Author Archive: Melissa Henley

Strategic Security

Credential Securities, Inc., Simplifies Regulatory Compliance

September 29th, 2009

Credential Securities, Inc., employs more than 2,000 staff and representatives who provide integrated wealth management solutions and services to Canadian credit unions, with over $10.8 billion in assets under management. But helping clients achieve their financial goals came with a price—overstuffed file cabinets, difficulty locating information and the stress of complying with regulatory requirements. Full story »

Making Work Flow

Xpyria Investment Advisors uses Laserfiche Avante to automate business processes - and save valuable resources

August 17th, 2009

Xpyria Investment AdvisorsWhen we last heard from Joseph Salpietro, President and CEO of Xpyria Investment Advisors, he was looking forward to implementing Workflow to streamline his Firm’s repetitive work processes. As one of the first Avante customers in the financial services industry, one of the reasons Salpietro chose Avante was because of its built-in business process management (BPM) functionality.

“A lot of people think if you have an office in a metropolitan city that the highest cost to a business is rent, it’s not. It’s the people we employ. So I’d rather have them doing mission-critical, profitable work.”
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Transamerica Financial Advisors connects representative, supervisory and home offices with TFA Synergy

Laserfiche serves as the foundation of TFA’s technology-centered business platform solution, which offers automated new account processing, Web-based document management and automated compliance review

July 28th, 2009

tfaTransamerica Financial Advisors, Inc. (TFA), an indirect subsidiary of AEGON N.V., provides investments and financial planning to clients nationwide. With a network of more than 700 registered representatives, 42 offices of supervisory jurisdiction (OSJ) branches and 51 home office staff, TFA is a rapidly growing enterprise whose independent representatives faced the growing cost of paper-based processes: misplaced documents, time-consuming manual workflows, express-mail costs and file storage expenses.
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Taming the Paper Monster

Woodard Insurance, LLP, a leading firm of investment advisors, uses Laserfiche to increase profitability

June 30th, 2009

woodard“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 »

Law’s New Order

Laserfiche helps the Daviess County Prosecutor’s Office make room for efficiency

June 30th, 2009

daviess-countyThe 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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What if … ?

The recent disaster in Cologne, Germany, underscores the importance of disaster planning.

June 5th, 2009

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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Positioned for Success

Financial Foundations, Inc., uses Laserfiche to enhance profitability and business value

May 27th, 2009

“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.”

Full story »

Document Management in the Wild

Sometimes, TV or movie characters can benefit from Laserfiche just as much as the rest of us.

April 3rd, 2009

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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Seamless Integration

MAC Financial marries Laserfiche and their CRM system to enhance efficiency while cutting costs and streamlining workflow

March 30th, 2009

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.
Full story »

Unlimited Potential

The Eastleigh Council Revenue and Benefits Department secures the present and plans for the future with Laserfiche

March 25th, 2009

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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A Whole New World

With Laserfiche, GCG Financial finds innovative solutions to business and operational challenges

March 16th, 2009

“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.
Full story »

The Savings Are Out There

Some of our users have realized impressive savings from their Laserfiche systems. Have you?

March 12th, 2009

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.

Full story »

A True Technology Partnership

Laserfiche helps Xpyria Investment Advisors create maximum efficiencies with minimal effort

February 24th, 2009

Xpyria Investment AdvisorsMany 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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An End to the Paper Chase

Regal Financial Services uses Laserfiche to cost-effectively cope with regulatory oversight

February 20th, 2009

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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Integration Nation

Bakersfield, CA, uses Laserfiche to unite documents with business-critical applications

February 3rd, 2009

100px-seal_of_bakersfield_californiaIn 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.”
Full story »