Kenneth Samuelson, one of the firm’s principals, brings over twenty years of experience in the financial services industry to his clients. With this experience, Samuelson places an emphasis on technology to get the maximum potential out of his operations. “I refer to it as tightening the bolts,” he says. “We need to get as much as we can out of our technology investments and make our operations faster and more efficient—and make our staff happier.”

It was this need to improve operational efficiency that led the Morehead Group to purchase a Laserfiche enterprise content management solution. Staff used college interns and a part-time staff member to scan all existing files into the system. “It did not take us nearly as long as we’d projected,” says Client Services Specialist Kris Balot. “We tailored our filing structure in Laserfiche to match how we’d kept our documents in paper format, which was in chronological order by policy.” Documents were further separated by document type, including policies, confirmations, legal, trust, statements, and pre-issue/underwriting.

Balot believes strongly that the success of the Morehead Group’s Laserfiche system is due to their strong partnership with their reseller, ADI-Laserfiche, who worked with the firm from the beginning to develop their filing system and integrate Laserfiche into daily operations. “Their support has been exceptional and unparalleled,” she says.

It’s this integration into daily operations that has resulted in the “tightening the bolts” that Samuelson emphasizes. These faster and more efficient operations have given way to an impressive ROI—and when it comes to the way things work at the Morehead Group, Balot outlines six distinct areas where Laserfiche increases the value of operations:

• Rent savings. “Previously, we had 12 filing cabinets stored in a room the size of our conference room,” Balot says. “Paying rent on space you can’t use is a waste of money. With Laserfiche, we were able to eliminate the filing room and turn it into two offices. The conversion of the space has paid for our entire investment in Laserfiche many times over.”
• Customer service improvements. “When a client calls, I pull up their Laserfiche documents on one screen and our contact information in Smart Office, our CRM, on another. Now I have all their information instantly available, so I don’t have to make them wait for a call back while I look for the answer to their question,” Balot says.
• Improved referrals. The Morehead Group’s client base is built on referrals from attorneys, accountants and other local professionals. Improved customer service doesn’t just build rapport with clients, but also with these outside professionals. “It’s amazing how many times we have more information on a client than their attorney or accountant,” Balot says. “In one case, the trustee did not even have a copy of the trust document, but because we had it in Laserfiche, I could e-mail it to him while we were still on the phone.”
• Operational cost savings. Balot outlines other areas where the firm has saved money thanks to Laserfiche, including paper, printing, postage and office supplies. “In a paper world, if someone requested that we send them information, we would have to pull their file, make a copy of the documents and then either mail or fax them,” Balot remembers. “Today, we simply e-mail the document directly to the client, right from Laserfiche, in a matter of seconds.”
• Easier audits. “I was getting ready to go on vacation. The day before my plane left, we had an NFPSI audit,” Balot explains. “When the compliance officer arrived, I sat them down with Laserfiche and let them search for what they needed. They had their notebook with their checklist, and for each item that was on their checklist, they found the corresponding document in Laserfiche. They were really pleased with our organization, because the entire examination only took about two hours!”
• Simplified—yet stronger—security. Through Laserfiche security, documents have built-in protection that meets requirements for HIPAA, Regulation S-P and both SEC 17a-4 and FINRA requirements. Document access is easily controlled, allowing compliance to just get the documents they need, and also prevents unauthorized access to client information.

According to Balot, Laserfiche has become an integral part of daily operations. “It’s more than just a central filing cabinet,” she says. “It’s the central repository for all our current work activities, including underwriting and client service. We use Laserfiche for all stages of the document’s life cycle, and it allows for several people to work on the same file at the same time—something you can’t do with paper.

“Laserfiche’s capabilities extend far beyond meeting the needs of our back office staff. Our principals and sales reps also have immediate access to client documents,” she adds.

But when it comes down to it, for Balot, the real value of Laserfiche is simple. “Laserfiche is the number one best improvement we have made in technology. It has had the biggest and most successful impact on our operations over the past six years, especially when it comes to ROI.”

While we have ROI white papers for financial services and healthcare, here are some examples of Laserfiche customers thinking creatively to save money, time and resources by running smarter.

Brownsburg, IN: After ten years using Laserfiche, Brownsburg upgraded to a Laserfiche Avante system last year and hasn’t looked back. Although right now the Town’s Boards and Commissions is only using one workflow, the Committee has already produced ROI figures showing that single workflow will pay for their system expansion in just 2 ½ years – although staff expect a faster ROI once they develop additional workflows in more departments. What are some of those workflows? Automating permitting in the Planning and Building department, automating the HR onboarding process and moving court-bound information from the Police Department to the County Prosecutor’s Office, to name just three.

Cambridge Financial: At Cambridge Financial, thanks to capture and processing automation through Laserfiche Quick Fields, staffers can process 35-60 pages a minute, with an error rate of less than 0.5%. Internal accounting reconciliations that used to take up to 14 days are now completed in a single day. The efficiency is so cost-effective, the firm’s IT director says Cambridge has realized its ROI in less than one year after implementing Laserfiche.

D.L. Evans Bank: Using Laserfiche, D.L. Evans was able to reduce audit time, streamline lending and realize a 33% reduction in hard copy document production and an 85% reduction in paper storage.

Elk River Police Department: Laserfiche has helped the ERPD eliminate 251 reams of paper, which was 2.2 tons of paper or 54 adult trees. The Department’s Chief estimates the paper alone cost well over a $1,000 a year, not to mention the storage costs of four shelves required to house all this paper. By his estimates, the ERPD spent over $17,000 a year and needed 3.5 full-time employees just to process and store the paperwork generated by the department’s 24,000 cases each year.

Fertility Centers of Illinois: FCI initially used Laserfiche for EOB management, and then moved to a hybrid EMR approach where they integrated Laserfiche with their EMR for total paperless chart management. Nine of their centers have switched to managing all their patient charts in Laserfiche – which saved $75 in shipping costs per chart.

Hamilton, ON, Police Service: HPS’ Records Supervisor points to $200,000 saved annually, due to downsizing 4 civilian staff in the Records Business Centre, as officers are able to access vital information directly. And redacting documents in Laserfiche saves “a fortune in paper and time,” he adds, helping staff more easily meet file requests from the Courts and outside agencies.

RMS: Using Laserfiche, medical device manufacturer RME has cut their formerly 8-10 week processing time to 72 hours. Laserfiche also accelerates shared business processes across its plants in Minnesota and Tennessee.

Saco, ME: City employees in every department have embraced an ecological and economical paradigm shift in how the city does business and offers services, setting a standard for e-government so high that its regional neighbors are beginning to look into it as well. Saco’s savings so far total over $10,000 a year, but as Laserfiche Administrator Fran Beaulieu points out, “We also look at the value of the system for not departments, but individual value to users. Service to constituents is a big factor.”

Texas A&M University Corpus Christi: TAMU-CC used Laserfiche to develop their Report Upload Bifurcation Engine (R.U.B.E.), which processes continuous BPP/FAMIS report files and splits them into individual ‘reportlets’ before filing them into Laserfiche – which saves 2 reams of paper daily.

Texas A&M University Department of Entomology: Since implementing Laserfiche, the department has removed almost 40 file cabinets, creating enough space for a new office and laboratory. Even better, they expected to receive an initial ROI of $54,000, but actually achieved an ROI of $272,000. (This doesn’t include the over $22,000 they save each month!) All told, in five years, the department estimates they will save nearly $1.4 million from their Laserfiche implementation.

Westminster, CA: Westminster chose Laserfiche as an enterprise solution to replace a previous solution that had only been rolled out in the City Clerk’s Office – and that required all documents to be entirely re-scanned to append additional pages. In their formal needs assessment, the City discovered that Laserfiche would ultimately save the city over $273,000 by freeing up enough office space to create a total of 13 workstations.

Xpyria Investment Advisors: Xpyria is using Laserfiche to automate two formerly paper-intensive processes, and as a result, has saved over $4,000 annually in hard costs and 72 hours of labor.

I’d love to hear how you’re saving money from your Laserfiche system. Please leave a comment and let us know!

But with state facilities in College Station, TX, a major USDA entomology research laboratory, and members of the department’s graduate faculty stationed in nine major agricultural areas in the state, sharing information efficiently had become problematic for department staff.

Beginning in 2004, different programs and departments within TAMU began investigating document management solutions in order to more efficiently and cost-effectively share information—not to mention save space. Ultimately, they chose a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) solution to securely store paper, implement business process management and eliminate file cabinets.

Currently, nearly 1,200 staff in 10 departments and divisions within TAMU use Laserfiche.

The Department of Entomology was introduced to ECM by Business Administrator Roberta Priesmeyer, who had read an article on document imaging during a business trip. She thought that an ECM system could help the department with administrative functions, and after learning about Laserfiche, she says that she couldn’t conceivably consider any other competitor due to the enormous difference in cost.

Laserfiche’s ease of use was a major selling point for the department; Priesmeyer reports that its user interface is simple to master, which increases staff adoption.

Once the system was installed, staff created a digital filing structure which replicated the department’s paper-based system. Before Laserfiche, department staff had difficulty finding documents if employees were unavailable, on vacation or had left. With Laserfiche, filing is standardized, so information retrieval is simple. Kathy Seaton, a staff member in the accounting department, previously had to return a vendor’s call after manually searching cabinets and folders. What previously took 30-45 minutes and several phone calls now takes 30 seconds and a single phone call.

IT Director Dr. Mark Wright believes that Laserfiche hasn’t just made life easier on the department head, but also for staff. “Staff really are happier as a result of their ability to increase productivity without expending more effort,” he says.

In addition, Laserfiche enables the department to adhere to their records retention schedule much more easily, something that was nearly impossible with paper. “It really helps us keep the auditors happy,” adds Wright.

With Laserfiche, researchers can easily access reprints that previously required them to spend up to half a day sifting through files to retrieve a single document. Laserfiche’s optical character recognition (OCR) capability and unified metadata model have allowed the department to virtually eliminate this necessary but inefficient use of time. Since 2007, peer review articles have increased by 11.7%, with total faculty publications increasing by 22.4%. In fact, Department of Entomology tenured and tenure track faculty rank #1 in term of peer-review publication output in the US (from data published by the Chronicles of Higher Education).

To further conserve space, the department plans to eventually add accounts for faculty members who each use 4-5 file cabinets to store their publications, to make researching even easier.

Due to the University’s Vision 2020 plan, the department has been hiring more professors, and Laserfiche is indirectly helping them reach this goal by freeing up office space formerly used for storage. Since implementing Laserfiche, the department has removed almost 40 file cabinets, creating enough space for a new office and laboratory.

The department expected to receive an initial ROI of $54,000, but actually achieved an ROI of $272,000. ROI is tracked in areas as varied as staff costs, the cost of lost files, consumables, storage, current and proposed purchases, and lease tax savings.

ROI mainly derives from savings on accounting staff ($7,385), professional staff ($4,865) and management positions ($10,597). The department also reclaimed nearly $1,000 in storage space and nearly $1,000 in monthly printing and distribution costs, for a total monthly savings of over $22,000.

In five years, the department estimates they will save nearly $1.4 million from their Laserfiche implementation.

“I love Laserfiche,” Priesmeyer says. “I’d fight anyone who tried to take it away from me. Choosing it is literally the best decision I’ve ever made.”

Relying on paper was an inefficient use of TAMU’s monetary and staff resources. In addition, board requirements frequently limit the amount of office space to conserve space for classroom and labs, so space used for paper storage was at a premium. What little space was available could have been better used for professors’ offices.

Beginning in 2004, different programs and departments within TAMU began investigating document management solutions, in order to more efficiently and cost-effectively share information—not to mention save space. Ultimately, they chose a Laserfiche enterprise content management solution to securely store paper, implement business process management and eliminate file cabinets.

Currently, nearly 1,200 staff in 10 departments and divisions within TAMU use Laserfiche. The Health Sciences Center (HSC) reaches across Texas to educate health professionals and researchers through its seven components: the Baylor College of Dentistry in Dallas; the College of Medicine in College Station, Round Rock and Houston; the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; the Institute of Biosciences and Technology in Houston; the School of Rural Public Health in College Station and McAllen; the Irma Lerma Rangel College of Pharmacy in Kingsville; and the College of Nursing in College Station.

When the HSC was planning to build its 200-acre new central campus, it wasn’t planning on using space that could house students and labs to house file cabinets. Add to that a system that spanned the state and often required costly overnight delivery of paperwork to its central office, then a need to duplicate and store copies of that paperwork, and Laserfiche was just the cure Project Manager Kristin Nace was looking for.

Nace, the director for fiscal services, was formerly in the HSC accounts payable division. While working in that department, she scanned documents into a basic system that used a centralized network drive. In 2007, the HSC formed a committee to find an alternative system and a vendor to provide it.

Because of Laserfiche’s successful implementation in the Texas A&M AgriLife program, it was considered for the HSC, and was ultimately chosen due to ease of use. Nace says that Laserfiche’s interface is simple and self-explanatory, and the system’s ability to import and export Microsoft Office documents was critical to its ultimate selection.

As in other departments, the HSC’s implementation committee chose to implement Laserfiche in stages. The implementation began in the Finance Department, which includes accounts payable, payroll, human resources and the contracts and grants division and has 180 users. The Finance Department was chosen for the initial implementation because it is the number one paper consumer in the entire HSC.

The HSC’s Laserfiche ECM system was implemented on February 1, 2008, and was completed by May 31, 2008. During the implementation, staff were trained and the department established scanning requirements for their component offices. Nace was surprised at how easily the staff embraced Laserfiche, and how easily the implementation went. “Adoption was extremely easy,” she says. “When it comes to Laserfiche, I don’t have to make anyone do anything.”

In fact, potential users approach Nace nearly every day and ask when they will get to use Laserfiche. Nace is also impressed by how her colleagues are constantly approaching her with new ways they can use Laserfiche to streamline their workflow. In fact, there is even competition between component offices over scanners, because everyone wants one.

The HSC implementation took place without IT support; in fact, IT staff only perform standard server maintenance. “Besides file structure and security, we’re really using Laserfiche straight out of the box,” Nace comments.

Since implementing Laserfiche, the finance office has quit accepting paper documents, and instead requires all internal documents, such as invoices, payroll documents and contracts, to be submitted electronically. They have been able to eliminate most of their 69 file cabinets, which cost $2,100 annually to maintain. And they have been able to adhere to their records retention schedule much more easily.

Even better, the department has eliminated nearly all their overnight shipments from regional locations. Previously, regional offices would overnight documents to the finance department on a daily basis. Because 95% of these overnight shipments were internal, they are now handled electronically through Laserfiche—eliminating nearly $55,000 spent in shipping costs.

“We’ve already seen a cost savings by reducing our overnight delivery charges for sending documents, which also translates into a smoother more efficient business process,” Nace explains. “Utilizing Laserfiche security, we’ve moved to only having one copy of the document and are allowing our departments access to many of those folders – which they love because they no longer have to keep their own copy, which of course means fewer files in their offices.”

Nace says an intangible benefit of Laserfiche is its ability to eliminate clutter from offices. She believes that employees are happier now because their offices are free from file cabinets and paper.

In the future, HSC plans to expand Laserfiche into Student Business Services (SBS). After the SBS implementation, stage three will be to implement Laserfiche in the medical records department (MR). MR stores performance review files for doctors practicing medicine in the state of Texas, which are reviewed by other doctors to determine if they have the potential to become a malpractice case. Nace plans to use Laserfiche to redact sensitive information, and also plans to segregate them on a separate Laserfiche repository, to maintain security. She would then be able to give non-departmental users, such as doctors from across the State, access to only the specific documents they need to review cases.

Also, HSC has just received a land grant from the neighboring city of Bryan, and the state has approved construction for two buildings. One of the stipulations is that these buildings be used mainly for classrooms and research, so offices located on the new campus will have to be extremely small. In an effort to maximize available office space, the department head has already made Laserfiche mandatory for document storage.

In addition, the board has also approved the establishment of a campus in Round Rock. Like the Bryan campus, storage and office space will be limited, so a Laserfiche implementation is planned for this campus as well.

Nace has recently created a position to manage the expansion of Laserfiche into new HSC departments. Eventually, every department in the HSC will be using Laserfiche.

“Our largest unexpected benefit came in realizing how popular Laserfiche has become within our organization,” she says. “I’m regularly getting requests from our departments to set up additional folders, processes, or even repositories. I knew people would love the product, I just didn’t expect they would love it this much.

“In the planning stages I remember wondering what I was going to do if our departments didn’t buy into Laserfiche,” she adds. “How was I going to get them to use it? I’m so pleased to say they bought in after the first training class. As a matter of fact, I’ve not had to convince anyone to use it, if anything I cannot keep up with all of their requests to bring more documents into the system. We are excited it has taken off as quickly and easily as it has.”

The Investment Dealers Association of Canada (IDA) requires securities firms to verify client signatures when existing clients change their account information. While Credential was complying with this regulatory demand, they were simply running out of space to house all the paper client files required to verify signatures.

“Our staff needed instant access to client information, but we didn’t have space to store all our client files onsite,” remembers Vice President of Operations Ernie Nichiporik.

Mr. Nichiporik and his team began researching digital document management solutions, focusing their efforts on finding a secure, scalable Web-based solution that was still easy to use. “We really wanted a Web-based solution, so external parties could access the system even if they weren’t connected to our network,” he says. “And security features were key—we had to guarantee that our client files were safe and tamper-proof.”

After attending a presentation by IKON Office Solutions, Mr. Nichiporik and his colleagues chose a Laserfiche® digital document management system. “It had everything we needed. It was secure, easy-to-use, cost-effective and didn’t require a lot of time to implement.”

Within seven months, employees were fully benefiting from the new system. “Installation didn’t take long,” Nichiporik says, “and we started realizing benefits quickly. The seven month time frame to full productivity was due to the fact that we imaged all of our existing files, as well as new files coming in.”

Currently, over 60 users, located in four offices over 3,000 miles apart, use the Laserfiche system. Credential has three different business lines, and they store all their client files—including scanned paper documents, faxes and e-mails—in their Laserfiche repository. Documents are easily accessible thanks to templates that store the account number, document type and the department that last worked on the document. Credential also created a folder structure for the six different administration departments that house working documents, so that all company staff can locate documents that haven’t yet been archived in the client’s folder.

To further optimize business processes, Credential implemented several tools to automate document import and storage. Import Agent™ monitors the company’s network folder for new faxes, imports them into the Laserfiche repository and dynamically creates new folders to store them. Quick Fields™ document capture tools automate document scanning and storage, creating the file structure with different templates for each of Credential’s three business lines. The Quick Fields Real Time Lookup module accesses three different SQL databases to retrieve client information from the appropriate business line and automatically fill each scanned document’s template fields with client demographic information.

Staff who only need to view documents retrieve them through WebLink™, a read-only document viewer accessible through their Web browser. Users who have to add additional information to client files use Web Access™, a Web-based thin client that simplifies deployment and support. “Web Access really makes upgrades to the system easier, because we only have to install them on our Web server, instead of on each computer,” Nichiporik says.

