“We have a fiduciary responsibility to get value from tax dollars,” says Captain Blakely of the Riverside, California Police Department. For the past decade, Riverside has increasingly turned to information management technology, emerging as a model of public efficiency, especially these days.

As Roz Vinson, Police Records and Information Manager puts it, “I’m short 10 bodies – that’s where we are right now. Where can I work smarter? If we only have to touch something once, that’s progress.” Full story »

Time was, when an officer from Ontario’s Hamilton Police Service (HPS) responded to investigate a call about an EDP (emotionally disturbed person), they’d have two choices to determine risk factors as they proceeded: Drive back to the station with the EDP to look up past reports – or place a call and wait for a Records Clerk to pull the report and read it to them over the phone. Either way, the officer would be off the street, sometimes for hours, waiting for the necessary information to act on.

These days, however, an officer responding to the same call can pull up reports right in their patrol car, accessing information vital to the safety of the EDP – and the public – using just a name, incident number or other simple keyword.
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Toronto, ON, Canada, is one of the world’s most competitive information management markets, but IKON Office Solutions – A Ricoh Company (IKON), has turned that challenge into an opportunity. “We know who we’re up against, so we’re good at determining what’s good business to go after,” says Enterprise Solutions Manager Franz Gangl. “We can determine, ‘Do we have a chance to steer the account?’”
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“We consider our faculty to be our greatest asset,” says David Haugland, Associate Vice Provost of the University of Southern California (USC). Trouble was, spread out as USC faculty were among its 17 schools and colleges, for the Office of the Provost, faculty records were increasingly the university’s greatest pain in that asset.
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Maine’s state motto is “The Way Life Should Be,” and the City of Saco’s could well be “The Way Laserfiche Should Be.” Thanks to a commitment to user education and establishing an in-house Laserfiche administrator, city employees in every department have embraced an ecological and economical paradigm shift in how the city does business and offers services.

So much so that in just three years, Saco has set a standard for e-government so high that its regional neighbors are beginning to look into it as well.

So why has Saco been so successful? For starters, when City Administrator Rick Michaud and Saco’s IT staff looked into document management three years ago, they didn’t have a problem, they had a plan.
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When Rupert Leaton of Isle of Man-Manx Business Solutions (MBS) titled his May technology seminar simply “Cost,” 55 of his fellow Manx (the term for residents of the Isle of Man) showed up to hear more. This number is significant because the Isle of Man, situated between England and Ireland in the Irish Sea, is a relatively small island—the kind of place where when you rent a car, they don’t keep track of your fuel because you won’t drive enough to need a fill-up—but is also home to one of the world’s most sophisticated financial services industries.
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The Eaton County, MI’s Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has long been recognized for its visionary use of Laserfiche. What began in 2003 as a means of archiving closed cases has evolved into a department-wide embrace of technology that has eliminated file cabinets, saved significant time and an exponential amount of money. Perhaps most sustainably, Laserfiche has improved the way attorneys work. Lawyers summon case information – police reports, photographs, even video and audio archives of 911 calls – right in the courtroom from a digital briefcase. Plus, minimal staff is required to stay ahead of the continuous inflow of paper generated.

Behind this success has been the foresight and follow-through of Laserfiche Luminary Dr. Robert J. Sobie, the county’s Information Systems Director. For almost 15 years, Sobie has patiently championed the efficiency of the paperless workplace, department by department, process by process, all the way to the Prosecuting Attorney’s office and beyond.
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Iberdrola Renewables is one of North America’s leading providers of structured energy solutions for wholesale and large commercial and industrial customers. With over 9,300 megawatts of renewable energy in operation globally – and more than 2,800 megawatts of that being wind power located in the U.S. – the Portland, OR-based company is currently the world’s leading provider of wind power. Last year, Iberdrola Renewables created 15,000 jobs worldwide, while investing $2.2 billion in wind power in the US alone – up from $1.54 billion in 2007 – to become the second largest provider of wind power in the US since entering the market in 2006.

But the rapid growth of its renewable energy division in the last few years led to challenges managing its documents and records. “With each new energy project, we were increasing the number of relationships with private land owners, commercial suppliers, and government agencies,” explains Sean Malowney, a Senior Business Systems Analyst at the company. “This translated into a growing volume of invoices and contracts.”
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“Yes, people are more cautious, but there are pockets of organizations in nearly every field that are looking to spend money on document imaging technology this year and my job is to find them,” says Larry Phelps of Minnesota reseller Solbrekk.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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