Charlottesville, VA is consistently voted one of America’s best cities to live, marked as it is by its deep history (birthplace of three U.S. presidents) and its college-town charm (home to the University of Virginia). But when it came to records management, Charlottesville’s paper history held little charm for the city staff left dealing with its outdated and overgrown filing system.

“Life before Laserfiche was full of frustration,” remembers Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue and Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.

Collins was often as confused as the seasonal staff she’d hire to help keep up with the mounting file load. In the city’s personal property area, for instance, a two-index paper filing system meant records older than four years had to be hauled down to the basement. If active incoming documents related to a past tax year, they had to be stored with older records. Business licenses were shuffled between active files and archives when they closed, only to be moved back if the business re-opened—always with more and more paperwork. “You could have 15 years of license applications and papers,” Collins says. “Name order wasn’t that great so there was always confusion about indexing business names: by the last name of the proprietor or the trading name or the first name of the legal name?”

Retrieving information was even worse. “Trying to find things was the biggest frustration,” she says. “My desk was nearest to the filing cabinet room. I can’t tell you how many slammed drawers and expletives I heard on a daily basis!”

And the inefficiency of the city’s information management system bordered on the tragic. “It took all year to file our documents, so most of what you needed was in a big pile of ‘stuff to file.’ Some years, we had a full-time employee, bless her heart, she was over 90 years old and a sweet petite woman. I’ll never forget the image of her folded up on the floor between cabinets filing in the bottom drawers.”

The last straw was when the city was reminded the hard way it had no disaster back-up plan when a plumbing accident damaged the basement records room. “I knew there had to be a better way out there somewhere,” says Collins.

There was—Collins just had to find a way to fund it.

“They say ‘pick your battles’ and I chose this one,” she recalls. “It took me three years of lobbying every way and everyone I knew and becoming a general pain in the rear, but we finally were able to set up an intra-departmental team to choose a system and, even better, we had funding to implement it.”

Her team reviewed almost 15 bids. “Some of the biggest names with the biggest price tags weren’t even meeting our minimum requirements, but Laserfiche met them all and then some.” Collins had done her homework; what she envisioned the new system doing read like a list of signature Laserfiche features: “OCR, scalability, public web access, configurable indexing, ‘print to scan,’ the ability to use any scanner hardware and to integrate with other systems, the ability to automate workflow and add routing capabilities,” she says, leaving one to ponder what else she could possibly ask for.

But the question wasn’t “what?” but rather “how easily?” Again, the answer was Laserfiche. “We were especially interested in ease of use and its fast learning curve,” she says. “We wanted something that stored our images and data in non-proprietary formats—especially since we’d been burned with an imaging project before that put thousands of HR files into a system we could no longer get into!” Collins also liked Laserfiche’s other qualities, including its price. “We were impressed with the security, multiple indexing ability, configurability and ease of maintenance and to top it off, it was the lowest bid.”

A pilot implementation in the city included five departments. The Commissioner of the Revenue’s office started day-forward scanning within months. The City Council Clerk archived city council minutes as well as current documents. These days, Human Resources and City Attorney offices are using Laserfiche, with more departments asking how they can be brought on board every year.

Progress has been gradual. “People have a hard time letting go of the tangible,” Collins says. “Then they see how much easier it is to get what you need with a few keystrokes. The person who was digging in the boxes of scanned documents the first year because they didn’t trust the digital system is now one of the most vocal advocates of this system.”

Managing index data quality and workflow took a little finessing as well. “Just as with misfiled paper documents, if an index key is entered incorrectly, the document may as well not exist since no one will find it,” she says. Collins automated indexing using Ascent Capture by Kofax and then Quick Fields (see sidebar) to improve accuracy and speed. “We centralized scanning and indexing to a few people with additional training,” she explains.

These days, Charlottesville’s new-found efficiency has taken many forms. “Time to find a document went from hours or sometimes days to seconds,” Collins beams. Using Laserfiche also inspired a paradigm shift in how the city considers what’s worth keeping around. “You start to see the value in that information, but also what isn’t valuable,” she says. “We eliminated the filing requirement for vehicles, which saved us not just money, but also from having to index and store over 20,000 documents a year. Today we stay current within a week in the personal property scanning area—in many cases, a document is stored with its metadata the same day it comes in!”

And there’s the cash savings. “We used to hire a full-time person for six months a year, just to open and file mail. We were usually just catching up for the year when the December bills went out. Now, we’ve saved half the cost of a FTE and only have one person scanning personal property files part-time just one day a week. We were able to eliminate another half of a position and reinvest the time into audit programs designed to increase City revenue,” she says. “That’s real dollars.”

Still, Collins realizes getting other municipalities to see the Laserfiche light means thinking of ROI in broader terms. “Getting funds is a challenge because the costs of doing things the old way aren’t staring people in the face. You’ll save a lot of time for your staff, but no one wants to eliminate staff or positions. Real estate isn’t a factor for a government that doesn’t pay rent or taxes. Nobody factors in the cost of lost documents or a disaster destroying all your files,” she says.

“You have to look at it as part of process improvements and think about what you could do with the time you save and the value of bringing data and paper together. Another wise user told me that to gain support for expanding the system to other documents, departments and processes, show them how it would work, because the truth is that it’s much simpler than people imagine it will be,” Collins adds. “We recently had a ‘what we like about our office’ meeting and so many people responded ‘Laserfiche!’ That’s why I recommend it. It’s easy to use, easy to learn, easy to configure, adapt or improve in particular—because of its incredible focus on the user.”

Tags: disaster recovery, implementation, Local Government, ROI

Posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 3:00 pm under Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Laserfiche Luminaries, Municipal Government. You can comment on this post.