“We also have a few ‘power users,’ who use the Windows®-based Laserfiche Client™ to scan and index documents,” he continues. “Using all three modules really fits our needs—and demonstrates the system’s flexibility. Instead of being locked into one option, we chose a combination of options to meet our exact requirements.”

Nichiporik believes that clients really appreciate the changes Laserfiche has brought to the company—“They really like that when they phone us with an issue, we have all their documentation in front of us,” he says—which is due to the secure digital storage of their files. Their previous paper-based storage system left staff dealing with lost faxes and misplaced documents, which made it difficult to respond to client requests in a timely manner. Thanks to Laserfiche, lost faxes have dropped by over 50%. “Now, only three people in the entire company have the authority to delete documents, whereas with paper files, anyone could misplace or lose a document in a file,” he says.

Credential also implemented the Audit Trail™ module to further guarantee security. Audit Trail tracks user actions within the Laserfiche system, simplifying compliance with regulatory requirements. “With Audit Trail, I can easily show IDA regulators that employees are looking up client signatures while updating client information, and I can also show them that we have a highly secure process to manage our client documents,” Nichiporik says.

Because of the company’s initial success with Laserfiche, Credential is actively planning to expand the solution. “Eventually, we’d like to integrate Laserfiche with our trading system, so that our sales force can easily access client documents during the trading process,” Nichiporik says. “Not to mention that many departments within the firm have seen how well the system works, and now want imaging for themselves.

“Because of Laserfiche, we now expect immediate access to documents,” he continues. “Laserfiche solves problems for us every day. It’s easy to use, easy to implement and works well in many different environments. Laserfiche is really a superior solution.”

“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.”

For Pittsburgh, PA-based Xpyria Investment Advisors, Inc., Laserfiche has already helped the Firm minimize labor costs by helping existing staff use their time more effectively. The Firm has grown to ten full-time employees since being incorporated in 1990, and now manages approximately $400 million in assets with clients in 14 states and three countries.

But before Xpyria could begin using Workflow functionality to automate paper- and labor-intensive business processes, they had to start by eliminating inefficiency from their daily tasks. So Salpietro and his Firm began implementation by working with their Laserfiche reseller, One Source/ADI, to integrate Laserfiche with Advent Axys, the Firm’s asset management platform, and Junxure, the Firm’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Watch Joesph Salpietro describe his Laserfiche success in his own words.

A trading applet pulls information directly from Axys to automatically populate the trading sheet, which saves time and prevents errors. And by integrating Laserfiche with Junxure, when a client calls, staff are able to access all related client documents stored in Laserfiche from the client’s record in Junxure—so they can answer customer inquiries instantly. “I’m not sure you can put a price tag on the efficiency gains,” Salpietro says. “We can access information in one or two keystrokes, which creates more time for mission-critical investment research—which ultimately benefits the client and our performance.”

Since the beginning of the year, Xpyria has focused on implementing Avante’s BPM functionality. Laserfiche Workflow, included in the Avante system, promotes constant productivity with rules-based document routing, e-mail notification and activity monitoring.

“Our trading process used to be paper and time intensive,” Salpietro says. “Each trade involved multiple pages that needed to be circulated to six people in the office for processing and approvals, but you never knew exactly who had it or where it was In the process.

“It was organized chaos,” he adds. “With Workflow, we can push this document in a very systematic fashion to the people who are required to sign off at various stages of the process.” In fact, if anyone in the workflow process is out on vacation or otherwise unavailable, Workflow automatically redirects the document to the appropriate on-duty personnel. Anyone can check the status of a trade by finding it in Laserfiche, and, if there’s a bottleneck, it’s easy to identify. Trades are automatically uploaded as a .csv file for final processing with the custodian and completed trades are stored in Laserfiche.

“Automating the trading process has given us better control, because we know exactly where the trade is in the approval process. Also, there are fewer data entry errors, because the trade sheet only needs to be keyed once during the process,” Salpietro says.

And now, the trading process isn’t just automated—it’s also more secure, because it relies on electronic signatures. “Electronic signatures are more secure than handwritten ones, because they are password protected, ” Salpietro adds.

Once staff at Xpyria completed the Workflow automation for its trading process, they moved on to the Firm’s “Chron (chronological) folders,” folders the firm uses to keep a record of all activity on a client’s accounts. “These folders need to be reviewed each week, and we used to physically print out or copy every piece of paper coming or going,” Salpietro remembers. “We’d put it in the Chron folder and that would get passed from associate to associate, and they’d check off that they’d reviewed it.”

Now, thanks to Avante’s BPM functionality, that process happens automatically. All relevant documents are automatically extracted from the Laserfiche repository and are put into an electronic Chron folder. The folders are then pushed out to all the associates simultaneously, so they all can review it when they have time. Salpietro estimates that Xpyria has saved over $4,000 annually in hard costs and 72 hours of labor by automating the Chron-folder process.

And he believes Laserfiche has helped Xpyria save tens of thousands of printed pages per year. “We walk around less and we push around less paper,” Salpietro says. “We find information more quickly.

“We used to print over 30,000 pages a year just for this one [Chron] process,” he adds. “We’re saving on paper, printing supplies, and service related to wear and tear on our office equipment.”

Xpyria doesn’t plan to stop there. It plans to implement Laserfiche Quick Fields to automatically index and file quarterly reports, correspondence and other client mailings, saving the administrative time spent filing electronic documents after they’re scanned. “While the cost savings will be nominal—we estimate them to be less than $400 a year—the automation will eliminate the possibility of filing errors and future service delays,” Salpietro says. “Our plan is to get Quick Fields up and running before the end of 2009.”

Salpietro encourages more firms to investigate BPM solutions like Avante. “If a firm has a process that involves multiple touches, multiple points of entry, and time sensitivity, then Avante’s workflow capability is a viable solution to streamline the process and gain better control,” he says.

“I would recommend that anyone considering Avante assign an internal project manager to improve the probability of benefiting by better matching your firm needs to the software’s capabilities. And having a committed reseller that understands the financial services industry, like One Source/ADI, is also recommended,” Salpietro concludes.

TFA was also concerned about the delay of processing transactions submitted by mail and the regulatory challenges of retention requirements.

However, with TFA Synergy, a comprehensive paperless business platform that incorporates the Laserfiche® document management solution, TFA is well-positioned to overcome these challenges and provide more responsive—and cost-effective—client service.

In their search for a document management solution, TFA “first set criteria for searching for strategic partners,” says TFA IT manager Julius Baldueza. “We knew that the right partner had to be committed to working with financial services organizations with a specific focus on broker/dealers, have the existing technology ready, and offer a Web-based solution that we could quickly deploy to all our representatives.”

Because Laserfiche met all these criteria, TFA chose it as the foundation of TFA Synergy, which offers automated new account processing, Web-based document management, an e-Signature solution and automated compliance review. “The document management solution from Laserfiche fits right into the existing business models of our representatives and OSJ managers,” says Baldueza.

“TFA Synergy is financial advisor-friendly, compliance-oriented and seamless in operation,” says Sandy Brown, TFA President and Chief Executive Officer. “It helps our current and future financial advisors save money through reduced administrative expenses, and frees them up to spend more time with clients by eliminating the hours spent filling out forms and tracking down paper files.”

“With TFA Synergy, we’ve improved service from the front office to the back office,” Baldueza adds. “Streamlined processes eliminated the inefficient manual workflows. At this point, 90% of our business is processed through Laserfiche.”

The TFA Synergy paperless office platform is available through the TFA representative Web site, making it accessible from anywhere with a Web connection. For compliance purposes, representatives can view only their own clients’ information, which is sorted into file folders that satisfy Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) retention requirements.

When a representative scans in a document, a template is assigned to it, after which Laserfiche Workflow™ routes the document into the proper folder based on the template choice. Workflow then automatically routes new business to the OSJ manager for approval and e-mails the OSJ manager that an application is pending review.

Once the OSJ manager has reviewed and approved the new business, the packet of new business is submitted to the home office for processing. If an application is rejected, Workflow e-mails it to the OSJ manager with a sticky-note annotation identifying the missing information. After the OSJ manager has corrected the application the word “resubmitted” is added to the document name and it’s resubmitted to the home office.

“Essentially, we now have a shared virtual file cabinet between the representative, the OSJ and the home office,” Baldueza says. “Everyone accesses the same documents, which creates a shared point of reference. If a rep has a question, they know that an OSJ or home office staff member is looking at exactly the same information.”

It may seem that a sophisticated system like TFA Synergy would require a significant amount of development, but that wasn’t the case. Within months of purchasing Laserfiche, the beta of the new system was ready to launch to field testers. The system was then rolled out to offices across the country, and by 2007, 90% of TFA regional offices were up and running with the new system. Home office staff and sales assistants all participated in training, with home office staff then moving on to train staff in the field offices. “You need to involve the leading sales offices in your beta testing,” Baldueza says. “They will definitely tell you what you need to know. And, they appreciate being asked.”

TFA expected they would have to deal with managing change, especially among their representatives. “It was new technology, and people are often leery about that,” Baldueza remembers. “We also had to adjust our operational roles to accommodate the new system, both in our home office and in our OSJ branches.”

In many cases, the expectations of the system significantly differed from the reality. “We expected that remote capture would cause operational problems, but we’ve found an error rate of less than 10 percent,” Baldueza says. “We thought the technology might prove too difficult, but the Field finds it very easy to use. Furthermore, we thought it might conflict with existing field operational procedures, but instead, our OSJ managers saw a huge benefit and really drove field adoption.”

OSJ managers especially appreciate the SEC books and records feature. “Through our virtual office, OSJ managers can fully review books and records of the representatives they supervise,” Baldueza says. “They can literally do most of the audit right from their office. This saves them time and money. While they still have to travel to the offices to review signage and other items, they can review more offices in a day because they do not have to spend the time looking at a myriad of file folders.

“Our largest OSJ branch office supervises 96 offices with one or two representatives in each location,” Baldueza continues. “Before TFA Synergy was implemented an OSJ branch office had two OSJ managers just to conduct audits. Now, one OSJ manager travels, and the other stays in the office to approve orders, which means faster service for their representatives.”

And the benefits stretch beyond faster, more cost-effective audits—Baldueza offers the example of an OSJ manager who now rents out the office space that his file cabinets used to occupy, at a price of $110 per square foot.

Besides the benefits TFA expected—elimination of lost paperwork, reduction in representatives’ faxing and mailing costs, and speedier approvals—Laserfiche has delivered some unintended perks. “Although we didn’t expect to reduce OSJ audit costs,” Baldueza says, “we eliminated more than half of our home office scanning, because the reps do it now. And we definitely have managed out-of-office OSJ approvals a lot more effectively, because when an OSJ manager is out of the office, that business is directly routed to the home office for approval by one of our principals, so representatives experience no delay in service.”

Overall, the rollout of TFA Synergy, including the document management solution, has been a success with everyone from representatives and OSJ managers to home office staff. “We’ve had an extraordinarily high adoption of TFA Synergy,” says Baldueza. “We find our reps are offering suggestions to add additional functionality to the system. They really notice how TFA Synergy improves their ability to provide better service to their clients.”

“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.

“We were becoming buried in paper, running out of space and spending valuable time looking for missing files. And as our investment business grew, our paper mushroomed, due to trade confirmations and quarterly investment statements. When our broker-dealer conducted our annual audit in 2004, it took a long time to find required forms. That’s when we knew we had to make changes,” Woodard remembers.

At Texas Christian University’s annual student job fair, Woodard was manning a booth when he ran into a local Laserfiche reseller.

“I had looked at several systems,” Woodard says, “but Laserfiche offered us the greatest flexibility to work like we always had, only using electronic files instead of paper. Laserfiche used TIFF files instead of proprietary file formats and used SQL as its underlying database, which gave us the ability to move our data to a different system later if we needed to. Also, the SQL platform is scalable as our electronic storage needs grow.”

Woodard Insurance purchased Laserfiche software and installed it immediately. Transition to the new system was relatively quick, given that there was an existing document management system in place, just not a digital one. Client securities files had been moved from paper file folders to three-ring binders with topical dividers and, when it came time to implement a digital solution, this interim step made the process much easier.

Where the old paper files were in strict chronological order, the topical divisions in the client binders made organizing Laserfiche’s filing structure much simpler. “We immediately began writing scanning procedures that covered the naming, indexing and location of each document in a binder,” says Woodard. These flexible procedures are updated and refined as employees encounter new situations or better ideas.

Client binders were divided up among employees, who began scanning them into the system. Scanning began in June 2005 and was completed by October. “Well, almost,” laughs Woodard. “The employees gave me one three-ring binder to do all by myself, and it still sits on my desk today.”

He then explains, “On the negative side, it’s that little task I keep procrastinating; on the positive side, the binder reminds me of our old archaic paper-based days and is a physical example of how far we’ve come in less than two years. Within two months, we were realizing great productivity gains, and five months after we began, we were fully benefiting from Laserfiche.”

One of the benefits Woodard noted was the ability to securely protect confidential information from prying eyes. “Since we shred immediately after scanning and auditing, Laserfiche removed highly-sensitive information from any threat of snoopy eyes, such as building cleaning crews, vendors or just nosy office visitors,” he says.

And then there’s the ability to serve clients with less stress. “We can show clients their applications, investment statements, check copies and other documents on our conference room slide screen during our periodic review meetings (which never fails to impress them), discuss the same documents with them when they call in without hunting them down, or we can e-mail them copies of these documents right from Laserfiche,” Woodard notes.

Woodard Insurance currently scans over 2,000 pages a month into their Laserfiche system. “It solves little problems for us daily,” says Woodard. “The biggest problem it solved was in the first few months when we scanned in our securities client binders. We were completely out of space. Now those $1,200 five-shelf binder cabinets are sitting empty. Anybody want to buy them?”

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.”

Daviess County’s move to paperless file management began when Overton attended the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA) annual conference, where he heard Laserfiche Luminary Jeff Sauter speak about his paperless prosecutor’s office in Eaton County, MI. Sauter, a well-known speaker at industry events, is known to host on-site visits from other prosecutors interested in his Laserfiche paperless file management system.

“I talk about Laserfiche whenever I can,” Sauter says. “When I present at continuing education events, I show screenshots of our Laserfiche repository and explain our various work processes. I also like to show photos of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ in our office. Instead of six file cabinets, we now only need a single drawer – and it doesn’t even hold paper! We use it to hold evidence CDs. The fact that we haven’t lost a single file in over three years is earth-shattering to other prosecutors.”

At the event Overton attended, Sauter asked attendees to guess how much time prosecutors’ staff spent working with case files. According to Overton, he and other attendees guessed 25 to 30 percent of their workdays. Sauter replied if they actually asked staff, they’d find it was likely closer to 50 percent.

Once Overton thought about it, he realized Sauter was right. “When we need older files, our administrative assistants have to physically retrieve them,” Overton says. “Somebody has to trek down there, find the file, get the file out and bring it back down here. It takes a lot of time, and it happens weekly.”

After Sauter’s presentation, Overton chose a Laserfiche Avante system for the prosecutor’s office. Although he knew it would take time to get up and running, he had confidence the payoff would be worth it. “We’re just running out of room,” he says. “Laserfiche is going to save us time, and eventually, save us money.”

Staff agree. “There’s no more looking for files,” says Chief Deputy Prosecutor Dan Murrie. “Everyone can work on the same file at the same time.”

The prosecutor’s office has six administrative assistants, each of whom has a Fujitsu fi-6130 scanner at their desk and scan documents into Laserfiche as they arrive. Mathes also worked with staff to create an electronic work process in Laserfiche that mirrors what they were used to doing with paper case files. The child-support side of the prosecutor’s office, with one attorney and four administrative assistants, is following the same process as the criminal side, as is civil cases.

When a case file arrives, staff create a standard document in Microsoft Word that lists necessary information such as the defendant’s name, case number and any other pertinent information. Using Laserfiche’s “Send To” feature, the Word document is sent to Laserfiche and a case file in Laserfiche is dynamically created. The case number and defendant’s information is automatically filled in the file’s template fields, and the template is attached to the original Word document. Staff then open the folder in Laserfiche and scan and enter all case documentation by document type, where a drop down list of document types speeds data entry. And at the end of the day, all scanned documents are full-text indexed for instant search and retrieval.

This system is just as easy for attorneys to navigate as it is for support staff. Attorneys are able to open the Word document and update their notes, just like they used to write on the front of a file folder—except instead of searching around the office for a file folder, they access documents right from their desktop computers. When they’re done entering notes, they simply close the Word document and their changes are automatically added to the case file stored in Laserfiche.

To guarantee disaster recovery, files are backed up twice at the courthouse and a third time off-site. “Even in the highly unlikely event all three back-ups fail, our files are largely made up of other agencies’ files, so we could reconstruct them if we needed to,” Overton says. And the original documents needed for trial exhibits—such as blood alcohol test results, documents from other counties and states and other supporting evidence—fit in one filing cabinet.

“It’s definitely a work in progress, but it’s one of those things where you have to realize that the problem didn’t occur overnight, and the solution won’t either,” says Mathes. “Byron and his staff have been great, hanging in there and sticking with it, knowing that the end result will be worth the effort.

“You can’t pick a perfect time to get started, you just have to get started,” she adds. “There’s no perfect conditions. With this office, they were just out of room, and that’s why they had to get started. But they have confidence that it will ultimately be successful, and it will pay off in greater efficiency.”

While the prosecutor’s office is still in the midst of deploying their Laserfiche solution, they still haven’t neglected to plan for the future. Overton says the attorneys in his office will eventually get laptops with “access to all files all the time.” And once the office is ready to implement the integrated business process management functionality that is included with the Avante system, Mathes will write a workflow rule that enables attorneys to automatically send necessary filing instructions and/or case files to support staff for additional processing. “We designed the template to enable Workflow automation in the future,” she says. “We were able to sit down, plan our implementation and do what we needed up front to make things easier as we move ahead.”

Once the office finishes scanning this year’s files, they plan to start on older files in storage, a process that will likely be handled by interns. “It’s a never-ending process,” Overton says. “We need more room. The courthouse has limited space. Everybody needs more room.”

And while Overton knows his office’s Laserfiche deployment is still unfolding, he has faith in its eventual outcome. “The conversion phase is in process,” he says. “It’s a difficult process, but it will ultimately prove to be worthwhile.”

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.

The historical archive was one of the oldest in Germany, holding 26,000 linear meters of records which included:

• 65,000 charters from 922 AD to the present.
• 104,000 maps and plans.
• 50,000 posters.
• 800 estates, literary remains and other special collections.
• 500,000 photographs of Cologne’s history.

It’s events like these that reiterate the importance of having a contingency plan for your most important records. For instance …

• Do you know what a disaster is? Here’s a hint: it’s not just earthquakes, fires and floods anymore.
• Do you have a plan to handle a disaster? You’d better, because 25% of businesses that close during a disaster won’t reopen.
• Do you know the difference between disaster recovery planning and business continuity planning?
• Do you know how to design and implement a business continuity plan? With only 6% of IT budgets allotted to business continuity, it’s important to know how to do this – and do it effectively.

Our business continuity white paper gives you more information on using document management as a crucial part of developing a business continuity plan for your organization. It’s important to be prepared, because you never know what’s around the corner.

