A committee was promptly formed to review content management solutions. Ralph Stephens, Executive Director of Strategic Sourcing & General Services at TAMUK, knew that some of TAMUK’s sister schools had turned to Laserfiche with similar content management challenges.

In fact, nearly 1,200 staff in 10 different departments and divisions within The Texas A&M University System’s members were already benefitting from Laserfiche, including:

• Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi, to comply with records management retention schedules, improve document security and decrease the cost of handling paper.
• Texas A&M Health Sciences Center, to digitize all internal documents, reduce overnight shipping, eliminate office storage and improve document access and security.
• Texas A&M’s Department of Entomology, to securely store digitized documents, automate business processes and eliminate the need for file cabinets.

Stephens spoke with colleagues about the benefits of using Laserfiche and learned that Texas A&M AgriLife had also recently implemented Laserfiche to eliminate the need to print records and to automate document matching across 86 locations. The TAMUK committee contacted Laserfiche reseller SMARTfiles, which had worked with several TAMUS accounts, and arranged several demos to see how Laserfiche could fit their needs.

“So many records and copies were being created that security became an issue, especially for upper administration,” explains Vicki Bienski of SMARTfiles. “Sensitive information such as social security numbers and travel vouchers were being manually transported between offices.” Implementing Laserfiche would allow multiple departments to access and share information from a single, secured repository, rectifying confidentiality issues surrounding certain records while also allowing multiple departments to instantly access the information they needed.

The committee decided that Laserfiche was the right choice for TAMUK, with users across the board agreeing that the system was not only user-friendly, but also scalable enough to grow as needs changed. “Although we needed Laserfiche to solve our document storage issues, its breadth of capabilities also played a large part in our selection process,” explains Stephens.

Updating by Automating

Implementation began late that June and by the end of the summer, 15 employees in six departments were using the system, paving the way for campus-wide deployment that fall. Initially, the school chose administrative offices to serve as beta sites for developing procedures, testing processes and eventually training other departments to use the system. The beta sites included:

• Accounting.
• Accounts Payable.
• Budgets.
• Human Resources.
• Physical Plant.
• Procurement.

Once the beta sites proved successful, campus-wide deployment began. A significant part of this expanded deployment was to change the scope of Laserfiche use from archival storage to day-forward capture of active business documents, the idea being to input, organize and access old and new files across multiple departments, all from Laserfiche. “We liked that Laserfiche could be a repository for any document—image files, Word documents, PDFs, e-mails— not only scanned images,” Stephens says.

To automate such a high volume of document capture and processing, TAMUK turned to Laserfiche Quick Fields, which pulls data from incoming electronic documents, to automatically create, sort and file records in the Laserfiche repository. Managing certain business documents like purchase orders or payment vouchers, however, required a more elaborate solution.

Utilizing FabSoft Integration to Optimize Functionality

While Quick Fields could easily scan documents and file them appropriately from the university’s legacy system, those records were then sent to the University College Station remote mainframe, where information is electronically housed, before they were sent back to TAMUK and printed—up to a staggering 4,000 pages of vouchers and purchase orders a day. In order to eliminate both the need to print such a large volume of paper, as well as to eliminate the extra steps it took to input this paperwork and deliver it to the departments requesting it, TAMUK worked with Laserfiche engineers to integrate FabSoft with Quick Fields to create detailed electronic forms unique to the information at hand.

FabSoft places the print data from the mainframe system onto a new form, and that key information is extracted by Quick Fields, then organized and stored in the Laserfiche repository. From there, TAMUK departments selectively print only the purchase orders or vouchers they need, bypassing the remote mainframe. Response time to inquiries—both internal and external—has been greatly reduced. Multiple departments are able to access information simultaneously.

“We can quickly look up images of the purchase order or payment voucher and provide either copies or specific data elements in seconds rather than hours,” says Tina Livingston, Director of Budgets. “Previously, we had to go to file cabinets (sometimes in different offices), pull folders and make copies. Now, we look them up in Laserfiche and e-mail them to the customer.”

With such a successful integration of systems, Stephens says, “Several of the other A&M schools have expressed interested in following suit and implementing their own Laserfiche-FabSoft integration.”

