Heartland is an active manager, seeking out those few companies from the broad market they believe fit the criteria of its investment discipline, embodied in Heartland’s Ten Principles of Value Investing™. This discipline is grounded in rigorous fundamental analysis, and has been exercised for over a quarter century. Each stock Heartland is potentially interested in is subject to a thorough review of multiple variables, resulting in a rich legacy of information and understanding of thousands of individual securities. This legacy also results in many pages of information and data!

In addition to research, the Firm has built a substantial file of client related material, going back to the Firm’s inception.

By 2010, decades of paper records had accumulated—much of which, for compliance purposes, required locked cabinets. “Any time we had a company visit, analyst research notes, quarterly company earnings reports, news articles or anything impacting an active company, paper was placed in a general location for administrators to file manually,” explains Mike Riggs, Senior Vice President and CTO of Heartland.

The pile of paper accumulated weekly and could require full days of filing by administrative staff. “We’d already gone through the 20 years’ worth of research, but we were still looking at 1,600 active companies for which we needed to maintain records,” he adds.

The Challenge

While the Firm had a fully developed and tested disaster recovery process for its mission-critical electronic information system, there were limited procedures in place for its paper-based stored files. “Both systems maintained single copy masters which took a large amount of floor and file cabinet space—and a lot of manual paper filing,” Riggs says. “We actually had a legacy scan-and-file system that was not being used because it added to the work load of users.”

Riggs led the Firm on a search for a more comprehensive electronic content management (ECM) system with two directives in mind—function and friendliness. As Riggs puts it, “We needed an intelligent forms processing system where we could develop a forms library to identify and process client-related paperwork, but it also had to be user-friendly.”

The Solution

In 2010, the Firm acquired a Laserfiche ECM system and began an extensive backfile conversion project using Laserfiche Quick Fields for advanced document capture. “For our client filing system, we were able to back scan all of our legacy files into Laserfiche according to form type and then organize the data according to client account code,” Riggs says. Using the Affinity integration tool, the Firm linked its CRM system to the digitized files in the Laserfiche repository using the client access code.

In the past, a sales administration representative would have to leave the phone call or schedule a call back with a client, go to the file cabinet and check out the file data. Now, with online access to the system, they can stay on the call and pull up client data using the shared client access code right from the CRM interface.

At the same time, Riggs notes, the flexibility of Laserfiche allowed him to grant remote, read-only access to staff who need to view files offsite for client servicing issues. “We have only one office but several executives who spend time at remote locations. Laserfiche gives them the opportunity to retrieve files when connected to their computers via a remote session.”

The process that saw the most operational improvement, however, was research. “We used Quick Fields to back scan our rich legacy of stock research, and we used Workflow to develop a way for research and portfolio managers to file directly to the Laserfiche repository,” Riggs says.

Here’s how it works:

• By utilizing a research template, analysts can drop files into a Workflow starting rule folder to kick off the template to select the research media type.
• Workflow then routes it to the proper security and media filing type.
• The workflow will run an SQL query to match the template security with an in-house security holding system to identify the full company name to place on file and route it to the proper Laserfiche research file folder.

“Now compliance, analysts and portfolio managers have ready access to research wherever they are, on-site and remote.”

Going with the Workflow

Heartland is now using Laserfiche and Workflow to deploy an accounts payable processing system that will scan in invoices from vendors, have operations staff identify cost centers and allocations, and then route them to department managers for approval. After the approval is routed back to the operation admin, it will then be posted directly into the accounting system for check processing.

Likewise, Riggs is also using Workflow to develop an automated system for approving marketing material that will handle markup and approval from multiple team members, as the content needs to be monitored for FINRA and SEC guidelines. “It’s a very time and paper intensive process that requires group participation,” Riggs says.

More recently, the Firm upgraded to a Laserfiche Rio enterprise system. “This allows us to have multiple Laserfiche servers, which means we have a mirrored Laserfiche server environment running at our disaster recovery site pointing to a backup copy of our production repository that is replicated to the disaster recovery site daily.” Riggs says he’s also looking forward to deploying Laserfiche Mobile to enable Heartland staff to use iPads to access data securely via Web Access.

By using Laserfiche ECM, the Firm is confident it will achieve its goal of limiting paperwork. Says Riggs, “We hope to build custom Web forms to avoid paper-based system processes that pop up as people develop templates for a variety of management tasks.”

During tax season, staff regularly doubles from 15 to 30, owing to the sheer volume of work—and paperwork—associated with tax preparation. But as HFG’s businesses steadily grew, the firm had also steadily outgrown what Chief Operating Officer Ali Mroue calls its “Stone Age document management system.”

In 2004, the firm had implemented the proprietary and non-SQL based system, which was an add-on module for the firm’s Intuit Lacerte tax preparation software, “purely for storage,” he says. Data transfer to PDF was difficult and error-prone, and “we were essentially scanning to create a back-up for the actual physical file. But that was unreliable—we lost data once, and it had no security or audit trail of any sort.”