Cosentino founded Financial Foundations in 2001, and by 2006, the firm had doubled in size, with assets under management of $135 million. Although he is the sole owner of Financial Foundations, Cosentino was still aware that digital document management would benefit his firm just as much as a larger one. “In fact, I knew we had to implement an electronic filing system if we were going to continue to grow,” he says.

When Cosentino began looking for a digital document management solution, he consulted his technology advisor. They went to visit other financial advisors using Laserfiche to see how they used the system and how it fit into their existing work processes. All the users he spoke with raved about how easy Laserfiche was to learn and how well it worked with their business, which was crucial. “The fact that so many other financial advisors used Laserfiche was the number one reason I chose it,” he says. “The ease of use and the way it fit into my existing business were definite factors, but seeing how well Laserfiche worked for other financial advisors was really the key.”

At Financial Foundations, nobody misses their old paper-based processes. “It’s not just the ease of finding things, but the ease of putting things in,” Cosentino points out. “Now we scan, shred and toss all our paper. Desks are neater, there’s less clutter, and the piles of paper are completely gone.”

A key concern was not just eliminating paper, but also complying with increasingly strict FINRA and SEC regulations for retention and documentation. “With compliance the way it is, there were up to ten forms per client, and it was out of control,” he says. “The amount of paper is completely prohibitive.”

Financial Foundations is also using Laserfiche for more than just storing client records; their repository also serves as a centralized resource for everything from accounts payable to staff training. “All of our back-office processes are stored in Laserfiche,” he says. “Our staff can use the back-office folder to store information and retrieve the ‘how-to’s’ that will allow them to learn more, including all the processes for what they need to know and how to do it. This is a use I couldn’t have anticipated.”

Since implementing Laserfiche, Financial Foundations has grown, not just in staff, but also in clients. “With Laserfiche’s scalability, we’ll be able to grow more, and even faster,” Cosentino says. “Eventually, I’d like to open a branch office, and Web Access will aid with that. We’ll easily be able to create a centralized resource without duplicating our efforts. We can take advantage of Laserfiche’s connectivity and capabilities to create a centralized repository without the cost of setting it up.”

Back office staff are working so much more efficiently that Cosentino is also looking into buying another advisor’s book of business. “We’ll scan the information into Laserfiche and move it over,” he says. “In this industry, when you take on another advisor’s clients, that means all the applications and account forms too, and you have to have that back-office capability. If you’re going to grow by acquiring other practices, you have to transfer accounts, and without this capability, it would be nearly impossible to do without hiring on a significant number of staff. Laserfiche helps you grow in an easier, more cost-efficient way.”

Cosentino believes that growth will continue to be key for his firm as more and more sole proprietors begin to consider retirement. “Personally, I believe that over the next five, ten, even fifteen years, you’ll see a lot of integration and consolidation, and Laserfiche will aid with that,” he continues.

“There are so many one-person shops out there. They may have between $30-40 million in assets, but they don’t have a succession plan. Laserfiche works well as a succession plan, because the ability to easily transfer data increases the value of your business.”

Cosentino doesn’t doubt the value of Laserfiche to his business. “Absolutely, if you have Laserfiche, your business is worth more. If you don’t have it, tough luck, because clearly, you will have to implement a digital document management solution eventually, just to keep up.

“It may cost me up front, but in the long run, I will be in a better competitive position,” he adds.

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

And it isn’t just “ER.” Everytime I watch the detectives on “Cold Case” sorting through boxes of documents pulled from cold storage, or Melinda on “Ghost Whisperer” visiting the dusty, jam-packed city archives, it’s hard not to see what a benefit Laserfiche would be to them.

We’ve already seen how detectives are using Laserfiche to work toward solving cold cases. How city clerks use Laserfiche to provide dust-free access to city records – sometimes even over the Web. And even how emergency rooms use Laserfiche to streamline billing – and recapture lost revenue.

Unfortunately, I think that a character sitting at a computer and retrieving the information they need with two or three clicks doesn’t quite have the dramatic value or ambience of a dark, underground document archive filled with boxes – and a few ghosts, too. (Although I’d venture a guess that most of the city archives out there aren’t dark, damp or filled with ghosts. Maybe just filled with boxes of paper.)

Have you seen any scenarios “in the wild” of TV or movies where Laserfiche would help? Or am I the only one that watches “The Dark Knight,” looks at Harvey Dent’s office, and thinks, “Man, he could really benefit from Laserfiche“?

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.

The Situation

MAC Financial, a firm of financial advisers based on the Isle of Man, boasts over twenty-five years’ experience providing employee benefits advice to large multi-national and small corporate clients. As a Corporate IFA (Independent Financial Adviser) for investment business, they also provide a full range of bespoke services to private clients.

With over 5,000 individual clients and more than 300 corporate schemes encompassing 4,000 employees, MAC Financial operates in a complex environment. Recent acquisitions made it even more difficult to keep up with business demands. McGowan knew his team needed a solution that would enable efficient document management procedures while also providing the tools for superior customer service and comprehensive compliance procedures.

MAC Financial required a proven and reliable document management platform that could produce benefits in several key areas: customer service, compliance and operations. Integration with their CRM system was also crucial, because their solution had to function not only as a system for storage, search and retrieval, but also as a workflow management system integrated with their existing CRM software.

With a solution from Laserfiche document management, MAC Financial has improved productivity, streamlined their workflow and even enabled an employee to telecommute from Australia—not to mention benefited from savings of 25-35% achieved through reduced staff and a more efficient use of time.

The Solution

Before Laserfiche, staff needed to walk up three flights of stairs to the attic to retrieve documents. They were spending enormous amounts of time searching for information and filing documents, not to mention impeding profitability due to the overhead costs of paper used to print correspondence and copies for their files. Since implementing Laserfiche, MAC Financial has cleared the attic of paper, completely freeing an entire floor of office space. Staff spend less time searching thanks to instant document retrieval and only print out documents for correspondence, cutting down on printer output and storage space. According to Chris Reynolds, senior consultant at Viking Office Systems Ltd., the value-added reseller that implemented MAC Financial’s Laserfiche solution, “They don’t print anymore.” With over 5,000 clients, that’s an incredible amount of paper that has been eliminated.

Eliminating paper was only one aspect of the implementation; McGowan knew that MAC Financial needed a document management platform that would support integration with the company’s CRM system, MIG Turbo®. “Everything we do begins and ends with client information that we enter, store and manage in MIG Turbo,” McGowan says. “We knew that we needed not only the document management aspects, but also scalability and the ability to custom integrate into how we did business.”

Viking provided the integration between Laserfiche and MIG Turbo that met MAC Financial’s needs. This integration dynamically searches the Laserfiche repository from within the MIG Turbo interface, while automatic login to the Laserfiche platform saves time and makes the integration easy to use. This seamless integration means that users only see one program—MIG Turbo—which has, according to Reynolds, “revolutionized the way they work since everything is in the same place.”

The benefits of this integration between Laserfiche and MIG Turbo are enormous. “Without Laserfiche, we would have had at least twice as many staff employed at our offices,” McGowan says. “Not to mention the space saving through the absence of paper documents and filing cabinets.”

Since implementing Laserfiche, client service has noticeably improved. Comprehensive search capabilities enable staff to search through client information instantaneously, without leaving their desks to go up to the attic. In addition, staff can access documents simultaneously, something impossible with paper files. “There’s no more shouting ‘Where’s the file?’, as any person can access the records in conjunction with our core CRM system,” McGowan comments. “We’ve definitely noticed faster, more dedicated responses to client queries.”

The benefits aren’t limited to enhanced front-end customer service; Laserfiche’s flexibility has also helped MAC Financial improve back-end operations. When an employee emigrated to Australia, instead of losing a valuable employee, McGowan and his staff used Laserfiche to enable her to work on their systems through a virtual private network (VPN), a set-up that was, according to Reynolds, “straightforward and uncomplicated.” Taking the time difference into account, this means that MAC Financial is able to update accounts on a nearly round-the-clock basis.

In the future, McGowan plans to continue enhancing the integration between Laserfiche and MIG Turbo. He’s also considering implementing WebLink™ to enable clients to access information from their home computers. “We’re definitely considering whether an ‘extranet’ offering to clients for our financial services products is required,” he says. “We would like to see what role Laserfiche could play in this.

“It’s been an exciting process getting to this point, and we continue looking for ways to streamline wherever we can,” McGowan adds. “Our philosophy is to continue to innovate in both technology and process, and Laserfiche is a critical component of our plans going forward.

“Essentially, Laserfiche has moved us from the paper century to the electronic century.”

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.

The Situation

The legacy DIPS was causing more problems than it solved for the department’s 20 employees. Slow inputting, incorrect indexing and inefficient searching meant that department staff were spending significantly more time looking for information than actually acting on it. Their most urgent needs were to first replace the dying system that was slowing their workflow down and, second, to increase operational efficiency.

Thanks to Laserfiche, the department found a solution that met both these needs.

The Solution

“Our system was very basic, and had been on its last legs for years now,” comments Cox. “We needed not only something quicker and more sophisticated, but we also needed a platform for workflow later on. Ultimately, we needed to migrate our legacy data to the new system. So we had to find something that would meet all those needs.”

The department put the project out to tender, and, with the help of their IT Manager, Andrew Walmsley, began reviewing different systems. Specifically, the department needed a system that would enable them to file documents securely. They were also looking for a system that would support a single, centralised electronic repository, replacing their current system that consisted of a repository spread across a number of optical drives. Their system also had to support efficient, quick search and retrieval functions.

Ultimately, they chose Laserfiche not only because it is easy to use, but also because its data and structure would make it simple to move existing information into the new CRM system when it became available. “Although the council is trying to introduce a CRM system across the whole of the authority, we needed to integrate whatever platform came along with our DIPS workflow,” Cox says. “However, the project wasn’t moving forward quickly enough—our old system would have been obsolete far before the CRM system could go live. So whatever solution we chose had to ultimately tie into the CRM system when it was up and working.”

Steve Livermore, Director of Laserfiche authorised reseller Crusader Technologies, helped the revenue and benefits department implement their solution. The initial installation took place over two days, with additional integration and customisation tasks taking about four weeks. “We had around 160 optical drives to convert to Laserfiche from the legacy system,” Livermore says. “These optical drives were over ten years old and worked on a DOS-based system, which made it time-consuming to copy data into a format that Laserfiche could identify—it was possible, however.”

Once the drives were converted, Livermore worked with the department to develop a program that auto-populated the Laserfiche template with data from the current revenue and benefits database. Users can easily identify documents populated with template data and move them to the correct system sub-folder. “The training went smoothly, due to the fact that we built a system that requires minimal operator intervention,” Livermore comments. “We made sure that the user profiles were set up correctly so that users could retrieve information within seconds when on the phone to their clients.”

Currently, the revenue side of the revenue and benefits department is using Laserfiche to store community charge documents, council documents and non-domestic rates documents—all documents supporting the council’s local taxation activities. They have one employee who scans and indexes documents manually. Documents are kept for three months to assure they’ve been indexed correctly and then are shredded—a holdover from the legacy system, which frequently indexed documents incorrectly and required re-scanning and re-indexing. “We haven’t had that problem with Laserfiche at all,” Cox says. “We’re scanning documents in quite happily.

“Compared to our old system, the new Laserfiche system is so much quicker,” she adds. “The problem was, the old DIPS didn’t work. We couldn’t access documents, and our prime concern was to have a replacement. We had to have access to our existing documents and we had to scan and retrieve the documents we receive on a daily basis.”

Because the revenue and benefits department is currently using their Laserfiche system for document imaging, finding information quickly is of paramount importance. Staff usually search under their account reference order, as documents are only scanned in after staff have finished working with them and have placed the appropriate reference numbers on the documents. This makes it simple to track multiple accounts. “It’s a lot easier for staff to access and to interrogate to find things,” Cox says. “Scanning is quicker and simpler—our old system used to be very laborious and would take several minutes. If the information was on an optical drive that wasn’t in the jukebox at the time, you had to go through, find it, put it in the jukebox, install it, reset the jukebox and rerun your search. With Laserfiche, there’s no messing around. You just go in, look for your document and it will search across the entire database in seconds. You don’t have to muck around changing drives in the jukebox.”

In the future, the revenue and benefits department would like to expand their Laserfiche system to include the benefits side of the department, as staff there still use paper documents and manual filing systems to store and index information. In fact, the Department believes that other council departments could implement Laserfiche, and that ultimately, the solution could serve as the backbone of an archival system for the entire council. With its open architecture, Laserfiche is the perfect tool to connect mission-critical front-end applications with a repository full of information.

“We view Laserfiche as our platform for moving on to bigger and better things,” Cox says. “It has a lot more potential for us.”

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.

When Levitz began investigating document management solutions, he surveyed his broker/dealer network about solutions they were using. A few were already satisfied Laserfiche users. “Because we’re semi-independent, we were free to make our own technology decision. Other firms that were using Laserfiche see it as a great solution. For us, it was a common-sense decision, a real no-brainer.”

To deploy Laserfiche, GCG used what Levitz calls a “phased but quick implementation,” where the firm “focused on fixing small things instead of large things.” The firm began scanning individual business files, then on to advisor and administrative files, compliance files, new investment business files, new group files and finally HR files.

“Taking baby steps at first is what made our implementation a success,” Levitz adds. “You have to start small if you want to be successful when you eventually go big.”

The firm employs a full-time staff member to scan documents, which Levitz finds helps processing move faster, while Human Resources, Licensing and the Group Department all handle their own scanning, which saved the firm from having to hire additional staff. And because GCG began with day-forward scanning, its business processes were paperless immediately. “Eventually we’ll get to back-scanning,” Levitz says. “It just wasn’t an immediate priority.”

What was an immediate priority was finding a way to integrate Laserfiche into their daily work processes. Working with their Laserfiche reseller, Cities Digital, Inc., GCG designed an integration with the two databases, EZData’s SmartOffice and Zywave’s Brokerage Builder, that support their primary business lines. With this integration, staff use a “hot key” to pull information from the database into Laserfiche. Because the file structure in Laserfiche mimics the file structure of their databases and original hard file system, staff have found it very easy to work with, according to Levitz.

In fact, Levitz speaks highly of Cities Digital’s support. “They’re more than just a reseller, they have been a business partner,” he says. “We couldn’t ask for more from them. They’re awesome, and they’ve really made our lives easier.”

He emphasizes the importance of working with a reseller that understands the financial services industry. “Cities Digital works with a lot of financial services firms, so they were able to provide us with a folder structure so we didn’t have to spend the time creating one ourselves,” Levitz explains. “ We continually send them our document archives on CD, which satisfies the SEC’s third-party download retention requirements. And they’ve really spent the time to understand how we operate, so they can help us become more efficient.”

But before Cities Digital could understand how to improve their business processes, Levitz adds, he had to first understand them. “Speed is very important for our advisors,” he says. “Any way you can reduce the time lags and the cost of paper processing is vital.”

What Levitz immediately realized was that Laserfiche could automate new business processing. When an order arrives, it’s immediately scanned into Laserfiche. Workflow files the documents to the correct subfolder within the individual client folder, then routes it to a principal for approval. The principal approves the order by signing on a secure digital signature pad – another Cities Digital custom integration, which, remarks Cities Digital CEO Patrick Welsch, enables compliance officers to approve documents more efficiently, regardless of where they’re working. And, finally, Workflow automatically routes the approved order paperwork to GCG’s broker-dealer for processing.

Welsch believes that GCG’s willingness to challenge accepted business processes was key to their success. “GCG has a dedicated spirit of innovation,” he says. “Their relentless search for efficiency gains brought about many creative solutions. We love working with customers like GCG that push the envelope and challenge us to create unique applications to solve new problems.”

Levitz is continuing to search for those creative applications for the firm’s Laserfiche system. Since attending the 2009 Laserfiche Institute Conference, Levitz says he realizes how much more Workflow could do. “There’s a whole new world out there with Workflow that we need to get to. We’ve done three workflows already, but I dreamed up 20 more in the two days of the conference,” he laughs. “Laserfiche is really a piece of clay. The question comes down to, ‘What can we do with it?’

What started as a flexible document management solution has transformed the very way GCG manages its business processes. “Laserfiche has become the center of our operations. It’s helped us define and refine our work processes,” Levitz says. “We recently lost a key staff member, and it wasn’t nearly as devastating as we thought it would be. Two or three years ago, that would have been an entirely different story.”

In fact, Laserfiche has streamlined operations so much, Levitz realized advisors no longer needed individual assistants. Instead, GCG restructured its support staff into a “pod system,” with one pod focused on communications and another focused on new business processing. “Even though our advisors and support staff may not be in the same location, we were able to bring them together with technology,” he says. “It’s really a case of doing more with less.”

Though Levitz was able to cut down on operating costs, his advisors see Laserfiche as an investment in their time and effort, which has been key to Laserfiche being so unanimously adopted throughout the firm. “We told them, ‘We’re building this around you, and you can decide when you want to be a part of it,’” he says. “We gave people what they needed to make the right decision. When they saw that there wasn’t a single instance of Laserfiche losing information, eventually, they all bought in.”

Even though Laserfiche’s ease of use won over reluctant advisors, Levitz says the biggest revelation has been how powerful Laserfiche actually is. “When we first got Laserfiche, I was faced with rooms of skeptics, including my brothers. I thought, ‘Oh, it will file paper.’ But the reality is, to get the most out of the software, you have to think about what you should be doing that you aren’t.

“Now we can’t live without it.”

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.

Bakersfield, CA Bakersfield uses Laserfiche in all 19 of its city departments, as well as to provide documents to citizens over the Web. Thanks to Laserfiche, most public information requests are “D.I.Y.,” so when staff leave or retire, they don’t have to be replaced with new hires. And because the city has integrated Laserfiche with their GIS application, ArcIMS from ESRI, and their ERP application, Sungard Naviline, the savings are even more apparent. “With Laserfiche, you get more bang for the buck than with other imaging systems,” IT Director Bob Trammell says. “And when you make Laserfiche available to all your city departments, not just the City Clerk, that’s when you really begin to realize the benefits.”

BC Biomedical By scanning in the more than 10,000 patient requisitions received daily, BC Biomedical eliminated more than 25 hours a day spent filing original documentation. “The old way of doing things around here was extremely time-consuming and ineffective. Laserfiche has allowed us to multitask across several departments. I cannot stress enough how reliable, fast and easy the system is,” saysBusiness Systems Analyst/Project Manager Chris Fiorucci.

Bloss and Dillard, Inc. Quick Fields automatically creates the repository’s folder structure, files documents in the appropriate folders and sends policies to the appropriate underwriters. Without Quick Fields, staff would have to manually locate each folder after scanning it into Laserfiche. This automation saved 20 minutes per policy, resulting in more than $23,000 in saved labor costs.

Eaton County, MI, Prosecutor’s Office After implementing Laserfiche, the prosecutor’s office withdrew their request for an additional legal secretary, only one month after beginning to scan felony files. Additionally, they saved more than $10,000 in clerical staffing costs, and decreased office supply usage by nearly 35%. “These additional savings are annual, not one-time savings,” Jeffrey L. Sauter, the county’s prosecuting attorney comments. “In fact, I expect my supplies budget to decrease even more next year.”