Enterprise-Wide Results

Today, 200 users have access to Laserfiche, with approximately 45 users accessing the system on a daily basis—which is only 25% of TAMUK’s projected use. While TAMUK is saving on paper, labor, mailing and storage costs, the real benefit of using Laserfiche, Stephens says, has been in changing the mindset of TAMUK’s staff and administrators, inspiring the adoption of new ways of working.

“Laserfiche can do so much more than we first envisioned,” he says. “We’ve been able to expand it from a simple storage repository to a system that controls the workflow of our documents and maximizes efficiency.”

Though Laserfiche is now primarily used within Administrative Services and offices within departments, Stephens says that collaborative content management is the next phase—and TAMUK is looking to Laserfiche Workflow to drive it. “Workflow is going to be the real tool for efficiently managing documents between departments. It’s going to deliver huge benefits,” Stephens says. He predicts that TAMUK will see exponential growth in process change.

As for his take on the Laserfiche Run Smarter® Philosophy, Stephens offers this advice to new users: “For TAMUK, Laserfiche has been a business-process change agent—it showed us solutions to problems we hadn’t even considered before. Think of Laserfiche as an initiative, not just an application.”

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.”

Dennis Raulie, Manager of Administrative Computing Technology Services, recognized that the university had outgrown its existing document management system. He realized that what staff really needed was an enterprise content management solution that would comply with the university’s records management retention schedules, better secure documents and decrease the cost of handling paper.

Raulie saw a demo by Laserfiche reseller SMARTfiles and was impressed. “Other document management systems didn’t fulfill our needs very well, while others just seemed rudimentary,” he recalls.

Raulie also listened to what his users had to say about Laserfiche. “They liked the simplicity and speed. They also liked the ease of use and how powerful it was in being able to find information. Laserfiche was also much more intuitive than what they were used to,” he remembers.

With his users’ approval and confidence in Laserfiche’s robust functionality, TAMU-CC chose Laserfiche. Says Raulie, “With Laserfiche’s direct, accomplished and ingenious approach, we knew we’d be able to provide state-of-the-art service to our client base.”

After reviewing the areas that could be most improved in the shortest amount of time, Raulie focused first on development of a system to streamline the University’s BPP/FAMIS report distribution – a process that generates a lot of information, and, in some cases, a lot of unnecessary paper. “The BPP/FAMIS feeds are mainframe listings that consist of several small ‘reportlets’ that are bundled into one file,” explains Programmer III Michael Williamson. These reportlets, Raulie adds, contain information that must be stored in Laserfiche as well as several pages of less useful information, such as security listings that are in some cases blank. “Some of these reports need to be seen, but don’t need to be kept,” he adds. “However, to the printer, it’s all the same. All the reports would be printed when they came in – sometimes as many as 60 data forms a day.”

Often these reports were thousands of pages long, requiring a ream or two of paper a day to print. This system, Raulie says, didn’t just consume time, it also consumed money. “The paper-driven report distribution system is very expensive when you add up the costs of printers, fax machines, paper, toner, storage for these supplies and storage for printed archived reports,” he says. “These paper reports often are copied and saved by individuals along the paper trail, which duplicates the expenses, too. So we knew if we could move duplicating the existing paper-driven report system into a digital form that would reap huge benefits.”

To filter the important information from the non-essential information, Raulie, Williamson, and Systems Support Specialist I Bobby Martinez took inspiration from Rube Goldberg’s legacy of creating seemingly complex machines to achieve simple tasks. They created their own “Report Upload Bifurcation Engine” (R.U.B.E.), which processes continuous BFF/FAMIS report files, and splits them into individual reportlets as it does so. R.U.B.E. then distributes the resulting reports and data into a virtual staging area where Quick Fields reads the data, Zone OCRs the documents and distributes the information into the proper folders within Laserfiche.

This is significant, notes Raulie, because R.U.B.E filters out the information that only needs to be seen but not stored. R.U.B.E. recognizes what data needs to be kept according to records retention demands and sends them to Laserfiche, then sends the rest to Windows Share. The information is still available for viewing, but the reports do not need to be printed, thus saving more paper.

