“Our decision to go paperless was driven not by cost or budget issues, but by the desire to grow our business, tame a paper monster that was consuming every available square foot of office space, improve our customer service, and keep up with a rapidly-changing financial planning industry,” says Blake Woodard, Managing Partner of Woodard Insurance, LLP, a Fort Worth-based firm of financial advisors and insurance professionals.

“In our view, we had no choice as to whether to go paperless. You must go paperless if you want to survive and thrive in the financial planning industry,” he adds. Full story »

The Daviess County, IN, prosecutor’s office, located in the basement of the county courthouse, isn’t the biggest office to start with. But with files stacked from the floor to the ceiling, it was clear that the office, home to three prosecuting attorneys, desperately needed more room.

Thanks to Prosecuting Attorney G. Byron Overton, they’re getting it. Overton and his staff are working with Laserfiche reseller Nancy Mathes of Paper-Lite to scan and store files electronically in Laserfiche. “We’re not going paperless,” Overton says. “We’re going file-less.”
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On March 3, the building housing Cologne’s historical archive collapsed into a nearby metro tunnel.

The actual degree of damage to the historical documents housed in the building is still unknown, with a substantial part of the written records of the city’s history believed to have been destroyed. In fact, recent accounts estimate that 90% of the archive’s records were buried in the collapse and may not be recoverable. The archive’s director estimates that they’ve only digitized a “tiny fraction” of their holdings, which includes the private estate of Nobel Prize-winning author Heinrich Boell.
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“Personally, I think that every financial advisor has to move eventually to an electronic filing system. It’s not a matter of if, but when,” says Nick Cosentino, president and founder of Financial Foundations, Inc. “In my opinion, it would be impossible to succeed without it.”

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I was watching the series finale of “ER” last night, which normally wouldn’t make you think of Laserfiche. But as I watched an intern escort a group of medical students around, and as he stopped at the paper chart holder and explained how their paper-based workflow worked (or didn’t, as the case may be), I couldn’t help but think …

Wouldn’t this be a lot easier with a document management system?
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The Challenge

The strict oversight of the Isle of Man Government’s Financial Supervision Commission (FSC) means that independent financial advisers require a secure, enterprise-wide platform for tracking and managing both paper and electronic records. Proliferating work process documents, extensive audits and strict records-retention rules leave many financial services firms struggling to maintain productivity in a highly-competitive industry.

For Jon McGowan, managing director of MAC Financial, these challenges multiplied with his business’s increasing success. With three major acquisitions in three years, McGowan and his staff were dealing with more customers, more work and significantly more paper. They needed a solution that would not only organize their records, but would also assist them in following compliance directives. Whatever solution they chose had to have enterprise capabilities, be able to manage a large volume of documents and integrate with their customer relationship management (CRM) system to enable fast, efficient and flexible client service.

It took less than half a day for MAC Financial to implement a Laserfiche solution, enabling instant document retrieval and freeing up an entire floor of office space. Now, MAC Financial runs more efficiently, saving time, money and staff resources while increasing revenue.
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The Challenge

The Eastleigh Council Revenue and Benefits Department faced a considerable challenge: increasing operational efficiency while transitioning from their rapidly-declining Document and Image Processing System (DIPS). Their current DIPS was slowing down information access and hampering staff productivity, due to an aging, ineffective query function. Whatever system the department chose, however, had to eventually integrate with the council’s planned enterprise-wide customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Lesley Cox, Local Taxation Manager, knew that the revenue and benefits department was working with a limited budget and had to procure the best-quality system available. By implementing a Laserfiche® digital document management solution, she was able to centralise the department’s records in a single repository, saving her staff time and aggravation while simplifying future integration with the council-wide CRM system.
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“We were an early adopter of many technologies, but not document management,” admits Alan Levitz, President and CEO of GCG Financial, Inc. “It was hard for me to envision it working effectively, because I was concerned about flexibility and searchability.”

