Heartland is an active manager, seeking out those few companies from the broad market they believe fit the criteria of its investment discipline, embodied in Heartland’s Ten Principles of Value Investing™. This discipline is grounded in rigorous fundamental analysis, and has been exercised for over a quarter century. Each stock Heartland is potentially interested in is subject to a thorough review of multiple variables, resulting in a rich legacy of information and understanding of thousands of individual securities. This legacy also results in many pages of information and data!

In addition to research, the Firm has built a substantial file of client related material, going back to the Firm’s inception.

By 2010, decades of paper records had accumulated—much of which, for compliance purposes, required locked cabinets. “Any time we had a company visit, analyst research notes, quarterly company earnings reports, news articles or anything impacting an active company, paper was placed in a general location for administrators to file manually,” explains Mike Riggs, Senior Vice President and CTO of Heartland.

The pile of paper accumulated weekly and could require full days of filing by administrative staff. “We’d already gone through the 20 years’ worth of research, but we were still looking at 1,600 active companies for which we needed to maintain records,” he adds.

The Challenge

While the Firm had a fully developed and tested disaster recovery process for its mission-critical electronic information system, there were limited procedures in place for its paper-based stored files. “Both systems maintained single copy masters which took a large amount of floor and file cabinet space—and a lot of manual paper filing,” Riggs says. “We actually had a legacy scan-and-file system that was not being used because it added to the work load of users.”

Riggs led the Firm on a search for a more comprehensive electronic content management (ECM) system with two directives in mind—function and friendliness. As Riggs puts it, “We needed an intelligent forms processing system where we could develop a forms library to identify and process client-related paperwork, but it also had to be user-friendly.”

The Solution

In 2010, the Firm acquired a Laserfiche ECM system and began an extensive backfile conversion project using Laserfiche Quick Fields for advanced document capture. “For our client filing system, we were able to back scan all of our legacy files into Laserfiche according to form type and then organize the data according to client account code,” Riggs says. Using the Affinity integration tool, the Firm linked its CRM system to the digitized files in the Laserfiche repository using the client access code.

In the past, a sales administration representative would have to leave the phone call or schedule a call back with a client, go to the file cabinet and check out the file data. Now, with online access to the system, they can stay on the call and pull up client data using the shared client access code right from the CRM interface.

At the same time, Riggs notes, the flexibility of Laserfiche allowed him to grant remote, read-only access to staff who need to view files offsite for client servicing issues. “We have only one office but several executives who spend time at remote locations. Laserfiche gives them the opportunity to retrieve files when connected to their computers via a remote session.”

The process that saw the most operational improvement, however, was research. “We used Quick Fields to back scan our rich legacy of stock research, and we used Workflow to develop a way for research and portfolio managers to file directly to the Laserfiche repository,” Riggs says.

Here’s how it works:

• By utilizing a research template, analysts can drop files into a Workflow starting rule folder to kick off the template to select the research media type.
• Workflow then routes it to the proper security and media filing type.
• The workflow will run an SQL query to match the template security with an in-house security holding system to identify the full company name to place on file and route it to the proper Laserfiche research file folder.

“Now compliance, analysts and portfolio managers have ready access to research wherever they are, on-site and remote.”

Going with the Workflow

Heartland is now using Laserfiche and Workflow to deploy an accounts payable processing system that will scan in invoices from vendors, have operations staff identify cost centers and allocations, and then route them to department managers for approval. After the approval is routed back to the operation admin, it will then be posted directly into the accounting system for check processing.

Likewise, Riggs is also using Workflow to develop an automated system for approving marketing material that will handle markup and approval from multiple team members, as the content needs to be monitored for FINRA and SEC guidelines. “It’s a very time and paper intensive process that requires group participation,” Riggs says.

More recently, the Firm upgraded to a Laserfiche Rio enterprise system. “This allows us to have multiple Laserfiche servers, which means we have a mirrored Laserfiche server environment running at our disaster recovery site pointing to a backup copy of our production repository that is replicated to the disaster recovery site daily.” Riggs says he’s also looking forward to deploying Laserfiche Mobile to enable Heartland staff to use iPads to access data securely via Web Access.

By using Laserfiche ECM, the Firm is confident it will achieve its goal of limiting paperwork. Says Riggs, “We hope to build custom Web forms to avoid paper-based system processes that pop up as people develop templates for a variety of management tasks.”

Rather than implementing separate solutions for the clinical and non-clinical sides of the house, MCCMHS officials recognized that enterprise content management (ECM) would be the most efficient and cost-effective way to answer its document-related challenges.

ECM Supports EHR

MCCMHS’ search brought the organization to Jeff Nelson of Bolt Document Management, a Laserfiche reseller based in Elkhart, IN. “Initially the objective was for the Laserfiche system to act as a bridge between legacy information and future digital content,” Nelson remembers. “At the same time, implementation of Laserfiche allowed MCCMHS to address areas where working with paper was simply inefficient.”

In 2003 Pat Latimer, the former project manager, led the effort to implement a 118-user Laserfiche system in the agency’s centralized scanning bureau. Staff began migrating and adding patient histories and signature forms for use in conjunction with patient records, which were being generated from Avatar by Crystal Reports and then scanned into Laserfiche.

Dave McElfish, Director of Technology, says that although the original idea was for clinical staff to simultaneously access patient information from Laserfiche and the practice management system, “the reality was, even though we purchased Avatar with the idea of integrating it with Laserfiche, when we explored it further, it was going to be cost prohibitive on the Avatar side of the project.”

In the meantime, Laserfiche deployment had been extended to MCCMHS’s HR and finance departments, which likewise began migrating backfiles to ease storage costs and give staff the ability to retrieve information on command. System use has since grown to the point that the Laserfiche repository now houses over 800,000 documents.

More recently, McElfish says clinical staff have once again expressed interest in being able to access to information from Avatar and Laserfiche at the same time, even going so far as to revisit the idea of using Avatar’s add-on imaging module. “After much consideration, our clinical staff felt that would put us no further ahead in our goal for a true, single database to model our EHR from,” McElfish says. “The reality is that Laserfiche is designed to manage unstructured data, so in that respect it’s closer to that single database because we are able to include unstructured data, such as lab reports and doctor’s notes.”

Going Mobile

McElfish adds that MCCMHS has been speaking with Nelson and Bolt to explore ways to simplify and streamline how data is entered and accessed between Avatar and Laserfiche. McElfish says staff is especially encouraged by the release of Laserfiche Mobile, which could be used to grant clinical staff in the field comprehensive access to patient data via Web Access. He says several options are being considered, including taking advantage of the Laserfiche Q3 Promotion to upgrade the agency’s current system to Avante and receive Web Access (which is required to use the Laserfiche Mobile app) for free.

“We know that allowing staff to access information from Laserfiche on iPads in the field would be a huge boost in our productivity,” says McElfish.

An Avante upgrade would provide lot of potential for automation as well. McElfish notes that Nelson and Bolt have recently been discussing implementing distributed capture processes for paperless faxes and digital signatures via virtual rubberstamps, all routed by Workflow through the agency’s central scanning office for oversight.

Looking ahead, he is understandably pragmatic. “Although Laserfiche is not our primary practice management system, it represents a critical and necessary content management tool that complements Avatar.

“We’ll continue to have paper and documents that need signatures, and the simplest, most cost-effective way to incorporate them into our EMR strategy is to use Laserfiche. There are digital signature solutions and other options, but Laserfiche lets us use what we already have,” McElfish adds. “Our goal was and is to have a single database to model our EHR from, and Laserfiche has provided us with the portability and flexibility to move forward with that goal from a solid foundation.”

During tax season, staff regularly doubles from 15 to 30, owing to the sheer volume of work—and paperwork—associated with tax preparation. But as HFG’s businesses steadily grew, the firm had also steadily outgrown what Chief Operating Officer Ali Mroue calls its “Stone Age document management system.”

In 2004, the firm had implemented the proprietary and non-SQL based system, which was an add-on module for the firm’s Intuit Lacerte tax preparation software, “purely for storage,” he says. Data transfer to PDF was difficult and error-prone, and “we were essentially scanning to create a back-up for the actual physical file. But that was unreliable—we lost data once, and it had no security or audit trail of any sort.”

From just paperless to purposeful: An ECM vision takes shape

By 2010, HFG files containing 10 years of data were simply too big to manage and too hard to find. “We’d already added a scanning clerk and a designated file clerk, but it was quickly becoming an operational nightmare, with more staff to manage and more documents getting misplaced,” Mroue remembers.

The irony is that when the firm’s search for a proper enterprise content management (ECM) solution brought Mroue to Laserfiche, it was not the first time. “We first looked into Laserfiche in 2006, but back then, we weren’t looking at ECM in terms of business process automation or any bigger-picture operational improvements,” he says. “We just wanted to get rid of the paper.”

Working with Patrick Welsch of Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital, Mroue began to see how integral ECM deployment was to not only keep up with, but also anticipate, Hewitt’s projected growth. “We looked at a few solutions, and they all did things in their own way. Only Laserfiche offered the flexibility to develop our own folder structures and templates—and we’d be able to change them depending on requirements without calling in a consultant,” Mroue says.

“Plus, we required that Laserfiche integrate with our Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Intuit Lacerte tax software, as well as send Microsoft Office documents directly to Laserfiche. We wanted everything to mesh together, other systems either didn’t integrate, or if they did, it was going be complicated and expensive.”

Ease and familiarity of use speeds an already speedy deployment

HFG purchased a 15-user Laserfiche Avante system with Web Access (for deployment to its Ventura County office) and Audit Trail in December of 2010. With April 15 on the horizon, initial deployment focused on the tax preparation side of HFG’s business, beginning with a substantial backlog conversion of paper files. “Considering the holidays, it took around 30 days to deploy, customize and integrate the system. We had one day of training for full-time staff. And it took me 30 minutes to train the part time staff on how they’d be using Laserfiche,” Mroue recalls. The ease of deployment was significant, he adds—based in no small part on Laserfiche’s ability to mirror the firm’s familiar paper filing structures. Tax worksheets are automatically sent to Laserfiche with a single click from Microsoft Office programs, while all forms from the Intuit Lacerte system are sent to Laserfiche using Snapshot.

“We were able to mimic our exact process in the Laserfiche system. Nothing changed for staff; I told them, ‘The client file doesn’t exist—it’s now a client folder.’ That made it easy for the employees to understand the change. Instead of people getting up and moving files from cabinets, it ‘jumps’ by itself,” Mroue says.

Workflow makes a $20,000/1,000 hour difference

The jumping-by-itself, Mroue continues, is the result of implementing Laserfiche Workflow. “A file used to jump between seven sets of hands, from client meeting to the client delivery,” he begins. “File clerk/ front desk staff/preparer/checker/scanner/processor/mail clerk, and back to the file clerk.”

“Now, using Workflow, the front desk sets up the appointment and creates the file for the preparer, and it’s just ‘click’ the field, ‘approve,’ ‘approve,’ ‘approve,’ all the way through the process. If something isn’t approved, it is sent back automatically with a ‘sticky note’ on the document in Laserfiche. Nobody has to leave their desk, and I can monitor the whole process and see where everything is so I know what’s getting done. It just raises the level of efficiency and accountability,” he adds.

“Operationally, we had the best tax season ever, especially for me since I could monitor every detail of the business and everyone’s performance from my screen,” Mroue says. “We delivered content on a CD instead of paper, so we used five boxes of paper instead of 50, plus we saved a lot on postage. We also saved the cost of our part time clerks—which is about $20,000 a year. We made our ROI in the first year alone. But the biggest savings was the preparers’ time—at least 10 minutes for every hour. When you add that up, that’s literally a thousand hours our staff can spend working with more clients.”

Coincidentally, the firm’s Laserfiche installation and training took place right around the time of the annual Empower 2011 Laserfiche Institute Conference in January, inspiring an even quicker adoption. “Everyone from our office agreed the Conference was pretty amazing in the amount of knowledge provided,” Mroue adds. “I was actually able to continue writing the Workflow automations for our tax preparation process at the Conference.”

Expanding deployment, saving more clicks with image-enablement integration

As of June 2011, the firm has extended scanning to Al Hewitt, Inc., its RIA firm. “Our goal is to eliminate all the files in our office by the end of August—which will free up a big space,” Mroue says.

For next tax season, Mroue says HFG will utilize Cities Digital’s Unfetterfiche to image-enable their Lacerte system with a single hot key. Deployment for the Al Hewitt, Inc./RIA side of the business is also being mapped out. “Each client file has about six folders, so that transition will be immensely beneficial,” he says.

“We’re taking things step by step,” Mroue adds. “One thing we’ve learned from this process is that in order for the transition to a totally paperless environment to be successful, users have to accept it and want to use it. Laserfiche has the flexibility to make that happen.”

For his part, however, Mroue is very satisfied. “From an IT standpoint, Laserfiche is easy to maneuver and to develop and change. You’re not going back and asking the VAR for help all the time, so it won’t cost you money down the road,” he says. “We’re already thinking about upgrading the system and adding more users.”

When Eastmont Towers’ Health Care Administrator Beth Nelsen RN, CHPN, began exploring enterprise content management systems, she soon discovered that “paperless” meant a lot more than just empty file cabinets. “First, we looked at outsourcing to a company that would scan our records onto disks,” remembers Nelsen, “but we were concerned about how we’d be able to use the information once it was digitally stored.”

Not to mention, outsourcing may have gotten rid of the paper—but it created an entirely new set of compliance concerns. Nelsen next began to explore solutions the agency could configure, use and administer in-house.

Quick Fields and Workflow: impressive possibilities

Kathy Gentile of Laserfiche reseller Bishop Business Equipment had worked with Eastmont Towers as an MFP hardware provider. Gentile, Bishop’s Laserfiche Document Management Specialist, invited Records Management staff from the agency to attend a workshop to see Laserfiche in action. Nelsen and her staff saw how Laserfiche Quick Fields could create files on the fly. Once files were created, Workflow could then notify decision makers of pending approvals and track those approvals throughout multiple business processes.

Nelsen was impressed. “We fell in love with Workflow,” she says, citing how it could help the agency:

• Transmit insurance information to the billing office.
• Send lab results to physicians.
• Route medication orders to the pharmacy.

“We’re a multidisciplinary team caring for people across a continuum, so that ability to share documents between departments, reduce paperwork and improve communication would greatly increase efficiency and positively impact patient care,” she adds.

Thus inspired, Nelsen and her team purchased a 30-user Laserfiche Rio pilot system and have spent the first half of this year preparing to roll it out. “Laserfiche Rio made the most sense in terms of meeting our immediate needs. It includes Workflow and the Records Management component to work with our EMR, as well as unlimited servers.

“As we progress, we can just add users to grow the system to meet our future needs and goals. Scalability was a big factor in choosing Laserfiche Rio,” Nelsen explains.

Goodbye filing cabinets, hello automated patient charting

Eastmont Towers’ medical records staff is now halfway through a backlog conversion process that Nelsen anticipates will eliminate at least four filing cabinets by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Nelsen and her staff have been analyzing business processes to guide the upcoming implementation. “After we had our initial training, we sat down to map out what exactly we do with our documents, where they are sent and why,” she says.

Initial focus has been on automating the patient charting process to compile and distribute client records and information as they enter Eastmont Towers from hospitals and other healthcare agencies. “We have several departments we need to route various information to, so we needed a way to streamline and simplify everything coming in and have it work with our EMR so staff could find everything in one place,” explains Nelsen.

Eastmont Towers is currently working with Gentile and Laserfiche consultants Our Support Services to automate and streamline the patient charting process:

• When a patient transfers to Eastmont’s Skilled Nursing facility, Quick Fields generates a chart by recognizing document types from an Excel spreadsheet.
• Quick Fields then populates metadata template fields according to patient name and ID number.
• Quick Fields then builds the folder structure out according to what documents fall under respective chart headings.
• Workflow then notifies the pharmacy and dietician according to document type (nutrition information, etc.).

Prior to implementing Laserfiche, paper files all had chart tab dividers. Every time a document was added to that tab, all documents had to be removed from the file so new information could be filed in the appropriate spot, then documents would be replaced in the folder and the folder refiled. A new feature in Laserfiche 8.2, dynamic fields, greatly simplifies this process, Gentile explains.

“When a ‘tab’ item is selected from the ‘Chart Tab’ field drop down, the ‘Chart Doc Type’ drop down list automatically populates to correspond with the documents that fall under that ‘Chart Tab’ category,” she says. “It’s saved staff a lot of time.”

Immediate practicalities, limitless possibilities

As Nelsen and her team continue to come up with ideas for future process automation, she sees even more potential for Laserfiche. “We wanted something that was would be fairly easy for the end user to learn but that also could streamline our processes better, and Laserfiche has met and exceeded our expectations,” she says.

Next up, she says, are integrations with the agency’s Keane clinical and financial software to support current EMR deployment and refine and automate processes in the Accounting Department. “We see a lot of value in having an ECM system that’s flexible and adaptable enough to meet clinical and non-clinical needs throughout our agency,” Nelsen adds.

“We have a lot of time and resources invested in our existing technology, so it’s important that Laserfiche enables us to build on the progress we’ve already made without interrupting the ways we’re used to working. Plus, the way Rio’s set up, we can keep building with it, which is very appealing to us. Technology’s always changing and Laserfiche is a great tool to adapt along with it.”

Screenshot of Eastmont Towers' table used to populate the template's dynamic fields by chart type.

The drop-down menu where users select Chart Doc Type to automatically populate the list with specific documents, instead of having to manually sort through tab dividers to find the paper file.

At the same time, Chelsea had been experiencing what Hyland terms “a slowdown” with some departments—IT and the Inspectional Services Department (ISD) among them—facing staff reductions of up to 15–25%. For Joseph Cooney, Director of Inspectional Services, servicing the FOIA/public records requests his department received every week from real estate agents and lawyers was affecting overall service levels. “We’re down enough staff that to devote one or two people to spend a whole day finding and copying paperwork to fulfill requests was just brutal,” says Cooney.