From just paperless to purposeful: An ECM vision takes shape

By 2010, HFG files containing 10 years of data were simply too big to manage and too hard to find. “We’d already added a scanning clerk and a designated file clerk, but it was quickly becoming an operational nightmare, with more staff to manage and more documents getting misplaced,” Mroue remembers.

The irony is that when the firm’s search for a proper enterprise content management (ECM) solution brought Mroue to Laserfiche, it was not the first time. “We first looked into Laserfiche in 2006, but back then, we weren’t looking at ECM in terms of business process automation or any bigger-picture operational improvements,” he says. “We just wanted to get rid of the paper.”

Working with Patrick Welsch of Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital, Mroue began to see how integral ECM deployment was to not only keep up with, but also anticipate, Hewitt’s projected growth. “We looked at a few solutions, and they all did things in their own way. Only Laserfiche offered the flexibility to develop our own folder structures and templates—and we’d be able to change them depending on requirements without calling in a consultant,” Mroue says.

“Plus, we required that Laserfiche integrate with our Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Intuit Lacerte tax software, as well as send Microsoft Office documents directly to Laserfiche. We wanted everything to mesh together, other systems either didn’t integrate, or if they did, it was going be complicated and expensive.”

Ease and familiarity of use speeds an already speedy deployment

HFG purchased a 15-user Laserfiche Avante system with Web Access (for deployment to its Ventura County office) and Audit Trail in December of 2010. With April 15 on the horizon, initial deployment focused on the tax preparation side of HFG’s business, beginning with a substantial backlog conversion of paper files. “Considering the holidays, it took around 30 days to deploy, customize and integrate the system. We had one day of training for full-time staff. And it took me 30 minutes to train the part time staff on how they’d be using Laserfiche,” Mroue recalls. The ease of deployment was significant, he adds—based in no small part on Laserfiche’s ability to mirror the firm’s familiar paper filing structures. Tax worksheets are automatically sent to Laserfiche with a single click from Microsoft Office programs, while all forms from the Intuit Lacerte system are sent to Laserfiche using Snapshot.

“We were able to mimic our exact process in the Laserfiche system. Nothing changed for staff; I told them, ‘The client file doesn’t exist—it’s now a client folder.’ That made it easy for the employees to understand the change. Instead of people getting up and moving files from cabinets, it ‘jumps’ by itself,” Mroue says.

Workflow makes a $20,000/1,000 hour difference

The jumping-by-itself, Mroue continues, is the result of implementing Laserfiche Workflow. “A file used to jump between seven sets of hands, from client meeting to the client delivery,” he begins. “File clerk/ front desk staff/preparer/checker/scanner/processor/mail clerk, and back to the file clerk.”

“Now, using Workflow, the front desk sets up the appointment and creates the file for the preparer, and it’s just ‘click’ the field, ‘approve,’ ‘approve,’ ‘approve,’ all the way through the process. If something isn’t approved, it is sent back automatically with a ‘sticky note’ on the document in Laserfiche. Nobody has to leave their desk, and I can monitor the whole process and see where everything is so I know what’s getting done. It just raises the level of efficiency and accountability,” he adds.

“Operationally, we had the best tax season ever, especially for me since I could monitor every detail of the business and everyone’s performance from my screen,” Mroue says. “We delivered content on a CD instead of paper, so we used five boxes of paper instead of 50, plus we saved a lot on postage. We also saved the cost of our part time clerks—which is about $20,000 a year. We made our ROI in the first year alone. But the biggest savings was the preparers’ time—at least 10 minutes for every hour. When you add that up, that’s literally a thousand hours our staff can spend working with more clients.”

Coincidentally, the firm’s Laserfiche installation and training took place right around the time of the annual Empower 2011 Laserfiche Institute Conference in January, inspiring an even quicker adoption. “Everyone from our office agreed the Conference was pretty amazing in the amount of knowledge provided,” Mroue adds. “I was actually able to continue writing the Workflow automations for our tax preparation process at the Conference.”

Expanding deployment, saving more clicks with image-enablement integration

As of June 2011, the firm has extended scanning to Al Hewitt, Inc., its RIA firm. “Our goal is to eliminate all the files in our office by the end of August—which will free up a big space,” Mroue says.

For next tax season, Mroue says HFG will utilize Cities Digital’s Unfetterfiche to image-enable their Lacerte system with a single hot key. Deployment for the Al Hewitt, Inc./RIA side of the business is also being mapped out. “Each client file has about six folders, so that transition will be immensely beneficial,” he says.

“We’re taking things step by step,” Mroue adds. “One thing we’ve learned from this process is that in order for the transition to a totally paperless environment to be successful, users have to accept it and want to use it. Laserfiche has the flexibility to make that happen.”

For his part, however, Mroue is very satisfied. “From an IT standpoint, Laserfiche is easy to maneuver and to develop and change. You’re not going back and asking the VAR for help all the time, so it won’t cost you money down the road,” he says. “We’re already thinking about upgrading the system and adding more users.”

Key to this transition, Burns believed, was leveraging business technology to minimize both the operational and risk management costs of working directly with advisors. “As a growing company, technology was the way to get more done with a smaller headcount,” he says.

