Most people know Gilroy, California, as the “Garlic Capital of the World.” But city staff in this agricultural epicenter are creating a slightly more technology-focused atmosphere. Thanks to some IT ingenuity—and an integration between Laserfiche® and other line-of-business applications—Gilroy is paving the way for other governments to adopt more citizen-oriented business processes.

With 50,000 residents and 13,000 utilities accounts to service, Gilroy’s 300 city staff members confronted a considerable challenge in providing timely service based on accurate information. Staff members’ far-too-frequent excursions to the file room were compromising service quality and consuming precious staff resources.

David Chulick, Gilroy’s director of information technology, explains the problem: “We needed a centralized document repository, so staff could quickly gather needed information. We also needed to maintain our records retention policies, some of which are very complex. But most of all, we needed an easy-to-use system that users could adopt quickly.”

Gilroy had already implemented Laserfiche in the city clerk’s office when Chulick arrived in January 2004. But under his leadership, new Laserfiche installations—and new business process improvements—are sprouting citywide. Gilroy has gone from one scanning station to nine, and its police, fire, human resources and community development departments all achieve remarkable results with Laserfiche. But it’s the finance department’s utility billing division that has realized the greatest transformation.

Before deploying Laserfiche, processing utility bill payments was labor-intensive and time-consuming. Clerks first separated checks and remittances, and then manually entered them into Gilroy’s financial system. After comparing the checks and remittance totals, they physically rubber-stamped each check and bundled them in stacks of 100 for courier pickup. “There was so much extra work,” Chulick notes. “50 percent of the time, some step of the process had a mistake, which was very labor-intensive to correct.”

Processing 6,000 checks per month using this error-prone method caused the city to hemorrhage time and money. Chulick was determined to stop the bleeding. The only problem? After a six-month search, Chulick found that no existing product could streamline check and remittance processing, increase accuracy and speed collections. So he decided to build one.

Working closely with DataNet Solutions, a Laserfiche reseller and Professional Developer Partner™, Chulick dreamed up the plans for an ideal solution. “The bank provided a check-scanning utility,” he says, “but it didn’t address remittances, which are half the transactional data. Other systems were cost-prohibitive, and couldn’t scale to meet our current and future needs.”

Chulick needed a product that would maintain “envelope integrity” by securely archiving scanned checks alongside their accompanying remittances as multi-page documents. After six months of development and beta-testing, he achieved the desired result: Checkmation™, an application that automatically scans and processes payments, then stores them in Laserfiche for easy retrieval.

Now, check processing still involves some manual labor: staff have to remove checks from their envelopes and feed them into scanners. But after that initial step, the system verifies—with over 90% accuracy—the customer’s bank account number, routing number, utility account number and amount paid. The program then compares that amount to the balance owed and marks discrepancies in red, so staff can quickly identify them during verification. To promote more responsive customer service, the program routes the scanned documents to the Laserfiche repository, then automatically creates WebLink™ shortcuts to them, which staff can easily access from the city’s financial system.

“When clerks need to resolve a billing issue, these documents are easy to find,” Chulick says. “Instead of three days’ worth of research, the clerks can spin their monitors around and show these documents directly to customers. The clerks don’t even realize that they’re retrieving them from Laserfiche—the integration is that seamless.

“When we finished implementation,” he adds, “the finance department was ecstatic. The clerks get upset on the rare occasions when the system is offline. ‘We don’t want to go back to the old way,’ they say.”

The efficiency gains from the new process are remarkable. But Chulick reveals an unintended perk: the city gets paid faster. “We send the bank a cash letter at 5 P.M. every business day,” he explains. “The bank converts the checks to an ACH payment, and the funds are available the next morning. Previously, there were two to three days of ‘float’ time.” Gilroy has also reduced bank fees by 56%, and Chulick suspects that, with paper handling costs increasing, these savings will climb even higher.

In addition to inefficient check processing, the utility billing division formerly faced a formidable challenge in following records retention policies. Every month, department staff filled up to six banker’s boxes with remittances, then transported them to a vault for safekeeping. To meet the two-year retention requirement for billing records, staff had to continuously manage almost 100 boxes of physical records. They’ve since forsaken the file vault in favor of scanning billing records into Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME).

Staff are currently migrating most of Gilroy’s other files into RME, too. With the HR department next on the slate, Chulick will rely on Audit Trail™ to monitor activity involving sensitive employee information. “There are so many regulations to follow—HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley—but if we do have a breach, we can go back and trace it,” he says.

So far, Laserfiche has played a vital role in the city’s mission of providing more agile, broader-reaching services. Thanks to WebLink, citizens can already retrieve agenda minutes and city ordinances online, and, in the coming months, the city will introduce twelve new online services, including crime reporting and payment of utility bills, permits, business licenses and other fees.

But the benefits won’t extend only to citizens. By accessing WebLink over Gilroy’s citywide Wi-Fi network, police officers will be able to retrieve case documents and audio files from the Laserfiche repository while in the field. And, when Gilroy integrates Laserfiche with its GIS system, the police and fire departments will be able to remotely retrieve aerial maps and other documents related to land parcels.

As one of California’s agricultural centers, Gilroy is somewhat predisposed to thinking green—and Laserfiche only promotes the city’s green initiatives. “Not printing five reams of paper per day has brought our paper and copying costs way down,” Chulick notes. Gilroy’s City Hall, already a certified green organization, will become even more eco-friendly when it achieves a paperless office with Laserfiche.

Although the system has only been in place a few years, Chulick remembers the time before Laserfiche as if it were a bygone era. “In the last four years, service has really blossomed. Laserfiche has helped our IT division deploy several cutting-edge technologies already, and I believe that in the coming year, our service offerings will rival those of any city of any size.”

Tags: records management, RME, WebLink

Posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 2:16 pm under Government Newsletter, Municipal Government, State and Local Government. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.