Filling a need, launching a vision

In 2009, Chelsea IT and ISD combined efforts to go before the Chelsea City Council to propose implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) system to address the problem. “It was a pretty easy sell,” recalls Hyland. His vision was to acquire a system that eventually all departments would use, with ISD leading the way. “ISD had the immediate need and the 100-year-old documents that made the case for digitization that drove the project.”

Out of the three vendor responses to the city’s RFP, it was the Laserfiche Avante ECM system proposed by Mike McDonough of area reseller Duplitron that met all the city’s requirements the most cost-effectively. “Several cities in our area were also already using Laserfiche,” Hyland notes. Faced with his own staff reductions, Hyland was especially encouraged by the idea of using Web Access to deploy, administer and eventually expand the system. “We have a virtualized environment, so the Web-based client made the most sense for us,” Hyland says. “The less desktop installation we need, the more resourceful it is for my staff, and Web-based deployment means more users can use the system from any browser in our intranet.”

For his part, Cooney was won over when Chelsea’s Deputy City Manager, a resident of neighboring city Peabody, showed him how that city’s Laserfiche Web Portal made public information instantly searchable and available from its website. “He literally typed in his name and every document came with his name in it came up right away. I was like, ‘That’s awesome. I’m sold.’”

Searchable, viewable, sendable

In April of 2009, the city purchased a 10-user Laserfiche Avante system with Import Agent and Web Access. Initial deployment targeted the ISD’s overflowing storerooms. Cooney’s staff began scanning in the 45 filing cabinets of building, electrical, zoning, etc. inspections, ranging from bulky legal size file jackets to 3×5 cards. Laserfiche in turn made all the documents, regardless of size, age or number of pages, immediately searchable by address and viewable as a series of thumbnail images. The improvement for Cooney and his staff was immediate. “We could literally be on the phone with a request, type in the address, ask, ‘What’s your email?’ And ‘Boom, boom, boom, see ya later’—it’s sent and done,’” says Cooney. “All our inspection notices coming in now are scanned in. We’re not bogged down at all.”

Building on the ISD’s initial success, deployment has followed to the City Clerk’s office, which has merged with the Licensing office to further consolidate and optimize departmental functions and systems. Planned implementations include the city’s Law Department, which, like ISD two years ago, has nowhere to go but the attic of City Hall with its file cabinet overflow. Hyland expects more to follow. “We envisioned the system to be something more and more departments will be using,” he says, noting that this makes sense not only from an IT resource perspective, but also in terms of establishing a single point of control for governance. “Our next step would be to securely open up our information to the community.”

Turning ‘physical ROI’ into a practical framework for increased efficiency and governance

To that end, Chelsea is considering a potential upgrade to Laserfiche Rio, which would include a WebLink Public Portal, similar to the one used in neighboring Peabody. With the ISD success as a cornerstone, he says, the idea at least has a fighting chance. “The reality is that using Laserfiche has given us a ‘physical ROI’ in terms of getting rid of hundreds of filing cabinets, so we have that foundation and momentum to work from.” With modest IT resources and city staff often wearing many hats (City Clerk Deborah Clayman also serves as de facto Records Manager, for instance), a Rio upgrade would offer Chelsea bite-sized benefits of an ECM strategy (incremental deployment/licensing; increased governance; simplified records management; test server environments) without the city—or Hyland’s modest staff—biting off more than they can chew.

The possibilities are many—from simply having a single, centralized repository for documents generated by all city departments to replacing its current PDF-based online documents available with links to view documents (with appropriate redactions) right from subdirectories in the Laserfiche repository. There are also other potential projects, from image-enabling the Police Department’s CAD/RMS system through its current SharePoint deployment to linking the city’s cloud-based GIS system to the centralized Laserfiche repository. Hyland is as hopeful as he is realistic. “Right now our concept of ‘workflows’ are limited to file-sharing,” he says. “But I think when once we get all the departments online, we’ll be able talk about how that will work for us and what ECM can do project by project.”

By 2004, handling all that paper manually had become so inefficient that the ASR Office’s Property Transfers Division was five months behind in processing documents, illustrating just how antiquated, inflexible and relatively unresponsive policies and procedures had become.

This led to the implementation of a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system in 2006. Utilizing Quick Fields to intelligently capture and process years of tax documents previously stored on microfilm, the impact was sweeping and immediate. Using Web Access, staff could now find and complete the review process without being tethered to their desks. Property transfers that took five months to process now only took 15 days. Reviewers could also stamp documents using electronic annotations. “On average, search and retrieval time per employee used to be two hours a week. Now, it’s less than 25 minutes a week,” says Vito Filippi, Systems and Procedures Analyst.

Quick Fields finds vroom for improvements

In fact, Filippi says, applying Laserfiche to the ASR Office’s operational framework exposed just how much more room there was for improvement. “We realized our people were supporting the processes instead of the processes supporting the needs of the department,” he explains. Between budget cuts, consolidation and attrition––from over 200 staff in 2008 to what would become its present 149 employees––the loss of institutional knowledge underscored the siloed, disconnected nature of how business was done, especially as the demand for services increased.

A Laserfiche upgrade in 2009 introduced the expanded capture functionality of Quick Fields––and a closer look at the status quo. “When we moved from Laserfiche 7 to 8.1 [in 2009], the enhancements to the Search function and Quick Fields capabilities––because that’s what we use the most––really were the catalysts that got us asking ‘How can we improve our processes?’” says Filippi. “The templates and ability to run batch sessions overnight had such an impact on how we were indexing that we began to analyze what we were doing in the first place. We were able to drill down our processes to where the bottlenecks were and apply Quick Fields to assist us in finding efficiencies.”

The ensuing improvements were game changing:

1. Changes of Ownerships that took 5–15 days now take 48–72 hours. The Property Transfers division is now 90% paperless.
2. The Personal Property area of the Business division now receives and processes 20% of its 30,000 business property statements within Laserfiche.
3. The Business Property Division saw a 20% reduction in paper statements processed.

“Adapting Quick Fields is to the different processes that we have at both the micro- and macro-level has been especially effective,” says Filippi.

Enterprise, naturally; Process automation, repeatedly

In the fall of 2010, Fresno County upgraded to Laserfiche Rio, including a WebLink Public Portal, which has both expanded the depth of efficiencies while formalizing an e-governance and enterprise risk management strategy. Filippi is confident that the upgrade and new features will go a long way to ensuring the sustainability of core business processes that meet service expectations in the years to come.

The decision to upgrade to Rio, he says, was based on its inherent scalability and bundled functionality—including Audit Trail and the Records Management Edition. “Rio made sense for how we’ve seen Laserfiche evolve,” Filippi says––that and the fact that the county can now use Laserfiche Workflow to automate review and approval processes. “We know we’re going to get the biggest bang for our buck from Workflow.” One process in particular, he continues, will be Business Property audits. “We’ve got airlines such as Sky West and agricultural companies like Dole that we are mandated to assess and audit annually. These audits can easily run 300–400 pages. Each part has to be reviewed by an auditor, which could be verifying an audit page by page or just going to a summary page. With Workflow, by the time the audit comes to them, they can go straight to the final calculations page and review the numbers from the junior auditor. That’s going to have a huge impact on productivity and efficiency.”

The combination of Quick Fields and Workflow will also enable an intelligent capture process that the ASR Office will use to reduce paper use in 85% of state-mandated forms and questionnaires sent out annually to agricultural businesses within the county. “We used to have 35,000 pieces of paper that needed to be opened and processed manually. Each piece of paper would have to cross three different skill sets and touch half a dozen individuals in three divisions. In the near future, one person will capture the document as soon as it arrives using the import feature in Snapshot, and then Quick Fields will pull the data off the questionnaires in real time and auto index it. Now, it’s in our system in 30 minutes.”

The WebLink portal will make ASR documents available online, transferring “ownership,” as Filippi puts it, of documents to citizens. “It’s not only efficient in terms of responsiveness, but it also makes government more transparent,” he says.

The move to Rio, he says, has not only been cost-effective, but supports an overall governance and enterprise risk management strategy. “Governance means different things depending on whom you’re talking to, but it’s essentially how we’re making information secure and available, responding to our citizens and maintaining transparency as efficiently and effectively as possible,” Filippi notes. “We’re no longer dependent on the county’s central IT department to administer, support and respond to our business requirements, and now we have the tools to gather the metrics that allow us to improve productivity and performance. It makes us more agile and responsive, whether that’s to citizens’ requests or to state mandates.”

Future plans include making ECM functionality available as a shared service for use county-wide. For instance, the Real Property division is collaborating with local city governments to move all the Permitting and Plans to electronic formats for processing within Laserfiche at the ASR Office using Quick Fields. Besides the four departments already using Laserfiche (ASR, Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector, Department of Public Works and the Sheriff), the Behavioral Health Services department and Department of Social Services are both looking into implementing Laserfiche as well. Filippi, for one, is confident more will follow: “It’s been a very organic and positive process. Now the technology supports our business needs, not vice versa.”

Implementing ahead of inclement weather

Meyer says the move toward ECM was a proactive one. “For us, it was the general idea that we could increase efficiency by saving time and money while continuing to improve client service that first got us interested in an ECM. Also, the disaster recovery aspect really attracted us.”

As both an advisor and the firm’s IT Manager, Meyer brought a unique perspective to the search for an ECM. “Naturally, being in the financial services industry, auditing, security and compliance were simply ‘must haves.’ After that, flexibility and scalability were important to us in an ECM—we wanted a system that could grow with us over time as our business evolved,” he says.

The firm looked at several ECM solutions, including cloud-based options, before deciding on Laserfiche. “Laserfiche was the most feature-rich of the solutions we looked at in terms of the comprehensive functionality it offered,” he recalls. “Quick Fields, Bar Code Plug-In, Zone OCR, Audit Trail, Workflow—these were all appealing because they either directly or indirectly addressed our ‘must haves,’” he says. At the same time, Meyer continues, Laserfiche would improve day-to-day operations. “We wanted to reduce costs, and we found from talking to other firms using Laserfiche and reading about the software that, first, Laserfiche saves time—employees spend less time searching for documents. Second, it saves on paper and printing costs; and third, it saves on storage costs of client files and other documents.”

Last, but not least, Meyer adds, Laserfiche is a name synonymous with ECM in the financial services industry. “Having a tried-and-true, trusted name in document management was important to us as well,” he says. “The system was already approved by our broker dealer, Commonwealth Financial Network, which was also a plus.”

Laserfiche’s impact was felt not long after implementation. “The savings in time and paper realized after just one quarter was significant,” Meyer recalls. “We used to scan a copy of each quarterly report to a PDF using a multi-function copy machine (MFP). Someone would have to manually rename and file each report. At that time, we also kept a duplicate copy on file. Using Quick Fields and the Bar Code Plug-In, we were able to scan all of our reports and have them renamed and filed instantly. We also eliminated the need to keep a physical copy.”

Soon, hundreds of client files dating back to 1985 were scanned into Laserfiche, eliminating the need for several bookshelves and filing cabinets. While Meyer admits it was “a paradigm shift” for some employees to move from a paper-based system to a paperless one, after they experienced how they could literally file things automatically and then find them instantly, they embraced the concept completely. The transition brought peace of mind—and cost savings.

“There’s a reassurance in knowing that all of our important documents are stored electronically and backed up off-site, ensuring access to the data even if something were to happen to our office,” Meyer says, adding, “employees now have the option of accessing documents remotely [over Fure’s secured network], so they can work from anywhere.”

A key component to true enterprise consolidation of the firm’s information was working with reseller Cities Digital to integrate Laserfiche with CRM solution Junxure. “Before Laserfiche, we used to have some digital files in the CRM, some paper documents in a large client file and some documents in different filing cabinets; it was very disjointed,” he recalls. “Now, with the two systems integrated, we have one centralized location for statements, account paperwork, estate plans, correspondence and all relevant material related to a client.”

Automating compliance with Workflow

In addition, Laserfiche Workflow automates several business processes—chief among them logging client letters for compliance review. “We no longer need to make copies, depend on a person to manually log each letter, compile all letters into a binder for review and signatures or fax the letters every week,” Meyer says of the familiar process. “We used to create three copies of every single client letter we sent out. Now, we simply scan one copy right at our MFP, which Laserfiche Import Agent OCRs and applies metadata to before moving it into Laserfiche.”

Then, Workflow renames the document and applies the correct metadata by referencing Fure’s Junxure SQL database. The document is then routed to the correct folders automatically, which a Fure senior advisor is then able to review and sign—all electronically. “Once the workflow is completed, it even e-mails the signed document to Commonwealth’s compliance department,” Meyer adds. “Import Agent and Workflow, with some custom scripts built by Cities Digital and an electronic signature pad, have taken that process completely paperless with one touch of the button on our MFP.”

Audit preparation has likewise benefitted from the centralization and automation—utilizing functionality as simple as a robust search and as comprehensive as Audit Trail. “Laserfiche allows us to pull the necessary documents together for an auditor extremely quickly instead of going through file cabinets,” Meyer says. “The security and auditing of documents is also important as we are able to prove the integrity of our documents; any activity or change with a document is right there.”

The Laserfiche advantage: weather-proofed is ‘future-proofed’

For a family-oriented firm like Fure, the little improvements add up as well. “We can train new hires much more quickly—the system is that intuitive. We’re not having to give tours of file drawers or a bank of cabinets anymore.”

Meyer says he can recommend Laserfiche on two levels: “From an IT standpoint, the program is very easy to administer, and the flexibility of Laserfiche and the highly customizable security options allowed me to tailor the program to fit our needs as far as setting up template fields, adding users and ensuring compliance,” he says. “From a user standpoint, Laserfiche allows our financial planning team to access client documents and pinpoint what we need, when we need it, which translates into more time spent with clients and generating revenue and less time on tracking things down. That’s the real benefit—the reclaimed time and effort.”

Still, for all the operational benefits he can identify, Meyer credits the long-term value of Laserfiche to fitting so well with the firm’s holistic business philosophy. “Having a powerful ECM system like Laserfiche allows our business to adjust to the changing environment that many small businesses in any industry face,” he says.

“The more agile and flexible your technology system can be, the more ‘future-proofed’ you can become,” Meyer adds. “While it’s very hard to predict exactly where compliance, government regulations, clients’ needs and technology will be in the future, Laserfiche allows us to prepare as much as possible. Staying on course, no matter which way the wind blows, means having to adapt as conditions change without compromising on the final destination.”

• Aspire Zone Foundation: Qatar’s largest athletic foundation chose Laserfiche over competing FileNet, Documentum and Ever Team solutions. Itqan was chosen to implement a 100-user Rio system for all five of Aspire’s companies after showing Aspire how easily Rio could integrate with existing line-of-business applications.
• Qatar Financial Markets Authority: Laserfiche was chosen as the ECM standard for the agency—which oversees the nation’s securities exchange—due to Laserfiche’s localized Arabic interface and extensive SDK.
• Lekhwiya (Qatari Royal Internal Security Force): After a six-month sales campaign, Lekhwiya chose Laserfiche Avante with Web Access to standardize reports and provide secure, remote access to records.

According to Mustafa Siddiqui, Head of Applications and Laserfiche Solutions, the sales increase has resulted from adopting a more consultative sales methodology. “Our success this year has come from positioning Laserfiche as the flexible, scalable ECM solution that adapts to meet an organization’s specific and changing needs,” Siddiqui says.

He mentions the Aspire Zone Foundation Rio project that will replace Aspire Logistics’ legacy Primavera Expedition construction management system while utilizing 10 workflows and establishing an ECM infrastructure. “We’re looking to close another 1,000 licenses in Q2,” Siddiqui adds.

The success has been good for Laserfiche’s profile in Qatar. “FileNet has traditionally been the prominent EDMS player, but we’re proving how relevant the Laserfiche Agile ECM messaging is to the market here,” he says. With the support of Muath Khatatbeh, CEO of parent company Itqan Holding, Siddiqui’s team added staff to establish its own separate Laserfiche division last quarter.

Before then, IT Director Lewis Paskin recalls PBC’s paper-based processes becoming overly cumbersome as the company grew, while escalating costs were adversely affecting profitability. There were shipping costs to receive charts; clerical costs to collate charts; and labor costs to copy, sort, log and distribute charts for coding, data entry and accounts receivable. “Adding to the paper overload were insurance claims that resulted in inbound Explanation of Benefits [EOB], patient payments, receipts, checks and correspondence—all of which needed to be opened, logged, accounted for and dispensed with daily,” Paskin says. “There were also significant paper costs from producing coding sheets for charts, making multiple copies of EOBs and eventually the long term offsite storage costs, as well as the HIPAA concerns that come with having all this copied and ‘travelling’ paper.”

Paskin led an internal committee to assess PBC’s needs in an enterprise content management (ECM) solution and began to search around four key features:

• Security.
• Accessibility.
• Accountability.
• Simplicity of user interface.

“We needed to make sure that billing records were easily retrievable, that protected health information was secure and that we could account for all our documents,” Paskin explains. “But we also needed a solution that was cost-effective and scalable. Our immediate goal was to be able to store billing records electronically, but our long term goal was a completely paperless workflow.”

Finding an ECM solution that fit—and would keep on fitting

PBC’s search soon took them to Laserfiche, and specifically to Laserfiche reseller JPI Data Resource. Paskin, for one, was initially skeptical. “When they said Laserfiche could dynamically create folders and structures as well as automatically extract text from documents, I told them I’d be shocked if it could. But it did,” he laughs.

