When Hurricane Katrina hit, many companies were suddenly and starkly confronted by the need to enhance their disaster recovery planning—particularly in the arena of document management. When they came to this realization, Image Tek of Louisiana was there.

“There was one client we’d been talking to for several years, but when Hurricane Katrina hit four years ago and they wound up spending millions on document recovery, that’s when we started working with them,” Travis Gilbert, a solutions consultant with Image Tek, recalls. “The CFO wanted to take the system nationwide, so we spent a month white boarding a workflow for their Miami location. When they saw how that worked, they were ready to roll it out to the rest of the country.”

The system grew to where it is now, processing 2,000 contracts a week between 400 branches, five regional processing centers and company headquarters, replacing a labyrinth of fax lines and paperwork and compressing a weeks-long process into a matter of days. “It’s literally their lifeline,” says Travis. “It can’t go down.”

A huge part of Image Tek’s success, according to Image Tek President and Founder Allen Gilbert, is winning over IT staff. “Once IT sees how the system works, once it is handling their work orders and purchasing slips, they see that Laserfiche is not making more work for them,” says Allen. “Our support package is a promise of that.”

Having buy-in from IT has spurred many of Image Tek’s recent sales, as well as upgrades of Workflow and Web Access. “A major selling point of Web Access for us is that it eliminates the need for all these IT support upgrades on every workstation,” says Travis.

In fact, Image Tek’s IT-savvy approach has culminated in the conversion of an upgrade to Laserfiche 8 into a budgeted Rio upgrade for 2010 with the company that first engaged Image Tek following Katrina. According to Travis, Image Tek was able to leverage IT staff’s needs into what is now a budgeted Rio upgrade with the promise of unlimited servers.

“The company trains IT staff to support their system, but they had no place to run test environments without buying more servers,” he explains. “So it became cost-effective for them upgrade to Rio and buy licenses for everyone upfront instead of adding another 10 here and there,” Travis explains. “With their own licenses, staff members can now create test environments for what they want to do in the future. They’re getting more out of the system and it’s a good push for us.”

The constant in the relationship—besides more and bigger deployments—has been customer contact. As Travis puts it, “It comes down to us having ideas and them being willing to buy.”

“Us having ideas,” Image Tek has found, is even more valuable in a savvier marketplace. “We’re not replacing as many systems as we did before,” Allen says. “People are doing more research on their own.”

Image Tek’s response has been to be more competitive: the company waives its professional services rates for needs assessments. “It’s more important for them to get something from us than pay us to see if they want to get something. Once we get in, they’ll pay us our rate,” Travis explains.

The end result, Allen says, is still being able to show the value of the technology investment. “When we talk about ROI, we point to the increase in productivity because employees are not spending all their time looking for things. We’ve been able to position it as ‘natural attrition’—existing staff is going to be so much more efficient that when someone retires or leaves the organization, there’s no need to replace them.”

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Laserfiche
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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 Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 10:52 am under VAR of the Month. You can comment on this post.