Levitz’s father, Robert, founded GCG Financial, then called the Greater Chicago Group, Inc. in 1975. Alan joined in 1983, and his brothers David and Rick soon followed. Alan’s now president and CEO; David and Rick are both executive vice presidents. But GCG is hardly a small family operation—the firm manages 83 producers who sell insurance, investment and benefits, most of them split between Bannockburn, and Oakbrook IL, and Denver, CO. “As our offices don’t share the same physical location, it was important to standardize the services we provide to both groups,” says Levitz.
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One of the things we get asked a lot is “How much money can I really save with Laserfiche?” We have two great white papers that show the possibilities - one for financial services and one for healthcare - but, as usual, our customers’ success stories speak for themselves.

We have so many customers out there who use Laserfiche in innovative and creative ways to make their budgets stretch as far as possible. Here are some examples.

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Many financial advisors consider technology an expense, no matter how necessary. Joseph Salpietro of Xpyria Investment Advisors felt the same way, until he came to a crucial realization.

“We always figured we’d have to hire more people to create the efficiency we needed,” he says. “We’d talked about needing two or three administrators over the next five or so years at a cost of, say, $30,000-40,000 each. And when we found out that we didn’t have to hire those people to help us with the paper chase—well, that’s a smart business decision.”

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With the strict oversight of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), independent financial advisers in the UK require a robust platform for tracking and managing paper records. Rigorous audits and record-retention rules, along with numerous work-process documents, leave independent financial advisors drowning in a sea of paper.

Regal Independent Financial Services Director Neil James and his co-directors were fighting a losing battle against rapidly-filling file cabinets and spiraling storage costs, all the while facing the strict compliance and retention pressures of operating in a highly-regulated environment. With files of up to 250 pages, easy searching was a priority, and physical storage space was at a premium.
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In Bakersfield, CA, a town known for its agriculture, manufacturing and petroleum extraction and refining is now known for something different: its innovative technology.

As the fastest-growing city in the United States with a population of over 250,000, Bakersfield was experiencing an explosion of records. “We wanted a document management system to store public documents in a secure, easily searchable manner,” says IT Director Bob Trammell. “We chose Laserfiche because of its pricing and how easy it was to search for and retrieve documents.”

“I had already installed Laserfiche in a city where I was previously employed, so I was very familiar with it,” Trammell adds. “That was eleven years ago, and today all 19 departments in the city, as well as thousands of citizens, use Laserfiche.”
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As one of the fastest growing counties in the nation, Collin County, TX, faced the challenge of managing an increasingly-large number of records generated by a growing population.

According to Records Manager Margaret Anderson, staff in the county’s courts had difficulty finding information, due to disparate systems implemented by each department. “We also had over 15,000 reels of microfilm and 18,450 boxes of paper stored throughout the county,” she says. “Files were everywhere and we couldn’t keep up with the demand. We had to ensure that staff did not unintentionally destroy records that needed to be retained, and we wanted to implement a case management system (CMS). But we also had to manage all the paper.

“Our first step was to select and implement a new case management system for the county court system,” Anderson continues. “The records management system (RMS) we chose needed to interface with this system and provide records management control for closed and disposed case files, as well as support documents.”
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When it comes to their firm’s infrastructure, many financial advisors rely on the same paper files they’ve been using since they joined the industry. For some advisors, letting go of their paper is an unfathomable hurdle.

But other advisors—and their firms—recognize the benefits of document management. From immediately eliminating clutter to long-term benefits such as saving time, space and money, the return on investment with document management is quite impressive.

Stage 2 Planning Partners is one of those innovative firms achieving their goals thanks to document management. Founded by Principal Josh Patrick in 1997, the firm offers wealth management services for owners of closely held businesses, individuals and groups, focusing on a variety of strategic and financial issues.
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Located at the southern shores of Chautauqua Lake, Jamestown, NY, is the largest city in picturesque Chautauqua County. The Jamestown Public Schools serve approximately 5,000 students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade at six neighborhood elementary schools, three middle schools and one comprehensive high school.

In 2003, the Jamestown City School District’s human resources department began investigating document management as a possible solution to managing an ever increasing amount of paper. The department’s six employees were responsible for managing personnel records, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, employment applications and reports regarding civil rights, unemployment and workers’ compensation, as well as all files relating to negotiations, arbitrations, grievances and meeting minutes of the district’s seven unions. Full story »