“The Laserfiche product fulfilled our requirements,” Paskin continues, “but it was how it did it—the fact that it was really simple but also very powerful in terms of processing information—that’s how we knew it made sense for us. We have some of the least technical and most technical people working with our information, sometimes in a similar capacity. So, seeing how a staff member could just drop a document in a scanner and how Quick Fields automatically pulls and files all the metadata, or how Workflow would mean our users wouldn’t have to leave their desks, this was functionality we’d see improvements with immediately.”

Working with JPI’s Joseph Gutierrez, Paskin and his PBC team designed a 20-user Laserfiche system including Audit Trail; Workflow and Quick Fields; Bar Code and Zone OCR; Scan Connect and Snapshot for capture; and set up five different scanning stations. Installation, Paskin notes, was completed in less than a day, while user training took less than three days.

Paskin credits the comprehensive capture methods with making the transition to an automated environment a smooth one. “We’ve found that working with whatever file format a hospital is using with minimal modification is our best way to retrieve data,” Paskin says. “We do a lot of scanning directly into Laserfiche from our hospital clients’ facilities, which makes for a wide differential in chart documents. Some hospitals send charts with barcodes, others use file names, some just send text, but through the various Laserfiche applications we ferret out a way to get the data into the system.”

The biggest improvement, he notes, has been in processing paper. “Staff now simply scan those documents, either separated by bar-coded index sheets or by utilizing Zone OCR, into Laserfiche. Quick Fields reads the patient’s name and ID from the bar codes and automatically indexes the scanned files and fills in all the necessary document metadata.”

The effect was as impressive as it was immediate. “We were able to migrate one of our largest volume clients to a completely paperless environment in less than a week. Then we started bringing our other client applications online,” Paskin says.

Scanning volume soon hit 50,000 pages a day. “We scanned over 200,000 documents containing over 2.5 million pages in just under one year,” he adds.

The process(es) of coding and billing, better and more efficiently

The impact on PBC’s business processes was transformative:

• Laserfiche Import Agent constantly monitors the multiple directories PBC has set up to receive files.
• Laserfiche Quick Fields then extracts and sorts data, which triggers Workflow to route files to the respective departments that need to touch the document before it moves forward and is finally archived.
• If any predefined criterion is missing, Workflow automatically reroutes the record to the appropriate department for further follow up.

Previously, PBC’s coders signed out up to three days’ worth of charts and held them at their desks until coding was completed. Charts were then passed in bulk to the insurance review department, then on to data entry for manual entry to initiate billing before eventually being archived in a file room and sent to an offsite storage facility. Now, PBC coders work and code offsite, accessing information over a secure connection to PBC’s terminal servers.

“An entire team of people no longer need to work in the office—everything’s accessed and managed centrally through Laserfiche,” adds Paskin. As the coders finish a chart, it automatically moves through the workflow to the next department, speeding up and evening out the process from inbound chart to billing.

“We have over 10 different client applications that reside in Laserfiche—five of which are hospital-related, and three that are used by our Accounts Receivable (AR) department to look up claim denials, track work batches and store EOBs. We’re using it in more than five distinct departments including coding, claims processing, AR, finance and Human Resources; it’s our document management back-end for all our lines of business,” Paskin says.

This centralized control has improved oversight to monitor productivity as well as to ensure HIPAA compliance. Using Audit Trail, a document ID number can trace the file’s history. “We can see who changed what—and when—for every document,” says Paskin.

Another benefit, Paskin adds, is the ability to use SAP Crystal Reports tools to help monitor PBC’s workflow. “We have about 15–20 reports that go out daily—one of which is referred to as our ‘bucket report.’ When we receive a medical chart, getting it coded and billed quickly is key to cash flow. The bucket reports tell us how many charts are sitting in a user’s folder. Because all this data is in a single, centralized repository, it’s easy to create reports,” says Paskin. “I credit Joe and JPI with understanding our business well enough to show us how we should have our information structured.”

Automating the billing process itself, Paskin notes, “works essentially the same way it does in the Laserfiche brochure that JPI showed us initially. Again, everything’s in a single and straightforward database. We simply wrote Java and Web-related scripts to pull the account number, CPT and diagnosis codes to automate the actual billing process. Of course, there was controlled testing for about two weeks before we went live, but that was it.”

Now, PBC’s business processes are synonymous with Laserfiche—and significantly improved. Paskin points to processing the hundreds of charts sent to PBC on any given day. “That used to take three employees a full day to process manually; now it takes one person about 15 minutes.

“Our original vision was a paperless workflow, and we’ve pretty much achieved that. We have over 800,000 documents representing 10 million pages, and that all happened within the past 2 ½ years,” he adds. “We have redeployed 60% of our FTE’s required to produce a claim, and no longer need a night shift to keep up with the workload. Considering how far we’ve come, it’s pretty amazing.”

For more information, read Laserfiche’s ECM for Third Party Medical Billing brochure.

Read more about PBC.

• Municipio de Monterrey: Expert Data expanded the city’s 15-user Avante system by implementing Quick Fields, Workflow, Audit Trail and Web Access to automate check and invoice processing in its Accounting Department.
• Grupo Materias Primas: This leading manufacturer of ceramic minerals chose Laserfiche over a competing Docuware solution because of Quick Fields Real Time Look-up’s ability to access a third-party database to meet compliance and functionality requirements.
• Grupo Agora: Expert Data closed a 15-user Avante deal with this prominent construction firm by developing an integration with its contract management software, and is now utilizing Web Access to deploy the system remotely.

According to Gasi Fayad, CEO of Expert Data, this recent pattern of success has been the result of embracing a consultative sales strategy that emphasized solutions, not products. “By focusing extensively on discovery and needs assessment, we’ve been able to tailor our demos in such a way to show that Laserfiche is a comprehensive answer to the problems a prospective client is facing,” he says.

“At the same time, we’ve been able to create a lot of opportunity, both with new and existing clients, to determine where Laserfiche can be more actively deployed to enhance and streamline business processes, and that’s also proven quite successful,” Fayad adds.

Besides the already low user adoption rate, the county faced stringent formatting for annual submission of digital copies of its land management records (“fee book pages”) to the state’s County Land Records Information Services (CLRIS) agency—now the Iowa Land Records System (ILR)—utilizing an application provided by the state to upload images. Or at least it was supposed to.

“We were never able to get this integration set up with our old system,” Koehler admits. “We had to pay the ILR an extra $2,500 in fees because we were simply unable to submit our images to the state.”

Agility in Action, Part 1: A New System for Less Than an Upgrade

By January of 2010, Koehler faced a challenge—and a choice. The county was on version 5 of EMC Application Xtender (AX), and it was being phased out by provider EMC/Documentum. So not only was Koehler’s team facing a mandatory upgrade, but also a service agreement renewal. And they were still likely facing $2,500 annually in fees to the state for fee book page submission.

“We were looking at a substantial enough reinvestment to retain our current system that it made sense to start looking at other solutions,” he says.

Koehler researched other CLRIS/ILR-approved systems and discovered Laserfiche via Advanced Systems, Inc. (ASI) based nearby in Waterloo, IA, which had a relationship with the county from servicing its printer and copiers. ASI solutions consultant Steve Lewis showed Koehler how Laserfiche’s Quick Fields Zone OCR component could capture and index information from specific areas of land records forms, which could then be used to submit images to ILR utilizing the state’s uploading application.

What’s more, implementing Laserfiche could address all of the county’s information management needs in a single system—at less cost than upgrading their existing system.

Agility in Action, Part 2: Deployment to Six Departments in Two Months

In March 2010, Bremer County purchased a 24-user Laserfiche Avante system with Quick Fields advanced capture, Import Agent and SDK. Just two months later, Laserfiche was successfully deployed to six county departments:

• Auditor
• Treasurer
• Attorney
• Recorder
• Assessor
• Building and Zoning

Each department was equipped with a scan station that Shane Peterson, solutions engineer at Advanced Systems, set up to automatically recognize and retrieve index information based on the standard forms used by each department.

The impact on scanning efficiency was immediate: in the Assessor’s office, four stacks of tax credit forms two feet tall were scanned and indexed within a few days. “Quick Fields automated all our scanning processes in all our departments,” Koehler says.

Agility in Action, Part 3: Six Months of Scanning in Less Than a Week

To illustrate the scale of improvement, Koehler uses the example of Bremer County’s Zoning Department. “Zoning was six months behind on their scanning,” he begins. “It would have taken staff over a month and a half to scan in all those documents using our old system. Instead, using Quick Fields, we were able to get those documents scanned in less than a week.”

At the same time, Koehler adds, staff who had given up on the previous system and scanning in general have warmed up to Laserfiche. “I am starting to see more people getting rid of the paper and using Laserfiche,” he says.

The end result of significantly improved scanning, Koehler says, is the reclaimed staff time. “We can devote the man hours we save from scanning for other projects.”

Agility in Action, Part 4: Integration Saves $2,500 in Fines

By November of 2010, Bremer County was submitting land records’ fee book pages automatically to the ILR, thanks to a combination of Quick Fields, Laserfiche Workflow and a custom integration developed by ASI:

• When staff in the Recorder’s Office scan land records, Quick Fields automatically retrieves index information from the image utilizing Zone OCR and Pattern Matching.
• Workflow then sends the image from a processing folder to a completed folder in the Laserfiche repository, where a custom integration exports the image and index information into an XML file.
• The XML file is then used to send the image to the state.
• This index information is then searchable by both the county and the state to tie the image to other pertinent index information about the land record.

Koehler says this process is not only more efficient, but more cost-effective, too. “We’re no longer charged $2,500 in fines for not providing the digital documents to the state that was such a problem with our old system,” he says.

Agility in Action, Part 5: Adding the Sheriff’s Office and More

The newest chapter of Bremer County’s information management overhaul has been the 2011 addition of five more named users for the Sheriff’s Office, which will use its own repository to catalogue video, photographs, ticketing, incident reports and other documents. The expanded implementation will include Laserfiche Web Access to enable the county attorney to retrieve information without going to the Sheriff’s Office to request that a detective put files on a disk for the attorney to review.

Koehler notes that with the addition of the Sheriff’s Office comes enhanced document security concerns. “We’ll be utilizing the auto-redaction capabilities of Quick Fields for more sensitive information, but we’re also able to manage the system from a central point of control,” he says.

Laserfiche use, Koehler predicts, will keep growing with each departmental success story. “The remaining three departments that don’t use Laserfiche are seeing how much the other departments love its ease of use and speed, so they’re starting to ask how they can use it too.”

• Kaplan International Centers. AMI leveraged PDP partner Cambridge Conections’s Docs-on-the-Cloud to develop a 200-user Rio pilot system for the Fortune 500 company, beating out a competing CompuThink solution.
• City of San Luis Obispo. The reseller recently added Web Access to a 100-user Avante system as part of an ongoing implementation that includes EnerGov and ESRI GIS integrations.
• Northrop Grumman. AMI is completing a MSSQL-to-Oracle server upgrade and utilizing the Laserfiche SDK to complete customizations for the aerospace company.

According to President George Bandarian II, the increase in sales is the direct result of “embracing” Laserfiche agile ECM messaging to successfully present function-rich solutions with the flexibility to grow with a customer’s business. “We don’t sell ‘document management,’” says Bandarian. “Everything we talk about is related to process optimization.”

Bandarian adds that AMI has supported this message by promoting staff to Technical Support Specialist positions. As a result, AMI has become more competitive as an ECM provider, as evidenced by the success of the Kaplan International Centers project.

“We utilized PDP partner Docs-On-the-Cloud to implement a cloud-based pilot implementation to satisfy the company’s UK IT Director,” he says. “With the encouragement of Kaplan’s U.S. IT Director, we were then able to show his counterparts in Australia, New Zealand and Canada that Rio’s scalability made it the most efficient and cost-effective way to implement a global ECM standard for managing international student records and automating student onboarding.

“Our success is being able to create partnerships with our customers so they ultimately choose the best Laserfiche ECM solution for their needs,” Bandarian adds.

By 2007, CapitalCare’s decade of growth had the side effect of generating more paperwork than the group’s 14 offices could efficiently manage—at least not the way they had been. “We were on our fourth expansion in our central office building in Albany; our offices were running out of storage and our CBO had rooms of files and boxes everywhere. So we asked ourselves, ‘Why all this space for storage? Why all this time to find things?’” says Charles Hagstrand, CIO of CapitalCare. “After 10 years, we needed a solution to move us forward.”

Hagstrand envisioned a true enterprise content management (ECM) solution from the start, one that could manage CapitalCare’s spectrum of information needs, including 700,000 patient encounters a year being stored remotely to over 280,000 EOB documents generated annually, as well as other documents and business records associated with its various practices. Eventually shared back-office business processes would be automated, beginning with AP processing.

“Initially we looked at a lot of vendors who had products that handled specific document types, but we were looking for something that wouldn’t pigeonhole us,” recalls Hagstrand. “You see a lot of departmental applications in larger organizations. We wanted a single system that could fit a variety of needs in different departments, and that ultimately could grow with us.”Hagstrand found what CapitalCare was looking for when his evaluation team discovered Laserfiche through reseller JPI Data Resource. “It was the product’s versatility that really won us over,” he says. “We liked that Workflow was a push technology that could keep things moving more effectively.”

Adds Jason Wicks, business analyst, “Laserfiche was like one-stop shopping as far as addressing the range of projects we were looking at, from HR files to Accounting and through-processing contracts and invoices. It’s very flexible.”

Wicks worked with JPI and CapitalCare department heads to design and deploy a pilot 20-user Laserfiche system with Records Management Edition (RME) and Workflow. They mapped out a multi-phase implementation that would eventually include using RME to automate retention and compliance, as well as Workflow to route invoices from CapitalCare’s central business offices in Albany to the group’s various remote locations for AP processing.

The first order of business was addressing Hagstrand’s storage and access concerns. “We took the approach that we should start by working with the items that didn’t involve Workflow first,” Wicks says.

Implementation began with backlog conversion of a decade’s worth of historical files in the HR and Medical Management departments, “just taking paper and getting it in Laserfiche to get people used to archiving,” as Wicks puts it.

The impact was immediate. “Our first touch is our site managers who are working with our patient encounters—that totals over 700,000 documents a year,” Wicks explains. “We used to have to process those in our central business office, then send them back out to the sites to store for seven years. Now they’re all inputted when received from the site and accessed as needed through Laserfiche.”

Standardizing to streamline AP processing

The next phase of implementation deployed Workflow to help automate AP processing for CapitalCare’s accounting department—which has seen the number of sites it supports grow from 14 to 27 in the four years since Laserfiche was acquired in 2007.

“Before Laserfiche, AP processing wasn’t very efficient, nor was there a common practice for approving invoices,” Wicks explains. “Some bills were received at the site, approved and forwarded; others came to the CBO and were distributed for approval and return. Laserfiche allowed us to standardize the process, and that’s been a big time saver.”

Thanks to Laserfiche, turnaround time for AP processing was reduced from 7–10 days to 2–3:

• Invoices are now captured and sorted centrally using Quick Fields in CapitalCare’s Albany office.
• Workflow then automatically routes the invoices to the appropriate site managers, who are notified through email that they have a document to approve with a shortcut link to retrieve the document.
• Working in conjunction with a custom file export tool developed by JPI, approved documents are then automatically pushed from Laserfiche to CapitalCare’s Great Plains accounting system via QuickLinks and PaperSave.

“Accounting now knows what documents need approval and which documents are in a queue once the site has approved the document,” Wicks says. A backup copy of the exported document is created using Workflow, which, after 30 days, is automatically deleted by a Workflow activity.

The next phase, Wicks adds, will be to establish a centralized shared service center, where invoices will be processed directly from the central business office. “Workflow will set up queues for each of our sites’ accounting departments to process invoices,” he says.

An overall benefit, Wicks says, has come from the time saved making action items more available to site staff. “Although we have a separate solution to store patient medical information for continuity, middle management at each site—typically one or two employees—utilizes Laserfiche to access past patient encounters, approving invoices and coding corrections, and this has eliminated a lot of lag time.”

The future of the future: Workflow

Future projects are already slated—including implementing RME. “The functionality of Records Management Edition will assist with purging documents once they have reached their shelf life, while Audit Trail will help keep us in compliance,” Wicks says.

Hagstrand says even the IS Department has its own ideas for how to utilize the system. “We’re actually hoping to use Laserfiche to manage our service agreements, so we’ll be able to run queries and see what’s going to expire in the next year.”

“The system keeps evolving as we bring on more documents and processes,” add Wicks, pointing out that Workflow will play a more leading role in future deployment. “I’d say we’re at the grassroots of pushing information between sites and departments. Right now, I’m looking at any situation where we have an opportunity to push documents and how we can utilize Laserfiche to automate additional functions between our practices and our central business office,” he continues, noting a recent meeting with a business unit to discuss improving billing and coding through automation. “Workflow has really worked out for us because we can take the visual process of scanning documents and apply that to designing workflows—it’s very intuitive.”

This versatility, says Wicks, is why Laserfiche use continues to evolve. That, and Wicks makes sure CapitalCare’s 50 named users know just what’s possible using the system that solved their initial storage problems.

Says Wicks, “We need to do more education within the company to say ‘This is a lot more than just a scanning solution’ and hold a ‘Did you know?’ session.”

Level Four also operates as an Office of Supervisory Jurisdiction (OSJ) for Lincoln Financial Securities. From its corporate offices in Plano, Texas, Level Four works with branded offices in Irvine, CA; Austin, TX; and Lubbock, TX, as well as numerous self-branded offices throughout the United States.

With the growing footprint of the company came a growing amount of records, documents and files to be managed. So much so, that by 2004, Level Four’s corporate offices had a conspicuous presence: eight lateral file cabinets worth of client files, corporate invoices, compliance papers and financial records. “It seemed like the file cabinets had more office space than some of our senior advisors,” jokes Joe Globensky, Level Four’s chief financial officer (CFO).

