Congratulations to our 2009 Run Smarter Winners
November 17th, 2009 Comment on this article
We’re proud to announce the twelve organizations who will be receiving Run Smarter Awards at the 2010 Laserfiche Institute Conference.
Please join us as we congratulate this year’s winners: the City of Norfolk, VA; Collin County, TX; the Texas Medical Board; the State of Guerrero, Mexico; the Central Contra Costa Sanitary District; the Elk River Police Department; La Porte County, IN; Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi; the Los Angeles County Office of Education; Spindletop MHMR; Cambridge Financial Group; and RMS Company.
We’d like to thank everyone who submitted nominations for this year’s award—and we’d like to invite you to join us at the Conference January 11-13 in Los Angeles to congratulate this year’s winners.
Municipal Government: City of Norfolk, VA
No municipality has dedicated itself to the growth of the Laserfiche Community more visibly this year than Norfolk, VA. So much so that the city’s in-house Laserfiche champions owe winning a Run Smarter Award as much to their evolving use of Laserfiche as to their role encouraging user interaction by co-founding the Hampton Roads User Group, one of an unprecedented number of user groups that have sprung up across the state in the last two years. Norfolk’s Run Smarter Award is really a Run Smarter Award for the entire Laserfiche community.
What started out as a user group for a small niche of Virginia municipalities has grown to include every industry, and has expanded from one statewide group to three. But the value to the Laserfiche community as a whole, says Laserfiche Luminary and leader of the Technology Team for the Norfolk Commissioner of the Revenue W. Alondo McClees, is unique and beyond compare. “I can’t think of another software product that has a community attached to it. There are many enterprise-level products that have user groups, but they don’t seem to have a community,” he says. “When I talk to people at a Laserfiche user group, I’m talking to my friends. We all care about how each other’s organizations are succeeding. It’s more than people getting together talking about software. When people see what we are doing, they want to be a part of it.”
County Government: Collin County, TX
Collin County saw its population increase nearly 50% – from 500,000 in 2000 to 725,000 by 2007 – straining the County’s infrastructure. In 2007, a committee drawn from several County offices selected Laserfiche as the County’s choice for document and records management.
IT Director Caren Skipworth saw Laserfiche as a standard for information management. “Laserfiche fits into our enterprise approach in that every department could use it effectively, it could run in our environment – as opposed to the other way around – and we’d be able to support a single system ourselves with minimum staff,” she says.
Since implementing Laserfiche, the IT Department has reduced a four-person legacy imaging support staff serving just two departments to a three-person staff able to support Laserfiche county-wide. And, according to Records Manager Margaret Anderson, “We process payments much more quickly – up to 10 days faster,” she says. And that’s just in the Tax Assessor/Collector’s Office, where Laserfiche helps recover the almost $1 million lost in interest each day.
Download the Enterprise Government Case Study white paper here.
State/Federal Government: Texas Medical Board
As the state regulatory agency charged with protecting citizens’ health and safety, the Medical Board regulates the practice of medicine in Texas by licensure, discipline and education. It has a legislative mandate to file and track all complaints filed on any doctor licensed in the state—typically hundreds of them a year. Investigating all these complaints led to the creations of hundreds of thousands of paper documents, and shipping and storing them was a considerable drain on agency resources.
The agency initially scanned and uploaded content on file servers, which resulted in redundancy and version control issues. Next, the agency implemented a FileNet document management system, which proved to be difficult to scale and expensive to customize. According to System Analyst Anthony Merritt, the system’s interface was cumbersome, and, due to its limited features, “people were starting to avoid using it entirely.”
Finally, the Medical Board reviewed its alternatives and decided that replacing FileNet with Laserfiche—with its more comprehensive capabilities, lower maintenance costs and easier administration—was worth the upfront investment. “Laserfiche nearly tripled our ability to capture and process complaint documents,” explains Merritt. “It saves us time and energy every day.”
Read the full story here.
International Government: State of Guerrero, Mexico
The State of Guerrero has long been a leading proponent of IT as business technology in Mexico. The relatively poor Mexican state used Laserfiche in 2001 to integrate with the City of Acapulco’s GIS system to increase its rate of tax collection four-fold without raising the tax rates themselves. This increased the City’s tax collection enough that Acapulco now has Mexico’s fourth-best tax collection ratio.
Most Mexican cities – in other words, almost all of Guerrero’s 80 other cities without as lucrative a tax base as Acapulco – rely on the federal government for approximately 85 percent of their funding, much of that devoted to the infrastructural and quality of life upgrades necessary to increase tourism and economic development in the state. In 2006, Governor Carlos Torreblanca initiated “The Global Estate Strategy to a Digital Government” with the belief that investing in technology could quickly boost Guerrero’s economy.
In terms of sheer economic impact on the region, no part of this strategy has been as successful as using Laserfiche to streamline and accelerate the process by which public works funds are distributed. Using a remote checklist capture system to ensure proper documentation is in place for requests for federal grants, Laserfiche Workflow automates a maze of submissions, approvals and disbursements, so much so that a process that used to take from three to six months owing to bottlenecks and incomplete documentation now literally takes days, keeping information – and Guerrero’s economy – moving forward.