After R.U.B.E.’s initial success, Williamson turned to converting TAMU-CC’s legacy imaging data from its legacy document management database into Laserfiche through the “Legacy Image Translation Engine” – the L.I.T.E. R.U.B.E., naturally. Williamson wrote a custom process that accessed the University’s outdated document management system and pulled the stored data and metadata, processing it through Import Agent and sending it into the corresponding folders in Laserfiche. “The old system was flat, with lots of template fields,” Williamson explains. “It was not always useful and many end users did not know why these fields were being used.” The actual process of converting all the old information into Laserfiche allowed Raulie and his team to collaborate with end users to reevaluate what fields were needed, determine which fields were most useful, and eventually add those to Laserfiche templates. In fact, Raulie says, this conversion process occasioned the same kind of useful re-evaluation and determination of template fields with each of the University’s business units and their respective document types.

Change, of course, can be hard, no matter what kind of progress it promises. Raulie offers this advice deploying Laserfiche: aim for small victories at first to win internal champions to inspire organic adoption – not just demand it. Raulie targeted TAMU-CC’s Accounting Department, where hundreds of data forms a day were printed, scanned and manually indexed by student workers, as a process ripe for improvement. Before Laserfiche, Raulie notes, it was considered acceptable to be a month behind in the filing because there was so much that needed to be done. Since implementing Laserfiche and R.U.B.E., Raulie says, reportlets can be separated, converted, uploaded and placed into Laserfiche within minutes. Not surprisingly, Accounting is no longer a month behind in their filing – instead, they’re now working in real time. Even better, the department is now one of Laserfiche’s biggest champions. “Get people like that comfortably productive and enthusiastic,” advises Raulie. “They talk about the success and the word spreads.”

Adds Williamson, “When they see the light at the end of the tunnel, and they see their associates’ success and what they can do, that speaks volumes.”

Raulie also advises creating a test environment where users learning Laserfiche can experience the software at their own pace. “Build a ‘sandbox’ repository for users to play in and let them learn the controls,” he says. “You can’t learn to ride a bike unless you get on it, right?” Raulie also suggests obtaining administrative buy-in with regular progress updates. Soliciting department and unit managers for their input is also invaluable, he says, to increase group ownership of the project. “These are the team members who ‘know the flow.’ Their input is crucial.” Updating administrators with reports of the success and progress of the implementation is also a key component. “It’s not bragging if it’s true,” says Raulie. “After a while, it begins to take on a life of its own, and individuals talk about the ease of use and time savings.” Lastly, Raulie advises developing a strong working relationship with your reseller like the university did with SMARTfiles. “SMARTfiles offers training videos and other training materials that we make available to our users,” says Raulie. “Offer continuous training opportunities for your clients. If you think the price of training is too high, consider the price of ignorance.”

For other IT Developers interested in creating their own R.U.B.E. using the Laserfiche Software Developer’s Kit (SDK), Raulie says that with prior knowledge of Visual Basic, developers shouldn’t have any problems at all. “In the hands of someone who knows VB, it should be a snap,” he says. Williamson adds that it is easy to write code that formats legacy imaging data into the components required to drive Import Agent, so it can then distribute converted data into the appropriate folder.

TAMU-CC’s future plans include automating and streamlining business process management using Workflow, with Bobby Martinez acting as project manager. It will bring its challenges and its success, but perhaps most importantly, it will continue to make their end users happy users – like Payroll Manager Melissa Wright. When asked to sum up her success using Laserfiche, Wright simply replied, “Laserfiche is easy to use. I LOVE LASERFICHE!”

Not that she wants to reinvent the wheel. “The Medical School has been collecting student and resident records for many years,” she says, “and has developed a workable filing method. Rather than change something that works well for them, I created the Laserfiche system to follow their method.”

The structure mirrors the filing hierarchy and classification codes that were already in place, so that staff can easily find information.