The paperless vision—and the compliance concerns

Level Four began to look into the possibilities of going paperless using an enterprise content management (ECM) solution—but not without some concerns. “Our foremost requirement was that the solution needed to meet industry compliance standards so regulators and our broker-dealer at the time would accept the solution and see it as something that would allow our business to increase scale,” Globensky says. “’Would we be able to produce the records in a timely fashion, and could we show that documents, once stored, could not be altered? How would we back up files?’ These were the kinds of questions they had, and frankly, we had them to an extent as well. In an industry geared toward paper, we had to consider how our operations were going to be affected, positively or negatively.”

Fueled by a mix of practicality and pragmatism, Level Four didn’t have to look very far to find what they were looking for. “Several similar firms in the neighboring Dallas-Ft. Worth area were already using Laserfiche,” Globensky recalls. “We spoke with them and they had had the same concerns we did and none had any problems with Laserfiche. Especially the security—the fact that Laserfiche was used by the government and could meet Department of Defense security specifications was the main reason we chose it.

“When we factored in the amount of time and space we’d be saving, it made even more sense in terms of cost-efficiency,” he adds.
Initial implementation began in 2004 with a two-month backlog conversion of Level Four’s existing files. “Once we had everything in Laserfiche, it was our only source of document storage for our staff of five—we were essentially paperless,” Globensky says.

The effect on operations was swift and positive. “The system was pretty easy to use after only some introductory training. We noted improvements in day-to-day operations almost immediately in terms of the ease and speed of looking up files and documents,” Globensky remembers. “But what really stood out to us was how multiple users could be using the system at the same time, pulling up information, something that used to take 15-20 minutes—if the file wasn’t already on someone’s desk or misfiled—literally while they were on the phone with someone. ”

Growing the business, growing the solution, easing the audits

In 2007, Level Four moved its broker-dealer affiliation to Lincoln Financial Securities. Lincoln had concerns similar to what Level Four had back in 2004. The difference, Globensky says, is that Level Four had such a solid track record using Laserfiche, that Lincoln’s concerns were more a formality than a doubt. “They wanted to see our procedures on storing documents, backing up records, document access and again how this would allow for growth.”

The answer, it turns out, was “very much so.” By 2008, Level Four had opened its first branded office outside of Texas, and Laserfiche went right along with it. “As we’ve grown throughout the country, and experienced audits from a number of different organizations, remote deployment made a lot of sense,” Globensky says. “As the OSJ, we’re required to have copies of the files in our remote offices. Because our remote offices are a part of our Laserfiche system, they don’t need to keep paper files, which helps us keep track of everything from a single, secure hub, but also frees up their office space as well.”

Another benefit, Globensky adds, is more hassle-free audit preparation. “The ability to offer Laserfiche remotely has helped our offices be more prepared for compliance audits, either by the OSJ, broker/dealer or industry regulators,” he says.

Now, it’s the auditors themselves who have been remarking on the effectiveness of using Laserfiche. “We’ve received numerous comments from auditors about how easy Laserfiche makes the auditing process, how quickly we’re able to produce documents and how organized the office seems to be because of Laserfiche,” Globensky says.

Level, headed forward

As efficient as auditors think Laserfiche is, Globensky thinks it’s even more so.

“We haven’t necessarily put a hard number to what our ROI is, we just know the amount of time it saves us anytime we need to pull information from a file,” he says. “We provide a wide range of support services aimed at keeping our advisors in front of their clients, instead of being buried in non-revenue generating activities, and Laserfiche is a big part of that.”

And, he adds, Laserfiche is continuing to be a big part of Level Four’s pattern of sustained growth as well.

“In the beginning, our main reason for purchasing Laserfiche was to get rid of paper. But after a while, it’s not just about ‘getting rid’ of paper—it’s about how much more you do with your information, like being able to access it remotely, prepare for audits and still save on office space,” Globensky says.

“Going forward, we plan to work with our technology partners to ensure we’re getting the most out of our Laserfiche system, including streamlining our operations, using the system to its complete functionality and relying less on manual functions,” he concludes.

“We were about to cross the $25,000,000 AUM threshold for SEC registration. With that milestone also came the millstone of an SEC audit sometime during that first year of registration,” says Margaret Hubbard, CPA.

The firm identified a link between compliance and operational efficiency, and outlined their requirements accordingly:

1. SEC compliance proof.
2. Easy access to files.
3. Managing the sheer weight and volume of records even as a small firm.

The answer came later that year at a TD Ameritrade Institutional Conference Hubbard attended.

“Speakers there were talking about an industry-wide need for electronic document management and it rang true with us, both in terms of operational efficiency as well as simplifying compliance,” Hubbard recalls. Researching what other firms were using led Hubbard to Laserfiche. “We wanted a large, reputable solution provider with a lot of experience and excellent references,” she explains. “The biggest draw was that the U.S. government was using Laserfiche.”

Implementation took place over two days in late 2005. With five years of confirmations, monthly brokerage reports, forms and correspondence to input, as well as current paper-based processes to streamline, EMM looked to Laserfiche Quick Fields, especially its zone optical character recognition (Zone OCR) tools, to automate the capture process. Laserfiche installation was completed in a day, while fine-tuning the Quick Fields capture process took another day. “The operational improvement was immediate,” says Hubbard.

“Quick Fields became our file clerk”

“We had been manually filing every confirmation as it arrived by mail. After installing Laserfiche, we had the brokerage houses switch us to electronic delivery. Quick Fields became our file clerk,” says Hubbard.

EMM now receives a monthly download of client statements from its brokerage houses, which Quick Fields reads, processes and imports into each client’s Laserfiche file. “We used to get a heavy package by mail much later in the month than the current downloads are available. That took time and resources to sort through and file. If we ever needed to access a record, we had to locate the big fat file book by month, manually cross-index between alpha name and account number and then manually find the report by account number,” she explains.

“Now we get the information earlier, file it faster, find it instantly when needed, have a nice clear electronic copy if we need to print it out—which is rarely—and we don’t have to hurt ourselves moving all those bankers’ boxes.”

With Laserfiche now doing the heavy lifting, so to speak, the firm was able to use part-time help to complete backlog scanning and conversion of the five years’ worth of existing files over the course of the following year. That first year also marked another milestone/millstone: the first SEC audit of the newly-registered firm. Before Laserfiche, the process would have involved compiling paper files manually, taking staff time and resources that, to a small firm, significantly impact or distract from revenue-generating day-to-day operations.

With Laserfiche, Hubbard says, preparation was as simple as using the system’s comprehensive search functionality to respond to the auditor. “Our original need was really to successfully complete the SEC audit process, and that was more than met within a year of implementation when we had a very clean audit,” she says. “The auditor only stayed onsite half a day because we were able to almost instantly hand her everything she requested. We were able to clearly demonstrate our compliance with all regulations. Laserfiche was essential to that demonstration.”

Hubbard says the firm is encouraged with the improvements to both its day-to-day operations as well as the relative ease with which it proves compliance. EMM is now planning to implement a new CRM system (likely Junxure, according to Hubbard) in the second quarter of this year. A major selection consideration is the ease with which the chosen CRM system integrates with Laserfiche. “We’ve been consulting with Laserfiche and our reseller [Bits and Bytes Document Solutions of Dacula, GA] to help with our selection to make sure it integrates with our existing applications including our portfolio management software, Schwab Performance Technologies® PortfolioCenter®, and Microsoft® Outlook®.”

Proving the wisdom of implementing proven technology

Hubbard admits that the firm’s steps toward more automated business processes have belied a conservative approach to technology. But, she says, that’s all the part of the long-term vision: to be innovative—just with proven innovations.

“We seek to be second-generation adopters in terms of determining the best technology we need for our next level of growth,” she says. “We want solutions others have tested through trial and error so we don’t have to. None of us in our firm are techies, so we’ve learned we get more out of technology by working with proven solutions.”

The way Hubbard sees it, Laserfiche provides a modest-sized firm like EMM with the best of both worlds: industry-recognized success with the scalability to do more as the need arises and uses evolve. “Laserfiche has provided more power than we have been able to harness, and that’s exactly where we want to be. We discover more uses for the system monthly, and we’re confident that Laserfiche can more than keep up with our needs as we keep growing.”

• Copying and filing checks, purchase orders and invoices.
• Filing bank and vendor reconciliations and journal entries.
• Answering daily open records requests from vendors and departments district-wide.
• Making records available for auditors from internal, local and state agencies.

By 2008, file cabinets were taking up more and more space—and staff trips to look up records were taking up more and more staff time. Sheryl Davis, Superintendent for Business and Support Services, decided to do something about it. Davis had seen how different document types could be scanned, sorted, indexed and filed according to a customizable set of template fields using Laserfiche at a workshop held at the Region 12 Education Service Center (ESC Region 12). ESC Region 12 held the workshop in conjuction with their Laserfiche reseller, Bryan/College Station-based SMARTfiles, to introduce Laserfiche and its benefits for ISDs.

Davis was encouraged by the fact that ESC Region 12 (which serves WISD) was already successfully utilizing Laserfiche, and contacted SMARTfiles about acquiring a similar system in the WISD Accounting Department.

A scan in time saves nine

Initial implementation focused on automating how AP staff captured vendor information, and key to that was integrating Laserfiche with the District’s SunGard e-Finance software (formerly Pentamation). Utilizing Laserfiche Quick Fields advanced capture software, staff could now schedule regular processing sessions to automatically create Laserfiche files using the purchase order (PO) numbers, which then automatically fill-in vendor information from the SunGard system. The efficiency, says Cindy Shaver, Accounting and Payroll Coordinator, was immediate. “It saves us time because we don’t have to scan in the POs and create a file,” she says. Then, after paying the invoice, the scanned check and other supporting documentation are likewise added to the file—which is all accessible from a desktop.

WISD found that user adoption is not without its hiccups—or its remedies. “We had an employee that did not want to scan at first, as she thought it would consume her time,” Shaver recalls. “Once she saw the value in retrieving documents at her desktop and not having to retrieve them from a file cabinet and/or boxes from off-site, she became more willing to scan.”

Shaver admits she herself took a little time acclimating to the idea of paperless information automation. “When I first came on two years ago, I thought we’d need to create a full-time position to scan in all these documents, but that hasn’t been the case,” she says. After every check-run, the Accounts Payable Specialist scans in the checks and supporting documentation by PO, adding them to the file already created in Laserfiche. “It takes some time and monitoring to ensure that items are being scanned in weekly, but the result is this overall efficiency,” she says. “It’s absolutely wonderful to have this information on our computers versus going to a file cabinet, or a person’s office, or finding a missing document.”

The scanning process itself benefitted from some refinements. Initially, Shaver says, staff scanned in by invoice. “But one check could pay 30 invoices, which took time. So we reevaluated the process and started scanning by POs.” Now, almost three years later, the department has seen consistent long-term benefits. “We are able to retrieve documents quickly and are able to move files off-site sooner, which has freed up space in our department.”

As a principal end-user, AP Lead Gloriana Murry credits a short but optimistic learning curve with contributing to both the success of initial adoption, and leading to a broader scope of Laserfiche use. “It’s a very easy-to-use system,” she says. “It didn’t take much to open my eyes to what else we could use the system for.”

WISD’s Laserfiche reseller, SMARTfiles, intially provided staff with an eight-hour training session, followed by annual refresher courses. In addition, monthly newsletters and tips-and-tricks e-mails keep users up-to-date with new ways to increase efficiency. Staff have also taken advantage of online training courses available through the Laserfiche Certified Professional Program to further increase their knowledge base.

Shaver credits the flexibility of Laserfiche to add and customize template fields with expanding its use for more detailed audit information and accounting functions, including journal entries, bank reconciliations and documents/reports for outside auditors. “I created a template for journal entries very easily. I simplified the template to include ‘Journal Entry Number,’ ‘Description,’ ‘Period’ and ‘Year,’” she says. “Since I’m scanning them in, I no longer have to keep an actual file folder for them.”

Paper-free means headache-free audits, records requests and reconciliation

The comprehensiveness and convenience of having vendor and other financial information in single, searchable repository has significantly impacted two major processes-slash-pains: answering open records requests and making information available to auditors. “Every day you’re bombarded with phone calls from people needing information from you,” says Murry. “In the past you had to get up and go to a file cabinet to look it up—if it was misfiled, you were on your own. Now I just save a copy to PDF and e-mail it off. It went from taking 15 minutes to less than two minutes. I’ll have campuses call and I’ll have them on the phone and say ‘Okay, it’s in your e-mail right now.’”

Shaver shares this story: “I had an open records request for all invoices that were paid to this one vendor for the last five years. For the first 2 ½ years—from before we implemented Laserfiche—for those, we had to track them down in off-site storage and then pay to have those files delivered. We then had to un-staple them and stand by the copier machine to make copies,” she says. “For the invoices from the 2 ½ years since Laserfiche was implemented, I searched by vendor, highlighted and saved it to a file and sent the file electronically, which saved paper, toner and valuable time.”

Between internal, local and state agencies, WISD’s financial records are subject to regular audits—at least 12 times a year—often without more than a few days lead time. “Our auditors usually provide us a list of maybe 200 invoices they wanted to review for testing purposes.” Shaver says. “We used to either pull the items for them or they would go through our files to pull it themselves. Now, I set them up with viewing-only access in Laserfiche, so they can review their selections in Laserfiche.

“They can also save paper by saving their selections to file versus printing as they, too, are trying to go paperless,” she adds. “I had one auditor comment how simple the process was for him to review and how much it sped up the process. Some of the auditors were fighting over the computer as we had stored all information for them in a special “Audit folder”—perhaps next year I will need to ensure they have another computer with Laserfiche so they don’t have to wait until the other auditor is finished with their testing.”

Another process that Shaver says significantly improved is reconciling the WISD fixed assets system with its SunGard system. “If there’s anything missing in our fixed asset program or SunGard, I just use Laserfiche to research the asset in question and make any corrections,” Shaver says. “It’s so easy, and I’m doing it from my desk.”

Now, she says, she can’t imagine life without Laserfiche. “If you take it away, it’s like you’re taking away my computer. It’s like going back to the Stone Age.”

Hello Payroll, goodbye nine filing cabinets

More recently, Shaver’s departmental duties have expanded to include the WISD Payroll Department—and all nine file cabinets worth of its personnel files. “One of the Account Payable Specialists was promoted to Payroll Specialist II position—she’s a strong advocate for Laserfiche and is looking forward to utilizing it for Payroll,” Shaver says. The department, she adds, is preparing to input personnel files into Laserfiche, including:

• Action sheets.
• Direct deposit forms.
• Payroll deduction forms.
• W-4 forms.

For her expanded duties, however, Shaver is already using Laserfiche. “Currently, I am scanning in all the payroll redistributions that I have prepared, because it enables me to keep track of the redistributions as well as to retrieve the documentation for the redistribution,” she says.

She says what has made Laserfiche so versatile for WISD has been its ease-of-use. “I’ve seen similar programs to Laserfiche, but nothing as simple to use,” Shaver offers. “We can set it up similarly to how we’re used to keeping out documents on our desktops.

“It’s so easy to use that when I joined the department as the system administrator, I picked it up right away. I think it says a lot about our success using Laserfiche that it is so easy and intuitive, because you can set it up however works best for you.”

• Westerville, OH, City Schools Treasurer’s Office. GFC leveraged Quick Fields and PDP partner Cambridge Connections’ Docs-on-the-Cloud to close this deal in less than two months.
• St. Charles, IL, Community School District. The reseller also closed this 30-user Avante deal (including a WebLink public portal) in less than two months.
• Trans International. GFC upgraded this Wisconsin logistics company to Rio so it could take advantage of unlimited servers to deploy customized workflows enterprise-wide.

According to Scott Martin, ECM Supervisor at GFC, the increase in sales is the direct result of a two-year-old training program for sales representatives focusing on broader solutions selling. “Our VP of Sales Kelly Moran and our Director of Professional Services Jeff Dotzler developed ‘the Unified Sales Process’ that focuses on 10 different competencies offered by GFC, and we’ve made sure ‘ECM’ is high on that list.”

He adds, “Our reps aren’t just talking about copiers, they’re talking about document management, content management and professional services. We’re able to go into an opportunity—even with a customer we’ve had a hardware relationship with for 20 years—and start asking questions in a way that establishes Laserfiche as a flagship application that’s going to positively impact their business.”

As a result, Martin says, GFC, a leading Canon distributor, has become more competitive as an ECM provider, winning RFPs with Laserfiche alone. “We had a small construction company in Ohio where we were up against another copier distributor. We didn’t win the hardware business, but our sales rep went back in and wound up selling an Avante system,” he says.

Martin is confident that similar opportunities will result in an exponential sales increase for ’11. “With an emphasis on ECM and professional services as part of our core sales methodology, we are on track to more than double our Laserfiche revenue this year.”

MC Imaging began the quarter with several deals expanding existing customers’ installations and finished the quarter by placing an order for a 1000-user Rio ECM system for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB).

In comparison to Q4 ’09, MC Imaging:

• Increased total sales orders by more than 200%.
• Boosted sales orders for new customers by more than 200%.
• Enhanced sales to existing customers by 20%.

According to Frank MacDonald, President of MC Imaging, the reseller won the OCDSB bid after an eight-month sales cycle, beating out Open Text. “Our success is the result of a team effort between MC Imaging and Laserfiche. We offered a number of references from our base of very satisfied Laserfiche users—and we received excellent technical support from Laserfiche to make this sale happen,” MacDonald says.

“In addition to the strength Laserfiche’s support, I also have to credit the strength of the software,” he adds. “Workflow used to be something we added to a digital file cabinet—now it’s what we lead with.”

MacDonald notes that MC Imaging’s Q4 ’10 success is yielding even bigger results this year. “One of our clients that purchased more licenses for a pilot project last quarter is now looking at upgrading to Rio this quarter,” he says.