Burns consulted Joel Bruckenstein, founder of Technology Tools for Today (T3), the multimedia practice management resource for the financial services industry. “Joel really had the vision. He said, ‘You guys could be a virtual firm,’ and that really resonated with us. Joel’s thinking was that we couldn’t afford to work with paper,” Burns remembers.

“We wanted to keep our fees low enough that we’d be extremely competitive—we’re less expensive than 90% of bond funds. To achieve that, manual processes just weren’t going to work.”

Part of the Solution

Bruckenstein suggested Laserfiche agile ECM. “For what they wanted to do, Laserfiche was the missing piece: they’d be paperless, and they’d have a solid workflow engine to share and secure information with their Portfolio Management System (PMS) and Client Relationship Management (CRM) system. Plus, they’d have that compliance piece,” he says.

“Laserfiche made sense because it could integrate with Microsoft Dynamics, which Tamarac was already integrated with, and do it quickly and easily enough that there wouldn’t be a lot of cost and lead-time,” Bruckenstein adds.

For his part, Burns saw the value of having “that compliance piece” when Asset Dedication purchased a Laserfiche Avante system in September of 2010. “By integrating Laserfiche with our Web-based technologies, we have a document management system that can talk to the cloud, and where the information we need to keep secure for compliance and auditing stays on our own server,” he says. “Regulators come in and, once they see that we have Laserfiche set up the way we told them, they have confidence in it the same way we do. We’ve been able to make the commitment to be paperless, but in a way that makes it easy for auditors to see that we’re following the guidelines.”

.NET Gain: A World-Class System without a World-Class Price Tag

Burns sees long-term value in building a system agile enough to maximize the firm’s infrastructural investment as the firm grows. “BondDesk has this world-class bond inventory and trade order management system, so we needed to marry that to a world-class equity portfolio management system like Tamarac. On top of that, they’ve bundled it with Microsoft Dynamics CRM through Tamarac’s Advisor 9, so we’ve got all these systems that all talk to each other and for the most part it’s a single log-in,” he explains. “Now, on the back-end, we can access every document we need because SharePoint talks to Dynamics and Laserfiche talks to SharePoint. Everything’s still on a Microsoft .NET framework, so we can add and subtract layers without it turning into a huge project with a hefty price tag.”

This agility has already translated into substantial savings. “We have been able to drive development costs way down—we can post a few Web services and we can integrate for $2,000 rather than $200,000,” says Burns. “Our risk is so low, we can just pop something out to replace it. When we upgrade to SharePoint 2010, the transition process will be minimal.”

Burns notes this interoperability translates to a more seamless user experience, no matter who’s using the system: a client, an advisor services representative or another staff member. “Once someone signs onto the system, they can do everything they need to without leaving the program they’re using. I don’t want people having to learn 20 systems—I want that single sign-on; I want it to be that fast,” he says.

“The way we look at technology is that it’s going to work if it can adapt it to the way we work, not the other way around.”

New Account Formation Made Advisor-, Client- and Business-Friendly

Burns points to Asset Dedication’s automated account formation process using its AdvisorSpace portal. “As we developed our AdvisorSpace portal, having everything on the .NET platform has really allowed us to fill in the gaps and make the experience seamless, and a lot of the back-end processes automatic,” he explains. “We were able to control the experience and avoid making more work for ourselves.”

An example of this is the new account formation process, including the client meeting that takes place leading up to it and the contract management that follows it. An advisor meeting with a client logs into the AdvisorSpace portal using an iPad. From there, he can access marketing documents through SharePoint. He can submit a request to run a proposal, which the SharePoint workflow engine routes back to the advisor. Then, he can initiate a client agreement using DocuSign. The contract is then automatically e-mailed to the advisor and Asset Dedication managers—until they sign off, when it’s automatically stored in Laserfiche.

“We step in a little bit, but essentially the whole back end operates seamlessly,” Burns says.

Technology Attracts Talent

As the firm grows, Burns sees the value of having a tightly integrated technology platform to attract new talent. “When advisors do their due diligence and ask, ‘What are you using?’ and we say, ‘Tamarac, MS Dynamics and Laserfiche,’ that’s just one more thing they can check off their list. We’re using proven technology in an innovative way.”

The value of that innovation, he says, in addition to reducing development costs, ensuring compliance and offering more convenient, comprehensive client services, is saving time. “For every one of us, time is money. So the more time you’re spending on basic operations, the less time you’re working with clients and the less revenue you’re generating,” Burns says.

“Our business model is based on using incredibly complex technology to drive very sophisticated processes in a way that is very intuitive to understand. For us, Laserfiche is an obvious natural partner.”

When the firm built its own broker/dealer in 2008, Chief Administration Officer (CAO) Phillip Fournier and the rest of the Spire management team saw the opportunity to streamline operations. “We knew there would be countless audits, reviews and requests for information from the various entities,” Fournier says.

Coming from other broker/dealers, “we’d experienced lost forms, high overnight charges, delays in getting business processed and audits that required home office staff to keep coming back to us for forms they had misplaced,” he remembers. “We knew we could do it more efficiently—for compliance supervision and oversight, for operational efficiencies, for field reps to access information from everywhere.”