“At first employees were resistant to change,” says Baccardax, “and could not see the value of having scanned documents. But when they realized the Laserfiche serves as a backup should documents be destroyed, they no longer worried about losing paper documents. Once employees saw how easy Laserfiche was to use and that it could be tailored to reflect their workable filing system, the word spread to other employees. Now new departments are taking interest in getting their documents scanned.”

Baccardax has paid attention to developing best practices as well, right down to scanning methods. She experimented with different colored paper and ink to clearly demonstrate the difference in clarity to users and help them develop good scanning techniques. She also determined what would be sacrificed in speed and storage space when scanning in color. The school found that black-and-white scanning was clearer and faster and, because the school pays for nightly backup and color files take up more disk space, much more cost-effective.

Laserfiche gives staff speedy access to records, which comes in handy when, for example, an MD applies for a job in a hospital setting and the school needs to verify her records. “Before we used Laserfiche it could take a lot of time to fill verification requests,” Baccardax recalls. We would have to find the material in the file folder or retrieve it from off-site storage. With Laserfiche, the employee can quickly find the student or resident records to fill the hospital’s request. We scan the verification information so it can be used again for future requests.”

Using Laserfiche has helped the school clarify just which information is vital and who is responsible for it. “As a result,” notes Baccardax, “the departments were able to clear a great number of paper documents, which made their filing much more manageable and freed up a lot of storage space.

“For new employees,” she continues, “it clarified the role each employee had with respect to information gathering. It also opened the communication lines among departments sharing information by addressing the grey areas concerning who is responsible for what information. It elucidates where the information stopped and started between departments. And employees became more aware of the amount of information that an organization actually obtains during the course of the day.”

The school also takes inventory of its records to see which ones are crucial. Baccardax notes, “After careful review with record inventory, we realized that a small percentage of information is actually vital. While record inventory may seem like a time consuming task, it is actually a time saver because it reduces the need to scan redundant information.”

Laserfiche was particularly useful for the school when the provisions of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection of Privacy Act. (FOIPOP) was extended to universities in Nova Scotia. Says Baccardax, “Certain types of information could not be shared unless approved by an authorized person. Laserfiche enables you to set the access rights so that information is available only to authorized staff. In addition, the Laserfiche redaction option serves as a useful tool to black out any information that cannot be shared with unauthorized personnel.”

Baccardax notes the ease with which she compiles the information she needs. She has set up a search function, for example, to help her record the number of pages the school has scanned in for the month. She can import it into an Excel spreadsheet and run reports to calculate the numbers.

Future plans include moving to a Web-based system, to get each department scanning in its own records and easing the workload on current scanning staff. “First, we must have the policies and procedures in place for each department. Upon departmental approval, the plan is to select and train an employee who can act as custodian of the departmental information. Once training is completed, our next phase will be to have each department to scan its own documents. Our scanner will then have more time to complete archival records and rush jobs.”

When asked what tips she’d give to other universities, Baccardax replies, “Educate, educate, educate. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of educating the employee about how to make the best use of paper and electronic documents, so they can achieve good quality images in a timely matter. Removal of staples, paper clips, tapes, consciousness of types of color pens and markers being used, color or photo copy papers—all play a role in the quality and speed of scanning.

“Get approval and commitment from higher level before proceeding with records management,” she adds. “Upon approval, create a Records Management Committee to include one person from each of the appointed departments, an archivist, and a lawyer. Each will offer insights that will enhance the Laserfiche system.”

Important documentation was often, as Desiree Brown, Faculty Services Coordinator, puts it, “floating out there.” Factor in the potential for breach of confidentiality for sensitive and confidential faculty personnel files, and it was clear that a new solution was in order.

The need for greater speed and efficiency became more pronounced when Provost Marty Levine starting making increasingly specialized queries of faculty records that emphasized the need for more data-driven accessibility. “He’d want to see, say for instance, what female faculty members had been promoted in the last five years,” Haugland explains.

Laserfiche was chosen both for its ease-of-use, but also its ease of customization, which was essential to an office working with 17 different schools campus-wide. Initially, adoption was sluggish until a former Dean of the Engineering School became the high-level administrator, which underscored the need to have buy-in from the top down. “We were very fortunate in terms of having management on the project that was very IT-friendly,” says Haugland.