When two of the 10 departments in ECOM’s Dallas office came to Zandi with what she recognized as a need for an electronic document management system (EDMS) in August of 2009, she saw an opportunity to introduce full-scale ECM/BPM functionality into the company, one familiar process at a time.

“I’d been preaching the importance of using workflow and document imaging, but I didn’t have any business groups with that burning need,” she says. “Then a year ago our tax and real estate departments each came to us with some ideas about streamlining and automation, and we told them, ‘If all your documents were electronic, you could.’”

Hitting the Ground Running—with the Vision to Go the Distance

ECOM had a relationship with Jeff Flory of Dallas-area reseller Datamax Technology Group, who suggested Zandi look into Laserfiche as an ECM solution agile enough to answer ECOM’s pressing needs while also possessing the potential to expand in size and scope. “Laserfiche was easily the most user-friendly solution we looked at, but it was also scalable to meet more and bigger needs as we evolved the system,” Zandi recalls.

ECOM purchased a 25-user pilot system with Audit Trail and the Laserfiche SDK with an eye toward future integrations, expanded deployment and automated business processes —once the immediate document management fires had been put out.

“We had the vision for BPM and automation upfront,” she says. “The important part for me was the Workflow and the scalability. We started with the two departments that were on fire, and we’re capturing that momentum to implement Laserfiche in other departments. The system lends itself to that flexibility.”

First up were HR and Accounting. Zandi explains, “HR saw that it could use Laserfiche for archiving and historical information, while Accounting could jump in with day-forward scanning of active records.”

Operational improvements followed these departmental implementations. For example, “Our Treasury Department has a variety of companies depositing checks and money. Those checks are now automatically scanned, so that when the bank receives checks it no longer copies them—and a notification that the bank has the check is automatically printed in Laserfiche as well,” says Zandi.

Unanimous User Adoption, Magnanimous Enterprise Expansion

Building on this initial success, ECOM is now upgrading from its pilot system to Laserfiche Rio with a goal of standardizing content and business process management worldwide. “Rio makes sense for us because it gives us the flexibility to add servers and licenses incrementally, in whatever way we need to,” Zandi explains.

Currently, the system is being rolled out to more departments in ECOM’s Dallas headquarters—with unanimous adoption. “The familiar interface, being able to save searches, being able to use sticky notes—these are things that helped people catch on right away,” she says.

Zandi is confident that Laserfiche’s ease-of-use is paving the way for bigger and better things for the enterprise by encouraging users to do bigger and better things with their information. “Laserfiche is flexible enough that departments can implement it in a way that mirrors their current system, but once they’re comfortable, they can say, ‘I don’t even need a folder, now I can start thinking about changing my business,’” she says.

That change, she says, will come from implementing business process management (BPM) initiatives using Laserfiche Workflow. To that end:

• ECOM is working with Datamax to integrate Laserfiche with its Navision accounting software to set up distributed approval A/P processing for 10+ departments. Invoices will be automatically updated, then filed according to payment type and date using Workflow.
• The Real Estate Department is planning to integrate Laserfiche with its Timberline accounting system to update contracts and payment histories and file them automatically.
• The HR Department plans to integrate Laserfiche with its ADP system to automatically create and update personnel folders.

The most extensive—and potentially impactful—use of Workflow, however, is in ECOM’s Traffic Department, which is developing 35 workflows with up to 250 different outcomes. “I can’t even get my head around it!” jokes Zandi. She credits the simplicity of the Workflow Designer for lending itself to such an extensive deployment. “Workflow is created graphically—the Designer is essentially drag and drop, so you don’t have to know Fortran to use it.”

With an operational model and foundation in place, Zandi says ECOM is well on its way to standardizing its approach to content management worldwide using Laserfiche Rio. “This is where the scalability of Rio is so, so important,” she explains.

“Once we have integrations with the ERP up and running in our office, we can roll it out to our offices around the world literally overnight,” Zandi says. “We’re developing what has the potential to be the global, centralized ECM/BPM standard for the company’s business processes. Even before we’ve done all our analysis or know where that infrastructure will go and how our repositories will break out, we know Laserfiche has the scalability to do it.”

Chuck Beard, president of DynaSource, credits a year-long sales strategy leveraging the high-visibility success of its Spindletop Mental Health and Retardation Services account (which uses Laserfiche and SharePoint to support its Anasazi EMR system) with closing the deal.

“We put our efforts into making the Spindletop account the best it could be—for the client and for us,” says Beard. This meant spending early 2010 expanding Spindletop’s use of Laserfiche to several non-clinical departments (HR, Accounting, Admissions, etc.) using Quick Fields, Workflow and Web Access.

Beard points out that a major catalyst for the sale to ETBHN was a presentation given by Spindletop CIO Jerry Carnley to a statewide group of 40 CIOs in June. “He had the enthusiasm and tenacity to say ‘Here’s what we’ve done, we need to get this out to everybody,’” Beard explains.

ETBHN spent the summer assessing solutions before choosing to adopt Rio—and the Laserfiche/SharePoint integration—for all its agencies in late December. “ETBHN wanted a standardized application for each department that would offer standardized deployment across locations,” Beard explains. “Out of multiple competitors, Laserfiche was the only one with a single point of contact to access patient records through SharePoint.”

Beard is confident DynaSource can continue to build on this exponential success in 2011. “We used to focus on implementing cookie-cutter solutions; this is more like whole bakeries,” he says. “Spindletop represented not only a county-wide opportunity, but one that’s now regional, statewide and, ultimately, national in scope.”

Mergers and acquisitions account for much of SEPT’s growth, but innovation, says Dominic Malvern, Head of Information Systems Development, accounts for much of its ongoing success. “It’s never been a stereotypical government ‘Mental Health Organization,” Malvern says.

In fact, when SEPT transitioned from a purely state-funded trust to a more privatized “Foundation Trust,” one of its primary initiatives was to partner with Adobe to develop an EMR system using its LiveCycle products supported by a Laserfiche ECM system from Laserfiche reseller ScanDoc/Fortus. Malvern saw the chance to hit the ground running with a pilot project in the trust’s Forensic Services Department, which was moving to a new building as part of a modernization program.

“It was the ideal opportunity for us to modernize how our live patient records were accessed, as it was apparent that continuing with a manual process was not in keeping with the state of the art service we provide to our patients,” he says. That process, he adds, had remained manual by default because the legacy imaging system in Forensics didn’t meet the Trust requirement for working with live patient records.

“A single patient record could run for several years, sometimes through a person’s entire adult life, so it would extend into several volumes,” he explains. “Constant patient monitoring meant frequent updates to records for many reasons such as observation or treatment plans, sometimes every 15 minutes.”

A Pilot That Needed To Fly 24-7

When choosing a department to establish proof-of-concept before deploying a full-scale EMR system, SEPT couldn’t have chosen a more challenging one than Forensics Services—or one in which the impact of a successful ECM implementation would be so pronounced.

Malvern worked with ScanDoc’s Steve Livermore to implement a Laserfiche pilot system for active patient records management system using:

• Quick Fields advanced capture to input, sort and file the steady stream of patient information.
• Workflow to automatically route information for reviews, approval and distribution.
• Web Access to allow both remote deployment and access to the system over SEPT’s broad geographic service area and affiliated agencies.

SEPT implemented a clinical pilot project in 2009 and, over the course of a year, the new system kept up with the staff’s round-the-clock demands, amassing over 500,000 documents in the Laserfiche repository in the process.

Malvern says the real breakthrough operationally was having a system aligned with the increasing need for information sharing between regional service offices. “Increasingly we have to work on a multi-disciplinary and multi-agency basis, so having shared but secure access to patient records and notes is vital,” he says.

From an IT perspective, Web Access gave the organization one more tool to centrally control system administration while capitalizing on Laserfiche’s flexibility to configure various access levels remotely.

“Being able to deploy the system through our server or using Web browser options allowed us to control the type of access we wanted to make available,” says Malvern. “Web-based deployment is key because of the ease of maintenance when working with such a large group of users. Updates and upgrades would be unwieldy to deploy with a large number of single desktop clients.”

Going from EMR to ECM Saves $1.5M

The vision to extend Laserfiche from its supporting role in SEPT’s EMR project to a full-scale ECM deployment came with the support of ScanDoc/Fortus’ Livermore, who helped Malvern make the case to SEPT’s directors to implement Laserfiche for the trust’s non-clinical side.

“Once I heard the directors were looking at other solutions, and knowing what Laserfiche was capable of, it seemed a waste to restrict its application to purely clinical processes,” says Malvern. “Of course, it seemed an even bigger waste to spend further public money on more software that would be superfluous when we had a perfectly good system that would likely be better than anything else on the market.”

Now moving ahead with full-scale deployment of its Rio system to what will eventually be 3,000+ users, SEPT is effectively standardizing its information management on Laserfiche, eliminating the need for multiple departmental systems—and their corresponding service agreements and upgrades.

“Initially Laserfiche was envisaged solely as a clinical and medical records solution, but we have now realized that it can be a complete multi-functional document management system for the whole organization,” he says.

“We’ve begun implementation in non-clinical areas such Human Resources and Finance, as well as Vehicle Service Management, where we’re using Quick Fields and Workflow to automate our lease applications.” Additionally, another major project is underway to use Laserfiche to meet Information Governance Corporate Records retention regulations.

“From a roll-out prospective, it makes life much easier to have one multi-tasking system that all employees are trained on no matter what their function. It makes live support a far more streamlined and efficient activity,” he explains.

Malvern says the efficiency—and cost-savings—are starting to add up. “Within 18 months to two years we’ll be able to replace all our legacy imaging systems with Laserfiche. Implementing Laserfiche and its enterprise licensing enables SEPT to discontinue several annual contracts and service agreements. It also delivers savings on labor and print costs for information requests, as well as paper document archive and retrieval services. Realistically, this will save us US$1.5 million over the next three fiscal years,” he says.

“We saw Laserfiche as a way to bring visibility, time-bound execution and accountability to our accounting business processes,” says Mandeep Singh, Head of Finance Shared Services at Essar.

Working with Laserfiche reseller Sigma-Tech India Pvt. Ltd, Essar Group initially purchased a 100-user Rio solution. What started as simply a way to centralize all finance-related information evolved into a full-scale ECM/BPM implementation.

According to Singh, “We started using Laserfiche primarily as a scanning and document management solution, but after experiencing the way Workflow and its integration capabilities could be used for our scanning operations, we scaled up use dramatically.”

Chandresh Sharma, Vice President at Sigma-Tech, worked with Essar business analysts to map out the end-to-end processes for finance and accounting functions. These processes were mapped in Laserfiche Workflow to validate vendor, customer, company and invoice information from the SAP masters, and ultimately route and approve invoices and contracts processed between Essar’s global business units and the Shared Service Center at its Mumbai headquarters.

Balancing Centralized and Decentralized Processes

“Laserfiche operates as part of a ‘hub and spoke’ model with the Shared Service Center as the hub and business geographies as the spokes, which connect to the central hub for document processing,” Singh explains.

A major operational benefit has been the ability to seamlessly balance centralized and decentralized processes using Laserfiche as both the hub and the spoke. “Financial Shared Services uses both models to fulfil transactions,” explains Singh.

• The centralized process approach is enabled by a central hub that accesses Laserfiche to process documents. Work allocation is assigned using Workflow, which detects exceptions to mapped data validation rules during the scanning process and provides notifications to responsible parties to resolve discrepancies. “This ensures that clean data is passed into the downstream operations of the financial services,” Singh says. A mail room solution is also in place to track and deliver transactions to Laserfiche, further accelerating the process and increasing productivity.
• The decentralized process approach uses Laserfiche deployed locally to establish remote common collection hubs at various offices across India (and eventually globally) through which vendors working with ESSAR can submit hard copies of transactions. “Laserfiche is run in a dedicated center and further downstream processes like scanning, indexing and quality assurance are carried out before being published to the SAP-DMS,” he adds.

International offices use an FTP route offline. “Here the SPOCs [single point of contact] submit their invoices to the FTP folder. From there it’s scheduled for automatic entry into the Laserfiche server using Laserfiche Import Agent. This enables further processing,” explains Singh.

In addition to streamlining accounting processes, Laserfiche has standardized work allocation enterprise-wide. “Operationally, work allocation is now defined based on certain parameters mapped in Laserfiche. For example, ‘Process Type,’ ‘Document Type,’ ‘Location Code,’ ‘Country Code,’ ‘Business Vertical,’ ‘Priority’ and others,” says Singh.

Shared Services, Enterprise Benefits

The benefits of using Laserfiche as part of the Shared Service Center have been both immediate and long-term:

1. Better throughput in terms of number of transactions per process associate.
2. Accelerated invoice turnaround times of less than an hour for urgent invoices across geographies and less than a day for normal invoices.
3. Increased visibility of daily transactions across 63 group companies. Laserfiche publishes a daily report to the business intelligence layer for companywide unified reporting.
4. Increased visibility of pending transactions in a categorized manner. Laserfiche Workflow notifies business process owners of necessary actions by way of mail alerts. “Moreover, we also unify these numbers with the Business intelligence Platform to provide better visibility,” says Singh.
5. Enhanced control environment through automatic system-end integrated validations with SAP-DMS using Vendor, Customer and Company Code checks for duplications or mismatches at the source stage itself. Laserfiche also does a validation for the key fields entered and runs a duplicate check across its database for any potential duplicates—which are then provided as reporting numbers and integrated with the BI platform.

The most ostensible benefit is obviously reducing invoice processing times from, on average, a matter of weeks into days and sometimes hours. But combined with increased transparency of business processes, Laserfiche has brought a new level of accountability to staff. With Laserfiche Audit Trail giving a step-by-step history of each action and user in the process, there are significant quality control and productivity benefits. Says Singh, “People think twice before performing a transaction.”

Though formal impact analysis will not be conducted until 2012, Singh estimates that Essar Group has realized a 40% return on its Laserfiche investment already, but foresees ongoing and expanding operational improvements. “Major ROI will come by de-skilling profiles deployed across companies for financial processes,” he explains.

Following the success of integration with SAP-DMS, Essar is now working with Sigma-Tech India to integrate Laserfiche (and SAP) with ARIBA financial software, as well as related procurement and e-invoicing modules to develop straight-through processing for accounts receivable, fixed assets, business expense reimbursements and income tax declaration. “We’re also now contemplating using [PDP partner] LincDoc for form-based workflow requirements,” Singh concludes.

Key to this transition, Burns believed, was leveraging business technology to minimize both the operational and risk management costs of working directly with advisors. “As a growing company, technology was the way to get more done with a smaller headcount,” he says.

Burns consulted Joel Bruckenstein, founder of Technology Tools for Today (T3), the multimedia practice management resource for the financial services industry. “Joel really had the vision. He said, ‘You guys could be a virtual firm,’ and that really resonated with us. Joel’s thinking was that we couldn’t afford to work with paper,” Burns remembers.

“We wanted to keep our fees low enough that we’d be extremely competitive—we’re less expensive than 90% of bond funds. To achieve that, manual processes just weren’t going to work.”

Part of the Solution

Bruckenstein suggested Laserfiche agile ECM. “For what they wanted to do, Laserfiche was the missing piece: they’d be paperless, and they’d have a solid workflow engine to share and secure information with their Portfolio Management System (PMS) and Client Relationship Management (CRM) system. Plus, they’d have that compliance piece,” he says.

“Laserfiche made sense because it could integrate with Microsoft Dynamics, which Tamarac was already integrated with, and do it quickly and easily enough that there wouldn’t be a lot of cost and lead-time,” Bruckenstein adds.

For his part, Burns saw the value of having “that compliance piece” when Asset Dedication purchased a Laserfiche Avante system in September of 2010. “By integrating Laserfiche with our Web-based technologies, we have a document management system that can talk to the cloud, and where the information we need to keep secure for compliance and auditing stays on our own server,” he says. “Regulators come in and, once they see that we have Laserfiche set up the way we told them, they have confidence in it the same way we do. We’ve been able to make the commitment to be paperless, but in a way that makes it easy for auditors to see that we’re following the guidelines.”

.NET Gain: A World-Class System without a World-Class Price Tag

Burns sees long-term value in building a system agile enough to maximize the firm’s infrastructural investment as the firm grows. “BondDesk has this world-class bond inventory and trade order management system, so we needed to marry that to a world-class equity portfolio management system like Tamarac. On top of that, they’ve bundled it with Microsoft Dynamics CRM through Tamarac’s Advisor 9, so we’ve got all these systems that all talk to each other and for the most part it’s a single log-in,” he explains. “Now, on the back-end, we can access every document we need because SharePoint talks to Dynamics and Laserfiche talks to SharePoint. Everything’s still on a Microsoft .NET framework, so we can add and subtract layers without it turning into a huge project with a hefty price tag.”

This agility has already translated into substantial savings. “We have been able to drive development costs way down—we can post a few Web services and we can integrate for $2,000 rather than $200,000,” says Burns. “Our risk is so low, we can just pop something out to replace it. When we upgrade to SharePoint 2010, the transition process will be minimal.”

Burns notes this interoperability translates to a more seamless user experience, no matter who’s using the system: a client, an advisor services representative or another staff member. “Once someone signs onto the system, they can do everything they need to without leaving the program they’re using. I don’t want people having to learn 20 systems—I want that single sign-on; I want it to be that fast,” he says.

“The way we look at technology is that it’s going to work if it can adapt it to the way we work, not the other way around.”

New Account Formation Made Advisor-, Client- and Business-Friendly

Burns points to Asset Dedication’s automated account formation process using its AdvisorSpace portal. “As we developed our AdvisorSpace portal, having everything on the .NET platform has really allowed us to fill in the gaps and make the experience seamless, and a lot of the back-end processes automatic,” he explains. “We were able to control the experience and avoid making more work for ourselves.”

