One Source Document Solutions (OSDS) has generated substantial sales to three North Carolina counties in the last few months, putting the Greensboro-based reseller on track to more County business than any other Laserfiche VAR this year. What makes this even more significant is that all three recent implementations have been in their Social Services departments, traditionally paper-heavy, process-burdened departments that have been slow to turn to technology.

Yet thanks to an innovative strategic partnership with Human Services Automation solution provider Northwoods Consulting Partners, OSDS has been able to leverage Agile ECM engineered with Laserfiche and Microsoft SharePoint as the underlying platform of these social services departments. It’s part of what could best be described as OSDS’ “footprint strategy” for success.

Kevin Smith, senior vice president and a founder of OSDS, explains. “We try to cultivate key partnerships to expand our offerings to counties,” he says. “Once the footprint is there, we want to grow the client into an enterprise customer and expand the scope of project throughout all county departments.”

The strategy’s also made good business sense operationally, says Smith. “We expand our reach without expanding our internal sales team, which keeps our overhead reasonable. Ultimately, it has resulted in growth for all of us, despite the current economy.”

Being part of an agile ECM ecosystem can make for pragmatic partnerships. In other territories, Ohio-based Northwoods Consulting Partners usually partners with another provider. But as Smith—and Northwoods—learned, when opportunity knocks, it can take one hand to open the door and another to shake its hand. “We kept running into [Northwoods], and we liked the solutions they were offering,” Smith says. “They realized our customer base and reputation were well-established, so we worked with them to present their comprehensive automation solutions, including advanced touch screen capture and e-forms, to a few of our current customers and those early adopters drove this recent momentum.”

Similar integrated pairings with Laserfiche PDP partners Energov, GeoDocs and Datanow Affinity have driven recent sales as well, while a fruitful partnership with ADI has made OSDS a leading Laserfiche VAR in the financial services sector. “We highly value our strategic partnerships,” Smith says. “They help to set us apart from competitors focused solely on scanning and retrieval systems.”

Another factor that sets OSDS apart, says Smith, are the IT-friendly qualities of Laserfiche 8, which he notes have been especially useful in winning over IT departments. “Some of them don’t believe us when we say we’re going to done by the end of the week with the initial implementation,” he says. “Then we train them, and they become believers. With Laserfiche, they can be as independent as they want to be, since administration is all graphically driven and they don’t have to code. The last thing they want to think is they’re going to be nickeled and dimed every time they want to add a user or make a minor modification to the system.”

These new county footprints are the first steps to enterprise installations, a vision Smith has had since the beginning. As he told the Laserfiche VARNews last year, “When we became a Laserfiche VAR in 1998, we believed in the enterprise approach, but the markets we were targeting weren’t ready for it yet.” But as OSDS’ recent success with county social service departments proves, the market is indeed warming up to the idea—it just takes getting your foot(print) in the door.

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Hobey Echlin is a Writer/Researcher in the Laserfiche Marketing department and is active in the Laserfiche Luminaries program.

Posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 4:28 pm under VAR of the Month. You can comment on this post.