In many cities, staff have to impose on the city clerk’s office whenever they need to consult a report, contract or other municipal document. But thanks to Laserfiche, staff throughout the City of Goodyear, AZ, can instantly access these items online, which helps them work more efficiently—and frees staff in the clerk’s office to spend more time helping the public.

Before the clerk’s office installed Laserfiche, staff literally spent hours each day fulfilling information requests. “It was so time-consuming,” recalls City Clerk Lynn Mulhall. “Other city employees would come to our office to submit requests, and they’d have to wait at the counter while we went to the records room and searched for the relevant documents. We definitely needed a better way to share information with other departments.”

Records Administrator Janet LeBlanc puts it more succinctly. “I cringe when I think about how it used to be,” she says.

Mulhall and her colleagues found what they were looking for at an Arizona Municipal Clerks’ Association conference, where they spoke with a Laserfiche representative and saw the software in action. Using Laserfiche, they’d be able to digitize and index all their documents, eliminating almost all of their paper archives.

“We really didn’t look at anything else,” Mulhall remembers. “Laserfiche was the only known product to meet the needs of city clerks, and once we saw it, we really liked it.”

The clerk’s office installed Laserfiche in 2001, and staff began scanning agendas, meeting minutes and other documents into the Laserfiche repository. In 2002, LeBlanc started an initiative to move all the office’s documents into Laserfiche, and she began scanning records one series at a time. Because documents hadn’t been named consistently, LeBlanc focused on developing a template with drop-down fields recording the document type, how it was approved, and contract numbers and terms, among other information.

“I really created it through trial and error,” she says. “But now it’s so easy. We can search by keyword to instantly locate the information we need.”

As LeBlanc added more documents to the Laserfiche repository, staff found it increasingly simple to locate information requested by other city departments. In fact, because they could e-mail documents from within Laserfiche, staff could fulfill many requests instantaneously.

As employees throughout the city became more comfortable with electronic documents, they began contacting the IT department to request access to Laserfiche. Rather than rolling the Laserfiche Client software out citywide, IT used WebLink to power a Web portal that provides staff with round-the-clock access to the Laserfiche repository.

“We held training sessions to show staff in other departments how to locate documents in Laserfiche,” LeBlanc says. “Because Laserfiche is so easy to use, everyone caught on quickly, and it’s definitely made us more productive. Our city manager, for example, absolutely loves it—he saves a lot of time by accessing contracts and other documents right from his desktop.”

In addition to making documents more accessible, Laserfiche has also helped the clerk’s office streamline everyday work processes. For example, before the office installed Laserfiche, preparing agenda packets was a tedious process that required hours of staff time. “We used to place the reports in black binders, which we’d then carry between people’s desks,” Mulhall remembers. “We had to create a Microsoft® Access® database to determine who had the binders, or even who’d seen them last.”

After creating the final agenda, staff had to assemble the packet by hand and create 40-50 photocopies. Last-minute additions required staff to photocopy more pages and append them to the end of each packet. “We certainly killed a lot of trees,” Mulhall notes.

Thanks to Laserfiche Agenda Manager, staff have dramatically cut the time, effort and copies required to distribute agendas and prepare minutes. Using Agenda Manager, staff members propose agenda items using a simple Web form. Agenda Manager then automatically routes proposed items, along with accompanying reports or other files, to the appropriate reviewers. Mulhall or one of her staff members can easily add approved items to the final agenda as well as remove or rearrange items to accommodate last-minute changes. Mulhall publishes and distributes the finalized agenda with the touch of a button, then posts it to the city’s Website.

“Our signers love it, and we all thought they’d resist,” Mulhall says. “They’re definitely ‘paper people,’ but not a single one has complained about it. In fact, they all tell us how great the system is.”

Goodyear uses Agenda Manager to manage over ten different types of meetings, so to help staff use it most effectively, the deputy clerk developed a how-to manual and several training classes. “As new people go live, either she or I go to their desk, give them the manual and walk them through preparing their first report,” says Mulhall. “It’s so easy to use that the questions we get are about how we prefer the report to be formatted, not how to use the product.”

The city has also integrated Agenda Manager with Granicus® to create and manage both meeting minutes and audio and video recordings of the proceedings. The video is indexed in real-time by each agenda item. “The public loves it,” Mulhall comments. “In fact, we all love it. If someone misses a meeting, they can watch it, click on an item and immediately access the staff report.

“In fact, it’s hard to tell what’s Agenda Manager and what’s Granicus, they’re so well-integrated,” she adds.

Goodyear now uses Laserfiche in the city clerk’s office, the municipal court, the city manager’s office and the engineering department, which has helped reduce copies of both paper and electronic documents city-wide. There has also been a marked decrease in internal records requests, because city staff can locate their own information. Staff have also managed to stay on top of an increased workload without hiring additional employees.

“We couldn’t do it without Laserfiche or Agenda Manager,” says Mulhall. “There would be no way we’d be able to do everything. Laserfiche has eliminated so much from our workload, it’s incredible.

“The change with Laserfiche is drastic enough that everyone has noticed,” she adds. “It’s a great tool that streamlines our work processes and makes us more productive on a daily basis. Laserfiche is truly something every city can benefit from.”

Tags: agenda management, municipal government

Posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 11:02 am under Government Newsletter. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.