An example of this is the new account formation process, including the client meeting that takes place leading up to it and the contract management that follows it. An advisor meeting with a client logs into the AdvisorSpace portal using an iPad. From there, he can access marketing documents through SharePoint. He can submit a request to run a proposal, which the SharePoint workflow engine routes back to the advisor. Then, he can initiate a client agreement using DocuSign. The contract is then automatically e-mailed to the advisor and Asset Dedication managers—until they sign off, when it’s automatically stored in Laserfiche.

“We step in a little bit, but essentially the whole back end operates seamlessly,” Burns says.

Technology Attracts Talent

As the firm grows, Burns sees the value of having a tightly integrated technology platform to attract new talent. “When advisors do their due diligence and ask, ‘What are you using?’ and we say, ‘Tamarac, MS Dynamics and Laserfiche,’ that’s just one more thing they can check off their list. We’re using proven technology in an innovative way.”

The value of that innovation, he says, in addition to reducing development costs, ensuring compliance and offering more convenient, comprehensive client services, is saving time. “For every one of us, time is money. So the more time you’re spending on basic operations, the less time you’re working with clients and the less revenue you’re generating,” Burns says.

“Our business model is based on using incredibly complex technology to drive very sophisticated processes in a way that is very intuitive to understand. For us, Laserfiche is an obvious natural partner.”

The impact has been significant, as Datamax recently closed several deals:

• BenefitMall, an insurance industry middleman serving over 7500 brokers, has purchased a Rio pilot system for its New Jersey office, with plans to deploy to all 15 of its markets serving two million clients.
• Taylor Olson Adkins Sralla & Elam, a Dallas-based law firm servicing local governments, is implementing a 34-user Avante system with a Trusted Edge email archiving solution from Laserfiche PDP partner FileTek.
• Ecom Atlantic, a multi-national trading company that imports over 75% of the coffee used by Starbucks, implemented 35 Workflows with over 250 outcomes in its global traffic department, and has plans to expand system use to all 30 Ecom offices in 30 countries in the next five years.

Jeff Flory, enterprise solutions consultant at Datamax, credits this success with having sales and technical staff capable of offering clients the scalable, end-to-end solutions the market demands. “BenefitMall, for example, was really a team effort,” he says. “Our business analysts were able to leverage Laserfiche’s open architecture and scalability to deliver exactly what the client asked for, using extensive integration with internally and externally hosted line-of-business applications.” The sales cycle, Flory notes, took place over the course of three meetings followed by a three-week implementation.

“By doubling the size of our staff this year we have been able to leverage the full capabilities of Laserfiche as a truly agile ECM solution that can scale and integrate to meet the content and business process management needs of any enterprise,” Flory concludes.

From its Onamia, MN, headquarters, the Corporate Commission of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians operates Grand Casino Mille Lacs and Grand Casino Hinckley, which includes hotels, convention centers, entertainment venues, a golf course, food and beverage venues, gift shops, an RV park, and a marina. In addition, the Corporate Commission operates an RV and auto shop, gas stations, a movie theater, a Subway franchise, and a wastewater management facility. “We have 12 separate businesses in all, spread out over 55 miles,” says Lance Dutcher, Systems Engineer for the Corporate Commission.

The Problem

A more efficient way was needed to manage the 500 contracts a year that keep these businesses serviced, supplied and staffed, says Dutcher. Each contract requires multiple approvals, which created ample opportunities for bottlenecks—sometimes costly ones. Missing deadlines could result in 10-15% fee increases because a discounted quote would expire, or due to penalties. And there was the potential for service contracts to lapse. “We could have a major piece of equipment go down and find out we had no contract,” Dutcher notes.

By 2008, Grand Casinos identified a need for an automated contract management system with three major requirements:

• Routing documents from outlying properties to the Corporate Commission’s office in a time sensitive manner.
• Tracking documents to enforce deadlines and address bottlenecks.
• Generating a required monthly report summarizing the activity/expiration of contract-related documents.

The Solution

For almost eight years, the Corporate Commission had been using a Laserfiche system with Quick Fields advanced capture to scan HR documents. When Dutcher saw the document routing and tracking capabilities of Laserfiche Workflow at the 2008 Laserfiche Institute Conference in Los Angeles, he realized he already had the enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) tools to build a contract management system using Laserfiche. “I literally went to one Workflow session at the Conference, came back, and started designing workflows,” he says.

Working with solutions consultant Clay Baer of reseller Crabtree Company, Dutcher laid the groundwork for a Laserfiche contract management system by:

• Moving the Laserfiche 7.2 server to a single virtual server running Windows Server 2003 SP2 and SQL 2005.
• Installing Laserfiche Workflow, Web Access, Quick Fields, and Audit Trail on the virtual server.
• Upgrading to Laserfiche 8.0.

Dutcher then worked with a five-member project team drawn from Management, Legal, Training, Purchasing and IT to develop and refine contract workflows over a two-month period. The team worked out routing processes, deadline times and designated the approvers.

While designing that process, Dutcher’s team found it made sense to have a backup person for every approver in the routing process, to keep the process moving efficiently.

Turning Months into Days—Without Incurring Costs

Following a month of designing and programming workflows, Dutcher led three months of trial testing using the IT Department’s own contracts. After training users, the system went live with all 39 departments in 12 businesses.

“Within six months, we had 22 Workflows,” he says. “We did all the training in-house without a consultant, so we were able to implement our contract management system without any outside services or additional costs.” Dutcher notes this is in sharp contrast to stand-alone contract management systems he had researched prior to implementing Laserfiche Workflow. “I looked at half-a-dozen contract management systems and went through all their bullet points, and I couldn’t find anything we needed that we couldn’t build ourselves using Laserfiche.”

Security and viewing is configured using Microsoft Active Directory groups, so only department heads can see their own contracts. Dutcher notes this keeps system administration to a minimum. “There’s actually no administration in Laserfiche.”

As a result of using Laserfiche for contract management, Dutcher says, the Mille Lacs Band has been able to:

• Centralize and standardize management and storage of contracts.
• Provide remote access to location-specific information and documents using Web Access.
• Track all contracts.
• Share documents between businesses and departments.
• Eliminate printing costs and duplication.
• Automate reporting.

The greatest benefit is time. “Most of our documents are now routed within 3 days or less, instead of weeks and in some cases months. We used to have an administrator at each location distribute paper copies for signatures that were faxed—and sometimes re-faxed if they weren’t legible. Now the documents are emailed to a single contract administrator, who uses Snapshot to add them into Laserfiche, and the contract is automatically routed for approval,” Dutcher says. “Upper management can review contracts from anywhere using Web Access. We’ve been able to have 12 people at different properties sign a document in less than 90 minutes.”

User accountability and timeliness has come from being able to track documents using stamps and annotations. “Anyone that has the ability to view the document can track where the document is and how long someone has had it,” Dutcher says. “We don’t need a spreadsheet of where a contract is or to search from office to office because we have automatic reminders to make sure that documents continue to be routed.”

Finally, using an “expiration” metadata field added to all contracts, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services creates monthly reports of contract activity for the company while alerting appropriate department heads of relevant contracts in danger of expiring. “It used to take an administrative assistant a full day to make these reports,” Dutcher notes. “Now, they’re generated automatically.”

With so many specialties—and specialists—IMC’s Board of Directors wanted to use electronic medical records (EMR) software to improve operational processes, encouraged by the promise of ARRA stimulus money to help fund it. But IMC’s Practice Administrator, Christine L. Holliman, CMPE, took a more pragmatic view of the situation.

“All vendors talk about the efficiencies of an EMR and the increase in the levels of coding that can be achieved from full implementation,” she says. “As my physicians are many different ages, the idea of transitioning to a full-blown EMR was daunting, to say the least.”

And expensive, especially in light of what Holliman perceived as a fundamental lack of functionality. “The document management portions of the leading EMR systems we looked at, including Greenway, Centricity and Allscripts, didn’t utilize OCR [optical character recognition] technology or any other shortcuts for actually scanning and filing documents,” Hillman notes. “Most EMR systems require manually sorting and dragging and dropping individual documents either back to an order or back to a patient record—very cost prohibitive in my opinion.”

Holliman focused on finding an enterprise content management system to establish electronic patient charts (e-charts) first. “Looking for a way to handle the paper felt like the most logical step in streamlining our practice in preparation for an EMR,” she says.

“As most of our physicians are still primary care, the sheer amount of paperwork we receive is just incredible,” Holliman adds. “We’d receive 2 ½ feet of paper a day in faxes, print-outs and mail—and that’s just from one of the two hospitals we work with.” At the same time, she notes, “as a multi-specialty practice with 20 providers, having a system that could allow access to patient records by multiple departments and personnel was critical.”

The 2 ½ Feet of Paper Stops Here

Holliman was introduced to Laserfiche by Jim Bergeron of reseller JPI Data Resource at the 2009 MGMA conference in Denver. She then met Bergeron again at a local HIMSS meeting. Encouraged by Laseriche’s ease of use and its flexible business process management (BPM) automation tools, IMC purchased a 44-user Laserfiche Avante system with Workflow business process management and Quick Fields capture tools to establish electronic patient charts.

“As anyone who has implemented new systems knows, the end users are the biggest variable. If they’re on board, the implementation will be a success,” Holliman says. “With 140 employees with varying computer experience, it was very nice to implement a product that anyone could be taught to use in just a few minutes.”

Key to establishing IMC’s e-charting was automating the way the clinic received patient information from the two hospitals it works with. Using Laserfiche in conjunction with the MD Network, an electronic patient information distribution platform, incoming documentation from hospital visits is processed by Quick Fields’ high-volume capture and processing tools, then automatically filed in Laserfiche according to patient name and date of birth, where it becomes part of patients’ e-charts.

A significant amount of this data is test results, which need to be reviewed by physicians; this review often prompts follow-up instructions and further review. “One of the worries of both physicians and practice managers is if test results have been reviewed and relayed back to the physicians,” says Holliman.

Prior to using Laserfiche, staff had to sort through faxes or independently request each report from the hospital while nurses manually pulled the paper charts. “We always worried that something got filed in a patient’s chart before it was ever reviewed by the physician,” Holliman adds. “We’d see 24 people a day and run tests on 22, and there’d always be that concern that there’s one ultrasound report no one ever saw.”

Flexible Control: Reviewing Test Results as a Condition of Filing Them

To automate the test review process, IMC created separate “inbox” folders in the Laserfiche repository for each physician. Quick Fields recognizes “test results” as a document type and the physician’s name associated with it, which Workflow then uses to route the results to the appropriate doctor and nurse’s folder. Workflow then alerts them they have items in Laserfiche for review. If a review deadline is not met, Holliman herself is notified.

“One of the things we really liked about Laserfiche was that all of our doctors can set their own parameters as far as what they need to see in their inboxes to review,” she says. A GI specialist who ordered a patient test, for instance, wouldn’t need to see an incoming discharge summary, but the patient’s primary care doctor would. The GI specialist would, however, need to review the results of a test he ordered, so only after he has reviewed it do the test and follow-up notes go to the primary care doctor’s inbox for review, and eventually to the patient’s file.

“Just using their inbox, each doctor can ask his or her nurse to follow up on their instructions. Whether it’s an abnormal lab or an abnormal chest X-ray, they can adjust medications or order further testing,” Holliman adds. The whole process is prompted, routed and tracked using Workflow.

The benefit, besides the economy of effort, is peace of mind, she says. “Our doctors can access the same, single inbox and know when they leave at the end of the day that they’ve seen every test result that needed to be dealt with on that day.”

Nurses who used to have to keep a manual log of all tests reviewed and what follow-up was ordered appreciate it as well, because logs can be generated automatically using simple search parameters. Plus, Holliman adds, “Being able to precisely track patient follow-up is a tremendous tool for mitigating medical legal liability costs, as we have an exact record of the doctor’s orders.”

IMC is also utilizing the Laserfiche/MD Network interface to automate other processes, such as recalling the dictation from an office visit. “After a report has been electronically signed, it’s printed in our medical records and stored automatically in Laserfiche. If, for some reason, a nurse on the floor needs that information before it’s been made a part of the patient’s record, she can still retrieve dictation from the last visit.” Likewise, when IMC’s triage nurses type up their notes from a phone conversation, they are automatically uploaded into Laserfiche.

Holliman credits Laserfiche’s ease-of-use as well as the overall efficiency of the system with the success of IMC’s e-charting adoption thus far. “The transition to a new system for people who’ve been utilizing a paper chart is very intimidating, but once they begin to use Laserfiche and see how truly easy it is to find and retrieve documents, they’re actually excited to get started,” adds Holliman.

A Natural Bridge to EMR—That Also Leads to Back Office Efficiency

Now that Laserfiche has made its impact on how doctors receive and act on incoming patient information, the clinic is rolling out Laserfiche for use in its business office, where Workflow will automate A/P processing and HR files updates.

“One thing that’s nice about Laserfiche is that it gives us a set of tools that can be applied to business management as well as practice management, so we’re really able to maximize our investment,” Holliman says.

At the same time, she adds, IMC is an important step closer to EMR adoption. “Laserfiche has definitely acted as an important bridge between where we were and where we want to be, and it’s done so in a way that’s been very natural.”

When the firm built its own broker/dealer in 2008, Chief Administration Officer (CAO) Phillip Fournier and the rest of the Spire management team saw the opportunity to streamline operations. “We knew there would be countless audits, reviews and requests for information from the various entities,” Fournier says.

Coming from other broker/dealers, “we’d experienced lost forms, high overnight charges, delays in getting business processed and audits that required home office staff to keep coming back to us for forms they had misplaced,” he remembers. “We knew we could do it more efficiently—for compliance supervision and oversight, for operational efficiencies, for field reps to access information from everywhere.”

Fournier says right away Spire’s management team had the vision to build a system that included both enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM). “We were talking about more than going paperless, we were talking about setting up workflows and automating processes,” he says. “Our management team is always trying to remove friction points, like lost documents. We really wanted to be able to say, whether you’re five miles or 500 miles away, you’re submitting your OSJ and principal approvals the same exact way.”

Spire was referred to Laserfiche reseller John Caso of One Source/ADI. “We were impressed that ADI had about 100 financial services customers using Laserfiche,” Fournier says.

Making Work Flow

For 18 months, the Spire team considered options. “We just couldn’t find anything on par with Laserfiche. We were either going to have to build our own homegrown system—or we could just customize a proven and established software solution. And we didn’t want our consultants to be beta testing a homegrown system.”

The firm purchased Laserfiche Avante for its 100 consultants working between 17 offices. “We asked them how they would like the system set up, and then we set about doing it in as few clicks as possible,” says Fournier. For compliance and auditing purposes, each client file would have three different sets of folders: fee-based accounts, commission-based accounts and insurance accounts. One Source/ADI helped design workflows to automate processes for OSJ and principal approvals, branch audits of sales literature and correspondence, as well as security protocols.

Within the first 18 months of implementing Laserfiche, 80% of Spire’s offices were regularly processing content through Laserfiche; today, all of them are. “We use our Laserfiche system for required paperwork for FINRA, but our offices have the capability to scan anything they want, and many scan paperwork for their entire book of clients,” Fournier adds.

Laserfiche data is stored offsite in a data bunker with Equinix to ensure its safety and security, while Spire consultants have instant access to all their forms over a virtual office system. The business continuity advantage this brought to Spire became apparent two winters ago. “We had several snowstorms that shut down the whole Washington D.C. area for two weeks, and we were able to continue working remotely,” says Fournier. “We’ve basically got our information in Fort Knox as opposed to being one burst pipe away from it being lost forever. “

Accelerated Transfer, Halted Costs

Now it doesn’t matter if an office is five or 500 miles away, since Spire’s Operations Department is capable of processing direct and custodial business the same day—removing the delays and costs of overnight shipping.

“Many of our accounts are fee-based, so each day assets are delayed during transfer adds up quickly,” Fournier explains.

The accelerated transfer allows Spire to process business with immediate feedback. If a set of forms is not in good order (NIGO), Workflow pushes it back to the rep’s assistant with an e-mail that tells the assistant exactly what information is missing. “The assistant knows exactly what the situation is and can fix it, so we reprocess business in real-time.”

With no physical forms to lose—they’re scanned directly into Laserfiche and indexed immediately—there are no processing bottlenecks. “One of our biggest complaints at our previous firm was lost forms. An overnight package would show up, and when it was opened, forms would be lost or attached to other forms accidentally,” explains Fournier. “Now, if a form is incorrectly filed, the Laserfiche search and indexing system can find it in seconds.”

From Days to Hours: Audits Made Simple – and Less Onerous

To facilitate auditing, Spire Operations configured a compliance folder in its Laserfiche repository where consultants scan in their required documents—correspondence, advertising and bank statements, among others—that the firm’s Compliance department needs to review.

“Our Compliance Department can be much less onerous in its supervision,” says Fournier. “Much of what we need can be searched, reviewed and saved right in Laserfiche.” Secure access to each folder can be scripted individually, further mitigating compliance risks.

Fournier points to a recent FINRA audit of the firm’s 529 college fund business. “On the fly, the FINRA auditor asked to see all our new 529 accounts opened from April 2008 through April 2010. Using Laserfiche, our staff was able to search through the entire database and provide him a copy of all our new account forms. We had all 300 forms for him on a zip drive in less than an hour. He was really impressed,” he says. “If we had to find all those paper files, it would have required days and countless staff hours to satisfy that one request.”

Quantifying Success

Fournier says Spire gauges the success of using Laserfiche in several ways, starting with the fact that each of its 17 offices saves approximately $3,500 in overnight charges annually. “Add the cost of storage, file cabinets, the business continuity issues of having that paper in the same place as our facilities, hours of file maintenance, lost paperwork, overnighting paperwork to be signed, not to mention the lost dollars due to delays in processing, and the numbers become even more significant.” 