Elk River, MN, Police Department Chief Jeffrey Beahen and his department saved more than $17,000 just in paper costs while realizing more energy and resources savings than they expected. When combined with budget cuts and man hours spent on other tasks, the savings really add up.

Feenan Financial Group Firm founder Tom Feenan discovered that he was spending $13,000 per year to rent space for file cabinets. Since implementing Laserfiche, they’ve eliminated the file cabinets and used that space as an office for a revenue-producing advisor.

Iredell Memorial Hospital Before Laserfiche, Iredell had to write off $40,000 per month due to lost and misplaced records. Now? They’ve reduced paper usage by 80% and eliminated lost records—and the write-offs that go along with them.

Meg Green & Associates Todd Battaglia, partner with Meg Green & Associates, a firm which manages $600 million in assets, saves $35,000 to $40,000 per year with Laserfiche. In addition, Laserfiche saves the firm an additional $8,000 a year by reducing filing space, so they could turn a former file room into an office for an advisor.

Rehmann Financial For this dually-registered RIA firm with 13 offices in 2 states, Laserfiche has streamlined workflow enterprise-wide, but it’s their compliance department that’s seen the most immediate, discernible benefits. As Operations Manager Amy Flourry explains, “Our compliance staff are now doing audits remotely, whereas before they would have to travel to all the other offices. We’re saving on mileage, hotel costs, time out of the office, meals—a whole laundry list of expenses that we’ve reduced just by using Laserfiche.”

Surrey, BC The city of Surrey Planning and Development Department issues 100 building permits per week, generating anywhere from 60 to 100 records related to each property and a minimum of 6,000 records weekly. By using Laserfiche, the department estimates they’ve reduced search and retrieval costs alone by $30,000 to $50,000 annually.

Wichita, KS Using Laserfiche as the foundation of their Web-based accident reporting system, the city of Wichita saved 50 to 60 staff hours and was able to raise fees by delivering an online service with immediate value. Wichita now charges $16 for each report, and charges to insurance companies have also increased from $2 to $16 per report.

Xpyria Investment Advisors Xpyria, an investment advisory firm that works with high-net-worth individuals, didn’t just save money by using Laserfiche to eliminate off-site storage. “We always figured we’d have to hire more people to create the efficiency we needed,” President and CEO Joseph Salpietro remembers. “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.”

Have you realized tremendous savings from your Laserfiche system? Let us know! We’re always interested in hearing from the Laserfiche community. If you’d like to share your story, I encourage you to comment on this post or e-mail me at melissa.henley@laserfiche.com.

Remember: the savings are out there.

“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.”

Pittsburgh, PA-based Xpyria had grown to ten full-time employees and two adjunct professionals since being incorporated in 1990. After joining the firm in 1996, Salpietro now serves as Xpyria’s president and CEO. The firm now manages approximately $400 million in assets for 140 clients in 14 states and three countries, providing investment and supervisory services to primarily institutional clients and high-net worth individuals.

Salpietro had been aware of the need for Xpyria to implement a document management solution since becoming an owner eight years ago. “It was always on our radar, but was never within reach,” he remembers. “But as our business evolved, it became more and more reasonable to pursue.”

Once faced with hiring more staff members to keep up with the paper chase, he realized Xpyria could simply use Laserfiche. “The technology was there, the expertise was there and it was applicable to our industry and the way we did business,” he says.

Xpyria needed Laserfiche to do two things. First, integrate with Advent Axys, the firm’s asset management platform, and Junxure, the firm’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Secondly, Laserfiche had to help Salpietro’s team minimize labor costs and maximize leverage, because while managing client records and documenting phone calls and e-mails were important, he didn’t want to pay his top earners to do it. “I always want to have talented people doing mission-critical, profitable work. What I don’t want to do is pay someone top dollar to file documents.”

Or spend all their time implementing new software.

When Salpietro and the Xpyria team investigated a competing document management system, they were disconcerted with the amount of effort staff would have to expend on developing the system. But once they met their Laserfiche reseller, One Source/ADI, they realized that they could turn most of their system’s development over to the experts.

President and CEO of Xpyria Investment Advisors, Joe Salpietro

“We were trying to figure out how to streamline our file trees, and they said, ‘Let us take a crack at it based on what we know about your industry and then you look at it.’ That’s what we needed,” Salpietro says. “Thanks to them, we only have one person functioning as a project manager instead of 10. I don’t want 10 people implementing Laserfiche—I want 10 people educated on Laserfiche and using Laserfiche, but I want them focused on our business, not on the technology behind it.

“Having a partner to ease the pain of implementation, especially one who understood our industry, was key, because the reality is that without a good service partner, things can fall apart very quickly,” he adds.

Salpietro worked with One Source/ADI, the firm’s reseller, to integrate Laserfiche, Junxure and Axys so staff could immediately improve client service. The results, he says, were instantaneous. “When we’re servicing our clients, I can access information in one or two keystrokes. I can retrieve correspondence from two years ago without moving from my desk,” he says. “And that just creates more time for me to handle additional client research, which ultimately helps the client and our performance.”

Salpietro also realized the firm’s paper storage would still be an issue, especially with respect to meeting SEC requirements. With One Source/ADI’s experience and Laserfiche’s reputation in the financial services industry, he felt confident that the firm’s Laserfiche solution would meet, if not exceed, SEC requirements. “I really didn’t want to spend too much grey matter figuring out what the SEC wanted and didn’t want in a technology solution.

“What Laserfiche has afforded us is the confidence that I’d have an advantage in audit time, when it next comes around,” he continues. “Compliance has always been a major challenge, but it’s become far more intense in the last five years. When the SEC used to come in 10 years ago, we’d pull the boxes they were looking for, and they had to spend the time going through the boxes. Now, they call you a week or two before they show up and ask for the specific information they want to see in electronic form. Everything else was swept to the sidelines for a week or two until we found everything. We didn’t want to go through that anymore.”

The SEC also requires the firm to store documents for three years on-site and then an additional four-to-ten years (depending on document type) off-site. “We’d ship stuff off to cold storage, but because you’re charged by the square foot, as you accumulate more and more documents, it gets pretty pricey,” Salpietro says. How pricey? “We were indirectly involved in litigation, where our records were subpoenaed by court order for another firm who was being sued, and it cost us over $1,500 to retrieve those documents—and we weren’t even a party to the case.”

Once Laserfiche was up and running, the firm started with day-forward scanning, and then moved on to capturing the three years’ worth of documents stored on-site. “I don’t have to send another box off-site for storage,” he says. “And it’s not just one box a year, it’s dozens of boxes. And that’s a big cost that’s going to go away.”

For 2009, Salpietro’s looking forward to implementing Workflow and Quick Fields to further streamline the firm’s repetitive work processes. “Eliminating the highest cost to my firm has never been my rent,” he says. “A lot of people think if you have an office in a metropolitan city, the highest cost to a business is infrastructure, and in that regard, it’s not. It’s the people I employ. So I’d rather have them doing mission-critical, profitable work.”

For firms considering implementing document management technology, Salpietro stresses the importance of choosing a quality local service provider to the success of his firm’s implementation.

“The lesson I’ve learned is that it’s all about the integrity of the organization you’re working with. And we’ve gotten the support we need from both our reseller and from Laserfiche,” he says. “The long term outcome will be just what we want.”

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.

Regal, a firm of financial advisers based in Bristol, offers advice to both individual and corporate clients on all aspects of financial planning, including pensions, investment and portfolio planning, life assurance, mortgages and general insurance. With eighteen advisers working remotely throughout Southern and South West England, as well as South Wales, James and his advisers needed a solution that would both allow secure remote access to documents and enable better management of paper records that were rapidly taking over the office.

As a whole-of-market, independent adviser, Regal is required by the FSA to store documentation of the entire research and sales process, from fact-finding documents, copies of insurance policies and correspondence to client illustrations—files so extensive that one four-drawer filing cabinet could only accommodate one to two hundred customers’ records. Staff wasted endless hours locating, copying, printing and faxing multiple copies, and audit preparedness was becoming more and more taxing.

“Every time we make a new sale, that equals hundreds of pieces of paper produced, copied and delivered,” says James. “Records often have to be kept for an infinite number of years.”

Any successful solution would have to be nimble enough to quickly and easily manage large volumes of paper while still ensuring compliance with strict FSA regulations. Enabling centralized access to files for remote workers was a priority, as Regal financial advisers working throughout the U.K. needed fast, effortless and dependable access to client records.

“Our goal was essentially to kill paper and eliminate the filing cabinets,” says James. Through a referral from CFS, his hardware supplier, he got in touch with Harvey Burgess of RB Document Solutions. Burgess recommended a Laserfiche document management system, primarily for its ability to securely protect documents while still permitting quick and easy access, even for remote users.

Regal purchased a multifunction machine and in no time had the new system up and running. It took a mere three days for Regal to implement Laserfiche. Almost instantly, piles of paper began to disappear as office space was reclaimed.

“Even with training to get people up to speed, there was a noticeable monetary benefit,” James recalls. “Because Laserfiche is Windows-based, it was much easier for staff to adapt to the new solution.”

Ending the paper chase created immediate, appreciable cost savings in both postage and labor. Documents that once had to be photocopied and faxed are now sent electronically. Regal’s Compliance Department requires the files from 10% of monthly sales to be provided for audit. Before Laserfiche, Regal copied, packaged and shipped each piece of paper. Now, they easily submit customer files via e-mail. “If you really look at it, they reckon Laserfiche saved 10% of gross revenue,” says James.

Regal also realized immediate space savings. Staff digitized and shredded 3,500 client files, eliminating almost 400,000 sheets of paper and nine filing cabinets. The space that used to house overflowing file cabinets is now home to two new desks. Off site deep storage is no more, saving monthly rent and staff time required to find documents.

The entire company accesses the central repository, with two administrative staff scanning and indexing all newly generated documents. Thanks to Laserfiche, filing is quick and easy and the supply chain process has been reduced to five simple steps.

In addition, the Laserfiche repository enables advisers working remotely to quickly access information located up to 100 kilometers away via virtual private network (VPN). Being able to instantly locate information like an applicant’s date of birth, mortgage details or the last date of policy review gives advisers an opportunity to re-visit their clients immediately, rather than waiting for files to arrive through the mail. Sales have increased, business has become more transparent and advisers are much more efficient in renewing business and keeping in contact with clients. Not only are advisers much happier, calling Laserfiche “a godsend” to their business, but clients are more satisfied too.

As a company, Regal has grown considerably since implementing Laserfiche and is now planning a move to larger offices. “The beauty of it is, when they were looking at premises, they didn’t have to consider storage or filing space,” Burgess remarks. “They just got to pick an office they liked.”

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.”

With staff in 38 offices across the city’s 148 square miles, Bakersfield achieves a broad range of benefits.

“There’s no reason to limit Laserfiche to a single department or use,” he adds. “Using Laserfiche in all departments means we really achieve results.

“For example, our human resources department puts performance evaluations into Laserfiche. Our fire department has a HazMat folder that only department personnel have access to, so the locations of hazardous material won’t become public knowledge. But it’s available in Laserfiche to the fire crew 24/7, so they can know any potential danger at a fire site.”

Bakersfield, CA, IS Director Bob Trammell

According to Trammell, the city was recently asked to cooperate with the California Attorney General’s office, which was conducting a major probe into price fixing. Staff had to collect all purchase records that met certain pre-determined criteria. “This would have required a lot of city resources,” he says. “Instead, we set up the Attorney General’s office with a Laserfiche account so they could access and search the necessary records themselves—which saved a great deal of time for us.”

But besides using Laserfiche to eliminate paper and simplify information retrieval, Bakersfield has also expanded Laserfiche enterprise-wide by integrating it with the city’s ERP system, Sungard NaviLine, and their GIS system, ESRI ArcGIS.

Bakersfield uses Laserfiche as the foundation of an innovative program to combat graffiti, which Trammell believes wouldn’t be practical—or possible—without integrating Laserfiche and Sungard.

When a citizen reports graffiti, the city’s goal is to remove it within 24 hours. The graffiti removal crew uses the Sungard NaviLine Work Order module to record how much paint and time was required to remove the graffiti. Photographs of the graffiti are stored as JPEGs in Laserfiche and attached to the work order, so retrieving a work order also brings up photographs stored in Laserfiche.

Next, the Bakersfield Police Department analyzes the photographs stored in Laserfiche, recording repeated patterns as Laserfiche template field values. When police arrest a suspect, officers retrieve all recorded examples of their “work” from Laserfiche and use the Work Order module to calculate the cost of the graffiti removal. Then, the city files a civil lawsuit against the parents to recover cleanup costs.

“That’s a pretty good deterrent when you consider that the bill could add up to six figures,” says Trammell.

Prior to implementing this program, Bakersfield found itself in the situation of most cities—they would arrest a tagger and overcrowded courts would let the perpetrator out on probation until they were arrested again. “Civil suits are a much better deterrent,” Trammell says.

Given the success of the anti-graffiti program, Trammell and his staff plan to continue the city’s integration with Sungard. “We just finished bringing code enforcement online so that the department can store pictures of code violations in the system,” he says. “Our finance department is looking forward to storing invoices in the accounts payable section by next fiscal year. They already ‘cold-load’ auditing reports, storing them in Laserfiche instead of printing them out on paper, which means they’re searchable, so people can find them easily.”

But Bakersfield’s Sungard integration is just the start. The city has also fully integrated Laserfiche with their GIS system, ArcGIS from ESRI.

Downtown Bakersfield with City Hall and Police Headquarters at left and Hall of Records at right

“About 12 years ago, around the same time that we purchased Sungard and Laserfiche, we also purchased an ESRI system,” Trammell remembers. “We needed a good tool to provide GIS services to various city departments. Almost all the work the City does is related to GIS. It’s one of the cornerstones of our IT infrastructure.”

According to Trammell, almost every city department has used the ESRI GIS system, and, in fact, GIS was one of his main goals for building Bakersfield’s IT infrastructure. “I really felt that there needed to be three main components—ERP, document management and GIS. Once we selected Sungard, Laserfiche and ESRI, we began to look for ways to integrate them. With our ESRI system, we store documents in Laserfiche and, through integration, retrieve them spatially,” he says.

In the city’s ESRI system, users can select a parcel or area of the city and search Laserfiche for documents relating to that particular area. “They can retrieve documents ranging from AutoCAD drawings to planning documents to fire HazMat information to photographs, whatever we have in the system,” Trammell says.

The ESRI integration took only about two months to complete, with city IT staff performing all of the work themselves. Currently, Public Works is using the ESRI/Laserfiche integration, with the Fire Department, Police Department and Building Department all planning to use it in the near future. “It’s very useful, because staff can quickly find the information they need,” Trammell says.

With Laserfiche fully integrated into the city’s IT infrastructure, Bakersfield’s IT staff is striving to live up to the city’s motto, “Life as it should be,” both for city staff and residents. “Our residents like the ability to quickly search for documents without having to go to the City Clerk’s office,” Trammell says. “And our staff appreciates the ability to store their own documents for quick retrieval. For our IT staff, we find that Laserfiche requires very little support—which is very important to us.”

CSU Bakersfield's Walter Stiern Library

Trammell believes that all cities can find benefits in Laserfiche, so he does not hesitate to recommend it to colleagues. “With Laserfiche, you get more bang for the buck than with other imaging systems,” he says. “And when you make it available to all your city departments, not just the City Clerk, that’s when you really begin to realize the benefits.

“You really should look at integrating Laserfiche with your ERP and GIS systems, because once you’ve done an integration, you really find that there’s nothing to it,” he adds. “We’ve realized enormous benefits from integrating other applications with Laserfiche, and that’s why we anticipate even more success in the future.”

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.”

Anderson found the ideal solution in Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME), which centralizes scanned paper and electronic records while automating records retention and destruction. “What I like about Laserfiche is that I can manage electronic documents, paper, microfilm and audio and video files enterprise-wide,” Anderson says.

Collin County’s journey to provide order to their paper-based legal system began with a two-year project in the district court clerk’s office, converting paper case files from 1846-2000 into archival images—a total of over ten million images.

Anderson then expanded the plan to manage archiving, retention and management of case files for the county court, integrating RME with the county’s CMS. RME provides back-end records retention for closed and inactive case files. “It’s very easy to use, and it helps us meet our goal of providing quality, cost-effective public service,” she notes.

Laserfiche also helps the district attorney’s office operate more efficiently. “We’ve scanned felony case files into Laserfiche, which has been great,” Anderson says. “Our old content manager didn’t have full-text search capability, and it didn’t manage records retention. With RME, it’s easy to manage retention periods, which can range from 25-50 years, and it’s simple to locate information.”

Anderson realized the value of the county’s Laserfiche system when a flood in May 2007 damaged nearly 1,000 boxes of records—many of them with no backup. “It’s clear how important Laserfiche is for business continuity,” she says. “Had those files been stored in Laserfiche, we wouldn’t have needed to worry when the flood waters started rising. People worry about computers crashing, but in reality, paper documents are much more likely to be destroyed than digital ones.”

Laserfiche also offers the flexibility Collin County needs to expand enterprise-wide—while still meeting each department’s unique needs. The county is implementing Laserfiche in the property tax department to digitally store copies of checks, stubs and letters received as part of the annual property tax receipting process. Planning for the next budget cycle includes integrating Laserfiche with SunGard® HTE in the auditor’s office to manage accounts payable documents. The development department also plans to integrate Laserfiche with its existing GIS application to manage septic system records. Eventually, most county records will be stored in Laserfiche and will be viewable over the Internet.

“I’ve been really pleased with the system,” Anderson says. “But what I’m most looking forward to is expanding our records retention plan to include electronic records—which will make us better prepared to comply with e-discovery orders.”

Anderson isn’t the only one who’s pleased. County staff have been so delighted that they’re spreading the word to other departments. “The response to Laserfiche has been so positive, that it’s been difficult to keep up with demand for new installations,” she says. “I’ve just had to start saying ‘No’ nicely—and tell them ‘You’ll just have to learn to wait your turn.’”

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.

“As a business owner myself, I understand the issues that are important to owners of private firms,” Patrick says. “So when I founded my own firm, I used my thirty years of experience as a business owner to build a successful wealth management and business consulting firm.”

And when it came to growing that success, Patrick knew that by utilizing technology, he’d be able to help his staff do more, more efficiently. “We chose Laserfiche because it’s really the acknowledged leader in document management for financial planners. Also, our broker-dealer, National Financial Partners, uses Laserfiche, and they highly recommend it.”

Prinicipal Josh Patrick

Yet while Patrick knew eliminating paperwork would bring benefits to his staff’s daily work processes, there was an even more simple reason for choosing Laserfiche: managing the firm’s growth, both current and planned.

“When we installed Laserfiche, we were in the middle of moving offices and adding additional reps to our staff,” Client Service Specialist Melissa Provost remembers. “With this growth came additional clients’ records to manage. As any financial planner can tell you, misfiling is always an issue, no matter how many clients you have. But of course the more clients you have, the more documents you have the chance to misfile.”