Fournier says right away Spire’s management team had the vision to build a system that included both enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM). “We were talking about more than going paperless, we were talking about setting up workflows and automating processes,” he says. “Our management team is always trying to remove friction points, like lost documents. We really wanted to be able to say, whether you’re five miles or 500 miles away, you’re submitting your OSJ and principal approvals the same exact way.”

Spire was referred to Laserfiche reseller John Caso of One Source/ADI. “We were impressed that ADI had about 100 financial services customers using Laserfiche,” Fournier says.

Making Work Flow

For 18 months, the Spire team considered options. “We just couldn’t find anything on par with Laserfiche. We were either going to have to build our own homegrown system—or we could just customize a proven and established software solution. And we didn’t want our consultants to be beta testing a homegrown system.”

The firm purchased Laserfiche Avante for its 100 consultants working between 17 offices. “We asked them how they would like the system set up, and then we set about doing it in as few clicks as possible,” says Fournier. For compliance and auditing purposes, each client file would have three different sets of folders: fee-based accounts, commission-based accounts and insurance accounts. One Source/ADI helped design workflows to automate processes for OSJ and principal approvals, branch audits of sales literature and correspondence, as well as security protocols.

Within the first 18 months of implementing Laserfiche, 80% of Spire’s offices were regularly processing content through Laserfiche; today, all of them are. “We use our Laserfiche system for required paperwork for FINRA, but our offices have the capability to scan anything they want, and many scan paperwork for their entire book of clients,” Fournier adds.

Laserfiche data is stored offsite in a data bunker with Equinix to ensure its safety and security, while Spire consultants have instant access to all their forms over a virtual office system. The business continuity advantage this brought to Spire became apparent two winters ago. “We had several snowstorms that shut down the whole Washington D.C. area for two weeks, and we were able to continue working remotely,” says Fournier. “We’ve basically got our information in Fort Knox as opposed to being one burst pipe away from it being lost forever. “

Accelerated Transfer, Halted Costs

Now it doesn’t matter if an office is five or 500 miles away, since Spire’s Operations Department is capable of processing direct and custodial business the same day—removing the delays and costs of overnight shipping.

“Many of our accounts are fee-based, so each day assets are delayed during transfer adds up quickly,” Fournier explains.

The accelerated transfer allows Spire to process business with immediate feedback. If a set of forms is not in good order (NIGO), Workflow pushes it back to the rep’s assistant with an e-mail that tells the assistant exactly what information is missing. “The assistant knows exactly what the situation is and can fix it, so we reprocess business in real-time.”

With no physical forms to lose—they’re scanned directly into Laserfiche and indexed immediately—there are no processing bottlenecks. “One of our biggest complaints at our previous firm was lost forms. An overnight package would show up, and when it was opened, forms would be lost or attached to other forms accidentally,” explains Fournier. “Now, if a form is incorrectly filed, the Laserfiche search and indexing system can find it in seconds.”

From Days to Hours: Audits Made Simple – and Less Onerous

To facilitate auditing, Spire Operations configured a compliance folder in its Laserfiche repository where consultants scan in their required documents—correspondence, advertising and bank statements, among others—that the firm’s Compliance department needs to review.

“Our Compliance Department can be much less onerous in its supervision,” says Fournier. “Much of what we need can be searched, reviewed and saved right in Laserfiche.” Secure access to each folder can be scripted individually, further mitigating compliance risks.

Fournier points to a recent FINRA audit of the firm’s 529 college fund business. “On the fly, the FINRA auditor asked to see all our new 529 accounts opened from April 2008 through April 2010. Using Laserfiche, our staff was able to search through the entire database and provide him a copy of all our new account forms. We had all 300 forms for him on a zip drive in less than an hour. He was really impressed,” he says. “If we had to find all those paper files, it would have required days and countless staff hours to satisfy that one request.”

Quantifying Success

Fournier says Spire gauges the success of using Laserfiche in several ways, starting with the fact that each of its 17 offices saves approximately $3,500 in overnight charges annually. “Add the cost of storage, file cabinets, the business continuity issues of having that paper in the same place as our facilities, hours of file maintenance, lost paperwork, overnighting paperwork to be signed, not to mention the lost dollars due to delays in processing, and the numbers become even more significant.” 

The most significant benefit to Spire, Fournier says, is not hiring extra staff. “We estimate we’re saving two or three bodies because of how we use Laserfiche to automate compliance, operations and trading.

“We knew it would enhance our operations center and create synergies between our field reps and our home office, but the smoothness of the system and the removal of friction has been really remarkable,” he adds. “After only 2 ½ years, if we tried to remove Laserfiche, our reps would revolt.”

A former change management analyst at Bank of America, Slack had seen technological innovation drive efficiency, from automating input and reconciliation processes using MS Excel to capitalizing on the use of e-mail and the internet in BofA business processes.

When Slack came to Keane, he began to analyze where automation could have the biggest impact. “I looked at it like this: we’re a small shop, so we don’t have entire divisions or departments. We have people—seven people. So we need to leverage technology as best we can,” he says.