The most significant benefit to Spire, Fournier says, is not hiring extra staff. “We estimate we’re saving two or three bodies because of how we use Laserfiche to automate compliance, operations and trading.

“We knew it would enhance our operations center and create synergies between our field reps and our home office, but the smoothness of the system and the removal of friction has been really remarkable,” he adds. “After only 2 ½ years, if we tried to remove Laserfiche, our reps would revolt.”

One Source began the quarter by landing a deal to expand Durham County’s Rio system by integrating it with its Public Health Department’s EMR. This was followed by the sale of a 41-user Avante system to the Person County DSS and a 12-user Avante system to the Craven County Health Department that included an integration with the county’s state-run EMR.

In comparison to Q3 ’09, One Source:

• Increased total sales by 250%.
• Boosted sales to new customers by 500%.
• Enhanced existing customer sales by 400%.

According to Kevin Smith, president and CEO of One Source, this success is the result of positioning Laserfiche agile ECM as integrative middleware in enterprise sales. In fact, 40% of One Source’s new sales were Rio implementations. “Embracing agile ECM messaging allowed us to offer tightly-integrated complete solutions emphasizing the value of Workflow,” says Smith. “Each of these clients is implementing some type of BPM solution where Laserfiche’s proven ability to integrate easily with other primary applications has been a big selling point.”

Smith notes that One Source leveraged strategic partnerships with PDP partners Northwoods and United Microdata, which played significant roles in landing the Person and Craven County deals. “These partnerships mean there are as many people as possible looking for new prospects on our behalf,” he adds.

Finally, Smith credits One Source’s investment in a year-long advanced sales training program from Sandler Solutions with the company’s success, as well as an expansion of its administrative and technical staff to accommodate the significant growth in sales.

Last month, Mississauga-based Ricoh Canada landed a deal for a 100-user Rio system for the University of Toronto, the largest university in North America. The deal calls for implementation of Laserfiche RME and a WebLink public portal in the Faculty of Medicine, with more licenses to be added as more of the university’s 24 departments buy into the system.

According to Jason Frost, solutions consultant at Ricoh Canada, the sales cycle took six months, the result of what he calls a “beachhead strategy.”

“Besides being very large, the University of Toronto is also decentralized, so we spoke to as many departments as possible to create an awareness of the need for ECM,” Frost explains. “Once we established the initial Rio installation, we used the internal reference to generate more interest and establish confidence in the solution. Next, we’ll leverage Rio’s scalability to expand to the whole enterprise.”

Of the five departments Ricoh Canada spoke with, the Faculty of Medicine initiated the Rio purchase to automate its academic promotions process, which tracks and approves staff tenure.

“The academic promotions process illustrated the need for Rio’s core strengths: straightforward ECM coupled with agile BPM,” Frost adds. “There was a clear need to standardize and manage information on unorganized network drives, implement version control along with a records retention policy and automate the actual process with Workflow.”

Frost is confident that Ricoh will be able to expand the installation to the university’s other 24 departments, which are spread out over three campuses. “The academic promotions process touches every department, and we’ll be able to leverage the existing Rio license to deliver it as a shared service.”

He adds, “The initial Rio investment gave us a central platform, and we can now append additional repositories for various other departments. We’ll be able to focus on adding licenses, Quick Fields and professional services as we look to expand Laserfiche enterprise-wide.”

A former change management analyst at Bank of America, Slack had seen technological innovation drive efficiency, from automating input and reconciliation processes using MS Excel to capitalizing on the use of e-mail and the internet in BofA business processes.

When Slack came to Keane, he began to analyze where automation could have the biggest impact. “I looked at it like this: we’re a small shop, so we don’t have entire divisions or departments. We have people—seven people. So we need to leverage technology as best we can,” he says.

Slack initially focused on the need for a common repository for staff to share thoughts and ideas from their research—and the various media it came from, including:

• Handwritten notes
• E-mails
• Reports from the Web
• Bloomberg charts
• 10-k filings
• And more.

So he launched the search for a content management solution.

On the Hunt

“Our technology support services partner gave us a couple of ideas. I talked to our prime broker, and I talked to compliance experts in the industry about what firms like ours were using,” he recalls. “Laserfiche was one of the five or six referrals we got, so I Googled it.”

Slack was then referred to John Caso of reseller One Source Document Solutions, Inc., which already had a strong presence in North Carolina’s financial services industry. Caso showed Keane staff how Laserfiche could automate the firm’s process for storing and sharing research, as well as its client records.

“Our discussion wasn’t about things like compliance and client service at first. We just wanted a better way to share research other than e-mails in Outlook,” Slack admits. “But when John started asking about our large collection of filing cabinets, he hit upon the biggest need in our office.”

The biggest need was to free up space in Keane’s modest offices. Six file cabinets worth of information—almost one cabinet for each employee—certainly weren’t helping achieve that goal.

“Those six cabinets contained the first eight years of our business. We knew as we kept growing, there would be more and more paperwork,” recalls Slack.

He adds, “Those filing cabinets contained the only copies of our information, so if a fire had ripped through our offices, it would have been quite difficult to replace all the documents, especially for a firm our size. That’s when the discussion turned to business continuity.”

Moving Forward with Laserfiche

The firm purchased an 11-user Laserfiche Avante system in July 2008. The hardest part of implementation, Slack admits, was getting the firm’s small but diverse staff to agree on a standardized naming and filing convention for the research-sharing process. Once the research folders were set up, Slack says, automating the active client folders was the easy part.

“We already had an efficient process and detailed file folders that we were able to mimic in Laserfiche,” he offers. “It may have taken a bit to get the investment folks to retrain their working habits and thought processes, but once they did, learning the Laserfiche product itself was very easy.”

Backlog conversion of a decade’s worth of client information was likewise relatively easy, requiring only a few months of part-time student help. “Now,” Slack says, “we can scan in every document received, file it away in client-specific folders in Laserfiche, and our entire network drive is backed up remotely by our tech support firm. We still file the originals in cabinets, but there are backup copies available.”

Enhancing Client Service

As Keane’s staff began using Laserfiche, it became clear the system’s value was not limited to disaster recovery. “The primary advantage is having all client-specific information available in a heartbeat, accessible from each desktop in our office,” Slack says.

“When clients call with questions, we can pull up those files immediately and provide the answer in that same conversation. Not only that, but we can pull a copy of the document they’re asking about, and e-mail it to the client within seconds—usually while we’re still on the phone with them,” he says. “It’s imperative to have a complete picture in terms of client history, and using Laserfiche, we have that right at our fingertips.”

Slack credits Laserfiche for soothing skittish clients’ fears in the wake of recent market fluctuations. “Our clients aren’t institutions, they’re individuals. They’re not just interested in numbers and charts, they value the kind of relationship we have with them. If we don’t provide good client service, there’s no performance in the world that will keep those clients invested with us,” he says.

“During this last market blip in 2008, it would have been easy for them to get scared and take their money out. Being able to pull up a caller’s information and click and drag it into an e-mail speaks volumes about how much we care for our clients’ wants and needs. It really helped take our client service to the next level.”

Responding to Regulatory Changes

Now, with recent regulatory changes all but guaranteeing more oversight by the SEC and other regulatory agencies, Slack sees Laserfiche playing a more significant role in audit preparation and maintaining compliance logs.

“Dodd-Frank gives oversight authority to the SEC, but it still leaves a lot of gray areas as to some of the specifics that will be required of us. But, we know we’ll be required to register with the SEC by July 2011 and we know that the SEC will come audit us on a regular basis. Laserfiche will help us to be organized and prepared for that inevitability,” Slack says.

“We made the choice to keep all working documents on the network drive, but all other documents in Laserfiche. So, it provides peace of mind knowing that all my documents are easily accessible, effectively filed and efficiently searchable. All the required books and records are there, and can easily be transferred to a CD or zip drive for the SEC’s reference.”

Onward and Upward

Slack sees continuing value in using Laserfiche to adapt not only to new challenges, but new success as well.

“At Keane Capital, we describe ourselves as ‘value investors,’ which also carries over to the way we run our business. The Laserfiche Avante system was a very affordable option for us, but I look at its value as more than cost savings,” Slack explains.

“Laserfiche allows us to grow the business. It scales from one to 1,000 clients in a way that allows us to handle the work using the same efficient processes.”

Led by Stormwater Quality Coordinator Alan Searcy, Central Records Administrator Sharon Blackstock, and Imaging Technician Greg Buchanan, DAG evolved into an ad hoc governance committee, setting recordkeeping and retention policies for each department, as well as standardizing document indexing for interdepartmental use. “My goal in the beginning,” says Searcy, “was to get as much ‘buy-in’ as possible for our fledgling imaging program. Working together on interdepartmental projects is a proven recipe for success in Lakewood.” The Digital Archives Group is a prime example of that fact.

DAG initiated the purchase of Laserfiche in 2001 from Colorado-based reseller Phil Landreth of S. Corporation, with several departments sharing in the cost. “Laserfiche was the most user-friendly solution we looked at, and we knew that was going to be very important,” Blackstock says. “Laserfiche also had a very strong presence in cities around our size (population: 145,000), so we knew that support for local government operations was in place.”

Although Laserfiche was first used only by the Engineering Division and the City Clerk’s Office, it eventually spread to other departments. As new departments joined in the project, they sent representatives to DAG meetings.

Initially, Laserfiche was used for archiving permanent records and closed case files. After a couple of years, the Finance Department became the first to manage active records with Laserfiche by scanning sales tax returns. More active records management followed as Laserfiche use began spreading to DAG members’ departments. Eventually most of Lakewood’s 10 departments used Laserfiche, each relying on DAG’s training and best practices to scan and manage their own records.

“With every new project, people really welcome our support and suggestions. We all listen to each other and are willing to hear new ideas,” Buchanan says. “At the same time, people don’t just say, ‘I’m going to do this’ and call up IT—DAG helps define the project and gives the go-ahead.” The City Clerk’s Office created Buchanan’s position as Imaging Technician in 2002 to facilitate Laserfiche projects by assisting departments in training users and developing and managing scanning projects.

Today, DAG’s goals are being met—long-term records are being archived and protected, concurrent retrieval of imaged records is possible, and storage space for maps, plats and plans has been reduced. What’s more, interdepartmental cooperation has resulted in a citywide sense of pride and ownership of Laserfiche.

Breaking Down Silos to Build an Agile Enterprise

IT Software Services Manager Tom Charkut credits DAG with addressing the training element since Lakewood began using Laserfiche in 2001 “in a way IT just couldn’t.” But by 2005, Charkut says, “There were so many departments using Laserfiche that it just made sense to centralize the software maintenance and support.” IT took over Laserfiche system administration in 2006, as well as the software maintenance costs.

The City of Lakewood’s IT staff of 27 supports more than 1,000 city employees. “We’re a small team with big shoes to fill,” Charkut admits. Filling big shoes with different sizes and styles, he says, requires an agile development philosophy.

According to Charkut, one key component in solving the diverse but often overlapping information needs of Lakewood’s business units was utilizing the Laserfiche SDK and its Microsoft-standard .NET API to integrate with legacy business applications. “Since Laserfiche was an enterprise-wide system,” he says, “we needed to figure out how to integrate it with our other line-of-business systems.”

A recent example is an integration between Laserfiche and the Planning and Public Works Department’s new building permit system. “The user will be in the permit system, and using the permit number, they click on a ‘documents’ button we developed that shows them the documents in Laserfiche,” he explains. “If they need to e-mail those documents, then we send URLs linking to those documents using Web Access. Laserfiche gives us the ability to arrange the information so it’s at the user’s fingertips.”

The user, Charkut notes, never leaves the permitting application. What’s more, the additional content is referenced from its single, centralized Laserfiche repository. Similarly, integration with the city’s GeoSmart GIS application geo-enables searches for employees across various systems whether it’s for code enforcement cases or service requests from residents, as well as for any documents—including plats, plans and forms—already in Laserfiche.

“For us, Laserfiche integration has helped break down silos,” Charkut says. “It’s all about decentralized capture, centralized storage and an enterprise library.”

What a Transparent Web We Weave

Now, as the City maps out an overhaul of Lakewood’s Web strategy, Laserfiche is one of the ingredients. “Our Web strategy in the past has been a patchwork of stuff. Just last year we said, ‘We have to do something about this—we’re getting 5,000 hits a day,’” says Charkut. “Part of our plan is to promote government transparency through the use of Web self-service, including access to records contained in the Laserfiche system.”

Lakewood also finds itself in the middle of an electronic records management inventory and assessment, where consultants are actually suggesting new and future uses of Laserfiche. Building on DAG’s solid support foundation and Lakewood IT’s agile, integrated Web strategies, the city is now assessing whether and when to upgrade to Laserfiche Rio, with its scalable, flexible user and module licensing—as well as its unlimited servers—to meet the needs of more and more departments, business processes and users, both internally and externally, from a single enterprise application.

“We are evaluating the ROI of Rio,” jokes Charkut. “We will assess that model on a 7- to 10-year timeframe.”

Recent deals include:

• Fideicomiso para el Ahorro de Energia Electrica, Mexico’s largest utility company, which implemented a 77-user Avante system with Audit Trail to oversee its waste resources. It plans to expand enterprise-wide for contract management using Workflow.
• Hipotecaria Su Casita, Mexico’s second largest mortgage company, took advantage of the “Cash for Clunkers” program to replace Max Image ECM with a Laserfiche system that includes Workflow and a WebLink public portal.
• Hoteles Cityexpress, the fastest-growing hotel chain in the country, is using the first-ever Laserfiche/SharePoint integration in Mexico to project manage new property expansion.

Other significant projects include:

• Grupo Parlamentario del Partido Accion Nacional, Mexico’s ruling political party, uses a 200-user Avante system with Workflow to manage and track legislative initiatives between President Felipe Calderon and the Mexican Parliament’s 52 senators.
• Registro Civil del Estado de Mexico, the civil registry for the State of Mexico, implemented Workflow and a WebLink public portal to make 13.3 million birth certificates available online in 250 offices, as well as through mobile devices and self-serve kiosks.

Carlos Landa, president and general manager of Apoint México, attributes this success to a sales strategy closely aligned with Laserfiche’s agile ECM messaging. “We’re able to build end-to-end solutions using Laserfiche that offer the most comprehensive functionality,” he says. He adds that recent custom automations include optical pens, forms capture, biometrics and smart phone applications.

Landa founded Apoint México in 2005 in a marketplace dominated by Documentum, but established himself as an ECM/BPM contender with a Run Smarter award-winning installation in the State of Guerrero. Integrating the state’s GIS with property tax information increased revenue 400% in Acapulco and 17 other municipalities. A state-wide vehicle registry using Laserfiche followed, as well as integrations with the state’s ERP system and Lotus Notes Domino in the state’s accounting offices.

“We became known as the Laserfiche reseller that could automate any process using any integration in any state,” Landa says.

As a result, Apoint México has become the go-to provider of Laserfiche-based business solutions to some of the country’s biggest names. “Mexico is an enterprise market,” Landa explains. “Normally, you sell Laserfiche to CIOs, but we sell to CEOs—it’s a different level of decision maker. By leveraging Laserfiche as a component of shared services, we’re engaging customers as consultative partners to improve their operations overall.”

Part of how TS drives Cary’s business units is to, whenever possible, follow an internal shared services model. The challenge, Stice says, is accommodating “fairly dissimilar” business processes with the same technology foundation, so answering to these unique needs has made agility an important factor in infrastructure investments. “When we look at purchasing new applications, we want them to be flexible enough to meet departmental needs, but able to be tied together with everything else when we need it to be.”

Stice offers the town’s GIS system as an example. “Everything we do is geo-spatial,” he explains. “Addresses are used and shared by departments. But where the Engineering Department does business by project number, Planning uses case numbers.” The challenge, he says, is finding a way to accommodate the unique ways individual departments work with information, while still providing a common foundation to link that information together across departments.

“We want the business to drive the software, not the software to drive the business,” Stice concludes.

The Need: Uniting Content and Contract Management

This was the mindset in 2003 when Rodney Overton, one of Cary’s three business analysts, first looked at content management to manage the over 300 contract documents received annually by the Town Clerk’s Office. Town staff was accessing contract documents by traveling to the clerk’s office, having the clerk look up reference numbers from an AS/400-based Contract Control System (CCS), then locating the paper contract from a labyrinth of file cabinets and making copies. The search was on for a more efficient way.

Overton was aware that many North Carolina municipalities already were using Laserfiche as their enterprise content management system, so he contacted Kevin Smith of Laserfiche reseller One Source Document Solutions to learn more. Smith demonstrated how, using Laserfiche, staff in the clerk’s office could scan and store contracts while making them available to town staff—even multiple staff simultaneously—right from their desktop computers. Overton recalls easing staff concerns following a prior experience with a cumbersome imaging system. “Laserfiche had an easy-to-use Windows look and feel everyone could see themselves using,” he recalls. For his part, he liked how Laserfiche Web Access could create URL shortcuts to documents. “I saw tremendous potential for integration with a lot of our primary departmental applications as we rolled it out.”

In spring 2003, implementation took place in the Clerk’s Office. The Engineering Department followed a month later, presenting the challenges of larger document volume as well as different types of documents. Laserfiche’s ability to categorize documents according to several template fields proved significantly effective. “We started out with about 15 template fields, which we’ve narrowed down to about seven that we use today,” Overton says. “In 2007, ‘Project Number’ and ‘Document Type’ fields became very useful as we began to find ways to integrate Laserfiche with our GIS software, MapInfo.”

Rounding out this initial deployment, One Source assisted the Cary Police Department with a massive migration of some 190,000 documents from its legacy imaging system to its own volume within the Laserfiche repository. Since then, the Cary Police Department hasn’t looked back, adding more than 10,000 documents a year to its Laserfiche system.

