Author Archive: Hobey Echlin
About the Author
Laserfiche
Staff
Hobey Echlin is a Writer/Researcher in the Laserfiche Marketing department and is active in the Laserfiche Luminaries program.
May 5th, 2009
To be honest, the City of Albany, OR, hadn’t really been maximizing Laserfiche when its new Finance Director wanted to do away with using it altogether five years ago.
The city had installed Laserfiche in its Finance Department in 1998 as a virtual file cabinet. “Between 1999-2003 we were only scanning a few thousand documents a month and it was limited to just the Finance department,” admits Network Administrator and Laserfiche Luminary Allen Pilgrim. By 2004, Laserfiche storage totaled just ten volumes of 4.6GB each. A significant number, but apparently not significant enough for one new city administrator.
Full story »
Tags: accela integration, Audit Trail, Building Department, Finance Department, GIS, Import Agent, IT, Laserfiche Toolkit, law enforcement, Public Works Department, Quick Fields, Snapshot, State and Local Government, WebLink
Posted in Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Municipal Government, Newsletters, State and Local Government | 3 Comments »
April 13th, 2009
Since its founding five years ago, Josanti InfoImaging has achieved significant success in its native Ghana, a market as economically and technologically challenging as the world has to offer. Yet, Josanti’s client list reads like a consortium of West Africa’s most forward-thinking financial institutions: CAL Bank, Ecobank Ghana as well as National Investment Bank.
With the addition of two World Bank-sponsored government projects, the Ghana Immigration Service and the Ghana Land Administration Project, Josanti InfoImaging has earned its place in the Laserfiche Winners Circle for the first time this year.
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Posted in VAR of the Month | Be the first to comment »
April 6th, 2009
Since implementing Laserfiche in 2007, Collin County, TX, home to the Dallas/Fort Worth area’s fastest-growing northeast suburbs, has enjoyed enterprise-wide success automating and integrating its business processes. But as Records Manager Margaret Anderson points out, it’s been as a direct result of equally enterprise-wide pre-planning working with the county’s myriad departments.
The County saw its population increase nearly 50%—from nearly 500,000 in 2000 to 725,000 by 2007—straining the county’s infrastructure. As Anderson puts it, “The exponential growth rate of our county is reflected in the increased demand for essential county services.” The governing body of the county, the Commissioners Court, then issued a strategic direction to improve efficiency and customer service. “This caused us to look at an enterprise solution to managing our records with emphasis on migrating to electronic records,” she explains. “We had to reduce our paper and microfilm records volume.”
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Tags: county clerk, county IT, courts, Enterprise, integration, Justice of the Peace, Laserfiche Toolkit, Local Government, microfilm, records management, ROI, tax assessor
Posted in County Government, Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Newsletters, State and Local Government | 2 Comments »
March 10th, 2009
Two years ago, the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office in Florida was another local government agency with overflowing file cabinets and the inspiration (and budget) to do something about it. Laserfiche was at first intended to manage departmental records, but was soon adapted to catalogue domestic violence cases and help create SORT, the county’s public database of sexual predators. “Being able to scan in domestic violence case reports is important because these cases are very time-sensitive as far as victims support services go,” says Commander Doug Waller. “Time is definitely not on our side.”
The importance of time is especially crucial to homicide cases. “We only see about 10-12 homicides a year and we generally stay on top of them,” says Lieutenant Bruce Barnett. “But the longer a case stays open, the more the paperwork piles up.”
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Tags: case management, law enforcement, police
Posted in Customer Stories, Law Enforcement, UserNews | Be the first to comment »
March 1st, 2009
To sell enterprise-wide, start with a single process.
Nashua Ltd. makes massive strides selling BPM by first getting its foot in the door.
“Simplify your sale by addressing a single process,” says Ben Sheppard, Solutions Consulting Manager. “You make the capital outlay and risk to the customer so much smaller. Find their pain first - find the financial drivers within that process causing the pain - then start your up-selling. Then constantly re-visit and show your customer and other departments more features and benefits.”
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February 1st, 2009
How do you become a million dollar reseller? You answer Laserfiche CEO’s Nien-Ling Wacker’s challenge to “Be IT’s sweetheart in 2009.”
That’s what Unity Business Systems (UBS) is doing – albeit with a slight twist. Over the past two years, the Virginia-based reseller has made its technical support staff the sweetheart of its sales effort: technical staff now account for 15% of sales.
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January 30th, 2009

IT Systems Analyst Gary Agira
If Gary Agira’s story were a movie, the story would include the Ugandan IT Systems Analyst navigating government bureaucracy, stubborn workers, and perhaps most dramatically, a national registry and warehouse overflowing with 34 million government documents—to bring them all into the digital world. It’d be a charmingly idiosyncratic story, but still a universal one: document management as a metaphor for progress, with Agira’s unwavering belief in the power of technology as he moves a nation and a workforce into the digital age.