Special District: Central Contra Costa Sanitary District
The Central Contra Costa Sanitary District (CCCSD) maintains 1,500 miles of sewer lines and treats an average of 45 million gallons of wastewater per day. But with 56 years of service came 56 years of records—including permits, construction plans and Board documents. Storage space was at a premium, gaining access to information was difficult and time-consuming, and the district wanted to strengthen its disaster recovery plans.
“It was important for us to select a system that could handle many different forms of content,” says IT Systems Analyst John Phillips. “Documents are simple. Maps and drawings are where things get more complex.”
Today, permit job files (including maps and drawings) are scanned into Laserfiche. This practice centralizes content management, reduces the need for physical storage space, minimizes wear and tear on the originals and enables convenient access to them by CCCSD employees. Staff have also integrated Laserfiche with their GIS system, AutoDesk MapGuide, to grant engineers, permit counter staff and field maintenance crews instantaneous access to content right from the field.
“This has eliminated time spent looking up hard copy permits and drawings and enabled our crews to be more productive,” says Carl Von Stetten, information systems analyst, Engineering Support, CCCSD.
Read the full story here.
Justice Systems – Law Enforcement: Elk River Police Department, Elk River, MN
Elk River, MN, Police Chief Jeffrey Beahen knew that going paperless would transform the way his officers dealt with information, both organizationally and procedurally. Along with the rest of the city’s departments, the police department began using Laserfiche to store documents in 2002. However, the records management system (RMS) the police department had in place worked on a proprietary server, so there was no way to integrate it with Laserfiche. “Everybody’s desktop had two icons – you’d pull up the case number and then go into Laserfiche to find the supporting documents,” Beahen says.
In 2007, Beahen was approached by the Law Enforcement Technology Group with a Web-based police records management system to manage information in relation to their core policing entities (people, locations, vehicles, organizations, incidents and property/evidence). “It wasn’t proprietary, so anything we could scan into Laserfiche and store, we could attach right to the record from the RMS. It turned the process of accessing records and documentation into a one-stop shop,” he says. “This is the kind of thing that you hear stories about seven engineers working on and two months and $85,000 later, it still isn’t working right. Our integration was done in less than a week.”
Now, officers have wireless-enabled laptops in their squad cars so all content is immediately accessible, which, says Beahen, “keeps officers safe all the time.” As the Elk River, MN Police Department’s Run Smarter Award-winning use of Laserfiche shows, you don’t have to be the biggest department to realize real and valuable benefits and safety from using Laserfiche, you just have to have some vision. In fact, the Elk River Police Department was recognized with a 2008 award for Excellence in Information Technology from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, alongside some of the largest police agencies in the world.
Read the full story here.
Justice Systems – Courts: La Porte County, IN
For La Porte County Superior Court No. 4 Chief Probation Officer Steve Eyrick, technology plays an important role in shaping departmental strategy. Under his direction, the department recently rolled out a video conferencing system, which has improved security by keeping inmates in jail during their arraignments. The department has also benefitted from the chief probation officer’s decision to implement Laserfiche content management more than seven years ago.
“Prior to implementing Laserfiche,” Eyrick says, “we were storing piles of files that had accumulated over the course of more than twenty years. Organizing everything was a problem, as was finding enough storage room. Laserfiche changed all of that.”
Eyrick’s success with Laserfiche soon attracted attention outside of his department, and it wasn’t long before Darlene Hale, IT director for the entire county, came calling.
Hale had noticed a few problems with the way content management had been rolled out county-wide. Chief among them was that, in the years before she’d taken the helm, individual departments such as Eyrick’s had been allowed to choose and deploy their own preferred IT systems. As a result, interoperability was lacking, sharing information was difficult and costs were high. In the course of Hale’s research, she determined that if one of the content management systems already in use could be expanded, the cost of conversion wouldn’t be quite so high. Two systems rose to the top: Laserfiche and Docuware. Ultimately, after talking to Eyrick and his department, comparing features and functionality and considering ROI, Laserfiche won out.
“Our users love Laserfiche,” Hale explains. “It just has so many more uses and capabilities than what they were using before.”
Read the full story here.
Higher Education: Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi
Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC) implemented Laserfiche to replace their legacy ECM system. When the results far exceeded their expectations, University staff started using the Laserfiche SDK to build automation tools tailored for the University’s general needs, specific unit requirements and the needs of individual departments.
Manager of Administrative Computing Dennis Raulie, Programmer III Michael Williamson and Computer Operator Bobby Martinez took inspiration from Rube Goldberg’s legacy of creating seemingly complex machines to achieve simple tasks to develop the Report Upload Bifurcation Engine (R.U.B.E.) system. The R.U.B.E. system processes a continuous stream of bundled report files from BPP/FAMIS feeds and distributes the resulting reports to the appropriate destinations in Laserfiche. Each report is split into smaller “reportlets” which are filed in Laserfiche according to their retention schedule. Some reports are thousands of pages long and, before Laserfiche, had to be printed, which required one to two reams of paper a day. Using the R.U.B.E. system hasn’t just saved all this paper; it’s also saved the Accounting department from lagging a month behind in filing.