Brown notes that the Provost’s Office was a perfect pilot office for Laserfiche implementation owing to the fact that her office had already been scanning all incoming mail for a year before installing Laserfiche. “We had a cultural acceptance in our office—no one was afraid of going electronic,” she says.

For her part, Brown kept initial implementation manageable and recognizable, beginning with just one school’s set of records, and “looking at them like they were in a file cabinet only on my desk.”

Owing to the volume of files their office was required to keep as the university’s custodian of faculty records, Brown already had a working knowledge of what document management could do—and pretty soon she’d found out how much better Laserfiche could do it. “In the hard files we had a cheat sheet already that kind of summarized what information we’d usually need to see right away. But some of these files could be 300 pages, so if we needed to find something specific it was still a lot of work,” she says. “We had been using something in-house to scan in records, but you could only retrieve them in three categories. Laserfiche just gave us so many more options, especially when you want to search for one particular thing in a hundred page document.”

But trying to come up with a system that was as centrally controllable as it was locally accessible—the classic ECM paradox—presented its own challenges. On an IT level and user level, this active document management technology had to reconcile the Provost’s needs to centralize and standardize records while simultaneously accommodating the individual schools’ unique filing systems and primary applications. Payroll, for instance, was centralized, but not personnel records, which were left to individual departments.

Ease of use was a major factor, Haugland says, for two reasons: First, the system would be needed for multiple and continuous access. Secondly, staff members using the system ranged from Ph.D’s to administrative assistants, and even within those parameters, computer savvy varied wildly from gadget-philes to technophobes. “Believe it or not, we have people at USC who don’t even read e-mail,” laughs Haugland.

Key to resolving both issues was establishing what Brown refers to as “the gold files”—a master set of faculty records that would serve as the gold standard for all schools, eliminating the inefficiencies and redundancies of duplication.

“I call them ‘the gold files’ because it’s such gold to me,” Brown explains with a laugh. What gives them their shine is their standardized field template, which Brown helped design based on the naming conventions and filing habits of each of the respective schools and colleges. “That’s the beauty of Laserfiche, you can customize it,” she says. This helped allow a thorough application of Quick Fields to index and file incoming paperwork. “We were able to do all our own scanning in-house,” she adds. The custom template, for instance, allows Brown to update faculty status say, from on sabbatical to active, instantly.

It didn’t take long for Brown to all but eliminate paper from her desk. “Anything that comes in, I scan it, then pass it along as an e-mail,” she says. “The great thing is that I have a record on my desktop.”

The benefits, say Haugland and Brown, range from the simple (cutting down on inter-office mail, reducing storage and processing costs) to the profound (disaster recovery, transparency and compliance).

When she’s asked about ROI, Brown hesitates to limit her response to just a number because so many of the benefits are as qualitative as they are quantitative. “I like this question because I want to laugh—in a good way,” she says. “Something that used to take me ten minutes to find, now it’s a matter of seconds. The time saving is substantial. A lot of the benefits are subjective, but turnaround times, compliance – we know we’re better than we were.”

So do the other schools and offices, who’ve had positive experience interacting with the gold files. “Our office is the custodian for all faculty records. We have to ‘mirror’ all the files, so we have all 17 schools’ personnel records in our office,” Haugland explains. “Now they’re checking their files against our ‘gold files.’”

Many now use Laserfiche themselves, including Marshall School of Business, Keck School of Medicine, Career and Protective Services, and Facility Management.

“People that were afraid of the scanner saw that we were green and more secure and we weren’t losing anything,” Brown offers.

“Disaster recovery has really been the catalyst for enterprise-wide adoption of Laserfiche,” Haugland says. “All institutions of higher education – especially when it comes to stimulus funding – are facing higher compliance issues. We’re able to report accurately and quickly, and that affects everybody.”

IT staffer Jeramy Berry describes the tedious process the department used to follow. When documents were received, staff sorted them by type and handed the separate piles to data entry personnel. These staff members then separated the documents into two further piles: those that were missing information and those that were complete. Documents with missing information were carried to a “pending” basket in another part of the department. Completed documents were sorted into still smaller piles, based on each student’s ID number. Staff then processed these documents and placed them in the file cabinet drawers assigned to the department’s financial aid counselors, who retrieved them throughout the day. When the counselors had finished with the documents, they sent them to the file room, where clerks would sort the documents yet again and, finally, add them to the appropriate students’ folders.