But this isn’t a movie, and the real Gary Agira is the IT Systems Analyst for Uganda’s Privatization & Utility Sector Reform Project (PUSRP). The PUSRP is the department of the Ministry of Finance and Planning charged with the epic task of overhauling the way the African nation archives, stores and perhaps most profoundly of all, actually works with records to support the divestiture and reform of 42 public enterprises. It’s all part of an initiative to move Uganda’s economy forward.
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Tags: disaster recovery, international
Posted in Customer Stories, Federal Government | Be the first to comment »
January 9th, 2009
Charlottesville, VA is consistently voted one of America’s best cities to live, marked as it is by its deep history (birthplace of three U.S. presidents) and its college-town charm (home to the University of Virginia). But when it came to records management, Charlottesville’s paper history held little charm for the city staff left dealing with its outdated and overgrown filing system.
“Life before Laserfiche was full of frustration,” remembers Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue and Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.
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Tags: disaster recovery, implementation, Local Government, ROI
Posted in Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Laserfiche Luminaries, Municipal Government | Be the first to comment »
January 3rd, 2009
RB Document Solutions Ltd. (RBDSL) has been named VAR of the Month twice in one year, increasing sales 122%, despite a global financial crisis that hit its market of financial advisers hardest.
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December 12th, 2008
When Banks Hardwoods, Inc. (BHI) was started in 1985, a single office housed its handful of employees in Elkhart, Indiana. In those days, expansion meant adding a manufacturing facility to kiln dry and plane the premium lumber it supplied to area builders.
Today, Banks Hardwoods has two manufacturing facilities in Michigan, another in Wisconsin, and a sales office in Arkansas employing upwards of 175 people. But as the business grew, says Dana Kennedy, Banks Hardwoods’ Controller, sawdust wasn’t the only wood by-product piling up around the organization.
“All this expansion means a huge amount of paperwork,” she says, “and the need for constant communication between the divisions.” When the company added its third division in Newberry, Michigan and saw a 20% increase in customers as a result, she felt the paper jam.
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Tags: green, Snapshot, sustainability
Posted in Customer Stories, Other Industries | 2 Comments »
December 9th, 2008

For Mohave County, AZ, the third time was the charm for the county’s Records Manager to successfully implement Laserfiche enterprise-wide.
The dry-witted comedian Steven Wright once joked, “I’m so far ahead of my time, nobody’s there yet.” Mohave County Records Manager Chuck Chlarson can relate. He saw his two predecessors try without much success to implement an enterprise-wide records management system—despite a state mandate to do so—because of a lack of technical support and user buy-in. But as Chlarson has found, in Mohave County, being the third Records Manager is the ticket to success.
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Tags: county IT, records management, RME, ROI, State and Local Government
Posted in County Government, Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Newsletters, State and Local Government | Be the first to comment »
December 1st, 2008
While this year’s business climate can seem daunting, Dayn Pefferle, President of Campbell, CA-based resellers Peelle Technologies is optimistic. In fact, Pefferle sees the challenge of the current economy as an opportunity. Simply put, the more careful a client is to research a solution, the more likely they are to go with Peelle.
“We expect the condition of the economy to actually fuel our sales for two reasons,” Pefferle begins. “Number one, prospects will be putting extra effort in making sure they make the most responsible product selection. We believe that the more discovery and research is done, the probability of selecting our business becomes greater. Number two, we fully expect to see an increase in businesses seeking our products and services to reduce their costs and streamline their operations.”
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November 11th, 2008
Running smarter sometimes means pacing yourself.
That’s the lesson from 2008 Run Smarter Award winner Thurston County, WA. Until implementing Laserfiche in 2007, the rustic county, peppered as it is with forests and Puget Sound waters, was beset with what could best be described as information management logjams.
But in less than two years, Thurston County has evolved its use of Laserfiche from a pilot project handling backlog conversion to the backbone of a department-by-department phenomenon. In short, Thurston County has realized the very essence of what it means to Run Smarter.
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Tags: county IT, courts, Laserfiche Toolkit, law enforcement, Local Government, records management
Posted in County Government, Customer Stories, State and Local Government | Be the first to comment »
November 10th, 2008
Newspapers are used to working on tight deadlines, but nothing could have prepared 2008 Run Smarter Award winners the Star Tribune for the time-crunch the Minneapolis newspaper faced when it needed to replace its legacy document imaging system—one with no support or upgrade path—with one that could migrate massive databases from shared servers in less than a year. Full story »
Posted in Customer Stories, Other Industries | Be the first to comment »
November 6th, 2008
“One team, one vision, advancing health.”
That’s BC Biomedical’s motto. And since implementing Laserfiche four years ago to manage its sprawling information network spread out over 47 patient service centers (PSCs), you can add “embracing technology” to its motto. Full story »
Tags: bar code, Canada, Healthcare, international
Posted in Customer Stories, Healthcare | Be the first to comment »