System Integrations “Just a Click Away”

A 2006 upgrade to Laserfiche 7.2 brought with it enhanced opportunities to integrate Laserfiche with line-of-business applications. “Laserfiche 7.2 allowed you to save searches; we felt that if you could save a search in Web Access, then you should be able to execute a search using a URL link,” Overton says. “Through testing, research and help from One Source, we were able to create a URL search where we could pass search information from a simple browser shortcut and have Web Access perform a search and pull up the desired documents.”

Overton soon wrote an AS/400 CL program that uses the Contract Control Number in the Contract Control system to display a contract in Web Access. While the user is viewing contract information on the Contract Control System, all they need to do is press a hotkey to initiate a Web Access search that displays the contract image in detail.

“Now users don’t even have to log into Laserfiche—with the press of button they can see all related documents for a contract,” he says.

A few months later, Overton developed another “hotkey” integration for Cary’s MapInfo GIS software. The ability to search across multiple templates, such as the clerk’s as well as engineering departments’, is helpful to bring up all documents for projects outlined in MapInfo. With this integration, a MapInfo user only needs to click an address, select a project and a search is launched that pulls up a list of all related project documents in Web Access—quickly focusing searches in a town where, “everything is geo-centric,” as TS Director Stice puts it.

To simplify multi-template searches, Overton—along with co-workers Wilson Farrell and Ken Guttman—created a small internal website to perform central searches using Web Access. “So instead of running into character limitations with MapInfo when we have more than one template search, we can pass critical information to an internal website to launch the remaining portion of the script,” says Overton. “This helps tremendously in minimizing the character length of the URL needed for integrating into other applications.”

Creating a Standard for Imaging—and Image-Enablement

This image enablement has proven so useful Overton says he’s now looking at ways to integrate Laserfiche with the Police Department’s RMS software as well as the Accounting Department’s Sungard Public Sector financial software. “Sungard has an imaging interface that was built specifically around a few select products on the market,” he says. “Now, with the ease of use and flexibility of Laserfiche, we hope to utilize this part of the Sungard interface to integrate the two.” Overton says that after taking part in the inaugural Eastern North Carolina State Laserfiche Users Group earlier this year, he’s looking forward to sharing his experience with fellow users.

“From our User Group meetings, I know lots of municipalities here in the Southeast that have both Sungard Public Sector and Laserfiche software,” he says. “So having that network of fellow users is very helpful in terms of sharing experience and ideas.”

And it ends up being more cost-effective, too, he adds. “You’re talking about tremendous cost savings when you don’t have to consult with a third party to write an integration. For our MapInfo integration, if we had to hire a consultant, it would have been at least $10,000, if not more. Multiply that per application and the savings can really add up,” Overton says. “The way we are able to link to documents in Laserfiche from another application really makes a difference in terms of value and functionality.”

As such, Laserfiche has become the integrative middleware used by several departments to access and share content. Besides Engineering, the Town Clerk’s office and the Police Department, the Parks and Recreation and Planning Departments have also implemented Laserfiche, with plans to expand to the Accounting Department as well as Inspections and Permits.

“Laserfiche has become a strategic application,” Stice says. “It’s the standard we use to manage paper and it’s the only one we use to access that information and tie it to other information.”

Tying that information together, Overton notes, has proven its value both in terms of saving IT resources, but also in the value of enhanced functionality to deliver shared services. “Laserfiche’s Web Access has made integration just a click away,” he says.

In fact, One Source has had such success with the agile ECM message that it has increased its Laserfiche revenue by 52%. The North Carolina reseller has also raised new customer revenue by 170%.

These numbers reflect three significant recent sales:

• Durham County, which is expanding its Rio deployment. The county’s DSS agency will use Rio to manage active records, and its Public Health Department has integrated Rio with a new EMR system. The Health Department estimates that it will save $4 million as a result of moving to a new paperless facility.
• Person County DSS, which has purchased a 41-user Avante system and is integrating it with the department’s Northwoods case management system (a PDP partner).
• Craven County Health Department, which is integrating its new 12-user Avante system with a state-run EMR that will use Workflow to automatically create and populate patient charts.

According to Smith, these sales have all resulted from focusing on agile ECM messaging, specifically the value of Workflow. “Each of these clients is implementing some type of BPM solution where Laserfiche’s proven ability to integrate easily with other primary applications has been a big selling point,” he observes.

Smith notes that One Source has leveraged strategic partnerships with a number of complementary solutions providers. “We have tight partnerships with both PDP partners and other companies so there are as many people as possible looking for new prospects on our behalf.”

Finally, Smith says, One Source credits its recent success to investing in a year-long advanced sales training program while expanding administrative and technical staff. “The training allowed our whole team to focus on properly qualified prospects and reduced the amount of ‘free’ consulting we provide,” he says.

“The entire One Source team deserves credit for our success, especially David Swan, my senior sales consultant, whose efforts afforded me the time to develop our Laserfiche agile ECM strategy, which is giving us strong results.”

Allen Adjamian of Laserfiche reseller Adjamian Affiliated was called to demonstrate how Laserfiche could lighten the firm’s paperwork load. Adjamian showed how Laserfiche could be integrated with the firm’s Lacerte tax software and other accounting software programs to create a central storage repository for the entire firm’s paperwork in a way that all but eliminated printing—even scanning.

Rocha says his fellow Olmsted staffers were particularly impressed by how user-friendly Laserfiche was, because it “had the look and feel of Windows and search engines we were used to using.” Another plus, he adds, was the comprehensive single solution Laserfiche offered. “Other programs you had to buy more products to get to that level of functionality. Laserfiche suited our needs right out of the box.”

Olmsted herself notes that even with all its functionality, Laserfiche offered a focus. “We looked at a lot of systems where the document management component was usually one component in this canned system,” she says. “What stood out about Laserfiche was that it was a stand-alone program that focused on a single, separate function that provided a higher level of security.”

The firm purchased Laserfiche with Web Access to serve staff internally and remotely, as well as its clients. Implementation began in late 2006 with a backlog conversion of seven years’ worth of paper files. Adjamian and fellow solutions consultant Kristina Yassi worked with Rocha and Olmsted’s staff to set up templates and document types to establish the file structure that, with some enhancements, the firm still uses today. “Allen and Kristina helped us a design a folder and subfolder structure that allowed us get started scanning our documents right away,” Rocha recalls. “We’ve been able to improve on it since then, which is actually something we’ve come to appreciate about Laserfiche: It’s flexible enough to grow with us, without making a big project out of it.”

The impact of using Laserfiche was immediate. “A lot of the time when we complete a project, we have to make associated information almost immediately available to meet deadlines and client demands. Once things are in Laserfiche, we can make that data readily available through e-mail or Web Access,” Rocha says.

A big time- and resource-saver, he says, is the ability to print directly to Laserfiche from the firm’s Lacerte tax software. “Printing to Laserfiche from Lacerte takes about 10 to 15 seconds for about 40 pages. There is no need to print, prep and scan paper copies for review, whether it’s for managers or staff. They go directly to Laserfiche to review it,” Rocha explains. “This allows us to move tax returns through the office for input and review without printing out any pages, which also saves time and money.”

This saves time making changes to tax returns and statements, Rocha says. “Whereas before we would have to recycle the old version and reprint the new one and file it, now we just delete it in Laserfiche and re-print/download to Laserfiche. It’s also very convenient that we don’t need to go track down the client’s file to review data, because it’s already in Laserfiche.”

Rocha also says that Laserfiche’s interoperability with other programs and file types has brought efficiency and convenience to other business processes. “We transfer all our disparate types of data and document types into Laserfiche—QuickBooks, PDF documents, and Excel,” he says. “We can print directly to Laserfiche, save-to, or just drag-and-drop it. It’s that easy.”

For her part, Olmsted says the Laserfiche system inspired rapid adoption for its ease of use, but again, its focus of use. “Laserfiche feels like an independent program in that it’s this standalone entity that’s open to all of the types of files we work with. Our staff and customers have adopted it really well.”

The ultimate customer service, she says, is Laserfiche’s DoD 5015.2-certified security. “It can take some time to get people used to not working with paper, but for us it’s the only way to secure information moving forward by making sure you don’t have sensitive information laying around the office. Our clients look to us as their accounting firm to secure their information at the highest level,” she says.

At the same time, Olmsted sees Laserfiche making her business more agile and responsive to staff and clients alike. “Laserfiche provides us a lot of mobility. Auditors going out in the field can scan in documents and access company files. We have everybody reviewing tax returns online as well.”

Now, four years since implementing Laserfiche, the firm is seeing its return on investment (ROI) from regained staff time and cutting overhead costs. “I can say we save about 25% across the board, as far what it takes us to process paperwork now,” Rocha says.

And Rocha says that Olmsted & Associates has found a new way to work. “With Laserfiche we’ve found a document management system that offers us control in terms of securing and centralizing information, but also the flexibility to handle all kinds of content and make it readily available to our staff and clients securely and conveniently.”

That, Olmsted says, has given her firm a competitive edge. “The only way to move forward is to get your efficiency up and your costs down. For us, Laserfiche has been a big part of that.”

Since becoming a VAR this past January, Shaffer has expanded Laserfiche use in six school districts while
landing deals with two new accounts last month: the Allegheny Valley and Franklin Area school districts.

According to John Shaffer, president of Shaffer Technologies, the school districts purchased or expanded Laserfiche to add records management functionality to their electronic student management systems (SMS). Shaffer says that, prior to implementing Laserfiche RME, districts printed and stored records every semester to comply with state-mandated 99-year retention requirements. “Our customers welcomed the user-friendly records management functionality Laserfiche offers,” he says. In short, “They loved Snapshot.”

Key to his success, Shaffer explains, was positioning Laserfiche as a natural extension of districts’ SMS. To that end, the company is working with SMS providers CSIU and ProSoft to develop seamless integrations with Laserfiche. “Using Snapshot, the experience with the SMS remains the same,” Shaffer says.

Shaffer sees this initial success is part of a larger, phased sales strategy. “Managing student records is our foundation application,” he explains. “In phase two, Laserfiche will be extended to accounting departments. In phase three, Laserfiche will automate the processes and forms in HR departments.” Shaffer adds that he will work with PDP partner LincWare to develop e-form solutions.

Shaffer sees these initial sales as “the cornerstone of multi-year rollouts to make Laserfiche the number-one ECM choice for school districts because they address a variety of information and business process management needs in a manner that is comprehensive and user-friendly.”

To that end, he says, Shaffer Technologies will host its first state-wide Laserfiche workshop for school district information managers on Wednesday, August 18.

As Jennifer L. Litchfield, IT Manager at Palladium, remembers it, onboarding more than 1,000 accounts all at once left almost no time to learn a new electronic document management system in their new Norfolk, VA, offices—even as the need to implement one to ensure the breakaway firm could hit the ground running was clear.

“We added $1 billion in assets under management within three months, so we needed to have everything come together very quickly,” Litchfield recalls. Experiences from a prior firm had proven how cumbersome and costly paper was, from the staff effort to file and find information to the yearly accumulation of paper that took up valuable—and expensive—space. “We used to have six or seven employees spend two full weeks every year just merging each client’s file with the historical files, purging information where appropriate, and making room for the next year’s paperwork,” she says.

As owners of their new firm, Palladium’s principals knew that the right technology would make a long-term difference. “We wanted to start off our new company with smart decisions when it came to technology and electronic document management,” Litchfield says. “We made decisions that required upfront commitments of time and money, but produced ongoing savings of both.”

“We needed it to be user-friendly, customizable to our needs, and manageable on-site.”

The search for a document management system began with three criteria in mind—and one given: value. “We needed it to be user-friendly, customizable to our needs, and manageable on-site,” Litchfield explains. “Cost is always a consideration, so we were looking for a balance between use and cost while considering long-term scalability.”

Litchfield was referred to Laserfiche through the Advent Users Group, a resource made up of companies that use the portfolio management products from Advent Software. John Caso, solutions consultant at Laserfiche reseller One Source Document Solutions, Inc., showed Palladium how Laserfiche:

• Enabled users to process and store documents according to customizable template fields.
• Offered multiple searching options using those templates as well as full-text keyword searches.

Litchfield invited users from each department to the demonstration for their feedback. Each, she says, agreed Laserfiche was the most user-friendly solution they’d looked at.

“Managers wanted to be able to answer client questions over the phone, so they liked how we could set up the Laserfiche system to feel like their paper files, with the same tabs as the old paper files. The client service administrators really appreciated the advanced search capabilities that helped them find documents quickly and easily,” Litchfield recalls. “Other solutions seemed like they had a pretty big learning curve; Laserfiche is a product that you can open up and it’s immediately apparent how you use it.”

The advanced searching, Litchfield adds, would play a significant role from a compliance perspective as well, allowing easier auditing and monitoring of documents. “Our compliance officer really needs to be able to slice and dice information, and it was clear Laserfiche was the right choice. Plus everyone would be using the same system, on the same server, so everything’s in one place. From a technology, disaster recovery, and business continuity standpoint, this was important.”

Long-term, Litchfield and fellow staff agreed Laserfiche was flexible and scalable enough to grow with the firm. “We liked how we could set up the folder structure like our paper files and then change it at a later date,” she says. “We have ever-changing needs and it was important to have a product that could grow and change with us.”

Palladium purchased Laserfiche in May 2008; implementation took place over a two-day period. “We opened in late January, so by then we already had the bulk of the accounts on our portfolio accounting system,” Litchfield explains. “We had onsite support for those first two days to get Laserfiche up and running and train users and administrators. We didn’t have a backlog of information, so that helped.

“We just set the system up, set up individual scanners and got the users trained so that they could start working in the system right away,” she adds.

Improving the Day-to Day, Keeping Pace with Compliance

Since then, Litchfield says, Laserfiche has been instrumental in streamlining the day-to-day operations of the firm. “I hear all the time from our client service administrators how much they love using Laserfiche as opposed to the old way of filing paperwork. Every day, they scan all account documents into the system so all the original paperwork and correspondence is in a single location. We don’t have to worry about the storage space and cost for paper documents, or the annual clean up and purging of those documents,” she explains.

“Besides our client folders, we also maintain other folders within Laserfiche with information that cannot be changed, including marketing and compliance folders. Because we store copies of custodial statements in Laserfiche, we don’t have to keep those hard copies onsite. The only hard copies we keep are our original signed agreements,” she adds. “Our onsite storage is minimal.”

In the future, Litchfield says the firm is looking forward to the advanced search functionality that will come with upgrading to Laserfiche 8. “Everything is changing in our industry, and compliance is such a huge part of that,” she says. “Our compliance officer is one of our biggest Laserfiche users. Because she needs to be able to search for multiple criteria, being able to search throughout the file structures , as well as the further capabilities that are available with upgrading to Laserfiche 8, will be a big step forward for compliance.

“We use Laserfiche a lot for in-house verification, so having what we call that ‘wildcard’ capability to search according to a manager’s code, that’s a great oversight tool for auditing,” Litchfield adds. “Also, if we have auditors in house, we need to be able to get information to them immediately—not in three days or four days. Having these features available shows us that Laserfiche is keeping an eye on the changing environment and is adapting to keep pace.”

Along with their upgrade to Laserfiche 8, the firm is investigating implementing Workflow business process management. “We’d love to automate a lot of our processes that cross departments. Where we currently use Outlook or walk paper around, each person could sign off on a section of a document in the workflow and automatically the next person would get an e-mail saying it’s ready for them. We could move paperwork through much more effectively and efficiently,” Litchfield says.

“The ability to integrate [Laserfiche] with our portfolio management software is a big step forward. This will make the opening of new accounts a single point of entry, where fields will be populated automatically directly to Laserfiche. Additionally, allowing us to monitor personal trading within the firm from a compliance standpoint is another improvement. Automating that process will save time and money,” she adds.

Beginning with the sale of a 200-user Rio ECM system to the City of Bloomington, MN, in May, Cities Digital went on to sell an additional 80 licenses to the City of Fargo, ND, ending the quarter with a 70-user Avante deal with Home Direct USA last month.

In comparison to Q2 ’09, Cities Digital:

• Increased total new sales by 550%.
• Boosted sales to new customers by 500%.
• Enhanced existing customer sales by 700%.

This exponential growth is the result of “expanding when others are contracting.” According to Patrick Welsch, president of Cities Digital, “We have invested a huge amount of time and resources back into the company over the last year. We increased our consulting staff and our sales team is now four times as big as it was a year ago. I went from being a salesperson to a sales leader.”

Welsch is confident Cities Digital can continue its current growth, which is on track to double its sales figures over last year’s. “We have the right team with the right product at the right time,” he says.

“We’d been working with the City of Bloomington for eight years, but this year the Rio ECM message of unlimited servers and named user licensing really connected with them because they’re looking to build an enterprise-wide ECM infrastructure,” he continues. “At the same time, I have to credit the staff at Laserfiche for working with our team to make this quarter so successful.”

“Advisors tend to be very fiscally conservative, and don’t always understand the value of technology to their bottom line. But when they hear about how our clients have turned an $8,000 Laserfiche investment into a $45,000 ROI, that’s very compelling,” says Zaheer Master, president of AIS.

According to Master, the financial services industry is realizing the need to balance the efficiency of a paperless office with the ability to keep up with increasing compliance demands, and that’s where Laserfiche Avante is a perfect solution.

“I’ve been in several demos where I’ve been able to show a prospect how, in three clicks, I can take out my iPhone and use Web Access to look up a client’s information and e-mail it to them, securely, from their own server—not the cloud,” he says. “That’s been very effective.”

Master believes that AIS’ recent success is the culmination of long-term effort. “When the market took a downturn in 2008, we followed Laserfiche’s lead and kept up our sponsorship of local FPA chapters,” he says. “Now, you have the combination of the market rebounding, Laserfiche’s reputation in the financial vertical, and the coming compliance tsunami that Avante is so well-suited to help firms adapt to.”