Slack initially focused on the need for a common repository for staff to share thoughts and ideas from their research—and the various media it came from, including:

• Handwritten notes
• E-mails
• Reports from the Web
• Bloomberg charts
• 10-k filings
• And more.

So he launched the search for a content management solution.

On the Hunt

“Our technology support services partner gave us a couple of ideas. I talked to our prime broker, and I talked to compliance experts in the industry about what firms like ours were using,” he recalls. “Laserfiche was one of the five or six referrals we got, so I Googled it.”

Slack was then referred to John Caso of reseller One Source Document Solutions, Inc., which already had a strong presence in North Carolina’s financial services industry. Caso showed Keane staff how Laserfiche could automate the firm’s process for storing and sharing research, as well as its client records.

“Our discussion wasn’t about things like compliance and client service at first. We just wanted a better way to share research other than e-mails in Outlook,” Slack admits. “But when John started asking about our large collection of filing cabinets, he hit upon the biggest need in our office.”

The biggest need was to free up space in Keane’s modest offices. Six file cabinets worth of information—almost one cabinet for each employee—certainly weren’t helping achieve that goal.

“Those six cabinets contained the first eight years of our business. We knew as we kept growing, there would be more and more paperwork,” recalls Slack.

He adds, “Those filing cabinets contained the only copies of our information, so if a fire had ripped through our offices, it would have been quite difficult to replace all the documents, especially for a firm our size. That’s when the discussion turned to business continuity.”

Moving Forward with Laserfiche

The firm purchased an 11-user Laserfiche Avante system in July 2008. The hardest part of implementation, Slack admits, was getting the firm’s small but diverse staff to agree on a standardized naming and filing convention for the research-sharing process. Once the research folders were set up, Slack says, automating the active client folders was the easy part.

“We already had an efficient process and detailed file folders that we were able to mimic in Laserfiche,” he offers. “It may have taken a bit to get the investment folks to retrain their working habits and thought processes, but once they did, learning the Laserfiche product itself was very easy.”

Backlog conversion of a decade’s worth of client information was likewise relatively easy, requiring only a few months of part-time student help. “Now,” Slack says, “we can scan in every document received, file it away in client-specific folders in Laserfiche, and our entire network drive is backed up remotely by our tech support firm. We still file the originals in cabinets, but there are backup copies available.”

Enhancing Client Service

As Keane’s staff began using Laserfiche, it became clear the system’s value was not limited to disaster recovery. “The primary advantage is having all client-specific information available in a heartbeat, accessible from each desktop in our office,” Slack says.

“When clients call with questions, we can pull up those files immediately and provide the answer in that same conversation. Not only that, but we can pull a copy of the document they’re asking about, and e-mail it to the client within seconds—usually while we’re still on the phone with them,” he says. “It’s imperative to have a complete picture in terms of client history, and using Laserfiche, we have that right at our fingertips.”

Slack credits Laserfiche for soothing skittish clients’ fears in the wake of recent market fluctuations. “Our clients aren’t institutions, they’re individuals. They’re not just interested in numbers and charts, they value the kind of relationship we have with them. If we don’t provide good client service, there’s no performance in the world that will keep those clients invested with us,” he says.

“During this last market blip in 2008, it would have been easy for them to get scared and take their money out. Being able to pull up a caller’s information and click and drag it into an e-mail speaks volumes about how much we care for our clients’ wants and needs. It really helped take our client service to the next level.”

Responding to Regulatory Changes

Now, with recent regulatory changes all but guaranteeing more oversight by the SEC and other regulatory agencies, Slack sees Laserfiche playing a more significant role in audit preparation and maintaining compliance logs.

“Dodd-Frank gives oversight authority to the SEC, but it still leaves a lot of gray areas as to some of the specifics that will be required of us. But, we know we’ll be required to register with the SEC by July 2011 and we know that the SEC will come audit us on a regular basis. Laserfiche will help us to be organized and prepared for that inevitability,” Slack says.

“We made the choice to keep all working documents on the network drive, but all other documents in Laserfiche. So, it provides peace of mind knowing that all my documents are easily accessible, effectively filed and efficiently searchable. All the required books and records are there, and can easily be transferred to a CD or zip drive for the SEC’s reference.”

Onward and Upward

Slack sees continuing value in using Laserfiche to adapt not only to new challenges, but new success as well.

“At Keane Capital, we describe ourselves as ‘value investors,’ which also carries over to the way we run our business. The Laserfiche Avante system was a very affordable option for us, but I look at its value as more than cost savings,” Slack explains.

“Laserfiche allows us to grow the business. It scales from one to 1,000 clients in a way that allows us to handle the work using the same efficient processes.”

Allen Adjamian of Laserfiche reseller Adjamian Affiliated was called to demonstrate how Laserfiche could lighten the firm’s paperwork load. Adjamian showed how Laserfiche could be integrated with the firm’s Lacerte tax software and other accounting software programs to create a central storage repository for the entire firm’s paperwork in a way that all but eliminated printing—even scanning.

