Laserfiche.

Tags: Code Library, Laserfiche Toolkit, WebLink

Posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 3:33 pm under UserNews. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.