Provost, who joined the firm in 2001, has never known a workday without Laserfiche. “We installed Laserfiche two weeks after I started, so Laserfiche and I started at the same time,” she says. “I’m not sure that I’d want to know what things would be like without it.”

Provost remembers that when the firm installed their Laserfiche system, staff were immediately able to get up and running because installation and training were done much more quickly than she expected. “Within a day and a half, our system was ready to go. The first day was installation, and half of the second was training,” Provost says. “It really has to do with the fact that Laserfiche is so easy to learn.

“Recently, we hired a new part-time employee, and she caught right on,” she adds. “That really says something about how easy to use Laserfiche is, that even a part-time employee can quickly get up to speed with the system.”

Client Service Specialist Melissa Provost

Not only does Laserfiche require minimal resources to set up and learn, it also requires minimal resources to maintain. “If we have any problems with Laserfiche, I can usually take care of it myself,” Provost says. “I set up and manage accounts for our reps, so we don’t have to have onsite IT personnel to manage the system. If any major problem arises —which is a true rarity—then our reseller, One Source/ADI, takes care of it for us.”

For Provost, who provides support for the advisors at Stage 2 Planning, Laserfiche made everyday work processes much easier. “We scan everything into Laserfiche, from all client and compliance files to accounts receivable and accounts payable documents. Not only are documents easier to find in Laserfiche, they’re never misfiled,” she says.

And when home office staff or clients call looking for a document, Laserfiche provides a quick and easy solution to getting it to them. “One of the best things about Laserfiche is the e-mail feature,” Provost adds. “Instead of printing and then faxing or mailing a document, we just e-mail it right from Laserfiche—which saves both time and money.”

When it comes to saving time and money, Laserfiche has definitely lived up to expectations. Before installing Laserfiche, the firm had six large file cabinets to store client and compliance files. But now, there aren’t any file cabinets anywhere in the office, which was a huge money saver when it came to the company’s move to a new office. And the benefits don’t stop there.

“We recently had a part-time employee leave the company,” Provost says, “but thanks to Laserfiche, there wasn’t a critical need to go out and hire a replacement right away. Because we’re able to work so much more efficiently, we can do more in a day, so we were able to cover the extra workload while we took our time hiring the right person.”

Also, Laserfiche has paid off in faster, easier audits for the firm’s staff. Provost estimates that their last broker-dealer compliance audit went significantly faster than usual, all thanks to Laserfiche.

“During our last audit, instead of the auditor requesting documents and sitting and waiting while we found them, we gave them a desktop computer logged into Laserfiche,” she says. “We can easily search for any document they’d like to see, and bring it up almost instantaneously for them to look at right there on the computer.

“Normally, our audits last from about 8:30 A.M. until 12:00 P.M.,” Provost adds. “But with Laserfiche, we were done and the auditor was out the door by 10:30 A.M.”

Stage 2 Planning staff have realized what many Laserfiche users ultimately discover: that getting rid of paper is only the start of the benefits Laserfiche can bring. From faster audits to savings on office supplies and staffing, once Laserfiche becomes a part of daily business processes, the possibilities for saving time and money are nearly endless.

“While I love that Laserfiche got rid of the stacks of files I had to search through to find things, what really surprised me is how much time Laserfiche saves me,” Provost says. “I expected Laserfiche to make things more efficient—but not nearly to the degree it has.”

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.

HIPAA requirements mandated that employee medical records must be segregated so only the HIPAA officer and benefits manager could access them, which required keeping these documents in separate file cabinets. And worst of all, there was no disaster plan in place, so if documents were destroyed, they would be impossible to replace.

But in 2004, the district received funding from the New York State Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund to hire a records management expert to examine the feasibility of implementing document management in the HR department. By 2005, a selection committee of the district’s HR director, IS director and records management coordinator were interviewing document management vendors.

“Although another vendor’s ‘unlimited user licenses’ offer was attractive from a fiscal standpoint, our selection committee was concerned that if the product wasn’t user friendly, unlimited licenses would not make the HR staff, or any other department’s employees, more willing to use it,” says Director of Human Resources and Records Management Officer Karen Briner-Peterson. “After a lot of research and deliberation, we decided Laserfiche would best suit our needs.”

J.M. Fletcher Elementary School

Once Laserfiche was installed, staff began with a pilot project to scan all personnel files into Laserfiche, with plans to eventually expand the project to other administrative areas and school buildings as resources and time allowed. The need for multiple file cabinets was immediately eliminated: staff designed their file structure to include five sub-folders (personnel, payroll, training, insurance and medical) set up so they could place security tags on confidential files. “Because all this information is confidential, we had to restrict access to everyone except the district superintendent and two of our assistant superintendents, who can access these documents through WebLink,” Briner-Peterson says.

And just as important is the peace of mind Briner-Peterson and her staff enjoy knowing Jamestown’s records are finally safe—come what may. “9/11 and Hurricane Katrina just proved the need to be able to continue running a business or government office immediately after a crisis,” she says. “Our largest concern was that we had no disaster plan in place. If water pipes broke or a fire started, we had no ability to recreate documents that could not be easily replaced.”

All of the district’s documents are retrievable through WebLink so that, in case of disaster, district maintenance employees, administrators and local police, fire and emergency personnel can immediately access information. In fact, Briner-Peterson is so confident in Laserfiche that she’s begun moving original hardcopy personnel offsite to the district’s new records storage facility. “Laserfiche is the foundation of our district disaster recovery plan,” she says. “Combined with our HR and payroll software, Laserfiche hasn’t just saved us time and money, but has also enabled us to be up and running at an offsite location within a matter of hours after a disaster.”

Beyond disaster recovery, some of the most noticeable benefits of using Laserfiche have come from staff expanding their use of the system into other areas, including managing e-discovery, tracking the history of provisions in collective bargaining agreements and handling FOIA requests.

Laserfiche has also been used to store and display large amounts of data in litigation. “We were able to import documents into Laserfiche, bringing more than 500 pages of documents to court for dramatic effect,” says Briner-Peterson. “During testimony, the information being testified to can be projected on a screen in the hearing room for the entire court to see. Due to discovery requirements, we are able to provide the judge and opposing counsel with all documents admitted into evidence stored on one CD instead of storage boxes.”

James Prendergast Library

Laserfiche has proven even more helpful in managing collective bargaining agreements between the district and its seven employee unions. At times, Briner-Peterson explains, a union may bring a grievance alleging violation of a contract provision or the parties must go to arbitration to define a word or phrase in a collective bargaining agreement. “Last year, I was asked by our Assistant Superintendent to determine a history on a particular contract provision,” she says. “By doing a word search in Laserfiche, within twenty minutes I’d printed out the appropriate pages of the contract provision as the language evolved from 1973 to the present. Before Laserfiche, this would have taken several hours, perhaps even longer.”

It’s equally easy for staff to quickly respond to the numerous FOIA requests they receive each year. “Sometimes documents must be disclosed under FOIA, but contain information that is confidential and can’t be disclosed,” Briner-Peterson explains. As the district’s Records Access Officer, she used to have to manually redact each document. First, she’d copy the document and use a marker to black out any confidential information. “But because print below these marks can still be seen, I’d have to make an additional photocopy to ensure that no redacted information could be read,” she sighs.

But now, Briner-Peterson simply uses Laserfiche’s redaction tool to securely—and clandestinely—remove any confidential information. “I really like the ability to use a white instead of a black redactor, because it’s impossible for the reader to see how many words in a sentence were removed,” she says. “Although it may seem trivial to anyone who doesn’t handle FOIA requests, using Laserfiche to store and redact our documents helps us prove that we used our best efforts to comply with the law.”

Jamestown is home to the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center.

Briner-Peterson and her staff have been so inspired by the utility of their document management system they’ve come up with even more ways to use Laserfiche throughout the district. “Our confidence in Laserfiche enables us to reach out to other departments—so we continue to find new and innovative ways to use it,” she says. In fact, in recognition of their innovative and creative use of their Laserfiche system, the Jamestown Public Schools HR team was recently awarded with the Laserfiche community’s prestigious Run Smarter Award.

Briner-Peterson believes that any Laserfiche user can enjoy the same success—as long as they invest the time up-front in proper planning. “We’d tell anyone to start in one department and deal with a workable amount of documents. We started with a small number of users and basic functionality, but we’ve added users and more advanced functionality as time goes by and our system becomes even more critical to our operations,” she says.

“Once you’ve had successes in one department and can prove to others that the system is user-friendly, functional and dependable, you’ll have departments knocking on your door,” she offers. “In our estimation, the best—and most unexpected—benefit of Laserfiche has been that we’ve been able to use it for so many things that no one on our selection committee ever could have envisioned.”

“I lived in the Kootenay-Columbia area from grade six until high school,” says Fraser, now Enterprise Solutions Manager at IKON. “I attended five schools in the area. The teachers and the school system were great. My most influential teacher was my grade seven teacher, Mr. Truant. I owe him a lot. I wish I could see him again and thank him for helping me immensely through a difficult year where I attended three different schools.”

This devotion to supporting educators led IKON to help school districts throughout British Columbia digitize their paper records and speed their workflows. School District No. 20 (SD20), located in the interior of British Columbia, Canada, serves a number of communities throughout the province. Thanks to IKON, it’s also discovered the benefits of Laserfiche.

When SD20 began looking for a digital document management solution, it was to maximize their extremely limited storage space. “Our biggest concern was too much paper,” says Greg Luterbach, Director of HR and IT for SD20. “The volume of paper was consuming more space than we had. It was very time-consuming to track things down, which made it difficult to respond to requests in a timely manner because we couldn’t access information quickly.”

The school district had identified three departments where the Laserfiche solution would provide nearly immediate benefits: the accounts payable department, the human resources department and Board operations. In the accounts payable department, lack of physical storage space was a concern, as was access to previous invoices for issues like warranty coverage. The storage and access to personnel files for both active and inactive employees was cumbersome. Payroll clerks needed to retrieve files from off-site storage on a regular basis, but due to the time and effort required to actually locate the file, this task became low-priority. In addition, there was an identified need to be able to search through Board agendas and minutes for previous data and decisions.

Laserfiche serves as a centralized repository for both hard copy and electronic documents, enabling space savings, a faster retrieval time and the ability to share files electronically among district employees. Christine Barrett, Solutions Consultant at IKON, believes that preparation and planning were key to the implementation’s success. “By doing the work up front, the implementation plan was fairly straightforward and we were able to meet the project’s objectives and timeframe,” she says. “Most people don’t realize that the time you spend planning and preparing in the beginning is the key to a smooth and stress-free implementation.”

Luterbach agrees with Barrett’s assessment. “The implementation went very well,” he remembers. “IKON did the backfile scanning for our HR records, while we just scanned day-forward records in the payroll and Board operations. Staff had some initial concerns regarding the time it took to digitize and profile documents in the system, but it didn’t take long for people to realize the benefits of accessing information from their desks.

“There was a nearly instant payback,” he continues. “I’d say it only took weeks for us to see a difference.”

In the human resources department, SD20 leveraged key Laserfiche features to minimize manual indexing of active employee files. With a simple data extract, the IKON implementation team pulled a list of key index fields like employee names and identification numbers from the school district software, which were used to create cover sheets with all the index fields SD20 required for employee file retrieval. The implementation team scanned the files with the matching cover sheets, which electronically pulled the files into the Laserfiche repository. Quick Fields™ and Zone OCR automatically indexed and stored the files, minimizing the time and effort required for digital archival.

Now, instead of having to get files from off-site storage or attempt to answer queries from memory, staff simply open a digital copy of the paperwork they need right on their desktop computers. “The best thing is that we’re much more confident in our answers to questions,” Luterbach says. “We can answer most questions while people are waiting, saving the time it would have taken to locate the information and then call them back. Now, we base our answers on facts. We just open up Laserfiche, click Search, find the document and answer the question. Our efficiency is up, and our confidence is, too.”

Staff has embraced the new system. “We really feel like we’re more efficient, more effective and more confident,” Luterbach says. “We have reliable access to information right from our desks, and that’s what we needed.”

Luterbach believes school districts of all sizes can benefit from a Laserfiche solution. “We’ve found our document management system to be highly effective,” he says. “We’ve been very happy as far as technology goes—the system has been rock-solid, and we’ve had good support from both IKON and Laserfiche in regards to any of our minor issues. The most important thing for school districts is instant access to information—and everyone benefits from that.”

When it comes to information access, Luterbach believes SD20’s Laserfiche system has been an overwhelmingly positive addition to the district office. “Laserfiche empowers people with click-convenient access to the information they need,” he says. “We’re really happy with it.”

“We were dealing with an enormous amount of paper,” remembers Teresa Devick. “And the paper files concerned us greatly, mainly because if our office were ever damaged, our information would be completely unrecoverable.”

Devick had read about document management in an industry magazine, and had heard about it from colleagues who had implemented their own paperless offices. When she saw Laserfiche at the FPA Symposium in Minneapolis, however, it was clear that Bond and Devick had found their perfect solution.

“We knew we needed a cost-effective system that was easy to use,” Devick says. “Some of the other systems that met our specific criteria were cost-prohibitive, and they required changing our operating procedures. Laserfiche didn’t require us to change how we do business, and we could choose exactly the functionality we needed—no more, no less.”

Once Bond and Devick decided on Laserfiche, installation was “very quick,” according to Devick. Within eight months, the firm had fully transitioned from paper to digital files.

The Bond and Devick Minneapolis Team – RJ Devick, Andy Feterl, Rachel Halvorson, Kristine Bisanz and Sherry Duggan

“It helped that our reseller, Cities Digital, Inc., sent two staff to the office to train everyone the day our system was installed,” Devick says. “It only took a couple of hours for us to feel comfortable with Laserfiche. It’s extremely easy to use, so training—even for new users—takes very little effort.”

Devick also believes support from Cities Digital was crucial to their success. “Once we started using the system, they were always available to answer any questions,” she says. “Their customer service is truly second to none.”

Thanks to this training and support, Devick says, users were instantly more productive. “We immediately started scanning and importing client information, including e-mail correspondence, trade reports, contracts, holding reports, retirement analysis and basically anything else we could think of,” she says. “We also store our company information, such as our compliance reports, employee files, 401(k) plan documents and meeting minutes.

“The interesting thing is that filing our information in Laserfiche actually takes a little longer than filing a paper document, because we have to take a few seconds to enter template information and put it in the correct location,” she continues. “But the ability to access information once it is filed is just so much easier and quicker. We don’t have to dig through file folders and try and find just the piece of paper we need. And, because it’s stored digitally, it can be viewed by more than one person at a time.”

With locations in Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN, sharing information was a priority. “Because we handle sensitive and private information, we needed a secure system, but we also needed to become more efficient,” Devick says. “To create that efficiency, multiple people needed to be able to access the same document simultaneously, and we needed to access it through our client management software.”

To truly enhance efficiency, however, the firm worked with Cities Digital to integrate Laserfiche with their client relationship management (CRM) application, ACT!® “From an efficiency standpoint, it was an obvious need for us,” Devick says. “The ability to integrate Laserfiche with ACT! was a question we asked about immediately.

When an advisor or staff member is viewing a client contact in ACT!, they simply click a link button to pull up all the folders for that particular contact. “Integration between a CRM system and Laserfiche is essential for firms who want to maximize the value of their digitally stored information,” says Cities Digital CEO Patrick Welsch. “With this type of integration, staff don’t have to do anything differently than they’re already doing. They just pull up information stored in Laserfiche directly from the CRM application. It’s a tremendous time-saver, and helps staff respond to client questions much more quickly.”

“The pleasant surprise with Laserfiche is how simple it is to use. Once things are scanned in, anyone can find the information they’re looking for.”

Devick agrees. “From the users’ perspective, this is truly the most useful feature in Laserfiche,” she says.

“The integration has really helped our financial advisors provide better client service. When speaking with clients on the phone, our advisors can immediately view documents to answer questions. When they’re doing account review, they can instantly pull up reports that are generated and scanned into the system.”

And when a client calls and needs tax forms or statements sent to their accountant or lawyer, Laserfiche enables the firm’s staff to turn those requests around “almost immediately,” says Devick. Staff simply find the document in the Laserfiche repository and e-mail it with a simple right click.

“This is really the biggest benefit for our clients,” she says. “Of course they benefit from our increased security, but that’s more behind the scenes. What they really notice is that, with Laserfiche, we can simply e-mail the document right from the system. It doesn’t matter whether the external party uses Laserfiche, because the document is sent in either TIFF or PDF format, which they can open from their own computer.”

And at the office, it’s not just advisors and back office staff that appreciate the firm’s Laserfiche system. “Even our greeter, who works on client accounts, benefits from it,” Devick says. “She doesn’t have to leave the front desk to grab client files because she’s able to view them right from her computer. So we always have someone sitting at the front desk—which is much better from a customer service perspective.”

Storing documents in Laserfiche also helps Bond and Devick comply with regulatory requirements for disaster recovery and information security. “Storing all our documents electronically enables us to back up the data and keep it offsite,” Devick says. “And our system is encrypted and password-protected, which makes unauthorized access nearly impossible.”

Laserfiche has also enabled Bond and Devick to more easily comply with legal and broker-dealer retention requirements. “Since we are required to maintain much of our client data for seven years, we’ve eliminated more paper than we could have imagined when we started this process two years ago,” Devick says.

“It’s also simplified our audit process,” she adds. “It’s cut the time of our compliance audits down considerably, since the auditor can quickly and easily pull up any information they need.”

When an auditor is onsite, they can sit down at a computer and pull up any information they’re looking for on their own. “Auditors have never had a problem using the system,” she says.

Ultimately, Bond and Devick knew that optimizing business processes was the key to their ultimate success. “We didn’t really look at our Laserfiche system from a financial perspective, but as a necessity,” Devick says. “Being able to access our information is quickly is key, and so is the fact that we can easily share information both in and outside the office.

“I would highly recommend Laserfiche,” she continues. “The pleasant surprise with Laserfiche is how simple it is to use—it’s much easier than locating a hardcopy client file. Once things are scanned in, anyone can find the information they’re looking for.”

According to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Okotoks “can fairly call itself the greenest community in Canada, maybe the world,” as it is one of the first municipalities to establish growth targets balancing infrastructure development and environmental conservation. And true to its motto of “Historic Past, Sustainable Future,” Okotoks has received national and international recognition for its environmental initiatives, so it’s no surprise they turned to Laserfiche to reduce paper consumption.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Watch Rachelle Meredith describe her Laserfiche success in her own words.

When the Town consolidated three administration buildings into one, the Safety Codes department, which encompasses building inspection services, began investigating scanning solutions. When the Town’s records manager was taking a course at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, the instructor commented that Laserfiche provided “top-notch products and services for public and private corporations,” says Rachelle Meredith, corporate records administrator.

After researching Laserfiche, the records manager then invited a representative from Laserfiche reseller IKON Office Solutions to conduct a demonstration. After issuing an RFP, the Town selected Laserfiche, primarily for its records management functionality, OCR capabilities and the Agenda Manager and WebLink modules.

“We love Records Management Edition’s versatility. Its ease of use was very important to us, both to gain staff buy-in and work effortlessly in our busy environment,” Meredith says.