Rocha says his fellow Olmsted staffers were particularly impressed by how user-friendly Laserfiche was, because it “had the look and feel of Windows and search engines we were used to using.” Another plus, he adds, was the comprehensive single solution Laserfiche offered. “Other programs you had to buy more products to get to that level of functionality. Laserfiche suited our needs right out of the box.”

Olmsted herself notes that even with all its functionality, Laserfiche offered a focus. “We looked at a lot of systems where the document management component was usually one component in this canned system,” she says. “What stood out about Laserfiche was that it was a stand-alone program that focused on a single, separate function that provided a higher level of security.”

The firm purchased Laserfiche with Web Access to serve staff internally and remotely, as well as its clients. Implementation began in late 2006 with a backlog conversion of seven years’ worth of paper files. Adjamian and fellow solutions consultant Kristina Yassi worked with Rocha and Olmsted’s staff to set up templates and document types to establish the file structure that, with some enhancements, the firm still uses today. “Allen and Kristina helped us a design a folder and subfolder structure that allowed us get started scanning our documents right away,” Rocha recalls. “We’ve been able to improve on it since then, which is actually something we’ve come to appreciate about Laserfiche: It’s flexible enough to grow with us, without making a big project out of it.”

The impact of using Laserfiche was immediate. “A lot of the time when we complete a project, we have to make associated information almost immediately available to meet deadlines and client demands. Once things are in Laserfiche, we can make that data readily available through e-mail or Web Access,” Rocha says.

A big time- and resource-saver, he says, is the ability to print directly to Laserfiche from the firm’s Lacerte tax software. “Printing to Laserfiche from Lacerte takes about 10 to 15 seconds for about 40 pages. There is no need to print, prep and scan paper copies for review, whether it’s for managers or staff. They go directly to Laserfiche to review it,” Rocha explains. “This allows us to move tax returns through the office for input and review without printing out any pages, which also saves time and money.”

This saves time making changes to tax returns and statements, Rocha says. “Whereas before we would have to recycle the old version and reprint the new one and file it, now we just delete it in Laserfiche and re-print/download to Laserfiche. It’s also very convenient that we don’t need to go track down the client’s file to review data, because it’s already in Laserfiche.”

Rocha also says that Laserfiche’s interoperability with other programs and file types has brought efficiency and convenience to other business processes. “We transfer all our disparate types of data and document types into Laserfiche—QuickBooks, PDF documents, and Excel,” he says. “We can print directly to Laserfiche, save-to, or just drag-and-drop it. It’s that easy.”

For her part, Olmsted says the Laserfiche system inspired rapid adoption for its ease of use, but again, its focus of use. “Laserfiche feels like an independent program in that it’s this standalone entity that’s open to all of the types of files we work with. Our staff and customers have adopted it really well.”

The ultimate customer service, she says, is Laserfiche’s DoD 5015.2-certified security. “It can take some time to get people used to not working with paper, but for us it’s the only way to secure information moving forward by making sure you don’t have sensitive information laying around the office. Our clients look to us as their accounting firm to secure their information at the highest level,” she says.

At the same time, Olmsted sees Laserfiche making her business more agile and responsive to staff and clients alike. “Laserfiche provides us a lot of mobility. Auditors going out in the field can scan in documents and access company files. We have everybody reviewing tax returns online as well.”

Now, four years since implementing Laserfiche, the firm is seeing its return on investment (ROI) from regained staff time and cutting overhead costs. “I can say we save about 25% across the board, as far what it takes us to process paperwork now,” Rocha says.

And Rocha says that Olmsted & Associates has found a new way to work. “With Laserfiche we’ve found a document management system that offers us control in terms of securing and centralizing information, but also the flexibility to handle all kinds of content and make it readily available to our staff and clients securely and conveniently.”

That, Olmsted says, has given her firm a competitive edge. “The only way to move forward is to get your efficiency up and your costs down. For us, Laserfiche has been a big part of that.”

As Jennifer L. Litchfield, IT Manager at Palladium, remembers it, onboarding more than 1,000 accounts all at once left almost no time to learn a new electronic document management system in their new Norfolk, VA, offices—even as the need to implement one to ensure the breakaway firm could hit the ground running was clear.

“We added $1 billion in assets under management within three months, so we needed to have everything come together very quickly,” Litchfield recalls. Experiences from a prior firm had proven how cumbersome and costly paper was, from the staff effort to file and find information to the yearly accumulation of paper that took up valuable—and expensive—space. “We used to have six or seven employees spend two full weeks every year just merging each client’s file with the historical files, purging information where appropriate, and making room for the next year’s paperwork,” she says.

As owners of their new firm, Palladium’s principals knew that the right technology would make a long-term difference. “We wanted to start off our new company with smart decisions when it came to technology and electronic document management,” Litchfield says. “We made decisions that required upfront commitments of time and money, but produced ongoing savings of both.”

“We needed it to be user-friendly, customizable to our needs, and manageable on-site.”

The search for a document management system began with three criteria in mind—and one given: value. “We needed it to be user-friendly, customizable to our needs, and manageable on-site,” Litchfield explains. “Cost is always a consideration, so we were looking for a balance between use and cost while considering long-term scalability.”