To move all of the university’s documents from their legacy ECM system into Laserfiche, Williamson wrote a program to pull all the system’s data and associated metadata and convert it using Import Agent. When all the archived data has been moved, the university plans to keep expanding their use of Laserfiche by using Workflow to improve business processes.
At TAMU-CC, user acceptance of Laserfiche has been especially high. When one staff member was asked about her feelings on Laserfiche, she enthusiastically replied, “Laserfiche is easy to use. I LOVE LASERFICHE!”
K-12 Education: Los Angeles County Office of Education
The Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) operates the largest Head Start-State Preschool program in the country, contracting with 26 agencies that employ a staff of more than 3,000 people and serve more than 25,000 children—and their families—in the greater L.A. area each year alone. Of course, with that many clients comes all kinds of records: attendance tracking, child abuse and accident reporting, growth charts, fiscal reports and more. Organizing and ensuring fast access to them all was becoming a major problem.
Laserfiche has helped LACOE’s Head Start-State Preschool program improve efficiency by digitizing student documentation. Using Laserfiche, the Head Start program now scans all paper documents and stores them, along with electronic content, in a central, secure Laserfiche repository.
“We thought we were just getting a repository to hold our electronic files, but Laserfiche is so much more,” says Lee.
Read the full story here.
Healthcare: Spindletop MHMR
For the people who struggle with mental health issues in southeast Texas, Spindletop Mental Health Mental Retardation (MHMR) Services has the resources to support their recovery and relieve their distress. But with over 8,000 patients every year and upwards of 400 employees, Spindletop’s ability to respond promptly to records requests—and, by extension, to patients—was being compromised.
Over 80,000 files resided in a hardcopy storage facility that cost more than $2,000 a month to maintain. And even with six full-time staff members dedicated to managing hardcopy documents, some records took as long as three days to locate and cost $4 each to retrieve and deliver; others were lost for good.
“We wanted to centralize access to patient records without forcing our employees to go out of their way,” explains Jerry Carnley, CIO at Spindletop. “Our intranet seemed to be the natural place to do this, but we needed to implement a content management solution that would be easy to implement, easy to install, and eliminate extra work for the people who deal with patient documents every day.”
Spindletop chose Laserfiche and integrated it with their existing SharePoint intranet. “We’ve increased productivity, and morale has jumped in every department that uses Laserfiche,” Carnley says. “There’s no more waiting around for days for hardcopy documents to be found, and no more lost or misfiled records resulting in huge institutional fines. And we aren’t spending thousands of dollars each month on offsite storage facilities.”
Read the full story here.
Financial: Cambridge Financial Group
Cambridge Financial Group, a Columbus, OH-based registered investment advisor managing assets of around $1 billion, is committed to technical efficiency – with good reason. With only 12 employees managing 4,000 active accounts from 32 different brokers and supporting Delivery Versus Payment (DVP) accounts for over 50 banks, Cambridge has to maximize the productivity of each staff member. That meant finding a way to help staff keep up with processing the 50,000 pages of statements that arrived in the mail each month, adding to the 20 years of back files spread out over 400 square feet of file cabinet space that had already spilled over into two storage lockers filled with statements and account records.
“We decided to go paperless,” says Mike Adams, Cambridge’s Director of Information Technology, who turned to Laserfiche reseller Gordon Flesch Company to help tailor a solution that could capture the up to 50,000 pages and merge them seamlessly with the firm’s own business processes and existing information systems. “When they recommended Laserfiche, we decided to go for it.”
Now Cambridge uses Laserfiche Quick Fields to capture the 100 different formats of broker statements arriving each month. As Adams explains, “Quick Fields recognizes the broker account number on each document and populates the Laserfiche template fields with information from Lotus Notes/Domino and our portfolio management software.” Adams’ team also created custom scanner profiles to optimize scanning on documents with background anti-tampering lines or colors that would otherwise reduce OCR accuracy.
The results were immediate. “We get our statements processed and viewable in Laserfiche in less time than it used to take to sort the paper before,” he says.
Commercial: RMS Company
As a contract manufacturing company that specializes in medical device implants and surgical instruments, precision is a chief concern for RMS. For over forty years, the company has ensured the accuracy and quality of its products, spurring expansion and business growth. But as the organization grew, some of its processes failed to evolve along with it.
“As a contract manufacturer, we fulfill a substantial number of jobs every year,” explains Michael Eklund, information systems coordinator at RMS. “We used to place all of the order information into a file folder and pass it around to multiple teams throughout our 155,000 square foot machine shop. As you can probably guess, files went missing and people spent a lot of time trying to track them down.”
Now, RMS relies heavily on Laserfiche Workflow to accelerate shared business processes across its plants in Minnesota and Tennessee. RMS has eight major workflows in effect across the company. “From an IT perspective,” Eklund says, “one of the best features is how easy it is to change and test the various workflows. Four of our major workflows could halt production if they stopped working properly. Because it’s so easy to make adjustments, we never have to worry about downtime.”
Read the full story here.