Initially the Safety Codes assistant and manager began scanning all new building and development permit applications into Laserfiche. These applications often contain more than 300 pages, ranging from architectural drawings for housing and commercial buildings and all their associated electrical and plumbing permits to individual applications for decks and other home additions.

As Okotoks entered into its prime building season and the number of permits submitted began to climb, the effectiveness of implementing Laserfiche became quickly apparent. “The immediate benefits were obvious,” remarks Meredith. “When we saw how we saved time locating current information, we began to realize how Laserfiche would benefit our external customers as the project continued. It was a great motivation to keep going.”

At this point, Safety Codes has added more than 3,000 records to their system, saving money on paper supplies and reducing impact on the environment. “Staff really noticed the difference,” Meredith comments. “Time savings was one advantage, because finding information was so much easier. Documents were immediately accessible to safety code officers when they were out in the field, and they had access to accurate, up-to-date information that helped them make better decisions.”

And now the benefits of Laserfiche have extended to builders, professional contractors and homeowners applying for permits. “Safety Codes staff can now e-mail approved documentation back to the applicant, as well as receive initial applications by e-mail, which can be dropped straight into the records management system,” Meredith says. “This saves builders time and money, because they don’t have to come to the office to drop off or collect documentation. Instead, they receive an immediate response.”

External clients aren’t the only ones noticing the difference—other departments are recognizing the benefits of Laserfiche too. In fact, Safety Codes staff, including manager Rob Mueller, assistant Diane Scott and support staff member Ann Williams, were recently nominated for a prestigious annual corporate award, based on the effects other departments have realized from the Laserfiche system. “This is a coveted award, because peers from all 22 business units nominate and select the highest performing team,” explains Meredith. “Safety Codes was recognized for their creative approach, which was encouraging.”

In fact, the Assessment Services department has identified several key tasks that have become much more efficient since Safety Codes implemented Laserfiche. “Off-site trips to locate records have been reduced significantly because staff can instantly review documentation to identify if there’s been a history relating to a certain parcel of land. Also, copier wear-and-tear has been eliminated because they no longer have to piece together copies to recreate 24”x36” drawings,” Meredith says.

“Moreover, staff has easy access to permits correspondence and information, making it easier for assessors to identify any deficiencies or problems in blueprints and written inspection details,” she adds. “More importantly, staff can use Laserfiche’s zoom tools to enlarge numbers on blueprints, so they can read details electronically. It makes their lives so much easier.”

Based on the success in the Safety Codes department, Okotoks expanded Laserfiche to their Cemeteries/Open Spaces department. “Cemeteries is a legislated service that requires us to manage cemetery records ‘in perpetuity,’ which essentially means forever,” Meredith says. “So it was critical that this project was done correctly, right from the very start.”

The Cemeteries project was focused primarily on creating archival records, because, by their nature, cemetery records are historically important. Since Okotoks became a recognized municipality in 1904, cemetery recordkeeping has changed significantly, from a receipt of monies collected for the burial plot and an index card with the deceased’s name, to a file containing anywhere from 8-14 internal and external documents.

“From the minute we started this project we knew how convenient it would be to access information from our desktop computers,” explains Meredith. “Having current and correct information to provide to grieving relatives immediately is crucial.”

Cemetery Administrator Monica Caines began the project on a day-forward basis, scanning records as they were received and archiving records as they were pulled. After nearly two years, almost 4,700 records are now searchable through a customized template. In fact, the Cemeteries project proved so useful, Town staff next began scanning and indexing Open Spaces (parks) records. With a customized template to aid in indexing, users can instantly access documents regarding the Town’s parks, boulevards, landscaping and horticulture.

In early 2009, Okotoks residents and other Web users will be able to use WebLink to search current bylaws and more than 100 years’ worth of historical bylaws. The Town also plans to implement Workflow in the Safety Codes department, and eventually expand Workflow into finance and other departments to optimize their business processes.

In recognition of the Town’s success with Laserfiche, Okotoks is currently in the running for this year’s Run Smarter Awards. “Laserfiche is fairly new to western Canadian municipalities,” Meredith says. “We’ve had a lot of attention from other Town departments, and also from other municipalities. They want to know more about how Laserfiche is helping us meet our sustainability and environmental guidelines, as well as how we’re using Laserfiche to work smarter, not longer.”

Despite recognition from inside and outside town limits, Okotoks continues to use Laserfiche for the primary reason it was purchased: to support a sustainable future for the town’s residents. “We really believed that Laserfiche was the best overall solution for our long-term needs,” Meredith says.

“We’re a rapidly growing community that has a solid reputation for being progressive and supporting an entrepreneurial, leading-edge culture,” she adds. “Laserfiche helps us as we strive to live and work in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Principal Mark Berger

Advisors at Berger Financial Group, Inc., (BFG) have always taken pride in providing sound advice and stellar client service, but when it came to their filing system, they knew that improvement was crucial.

“We had file cabinets that were using up valuable space,” says Principal Mark Berger, “not to mention the substantial administrative time required to keep each physical file up-to-date. We knew we needed to improve our filing to improve our efficiency.”

BFG has been in business for nearly 30 years, evolving from a CPA firm to a full-service firm offering financial planning, portfolio management and income tax planning services. The practice originated in Edina, MN, and moved in 2003 to their current location in Medicine Lake (Plymouth), MN. But as the firm’s services and client base grew, so did the complexity of their files.

“Our client files are very deep, complex and extensive,” Berger says. “Essentially, we needed a reliable, efficient paperless system with automatic statement sorting capabilities.” And, thanks to assistance from their Laserfiche reseller, Cities Digital, Inc., that’s exactly what they’ve gotten.

When Patrick Welsch of Cities Digital introduced BFG to Laserfiche in late 2003, staff had never heard of Laserfiche or document management, and hadn’t really considered what efficiency improvements document management could bring to their business processes. Yet after viewing a demonstration, they immediately realized how much time and space they’d save by eliminating bulky paper files and associated file cabinets.

“When we first saw Laserfiche, we were really impressed with the interface and ease of use, especially when it came to scanning,” Berger says.

“This is a very tech-savvy firm that is growing very quickly,” Welsch adds. “They’ve really embraced their Laserfiche system, and have used it to fuel that growth. Every employee has a user license and desktop scanner, so it’s truly a part of their daily work processes.”

Now, instead of digging through file cabinets, BFG’s fourteen staff members retrieve client information from their desktop computers. The firm uses their Laserfiche system to store not just images of scanned paper documents, but also what Berger says are “tons” of Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheets, Word® documents and Outlook® e-mails. Staff can scan phone messages and working documents right from their desks, while the front desk clerk scans printed mail as it’s received.

“We’ve organized an extremely large amount of data in an easy-to-use way, which helps all our staff do their jobs more efficiently,” Berger comments. Each client’s folder contains separate sub-folders for correspondence, tax information, insurance information, invoices and agreements, legal documentation, reports, investment management information, trading and securities executions, and statements. Because the file structure is so well-organized, users can simply browse to the client’s folder and locate exactly the document they’re searching for.

“It’s not just a benefit for us,” Berger says. “It helps our clients, too—they don’t have to fill their basements with old investment statements, reports and tax documents, because we store all those for them.”

Not to mention that the instant access to information helps when an inactive client calls. “No matter how long it’s been since we’ve spoken, we can bring up their information instantly to jog our memory,” Berger says. “It’s tremendous from a customer service standpoint.”

While making client files more easily accessible and searchable has proven very successful, it’s Quick Fields, Laserfiche’s suite of high-volume document capture and processing tools, that has brought BFG the most significant and immediate time-saving benefits.

“We love Quick Fields,” Berger says. It’s not often that a document capture and processing module inspires such devotion, but that enthusiasm is well-founded. Quick Fields automatically sorts thousands of statement pages into BFG’s sophisticated folder structure every week. In fact, Berger remembers that when he first saw Laserfiche, he was immediately impressed with Quick Fields. “Quick Fields sealed the deal for us,” he says. “There is really nothing out there like it.”

Staff no longer have to manually separate and file electronic statements; instead, Quick Fields automatically processes and moves them into individual client folders. Given that the firm receives upwards of 8,000 statement pages monthly, this saves staff a significant amount of time. “We have a different Quick Fields processing session set up for each major company, so it really saves us a lot of manual sorting,” Berger says.

“We tend to track an above-average amount of investment detail, so we need to have all of a client’s statements readily accessible, with complete data.” He adds, “Quick Fields really does that for us.”

Even with this extensive automation, the firm’s Laserfiche system doesn’t require extensive resources to support or maintain. “We don’t have a dedicated support staff,” says Berger. “I personally deal with many of the smaller questions that our staff have, but I really rely on Cities Digital to help out when a more complex question arises. We’ve had nothing but good experience with their support.”

When it comes to audits—often the bane of a financial advisor’s life—Laserfiche is a tremendous help. Berger explains that the instant access to information makes it much easier to answer auditors’ questions, because staff no longer have to search through file cabinets or off-site storage. “We had an audit two days ago,” he says, “and the auditors really were impressed. We were able to pull up documents from the 1980s within seconds. The auditors commented that most advisors have to go off-site to retrieve information from that long ago, and it’s not nearly as accessible as ours was. They really liked it.”

With all the benefits the firm has realized from their Laserfiche system, Berger doesn’t hesitate in recommending it to other investment professionals. “We definitely have recommended Laserfiche to other firms,” he says. “Increased overall office efficiency and auto-sorting of statements are something all firms can benefit from. Not to mention that Laserfiche has enabled us to grow our practice at a much greater rate than our staff. And, with Laserfiche, we’ve been able to provide a greater number of services for our clients that just wouldn’t have been possible before.

“Going paperless is everything we’d hoped it would be,” he adds. “It doesn’t just help us all do a better job, it also helps us provide better service for our clients.”

Faced with trying State v. Valentini, the largest gambling conspiracy case in Arizona history, criminal defense attorney Howard Snader knew his old paper-based system wouldn’t work any longer.

“I was retained in a criminal defense matter where the state’s discovery documents were provided in digital format,” Snader says. “Although I could read the documents, I couldn’t search them in any meaningful way.”

Snader found that opening every single page was cumbersome and completely ineffective. “I would have had to print each page as I read it, and with more than 30 defendants and an initial discovery of nearly 150,000 pages, that’s a significant amount of paper,” he explains. “I would have spent weeks reading and marking the necessary evidence, and I’d have to do it each time I needed to prepare another motion.”

“In Arizona, court systems are forcing attorneys to move into the 21st century, because many of them are now providing all evidentiary documents electronically,” says Greg Dutton, managing partner of ArcWare Solutions, the Laserfiche reseller that oversaw Snader’s Laserfiche implementation. “From our experience, law firms in Arizona are significantly behind the curve and need to catch up.”

Snader’s firm was a prime example of this. “I believed I had no need for document management, so I had no system in place,” he remembers. “After I saw what Laserfiche could do, I realized the need was there. Not only would I be able to deal with the ongoing discovery of police reports, medical records and financial statements, I’d also be able to securely archive files, destroy hard copies and save on storage fees.”

A practicing attorney since 1988 and a certified specialist in criminal law since 1995, Snader knew that minimizing time spent on discovery and money spent on storage was key to his firm’s success. When he found Laserfiche, he knew that its upfront cost would return enormous dividends. “I really looked at Laserfiche as an investment,” Snader says. “The ease of access, support and training, as well as the software’s capabilities, made this the best choice for my practice.”

Dutton believes that, like Snader, many attorneys underestimate the utility of a document management solution. “Case preparation software does only what it was designed to do. Laserfiche can provide case preparation functionality, as well as manage all of the documentation for the day-to-day business of your entire practice, including accounting, billing and HR records,” he says.

“When you consider that attorneys receive information in so many formats—including paper, PDFs and other types of electronic documents—a system that can manage all those disparate formats from a single screen ends up providing an incredible ROI,” Dutton adds. “In fact, Laserfiche could be a law firm’s single best software investment.”

Faced with the mountain of evidence in State v. Valentini, Snader wholeheartedly agreed. “With Laserfiche, it’s not just about saving time, money and providing a valuable resource for clients—which it certainly does. It’s also about competitive advantage. Laserfiche is a powerful tool that enables me to show prosecutors and clients the strength and weaknesses of a case by just pushing a few keys.”

In fact, with Laserfiche’s sophisticated search tools at his disposal, Snader was the first defense attorney in the case to submit a motion to remand for his client—and the only one to submit his motion by its original due date in June.

“I’m amazed how quickly and easily I can locate information,” he says. “I was able to show the prosecutor that he failed to provide any testimony on a key issue, simply because I could immediately find the information.

“That would have been incredibly time-consuming with boxes of documents or printed PDFs,” he adds.

Dutton agrees, “The way the county provided documents to Mr. Snader made discovery even more difficult—and Laserfiche even more important. Because each page was provided as a separate file, it was quite difficult to tell what pages belonged to what records.

“Worse yet,” he adds, “it was nearly impossible for someone without technical know-how to figure out. But by using Laserfiche, in just a matter of hours, I was able to reconstruct all the discovery documents, fully migrate them into Laserfiche, make every page full-text searchable and teach Snader to do it all himself.”

“It took less than four hours to get Laserfiche installed and for me to learn how to use it,” Snader says. “Laserfiche’s help tools are phenomenal, the tutorials are excellent and the software is very user-friendly. It has a learning curve like any other software, but the end result was much better than I expected. I’ve definitely saved more time than I thought was possible.”

Snader plans to complete the discovery issues in State v. Valentini and continue on to scanning and archiving all his closed files. In fact, Laserfiche has even helped him market himself, as he can handle larger cases with even larger volumes of discovery documents.

“Laserfiche is a perfect complement to my growing practice,” Snader says. “It’s an easy-to-use product that provides fantastic results and is a great value for the cost.

“Other products may be less expensive,” he adds, “but they certainly don’t provide the same quality or capability.”

According to the Wall Street Journal Business Technology blog, a recent Emerson Network Power survey showed that only 31% of the respondents had a business continuity plan to prepare for such disruptions, yet nearly 80% said they had experienced at least one power outage in 2007, and two-thirds said they expected another one to occur within 12 months.

Did you know that you can use Laserfiche as the foundation of your organization’s business continuity plan? Despite the recent floods in the Midwest, law firm Arenson & Zimmerman used Laserfiche to continue working, even though power at their offices would be out for at least four weeks. The weekend after the flooding began, staff set up remote computer connections for all attorneys and support staff so they could work from off-site locations.

Without Laserfiche, staff members would have had to carry large boxes of files down nine flights of stairs while holding flashlights. “Although the stair climbing would have put us all in much better physical shape, Laserfiche has allowed us to spend our time producing billable work,” concluded legal assistant Laurie L. Chappell. “Laserfiche definitely helped keep us going during this difficult time.”

What if your offices lost power for four weeks? Do you know how you could use Laserfiche to keep working? Download our white paper, “How Digital Document Management Streamlines Business Continuity Planning,” to learn more about how you can better prepare for disaster, whether it’s a power outage, an earthquake or a tornado.

Before the clerk’s office installed Laserfiche, staff literally spent hours each day fulfilling information requests. “It was so time-consuming,” recalls City Clerk Lynn Mulhall. “Other city employees would come to our office to submit requests, and they’d have to wait at the counter while we went to the records room and searched for the relevant documents. We definitely needed a better way to share information with other departments.”

Records Administrator Janet LeBlanc puts it more succinctly. “I cringe when I think about how it used to be,” she says.

Mulhall and her colleagues found what they were looking for at an Arizona Municipal Clerks’ Association conference, where they spoke with a Laserfiche representative and saw the software in action. Using Laserfiche, they’d be able to digitize and index all their documents, eliminating almost all of their paper archives.

“We really didn’t look at anything else,” Mulhall remembers. “Laserfiche was the only known product to meet the needs of city clerks, and once we saw it, we really liked it.”

The clerk’s office installed Laserfiche in 2001, and staff began scanning agendas, meeting minutes and other documents into the Laserfiche repository. In 2002, LeBlanc started an initiative to move all the office’s documents into Laserfiche, and she began scanning records one series at a time. Because documents hadn’t been named consistently, LeBlanc focused on developing a template with drop-down fields recording the document type, how it was approved, and contract numbers and terms, among other information.

“I really created it through trial and error,” she says. “But now it’s so easy. We can search by keyword to instantly locate the information we need.”

As LeBlanc added more documents to the Laserfiche repository, staff found it increasingly simple to locate information requested by other city departments. In fact, because they could e-mail documents from within Laserfiche, staff could fulfill many requests instantaneously.

As employees throughout the city became more comfortable with electronic documents, they began contacting the IT department to request access to Laserfiche. Rather than rolling the Laserfiche Client software out citywide, IT used WebLink to power a Web portal that provides staff with round-the-clock access to the Laserfiche repository.

“We held training sessions to show staff in other departments how to locate documents in Laserfiche,” LeBlanc says. “Because Laserfiche is so easy to use, everyone caught on quickly, and it’s definitely made us more productive. Our city manager, for example, absolutely loves it—he saves a lot of time by accessing contracts and other documents right from his desktop.”

In addition to making documents more accessible, Laserfiche has also helped the clerk’s office streamline everyday work processes. For example, before the office installed Laserfiche, preparing agenda packets was a tedious process that required hours of staff time. “We used to place the reports in black binders, which we’d then carry between people’s desks,” Mulhall remembers. “We had to create a Microsoft® Access® database to determine who had the binders, or even who’d seen them last.”

After creating the final agenda, staff had to assemble the packet by hand and create 40-50 photocopies. Last-minute additions required staff to photocopy more pages and append them to the end of each packet. “We certainly killed a lot of trees,” Mulhall notes.

Thanks to Laserfiche Agenda Manager, staff have dramatically cut the time, effort and copies required to distribute agendas and prepare minutes. Using Agenda Manager, staff members propose agenda items using a simple Web form. Agenda Manager then automatically routes proposed items, along with accompanying reports or other files, to the appropriate reviewers. Mulhall or one of her staff members can easily add approved items to the final agenda as well as remove or rearrange items to accommodate last-minute changes. Mulhall publishes and distributes the finalized agenda with the touch of a button, then posts it to the city’s Website.

“Our signers love it, and we all thought they’d resist,” Mulhall says. “They’re definitely ‘paper people,’ but not a single one has complained about it. In fact, they all tell us how great the system is.”

Goodyear uses Agenda Manager to manage over ten different types of meetings, so to help staff use it most effectively, the deputy clerk developed a how-to manual and several training classes. “As new people go live, either she or I go to their desk, give them the manual and walk them through preparing their first report,” says Mulhall. “It’s so easy to use that the questions we get are about how we prefer the report to be formatted, not how to use the product.”

The city has also integrated Agenda Manager with Granicus® to create and manage both meeting minutes and audio and video recordings of the proceedings. The video is indexed in real-time by each agenda item. “The public loves it,” Mulhall comments. “In fact, we all love it. If someone misses a meeting, they can watch it, click on an item and immediately access the staff report.

“In fact, it’s hard to tell what’s Agenda Manager and what’s Granicus, they’re so well-integrated,” she adds.