Litchfield was referred to Laserfiche through the Advent Users Group, a resource made up of companies that use the portfolio management products from Advent Software. John Caso, solutions consultant at Laserfiche reseller One Source Document Solutions, Inc., showed Palladium how Laserfiche:

• Enabled users to process and store documents according to customizable template fields.
• Offered multiple searching options using those templates as well as full-text keyword searches.

Litchfield invited users from each department to the demonstration for their feedback. Each, she says, agreed Laserfiche was the most user-friendly solution they’d looked at.

“Managers wanted to be able to answer client questions over the phone, so they liked how we could set up the Laserfiche system to feel like their paper files, with the same tabs as the old paper files. The client service administrators really appreciated the advanced search capabilities that helped them find documents quickly and easily,” Litchfield recalls. “Other solutions seemed like they had a pretty big learning curve; Laserfiche is a product that you can open up and it’s immediately apparent how you use it.”

The advanced searching, Litchfield adds, would play a significant role from a compliance perspective as well, allowing easier auditing and monitoring of documents. “Our compliance officer really needs to be able to slice and dice information, and it was clear Laserfiche was the right choice. Plus everyone would be using the same system, on the same server, so everything’s in one place. From a technology, disaster recovery, and business continuity standpoint, this was important.”

Long-term, Litchfield and fellow staff agreed Laserfiche was flexible and scalable enough to grow with the firm. “We liked how we could set up the folder structure like our paper files and then change it at a later date,” she says. “We have ever-changing needs and it was important to have a product that could grow and change with us.”

Palladium purchased Laserfiche in May 2008; implementation took place over a two-day period. “We opened in late January, so by then we already had the bulk of the accounts on our portfolio accounting system,” Litchfield explains. “We had onsite support for those first two days to get Laserfiche up and running and train users and administrators. We didn’t have a backlog of information, so that helped.

“We just set the system up, set up individual scanners and got the users trained so that they could start working in the system right away,” she adds.

Improving the Day-to Day, Keeping Pace with Compliance

Since then, Litchfield says, Laserfiche has been instrumental in streamlining the day-to-day operations of the firm. “I hear all the time from our client service administrators how much they love using Laserfiche as opposed to the old way of filing paperwork. Every day, they scan all account documents into the system so all the original paperwork and correspondence is in a single location. We don’t have to worry about the storage space and cost for paper documents, or the annual clean up and purging of those documents,” she explains.

“Besides our client folders, we also maintain other folders within Laserfiche with information that cannot be changed, including marketing and compliance folders. Because we store copies of custodial statements in Laserfiche, we don’t have to keep those hard copies onsite. The only hard copies we keep are our original signed agreements,” she adds. “Our onsite storage is minimal.”

In the future, Litchfield says the firm is looking forward to the advanced search functionality that will come with upgrading to Laserfiche 8. “Everything is changing in our industry, and compliance is such a huge part of that,” she says. “Our compliance officer is one of our biggest Laserfiche users. Because she needs to be able to search for multiple criteria, being able to search throughout the file structures , as well as the further capabilities that are available with upgrading to Laserfiche 8, will be a big step forward for compliance.

“We use Laserfiche a lot for in-house verification, so having what we call that ‘wildcard’ capability to search according to a manager’s code, that’s a great oversight tool for auditing,” Litchfield adds. “Also, if we have auditors in house, we need to be able to get information to them immediately—not in three days or four days. Having these features available shows us that Laserfiche is keeping an eye on the changing environment and is adapting to keep pace.”

Along with their upgrade to Laserfiche 8, the firm is investigating implementing Workflow business process management. “We’d love to automate a lot of our processes that cross departments. Where we currently use Outlook or walk paper around, each person could sign off on a section of a document in the workflow and automatically the next person would get an e-mail saying it’s ready for them. We could move paperwork through much more effectively and efficiently,” Litchfield says.

“The ability to integrate [Laserfiche] with our portfolio management software is a big step forward. This will make the opening of new accounts a single point of entry, where fields will be populated automatically directly to Laserfiche. Additionally, allowing us to monitor personal trading within the firm from a compliance standpoint is another improvement. Automating that process will save time and money,” she adds.

Declaring Independence from Its B-D – and its ECM

Laserfiche was not the firm’s first ECM solution—but it was its first successful one. “Two years ago, our broker-dealer at the time came to us as one of their two branch offices in the whole country they were going to let beta test their document management system. I jumped on it, thinking this has got to be better than having a file clerk in a room all day,” recalls Marcy Gitterman, director of IT & HR.

Trouble was, with no folder hierarchy and searching limited only to template fields, the legacy system was creating as many problems as it was meant to solve. “It was just a really cumbersome program to use,” she says. As the firm prepared to switch broker-dealers to Fidelity, only one of 19 staff had actually scanned their paperwork into the system. Gitterman was frustrated, but optimistic. “I knew there had to be something else out there that would work,” she says.