“Because documents could be at any point in this process, they were difficult to find, which often gave the impression they’d been lost,” Berry explains. “We’d ask students to stop by our office to fill out incomplete paperwork, but when they’d come in, they’d have to wait while staff went to look for the documents we’d contacted them about.” He adds that storing all of this paper required a significant amount of space, given that the university must retain documents for seven years following the student’s graduation. “Because we’d filled up our own file room, we had to store older files in another department—and we had stacks of paper all over our office,” he says.

The department’s IT staff began researching digital document management systems with the goal of eliminating this massive paper archive and of finding a more efficient way of routing documents among staff members. In Laserfiche, they found all the functionality they were looking for. Laserfiche enables the department to store all of its documentation electronically, while the system’s comprehensive search tools help staff quickly find what they need. Perhaps most importantly, the Laserfiche Workflow™ module has fully automated document routing processes, eliminating the need to carry documents from one part of the department to another.

Now, when the department receives a document, staff scan it into the Laserfiche repository, where it’s stored as an archival-quality TIFF file. They then apply a digital template to the document and enter key metadata, including the student’s name, ID number and social security number. Finally, they use the template’s Status field to instantly route the document to data entry personnel.

Once data entry staff have processed the document, they update the Status field. The Workflow module then routes the document to the correct financial aid counselor—automatically. “We’ve always assigned cases to financial aid counselors based on the last two digits of the student’s ID number,” Berry explains. “For example, IDs ending in 00-07 go to Counselor A, IDs ending in 08-22 go to Counselor B, etc. In the past, staff had to manually sort documents into separate piles for each counselor—a process that was both tedious and prone to error. Now, Workflow ‘reads’ the student ID number entered in the template field and automatically routes the document to the right counselor.”

When the counselor has finished with the document, he or she sets its Status field to “Complete.” The document is then stored in the Laserfiche repository, where staff can locate it using the student’s name, ID number, social security number or other search criteria. Even though the department has over a million documents in its repository, searches take only seconds.

Berry estimates that Laserfiche has helped the department reduce processing time by two-thirds, meaning that students receive aid and scholarship money much sooner than they used to. “In the past, it would take us at least six weeks to process a student’s paperwork. Now, thanks to Workflow, we can process the documents in two weeks,” he says. Laserfiche has also made it easier to respond to information requests from other university departments. Instead of having to search for, photocopy and then hand-deliver the requested document, staff can now quickly e-mail it from within Laserfiche.

In addition to making information more accessible, Laserfiche has also made it more secure. “Every day, we receive documents that contain sensitive information, including students’ social security numbers,” Berry says. “In the past, these documents were ‘floating’ all over the office—stacked on people’s desks, piled on top of file cabinets or sitting in people’s inboxes. Now, all of these documents are stored in Laserfiche, and only authorized staff members can access them.”

Increasingly, students submit documents to the department in electronic format, and Berry says that Laserfiche helps staff manage these documents as well. Laserfiche offers multiple methods of importing electronic files—from Microsoft® Word® documents to PDF and JPG files—into the repository, where they’re stored in their native format. Alternatively, staff can use the Laserfiche Snapshot™ utility to quickly create TIFF images of the electronic documents, which they can then process in the same way they handle scanned documents.

Looking forward, Berry would like to install the Laserfiche Quick Fields™ module, which eliminates manual data entry by automatically capturing information from a document and copying it to the relevant template field. Given everything the department has already accomplished, Berry doesn’t doubt the success of this initiative.

“Thanks to Laserfiche, we no longer have to search through stacks of paper to find documents. We no longer have to manually sort documents and carry them to someone’s inbox. We no longer have to search for lost documents and misplaced files,” he says. “Most importantly, we’ve greatly reduced the amount of time we needed to process documents—meaning we can disburse money to students a lot more quickly than in the past.”