Goodyear now uses Laserfiche in the city clerk’s office, the municipal court, the city manager’s office and the engineering department, which has helped reduce copies of both paper and electronic documents city-wide. There has also been a marked decrease in internal records requests, because city staff can locate their own information. Staff have also managed to stay on top of an increased workload without hiring additional employees.

“We couldn’t do it without Laserfiche or Agenda Manager,” says Mulhall. “There would be no way we’d be able to do everything. Laserfiche has eliminated so much from our workload, it’s incredible.

“The change with Laserfiche is drastic enough that everyone has noticed,” she adds. “It’s a great tool that streamlines our work processes and makes us more productive on a daily basis. Laserfiche is truly something every city can benefit from.”

“We used to print out e-mails to conduct surveillance,” remembers Operations Manager Kelly Buda. “And when you consider we have over 260 representatives and home office staff, that was a lot of paper.”

Buda began investigating document management solutions, and, after a presentation by Laserfiche Solutions Group (LSG) consultant Jeffrey Green, was sold on going paperless. “I’d been pushing the paperless concept for almost four years, because I was the one looking at files and dealing with most of the paper,” Buda says. “Laserfiche looked promising, but it wasn’t until I met Jeffrey at a conference and spoke to him at greater length that we realized it could work for us.

“When Jeffrey came in to do a demo, Laserfiche really sold itself,” he continues. “With the Windows®-like file structure, it was easy to learn—in fact, the ease of use was its best feature. And Jeffrey made it so easy to understand. He really showed us what was possible.”

Green believes that for financial services firms, the benefits of eliminating paper are clear, with a compelling return on investment. “Most firms think digital solutions like this are complex, difficult to implement and prohibitively expensive, but I showed Workman Securities that a digital solution was more affordable than they thought it would be,” he says. “Ultimately, e-mail archival proved to be the most important component for them, so that’s where we started.”

Using Laserfiche’s open architecture and a combination of modules including Workflow™, Audit Trail™ and Quick Fields™, LSG developed an e-mail archival solution that perfectly met Workman Securities’ needs.

When e-mails and attachments are received by the firm’s e-mail server, they’re automatically sent to Laserfiche, converted to searchable TIFF files and indexed in the repository. E-mails with a high ratio of suspect terms, such as “promise,” “sure thing” and “guarantee” are flagged for compliance department review. If needed, Workflow is then able to automatically move these e-mails to a registered principal’s Laserfiche folder and notify them that e-mails are waiting for their review. The reviewer can then open, read and search flagged e-mails.

After the compliance department or a principal reviews the suspicious e-mail, Laserfiche records their approval in a template field. Audit Trail monitors and time-stamps these approvals along with all other repository activities, such as user logins, searches, document views and attempts to print. With this functionality, compliance staff can generate reports that clearly illustrate the identity of the reviewer, what communication they reviewed, the date of the review and whether the review was forwarded on for further examination.

Even with this sophisticated e-mail archival functionality, Workman Securities’ Laserfiche system took less than ninety days to implement. “The increase in our efficiency has been huge,” says Chief Compliance Officer Klaus Siepmann. “Instead of printing a random sample, suspicious e-mails are automatically sent to the compliance department or a supervisor for immediate review.

“In the compliance department, we’re really loving the e-mail system,” he adds.

About a month after Workman Securities implemented the e-mail capture, approval and archival system, SEC auditors arrived on their doorstep. “Thanks to this e-mail solution, the auditors noticed a definite improvement,” Green says.

“In the past, we used to give the auditors a four-foot stack of paper and let them spend a week going through it. But now we can sit an auditor down at a computer, show them the system and generate reports documenting the review process. It’s a lot more efficient for us, and for them,” adds Buda.

After successfully automating e-mail archival, Workman Securities decided to apply the same principles to order processing. Rather than passing copies of order paperwork back and forth, Workman Securities is implementing Laserfiche Workflow to streamline suitability approvals, improve order processing and speed up payment. Once mailroom staff scan new business paperwork into the Laserfiche repository, Workflow automatically routes it to a registered principal for suitability approval, to the operations department for order processing and, finally, to back-office staff for commissioning.

This automated process has already improved efficiency, but to truly maximize its benefits, Workman Securities plans to enable representatives to scan and submit business over the Web, using the Web Access thin client. They may also begin submitting business to clearing firms electronically. “Over ninety percent of our orders are checks and applications, which is why rolling out the solution to the field will be such a benefit,” Buda says. “Because they’ll be able to do their own scanning and access their files online, we think the reps will really like it.”

In fact, Workman Securities is planning on having Green attend their annual compliance meeting to demonstrate the system to the firm’s representatives, something that Buda believes will help their representatives visualize the possibilities of Laserfiche. “We’re a pretty low-tech bunch, generally speaking, but the system is just so easy to use. I’m sure Jeffrey’s demonstration will show our reps how simple it is, and how much it could benefit their practice.”

Buda feels that even though Workman Securities is just beginning to realize the benefits of their Laserfiche system, it’s the right solution for financial services firms like themselves. “I wouldn’t have a problem recommending Laserfiche,” he says. “When we started, we didn’t have an exact idea of what we wanted or what was even possible.

“We’ve just begun to test the limits of our system,” he adds, “but we know it can do so much more.”

Every year, we award Laserfiche users with Run Smarter awards in five categories: government, financial services, healthcare, education and commercial. The only requirement to enter is that you’re using Laserfiche to improve efficiency in your organization!

Run Smarter award winners receive a scholarship and three night accommodations at the Laserfiche Institute Conference, which will take place January 12-14, 2009, at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport. We’ll also write an article about them that will be in the Laserfiche UserNews, and, probably best of all, they’ll get a beautiful, one-of-a-kind congratulatory plaque!

So don’t wait, because the entry deadline is July 31, 2008.

To enter, visit www.laserfiche.com/runsmarter. If you have questions, feel free to contact me at melissa.henley@laserfiche.com.

But success has its price, and for BDI, it came in the form of proliferating paperwork. As an MGA, BDI provides a broad range of insurance products to independent insurance agents. A staff of underwriters supports these agents by quoting and binding both commercial and personal insurance coverage, from simple property policies to highly sophisticated excess and umbrella coverage.

“We had over 7,000 insurance policies that our underwriters constantly needed to access, which meant multiple trips to our file room,” remembers IT/MIS Manager Tate Tooley. “We were constantly dealing with misplaced files, which cut into our ability to provide quality customer service.”

BDI realized that a digital document management system would not only eliminate these lost files, but would also improve customer service by enabling staff to immediately respond to agents’ questions. “We wanted staff to have all documentation at their fingertips,” Tooley says. “We wanted to store auto, property and excess liability documentation in the same place, so underwriters wouldn’t have to request information from another department.”

“Many of our clients had already switched to digital documents and paperless offices, so we were a little out of date with our paper filing system,” Tooley continues. “The key was to fit the new system to our current workflow, with minimum lag time during the integration process.”

After evaluating several systems, BDI chose Laserfiche®. “When we evaluated and ultimately chose Laserfiche, there were two main things about the product that really stood out,” Tooley says. “First, we liked having a local reseller that would assist us with implementation and ongoing support. Second, when our reseller, nCompass Networks, showed us Laserfiche, it was clear that we could take our existing paper workflow and mold Laserfiche around it. The competition gave us the feeling of ‘here is our system and how it works—adjust your workflow to make it fit with ours,’ and that isn’t what we wanted.”

Tooley also appreciated the Laserfiche system’s flexibility. “The Laserfiche software is very user-friendly and intuitive, unlike the other systems we reviewed,” he says. “And from the hardware side, Laserfiche doesn’t require multiple servers to run efficiently. We found Laserfiche runs very nicely on a mid-level server that also handles other processes in our office.”

BDI began their implementation by scanning 350,000 documents into the system, and, using the Quick Fields™ module, dramatically reduced the labor costs that would have been associated with such an ambitious project. Quick Fields automatically created the repository’s folder structure, filed the documents in the appropriate folders and then sent policies to the appropriate underwriters. Without Quick Fields, staff would have had to manually locate each folder after scanning it into Laserfiche. This automation saved 20 minutes per policy, resulting in over $23,000 in saved labor costs.

Since implementing Laserfiche, the firm has cut the amount of time necessary to issue a new policy from 10 days to three. Staff continue using Quick Fields to automate the scanning and sorting of monthly agent statements. Using Zone OCR technology, Quick Fields reads the account number and agent name on the statement and automatically fills in the matching template fields, and then files the statement in the appropriate agent’s folder. Audit Trail™ helps Tooley monitor actions occurring in the Laserfiche repository, tracking where a file was moved to, or if it was placed in the wrong location or improperly named, which he says tremendously minimizes the burden on IT staff.

Because there is only a single staff member supporting the company’s IT infrastructure, Tooley stresses that Laserfiche’s minimal IT support requirements are key. “From an IT perspective, the flexibility of the system’s security is excellent,” he says. “And it’s very easy to administer.”

Currently, BDI stores nearly a million documents in their Laserfiche repository—a total of almost 3.9 million images, ranging from scanned paper documents and electronic documents to photographs and e-mails. The repository has three main folder trees: one for policies, one for quotes and one for daily mail. Tooley uses access rights to give every user their own personal folder, where new policies are dropped for underwriters to review. Managers and supervisors can access each of their employees’ in-boxes to see their workload, which Tooley says makes it much easier to track workflow and the quantity of work completed. “But it’s not just important for supervision,” he says. “If an employee has any question about a file, both the supervisor and the employee can review the file simultaneously, even if they’re in different locations.”

As an MGA, BDI works with both the independent insurance agents who purchase policies for their clients and the insurance companies that provide the policies. By eliminating paper-based processes, Laserfiche helps staff provide both groups with more comprehensive customer service. “Handling documents electronically is much more efficient than handling physical paper,” Tooley says, “and having information right at our fingertips allows us to process quotes and policies much quicker than before.”

In the future, BDI plans to expand Laserfiche to the accounting department, as well as to implement WebLink™ to provide agents with access to documents—such as their monthly statements—through BDI’s Web portal. They’d also like to add the Workflow™ module to further automate their existing procedures. “Many people argue that the largest benefit of document management lies in the efficiency gains provided by workflow technology, and I wouldn’t disagree with that at all,” Tooley says. “Laserfiche has already made our office so much more efficient that I can’t begin to imagine what adding Workflow will do.”

Tooley appreciates the flexibility of Laserfiche’s modular design, which enables him to add functionality when needed—but he also stresses how well the system works, without requiring any additional modification. “At this point, we haven’t integrated any other applications with Laserfiche, and, believe it or not, we haven’t customized it at all,” he says. “We haven’t needed to, because Laserfiche works perfectly straight out of the box.”

“I have recommended Laserfiche to several organizations,” he continues. “When we decided to focus on technology, streamlining our work processes was the logical first step forward. As an IT director, I was relieved to have an easy to use and easy to administer system that improved our work processes without confusing our staff. And that’s something that works for any organization, regardless of industry.”

Imaging Supervisor Marc St. Laurent.

The Kern County Superior Court has a metropolitan division in Bakersfield, CA, and three regional divisions with seven branches. Staff had been microfilming case files for many years, but, according to Imaging Supervisor Marc St. Laurent, this solution was far from ideal. “Microfilm was never a good storage medium,” he explains. “Court cases can be active for many years, so we frequently need to add probation reports or other information to the case file. We had to re-film entire files when we added a single piece of paper, and it was very difficult to find information.”

Staff knew they had to replace this antiquated archiving system, so they began searching for a flexible, cost-effective solution that would meet everyone’s needs. “We knew we needed to make files more accessible for judges, but the technology had to be extremely user-friendly,” St. Laurent says. “Our court clerk also needed to respond to records requests more quickly. In fact, we wanted to make case files immediately available, rather than making customers wait 2-3 days.”

The court chose to implement a Laserfiche^® digital document management solution because it met all these needs. “Our previous clerk was very technology-minded, and he really grabbed the bull by the horns,” St. Laurent remembers. “We didn’t have any technology in the regional courts—in fact, most of our branches were storing files in trailers in the parking lot. So we knew the regional courts were a great place to start rolling out our solution.”

The deployment began with a pilot project in the Lamont regional court, chosen for its smaller size and lower case volume. The court freed up space, improved file accessibility and provided better service, proving that Laserfiche could meet the needs of Kern County’s other courts. Best of all, judges were comfortable with the solution—once they realized that files, in St. Laurent’s words, “were not going to disappear into the ether.”

Fly fishing in the Kern River.

After the successful deployment in Lamont, the court expanded its Laserfiche system county-wide. The enterprise deployment began with court staff scanning closed files. “We began scanning adjudicated case files so they are securely archived,” St. Laurent says. “We’ve gone back six years on felonies and three and a half years on misdemeanors. We’d eventually like to start scanning at the counter, but right now we have such a large backlog of files, we’re just trying to deal with that.”

Staff at each court use Laserfiche to scan case files into the central repository in Bakersfield. The court uses Laserfiche’s flexible file structure to organize its repository by division, and then by year, date and case number. To automate this process, the county’s reseller, DataNet Solutions, designed a custom integration that not only creates the file structure, but also integrates with the state judicial database, the California Justice Information System (CJIS). “This customization is just wonderful,” St. Laurent says. “All our staff have to do is enter the case number, and Laserfiche automatically pulls the name, date of birth and other pertinent information directly from CJIS. Not only does this ensure quality control, it also limits manual data entry, which speeds up filing.” Eventually, the court plans to expand the integration to include CLASS ACT, the state’s civil, family law and probate database.

After files are scanned into the repository, over 300 users county-wide access them using nothing more than their Web browsers—thanks to Laserfiche WebLink™. “WebLink is great, because there’s no software installation required,” St. Laurent says. “Our IT staff find Laserfiche extremely easy to support. We have two staff members managing Laserfiche from the network end, and, because of WebLink, they’re able to handle everything countywide from our Bakersfield location. It’s really a smooth process.”

A view from “The Needles” in the Sequoia National Forest.

And it isn’t just IT staff who appreciate Laserfiche. Court staff find it useful, too—just not in the ways you might expect.

While staff definitely benefit from improved access to information, it’s the security features, like blackout and whiteout redactions, that they really appreciate. “It seems like such a small thing, but to them, it’s extremely important because it’s so useful. They don’t have to take markers to black out witnesses’ names or addresses on arrest reports anymore—there’s been a lot of excitement over that feature,” St. Laurent explains.

Since deploying Laserfiche county-wide four years ago, court staff have eliminated approximately 40,000 files from their records room. Now, instead of calling the records center and waiting for records to be delivered, clerks simply open Laserfiche and retrieve the files they need. When another branch requests felony case files from the Bakersfield office, staff scan the files into Laserfiche, rather than mailing a physical copy. With Laserfiche, authorized staff in any location can instantly retrieve these files—eliminating lost files and saving both time and money.

“Customers probably don’t notice much from the front end, because Laserfiche helps us deal with cases that are already disposed of,” St. Laurent says. “But it has certainly made us more efficient behind the scenes.”

But some customers have noticed the difference. Before Laserfiche, customers seeking files from the regional courts would have to travel to the metro division in Bakersfield. “From the court in Ridgecrest to metro division in Bakersfield is a two and a half hour drive, one-way,” St. Laurent says. “But with Laserfiche, we can help people right at the counter, even if they’re at the wrong building.”

St. Laurent remembers when Laserfiche helped court staff cope with a quintuple murder trial, one of the biggest trials in the county’s history. “About 500 potential jurors were brought in for questioning, and the media wanted access to their questionnaires,” he remembers. “The judge had the idea that, instead of copying hundreds of eight-page jury questionnaires for reporters, we’d scan them into Laserfiche. We created a public folder reporters could access from the media center, which saved our staff a lot of time.

The Kern River valley is a haven for rock climbers.

“The system worked beautifully, and it really exposed the court at large to Laserfiche’s benefits,” he continues. “Because this is a death penalty case, it will automatically be appealed. We’re hoping that the appellate court will let us submit the jury questionnaires on disc.”

Eventually, court staff hope that more county departments will use Laserfiche to enable more efficient information sharing. The sheriff’s department and other law enforcement agencies already have access to restraining orders stored in Laserfiche. Court staff scan the orders into the Laserfiche repository, providing law enforcement officers and 911 dispatchers with immediate access—something that St. Laurent says has definitely increased public safety.

The public defender’s office is also using Laserfiche, and St. Laurent hopes the probation department will be next in line. “This would be very effective. There’s a lot of document flow between our two organizations, and it would be great to have probation reports immediately available to judges at sentencing hearings,” he says.

For the Kern County Superior Court, Laserfiche has proved to be a wise investment, one which St. Laurent would recommend to other courts. “Laserfiche is here to stay as far as our court operations are concerned. You don’t lose files once they’re captured, it’s simple to add information to case files, even years after the fact, and it’s good for customers. It’s a fantastic solution.”

The York County Clerk of Courts Office uses a Laserfiche® digital document management system to manage criminal court records for the York County Court of Common Pleas, whose records are used by 25 other county departments. With over 8,000 cases processed annually and more than $9 million collected in costs, fines and restitution, managing the related documents is a big job.

Senior Project Administrator Mary Jane McCluskey.

Before implementing Laserfiche, York County faced what Information Services Department Senior Project Administrator Mary Jane McCluskey calls a “‘sneakernet’ nightmare,” with paper copies as the only reliable means of circulating information. Searching for documents which could be located on any one of sixteen clerks’ desks was becoming increasingly costly. Not to mention that older documents resided five miles offsite and communicating with the county prison—also located five miles away—relied on easily-misplaced faxes.

“With the prison, people were often quicker than the process,” McCluskey says. “New inmates would be turned away because their paperwork hadn’t arrived and the prison didn’t expect them. Or the family would arrive to pick up a released inmate, and the prison wouldn’t know the case disposition, so they wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

After a successful pilot project to digitize minutes from board meetings, York County began digitizing court files in 2005. The first step was to identify major categories or topics of filings, such as “motion-petition-order” or “disposition-sentencing,” which streamlined file organization in Laserfiche. “My staff put their institutional knowledge to work and developed 17 criteria, or file chapters, from the myriad filings we receive daily,” says Clerk of Courts Don O’Shell. “Wendy Bossard, our judicial services manager, and Kathy Groff, our records unit manager, deserve tremendous credit for developing the basic building blocks of our electronic file structure in Laserfiche.”

In 2006, the office began scanning all incoming filings, with the goal of imaging all filings within four hours, or by the next business day for documents received after 3:00 P.M. Staff established a rush process, whereby documents requiring more rapid processing are rushed directly to imaging, docketed and forwarded to a judge, serviced to the sheriff or district attorney, or sent along to defense counsel.

On the recommendation of their reseller, DocuScan USA, the county also set up a system to simplify scanning and filing. They implemented Quick Fields™ with Pattern Matching and Real Time Lookup™, which pulls the case number from the state database and creates a folder structure. Quick Fields also automatically sorts and files case documents, which minimizes staff training. “All we have to do is create batch header sheets with bar codes, and Quick Fields does the rest,” says Front Counter Supervisor Garth Bambling. “It takes seconds for front counter clerks to create batch header sheets, which are attached to the documents and then sent back for scanning.”

The Gates and Plough Complex reflects private and public life in Colonial York.

