To be honest, the City of Albany, OR, hadn’t really been maximizing Laserfiche when its new Finance Director wanted to do away with using it altogether five years ago.

The city had installed Laserfiche in its Finance Department in 1998 as a virtual file cabinet. “Between 1999-2003 we were only scanning a few thousand documents a month and it was limited to just the Finance department,” admits Network Administrator and Laserfiche Luminary Allen Pilgrim. By 2004, Laserfiche storage totaled just ten volumes of 4.6GB each. A significant number, but apparently not significant enough for one new city administrator.

“That same year, we got a new Finance Director. We’ll call her Brenda (not her real name),” Pilgrim explains. “We were having our second weekly meeting with her and she blurted out ‘We’re getting rid of Laserfiche.’ We were all shocked.”

Pilgrim took it upon himself to prove the system’s worth. He went into what he calls “stealth mode,” personally approaching other departments about stepping up their use of Laserfiche, tactfully earning their trust and answering their concerns along the way. Simply put, Laserfiche had its internal champion, but the software ultimately sold itself, user by user, process by process, department by department.

“Most people were fearful of losing their precious paper. I sat down in meetings with people and just one on one made it clear that I was committed to ensuring the safety of their data,” Pilgrim explains. “As we progressed, people saw the evidence that I was serious.”

The Building division in Community Development was interested, for instance, but thought Laserfiche was limited to just the Finance Department. Pilgrim pointed out the annual maintenance had been moved to the IT budget, leaving Laserfiche open for intra-office adoption.

“What happened next was nothing short of amazing,” Pilgrim says. “The Building division latched onto Laserfiche as if it was the greatest thing they had ever seen.” Building’s Allison Liesse began scanning all day, every day, eventually working with Pilgrim to purchase a wide-format scanner. IT Staff even came up with interface integration with the city’s Accela PermPlus permitting software so that building inspectors could retrieve Laserfiche documents through the application. Within a year, storage jumped from 10 to 42 4.6GB volumes. Now, inspired both by Building’s success and Pilgrim’s handling of the implementation, Albany’s Planning division has come on board just this year.

Around the same time, Paul Jacobson in the Public Works Engineering division was interested in Laserfiche. Pilgrim was able to, as he puts it, “give him an area in Laserfiche to play with.” Jacobson’s experience inspired his whole department to convert to using Laserfiche. “There was no longer any talk of getting rid of Laserfiche because it had become too valuable to the City and more people were using it all the time.”

By 2006, Pilgrim convinced Albany’s IT Director to add Laserfiche as a standard install on every computer in the city. Pilgrim notes that by then, IT was independent from the Finance Department – and that “Brenda” had since moved on.

In 2008, the police department requested a demo. “They fell in love with the product,” Pilgrim says – and he was soon requesting two high-end scanners and training several PD employees. Concurrently, Pilgrim implemented Quick Fields. Police reports are now completely automated with Quick Fields. “They just drop them into the scanner and they’re done,” explains Pilgrim. Planning has since come on board; by now Public Works was now doing all of their projects in Laserfiche. Ambulance Billing has become, as Pilgrim puts it “another Quick Fields success story.” Operations also started doing more with Laserfiche.

Quick Fields, Quicker ROI

Pilgrim worked with Albany’s new (post-“Brenda”) Finance Director to approve the purchase and implementation of Quick Fields following a demo last year by reseller Michael Dane of VPCI. “We determined it would be perfect for four departments and the benefits have been spectacular,” Pilgrim says.

1. Allison Liesse in Building says it has saved her literally hundreds of hours of work – it saves her four hours a month processing timesheets alone.
2. Ambulance Billing reports are automatically processed by Quick Fields, which saves “dozens upon dozens” of hours.
3. For the Police Department, automatically processing thousands and thousands of police reports has been the biggest benefit of the city’s Quick Fields implementation. The failure rate is less than 1%. “Changing the slashes in the dates to dashes made all the difference,” Pilgrim notes. “Basically they just drop a stack of reports in the scanner and their job is done.”

The Future

Already in 2009, Pilgrim has done demos for staff of the Municipal Court, which has since started using the system, as well as to Albany’s Fire Department. The City Manager’s office and the HR Department are the latest additions, while the Parks & Recreation Department is slowly but surely adopting their own system. And all of Purchasing’s paperwork is stored in Laserfiche. “Most recently our GIS division had me set it up so they could move all of their As-Builts into Laserfiche,” adds Pilgrim.

Besides efficient (and satisfied) city employees in virtually every department, 2009 marks another Laserfiche milestone: the City of Albany will be only the third city in Oregon to launch “Digital Image as Original” (DIO). This will allow the city to maintain digital copies for many of our records,” explains Pilgrim. “This will allow us to lead the way on being more green, because it’s fun being green.” And as Albany has proved, Brendas of the world be darned, it’s fun being efficient, too.

Register for the “Laserfiche for Local Government = ECM + BPM” Webinar and learn more.

Tags: accela integration, Audit Trail, Building Department, Finance Department, GIS, Import Agent, IT, Laserfiche Toolkit, law enforcement, Public Works Department, Quick Fields, Snapshot, State and Local Government, WebLink

Posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 8:56 am under Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Municipal Government, Newsletters, State and Local Government. You can comment on this post.