County-wide access to the Laserfiche repository means that other departments can view scanned documents as they need them, eliminating the need to copy documents multiple times and significantly reducing file requests—making the court and related departments much more efficient. This reduces the need for overtime and promotes better relations among departments, given that staff in other parts of county government can instantly access case files maintained in the clerk’s office. The prison records office also has access to case dispositions and court documents in a searchable format, which eliminates the problem of misplaced documents, as well as the need to physically fax or transport paper records.

The office’s Laserfiche repository stores everything from criminal and juvenile records to miscellaneous docket files, summary appeals and administration files. By early 2006, all files had been imaged from the front end, and, in summer 2006, staff began the back-scanning process. “We had four million documents from 2000 on alone,” McCluskey says, “and we needed to be able to give the judges, probation staff, district attorneys and public defenders access to those documents.”

But not everyone immediately saw value in digitizing case files. “Certain members of the court expressed their preference that imaging take a back seat to the docketing and servicing of court filings, and said that imaging should be accomplished on the back end, instead of on the front end,” O’Shell remembers. “Some even went as far as to cite potential contempt of court proceedings if imaging wasn’t relegated to solely an archival process.”

Yet once the 2006 and 2007 files were digitized, judges began asking for even more documents online. “They found that it made research easy,” McCluskey says, “and they liked being able to immediately respond to questions from attorneys, probation officers and the public.”

To help judges and staff further embrace the new system, McCluskey and her colleagues started a hands-on training program to train staff during the judges’ lunch hour. “This is an ongoing project,” McCluskey says. “We’re training other departments as well. When we first implemented the system, we gave users access to it before we’d trained them, and some users became slightly frustrated because they didn’t realize everything the system could do. We definitely learned from that.”

The Snyder’s of Hanover bakery tour is a favorite in the “Factory Tour Capital of the World.”

And that wasn’t the only thing McCluskey learned. “With a big project like this, it’s important to think in terms of years, not months,” she says. “Just realize that success builds upon success—just focus on getting one thing accomplished, then move on to the next thing. Work in small steps, and before you know it, you’re done.”

The York County program doesn’t just provide faster access to case files, it also helps to ensure business continuity. McCluskey chairs an initiative to develop a countywide continuity of operations plan, of which Laserfiche is a key component. “This is a three-year project that moves far beyond disaster recovery,” she says. “We focus not just on technology, but also people, process and location to identify vulnerability. With departments that only have paper files, like our public defender or our mental health department, what happens if they can’t get back into their building for months? What happens if the files are gone entirely?”

In fall 2007, York County implemented a pilot program to give attorneys access to case files over the Web, and hopes to extend the system even further. The county also plans to implement Laserfiche in both the central booking division of the sheriff’s department and in the children and youth services department, where cases are often open for more than 20 years. The benefits have been so great that the clerk’s office would like to receive superior and supreme court appeals electronically, and they’d like to install touch screens in the courtroom so clerks can enter information and send it to Laserfiche even more quickly.

The progress the county courts have made is impressive. “To us, the biggest change is that the judges who refused to give up paper—the same ones who were threatening us with contempt of court charges if we couldn’t give them immediate access to case files—are now the system’s biggest advocates,” O’Shell says. “We even had one judge tell us the system was ‘better than sliced bread.’ ”

The SurgiCenter performed its first procedure on May 22, 1989, and hasn’t stopped since. “We have 100 doctors and 35 staff members working together to provide superior patient care, with over 20 procedures performed on an average day,” says Jeffery Johnson, systems information specialist. “That creates a lot of information to manage.”

Relying on paper patient charts, however, was limiting staff’s ability to efficiently share that information. “Too many people needed records simultaneously, including clinical staff, the billing department, auditors and the medical records technician, who needed to file reports that came in days later,” Johnson says. “Staff didn’t take the process seriously, and there were constant filing errors.

“Around 30 charts per month were checked out just for auditing by anesthesia and nursing staff,” he continues. “If the charts were unavailable or incomplete, the billing department couldn’t do their work. And to make matters worse, we were more successful than expected—over a five year period, our case load grew from 5,300 to 8,600.”

Too much success is a nice problem to have, but the SurgiCenter faced its biggest challenge in managing paper patient records. The cost of storing records was rapidly increasing, and keeping up with records retention requirements was a burden. “Offsite storage was 5 miles away, so we were paying to store the records and wasting man-hours to retrieve them,” Johnson remembers. “Even before HIPAA passed, we knew we couldn’t maintain records integrity and patient confidentiality with paper records. We knew something had to be done.”

Staff initially considered implementing an electronic medical record (EMR) system, but rejected the idea because commercial systems didn’t meet the SurgiCenter’s needs. “As a surgery center, we typically only see a patient two or three times, so we didn’t need the functionality of a traditional EMR—not to mention the expense,” Johnson says. “We knew we needed to move to electronic record keeping, however, so digital document management seemed to be an ideal solution. We could eliminate paper, secure our records and easily locate information, which was just what we needed.”

When Johnson took over the medical records department in 1996, he agreed to manage HIPAA compliance only if he could deploy a digital document management system. “We experimented with another product that didn’t scan efficiently, wasn’t user-friendly and had poor retrieval capability,” he explains. “The clincher came when the manufacturer phased out the application, and they wanted us to purchase their replacement product. That’s when I began researching other document management applications and found Laserfiche®.

“We selected Laserfiche because we needed a solution employees would learn quickly,” Johnson continues. “We liked the quality of the scanned images, and the processing speed was superior. We also liked that we could run audit reports for accountability. Laserfiche had everything we needed.”

Implementation went quickly, with the repository going live after only one month of testing. “We initially scanned in three years’ worth of records,” Johnson says. “In phase two, we scanned another four years’ worth of records—about 31,000 medical records in all.”

Currently, the SurgiCenter uses Laserfiche to streamline workflow throughout the life cycle of patient records. When a patient pre-registers, staff create a paper chart that includes a bar-coded face sheet. After the patient’s procedure, they scan the chart into Laserfiche, using Quick Fields™ and Bar-Code Recognition™ to automatically create the digital patient record and populate each document’s template fields, simplifying indexing and chart retrieval.

The SurgiCenter’s billing department also uses Laserfiche to manage explanation of benefits (EOB) forms. Quick Fields automatically fills in the payor and date for each EOB in the associated template, which aids in tracking and retrieval. “Laserfiche has brought greater efficiencies in all departments, but especially in Billing,” Johnson says. “We’ve seen much faster claims processing and collections.”

Perhaps most importantly, Laserfiche helps the Center remain compliant with HIPAA regulations. “With Laserfiche, we can log in requests for records, track due dates and redact sensitive information, fulfilling release of information requirements. We also use the Audit Trail™ module to safeguard patient privacy,” Johnson explains. “Our administrator serves on a national HIPAA compliance panel, and she frequently invites confused hospital administrators to see how Laserfiche helps us meet these challenges.”

The Center also must remain compliant with Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAHC) regulations. The AAHC conducts on-site evaluations every three years, and audited the SurgiCenter just a few months ago. “We passed with flying colors,” Johnson reports. “In a typical audit, they request random charts, but on this last audit, they got very specific, requesting two charts of patients who were also Wards of the State. This isn’t information we track, so it would normally be very difficult to find.

“Thanks to Laserfiche’s full-text search capabilities, we located these charts very quickly,” he continues. “The auditors also requested charts of cancer patients, which we found just as quickly. Needless to say, they were duly impressed.”

Laserfiche also helps the SurgiCenter easily complete state-mandated quarterly pathology reports of cancer quantities, broken out by type. “As you can imagine, this data was quite difficult to flag and track with paper, but with Laserfiche, the staff person simply searches on the specific cancer—like melanoma or carcinoma—for the relevant time period, and the results are right there almost instantly,” Johnson says.

The best thing about Laserfiche, according to Johnson, is that the Center can manage patient records with fewer staff members. “Before Laserfiche, we had separate departments for surgical scheduling, patient registration and medical records. We’ve merged the three departments and eliminated the medical records clerk position,” he says. “We originally had three scanning clerks, and when one left, not only did we not have to replace her, but the remaining two were able to take on scheduling and records management duties. We’re now down to a single full-time scanner.”

But Laserfiche has delivered more than easier compliance, faster reporting and staffing efficiencies. “We’ve had a lot of benefits that we didn’t expect,” Johnson says. “We used to have constant friction among departments who needed the same records or who were looking for missing records, but with Laserfiche, everyone who needs a chart can always find it. It’s dramatically improved the working relationship between departments.”

Johnson doesn’t hesitate in recommending Laserfiche to other ambulatory surgery centers. “In practical terms, we’ve reduced costs, improved collections and established peace of mind when it comes to record keeping,” Johnson says. “You can’t go wrong with Laserfiche.”

Processing the thousands of paper documents associated with these accounts, however, was limiting MDS’s productivity. “We needed a system to provide three key features: security, accessibility and accountability,” says Solutions Architect Matt Brown. “We also wanted to cut down on paper-related costs. We spent the better part of a decade looking for a system that could accomplish all these goals.”

MDS first experimented with a Web-based product in an attempt to eliminate paper documents and streamline work processes. “It did a very good job of storing and retrieving documents, but that was about the extent of its usefulness,” Brown says. “It proved difficult to administer. So we then built a second system ourselves, using Microsoft® SharePoint® as the foundation.”

This second solution provided a clear demonstration of the benefits of an enterprise-quality system. “We could see the possibilities, such as ease of retrieval, improved business intelligence and the efficiencies of automating work processes,” Brown explains. “However, SharePoint isn’t a document management system, so we were asking it to do something it wasn’t designed to handle.”

This experiment, however, helped staff envision an ideal solution. “Our immediate goal was to store billing records electronically, but our eventual goal was and still is a completely paperless workflow,” Brown says. “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, but we also needed a solution that was cost-effective and scalable.”

Laserfiche® fulfilled all these requirements—and more. Thanks to its open architecture, Laserfiche can serve as the document management back-end for many line-of-business applications, including Med/FM™, the application MDS uses to manage billing and claims processing. With help from their Laserfiche reseller, JPI Data Resource, MDS integrated the two systems so that staff can instantly access Laserfiche documents from within Med/FM. “That was the system’s number one selling point,” Brown notes.

After MDS selected Laserfiche, things moved quickly. “Installation was completed in less than a day, and training took less than a week,” Brown remembers. “We were able to initiate a completely paperless workflow for one of our clients by the week’s end. Then we started bringing our other clients online.”

MDS has two Laserfiche servers, one in each of their two divisional offices. Over 30 users in those locations—and in smaller offices throughout California—use the system daily to process billing documents submitted in both paper and electronic formats.

Some clients still send MDS paper billing documents, which must be processed manually. Staff scan those documents, separated by bar-coded index sheets, into Laserfiche. The Quick Fields™ Bar Code Plug-In™ reads the bar codes and automatically indexes the scanned files. “We simply attach the cover sheet to its corresponding billing record and Quick Fields does the rest,” Brown says. “Quick Fields fills in all the necessary document metadata—such as the patient’s name and identifying information—that is stored in the bar codes.”

When clients submit electronic documents, staff use the client’s daily log to create empty documents in the Laserfiche repository that serve as place holders for corresponding billing documents. Staff then use Snapshot™ to convert the electronic information into unalterable TIFF files and import them into Laserfiche, where they are matched up with the empty documents created earlier.

To further automate work processes, Workflow™ routes documents among the various departments that create the billable record and generate the final claim. If any information is missing, Workflow automatically routes the record to the appropriate department for further follow-up.

While Laserfiche speeds up the entire collections process, it has specifically streamlined the process for submitting claims that require supporting documentation. “Before Laserfiche, there was a delay of several days, given that a staff member would have to physically locate the billing record, pull it and copy it,” Brown says. “Now, we can send claims out the same day. Employees simply pull the account up in Med/FM and press a function key, which automatically generates a search in Laserfiche for the patient’s billing record.

“These efficiencies have enabled us to shift job priorities from one department to another—or eliminate tasks altogether,” Brown continues. “Before, we needed a rather large staff just to manage all the paper. Our medical records department has been completely transformed. Now, they simply handle scanning and document printing for claims attachment.”

In addition, Laserfiche has given MDS greater oversight of business processes. “We use Microsoft SQL Server™ Reporting Services to query the Laserfiche database, which provides us with a wealth of real-time data we didn’t previously have access to,” Brown says. “This data gives us greater awareness of our business processes, which helps improve decision-making.”

MDS’s clients benefit from this improved reporting as well. “The medical director at one of our client sites requests a monthly time study showing how many patients their physicians see each hour,” Brown says. “Before Laserfiche, this was a laborious process that required manually entering statistics into a spreadsheet. Now, we use Laserfiche to pull this information directly from the ER log and store it in the document template fields. Our reporting server queries this information and automatically generates and sends the report—with no user interaction required.”

In the future, MDS plans to completely eliminate paper from their billing processes. “We’re in the beginning stages of adding additional automation and integration with our billing management system that will eliminate manual demographic and charge entry. We also plan to implement a paperless workflow in our payment processing department,” Brown says. “We are constantly looking for new ways to extend our Laserfiche system with integration and customization—so we definitely appreciate the ability to purchase components separately and add new ones over time.”

Customizing MDS’s Laserfiche system comes easy to Brown, who values the flexibility of Laserfiche’s open architecture. “As a programmer, I appreciate the expansive features of the Integrator’s Toolkit™,” he says. “With the Toolkit, you can create additional functionality with just a little effort. I also enjoy interacting directly with Laserfiche Developers through the Laserfiche Institute Conference, the Support Site and the forums.”

Brown doesn’t hesitate in recommending Laserfiche to his peers. “I would unequivocally recommend it,” he says. “After years of evaluating just about every document management system there is—and there are a lot—none of them comes close to matching the breadth of features Laserfiche provides.

“Along with our medical billing system, Laserfiche is one of our core applications,” he continues. “We would be hard-pressed to function without it. Employees benefit from rapid access to the information they need to do their jobs, and management benefits from the peace of mind of knowing the documents that are integral to our operation are safe and secure. It’s a win all around.”

For prosecuting attorneys, cases revolve around overstuffed paper file folders, and the Eaton County prosecutor’s office was spending a large amount of time shuffling paper. “We spent up to 50 percent of our time in the office working with the case file folder—and we weren’t using the time, we were wasting it,” says Jeffrey L. Sauter, the county’s prosecuting attorney.

The process of digitizing paper files began in October 2003, when Dr. Robert Sobie, Eaton County’s information services director, suggested that Sauter’s office digitally archive closed files and scan active files. Sauter had one simple question: “Do you think you can eliminate all this paper?”

A resounding “yes” came in the form of a Laserfiche® digital document management solution. With a simple integration, case files scanned and stored in Laserfiche link to the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan’s Adult Case Tracking System (ACTS) and Juvenile Case Tracking System (JCTS), the case management systems (CMS) used by 78 of the 83 prosecutors in Michigan. While that system was great for managing schedules, attorneys still relied on paper progress notes and case documents. Now, from within the CMS, attorneys or staff simply click a button to create case notes that are automatically filed in Laserfiche for easy retrieval.

Reducing paper consumption was a big plus, but the biggest efficiency gains happened when the prosecutor’s office began scanning in current files. In January 2004, they began transitioning between paper and electronic files, and a year later, the office stopped creating paper misdemeanor files entirely.

“We went slowly,” Sauter remembers, “but once we realized the sky hadn’t fallen, we stopped making paper felony files. These are more serious cases, and eliminating paper files entirely made some of our attorneys nervous. But within a month, we noticed how much more efficient we were.”

Eaton County structured their Laserfiche filing system around the criminal transaction number, which the CMS automatically generates. “We have ‘frequent fliers,’ habitual criminals with multiple case files, so it was no use to search by name,” Sauter says. Once the CMS creates the case file, the assigned attorney then reviews it, highlighting the authorization or denial of the charges in Laserfiche. Laserfiche’s sticky note annotation feature enables attorneys to provide detailed analysis and charging instructions directly on the documents.

The police department and defense attorneys have started submitting police reports, pre-trial motions and other documents electronically, eliminating scanning and shredding. “90 percent of our police reports are sent electronically, with photos and videos sent on disk,” Sauter says. “We use Snapshot™ to send them to our repository. Defense attorneys submit their documents to our department e-mail address, and we e-mail documents to them as well. The defense attorneys like it so much—because the court sends documents via US mail, they often have our discovery documents days before they even know they’ve been assigned the case.”

After implementing Laserfiche, the prosecutor’s office withdrew their request for an additional legal secretary, only one month after beginning to scan felony files. In addition, they saved more than $10,000 in clerical staffing costs and decreased office supply usage by nearly 35 percent. “These additional savings are annual, not one-time savings,” Sauter comments. “In fact, I expect my supplies budget to decrease even more next year.”

While their Laserfiche system worked well, Sauter wanted to extend its benefits outside the prosecutor’s office. “The interface was great,” he said, “but our attorneys needed files in court. I talked to Dr. Sobie, and we switched our attorneys from desktop computers to laptops, and we also extended a county wireless network into courtrooms and conference rooms.”

With wireless access from the courtroom, attorneys who are in court can also e-mail their colleagues back in the office with questions pertaining to case law. “We get a lot of S.O.S. e-mails from the courtroom, of the ‘Help, the judge is about to rule against me’ type,” Sauter comments.

Eaton County uses Laserfiche to store audio of all 911 calls, so attorneys can access them instantly from within the CMS. Having evidence at the ready makes pretrial conferences faster and easier, because prosecutors can present their evidence, convincing defense attorneys and defendants of the wisdom of a plea bargain. “Honestly, it provides many quick resolutions to cases that likely would have gone to trial instead—which is a huge advantage for taxpayers,” Sauter says.

Laserfiche also makes managing electronic evidence and complying with e-discovery orders much easier. “We can instantly search documents to find information in witness statements, which makes it easier to impeach those witnesses on the stand,” Sauter says. “The text is right there, and with the ‘hit list’ showing bolded lines of context, it’s quick to find information, which we can save to use during the trial.”

And that’s not to mention the benefit of having photographs and other evidence at the ready when the witness is on the stand. Sauter recalls using Laserfiche for the first time during a double murder trial. “Because it was the first big case without the paper file, I wanted to take it to set an example for the other prosecutors in the office,” he remembers.

With diagrams and crime scene photos stored in Laserfiche, Sauter explained the sequence of events to the jury. “This proved very effective,” he says. “I used the Laserfiche digital zoom feature to focus on specific areas of the crime scene photos. The jury found that very impressive.”

In the future, Eaton County plans to use Laserfiche Workflow 8™ to further automate case workflow. The new system will automatically notify attorneys of cases by e-mail, as well as automatically notify police when charges are filed.

Sauter and his team are so committed to educating prosecutors about the benefit of a paperless office that their Website provides an extensive review of their file management system, as well as training videos prepared by office staff. Sauter also speaks at industry conferences about Eaton County’s successes with Laserfiche.

“Paperless file management is not an ‘if,’ it’s a ‘when,’” Sauter says. “Our change has led to a revolutionary improvement in how we do the people’s business, and it’s a harbinger of the future for many other prosecutors’ offices.”