The firm’s principals, meanwhile, just wanted something people would actually use. “At one point, we were just talking about scanning everything to PDF ourselves and storing it on a hard drive, but I was really against that,” Gitterman says. “We needed something a lot more robust—the fact that PDFs can be altered wouldn’t help with security or compliance.”

Laserfiche, turns out, was one of the ECM providers on Fidelity’s short list of recommended solutions. Jeffrey Gitterman was aware of Laserfiche from local FPA chapter meetings, as well as from hearing about it from colleagues who used it. “It’s just a name we kept hearing a lot,” he says. When Zaheer Master, president of Laserfiche reseller Accelerated Information Systems, presented a Laserfiche solution tailored to the firm’s dual registry, Gitterman knew he was working with the right company—and that he’d actually use the software.

“I avoid technology like the plague, so ease of use was for me the number one priority. How easily can our new employees use it? How easy is it for me to use it?” Gitterman says. “Laserfiche could take our paper filing system—the one we’ve been using successfully since 1996—and transpose it to a Windows-type environment we were comfortable with.

“But what really impressed us about Laserfiche was the way our reseller presented it. The other solutions we looked at were totally reactionary—they just said ‘this is how you get rid of paper.’ Our reseller presented Laserfiche in a way that said, ‘Okay, now that your information’s automated, here’s how you’ll need to set this up to get the most out of it and here’s how you do it,’” he adds.

Implementation took place over two months. Says Master, “We showed them how they needed to separate the RIA side of their business from the B-D side for FINRA and SEC compliance. We also showed them how using metadata, you could set up a template field search with a cut-off date or destruction date to easily enforce a retention policy. I think the important thing to realize with ECM is that just because it’s easy to keep everything, doesn’t mean you necessarily want to.”

The space saving alone, Marcy says, was a relief. “We look at the hundreds of square feet we’d been devoting to our file room—it just gets crazy. And half of those files you’ll never see, but you have to keep for compliance,” she says. “Now we get our space back and now all we have to do is shoot something through the scanner so we don’t have to touch it again. It’s that simple.”

The flexibility to segregate information and customize user access to certain folders was not only effective, she says, it was easy. “In the old system, we would have to hire a support person to do that. Now we can set up permissions to assign access,” Gitterman says. “We use Laserfiche for client files, HR files, benefits, payroll, you name it, so the ability to lock down some files versus other files is really helpful.”

She adds, “Laserfiche doesn’t just say it’s user-friendly, it is.”

Automated Compliance – Even at 2 AM

While having more accessible information is a benefit, Gitterman & Associates have also realized that automated information is more useful information. “We do a lot of our compliance right in Laserfiche,” Marcy says. “Instead of our reps having to make copies of client correspondence, they scan them in and it’s automatically submitted to our Chief Compliance Officer in a folder only they have access to. Then we set up a stamping process so the compliance officer can tell the rep that it’s been approved.”

This automation has paid off in faster service for financial advisors. “One of the nice things is that if our CCO is on the road, it’s not like it has to wait a week if it’s something that needs to be pre-approved. He doesn’t have to look for a fax machine or find time to respond during business hours, he can just log into Laserfiche at 2 AM.”

For his part, Jeffrey agrees. “Laserfiche is a huge help from a compliance side.”

But Gitterman says it’s the little things that make using Laserfiche an effective part of everyday business. “The fact that I can redact a line in a memo, and then send it in a secure e-mail—these are the kinds of things I like. I don’t have to ask someone how to do it, I can just do it.”

He sees the potential for Laserfiche to make audits more hassle-free. “I just went through six months of FINRA audits and I can tell you it was painful. They basically put me out of business for six months. If we had already had Laserfiche, it wouldn’t have been a tenth of the nightmare it was,” he says. “Now that we have Laserfiche, even though an auditor can come and say they want to see incoming correspondence from a certain date range, we can have everything for them in 30 seconds. That’s going to be huge for us.”

Marcy says now that the firm is enjoying its first taste of content management efficiency, she is eager to see what Workflow can do to automate business process management. “Right now our CRM integrates with our e-mail system—I’d like to see it integrated with Laserfiche as well,” she says. “And our internal processing department will be able to automatically route documents to our principals to approve from anywhere, instead of having them wait in a folder on a desk—that’ll be nice.”

As nice, says Jeffrey, is that the Gitterman & Associates Wealth Management has found an ECM system that’s finally living up to its potential—and uncovering new potential in the process(es). “Of all the new software we’ve gotten in the last few months, this is everyone’s favorite,” he says. “Laserfiche did what it promised to do. None of the other software did.”

As a large community bank and federally-insured financial institution, Nara gets audited “all the time,” says IT Manager Mona Chui. “Keeping information secure and confidential is a top priority for us.”

According to Chui, audits are conducted by the following regulatory boards: the FDIC, the Federal Reserve Bank, the California Department of Financial Institutions and the Office of Thrift Supervision. The most frequent types of audits the bank faces include:

• Safety and soundness (FDIC), to assess the bank’s overall financial condition.
• Information Technology (FDIC), to evaluate the security of the bank’s electronic systems.
• Compliance, to gauge the bank’s compliance with consumer protection regulations such as the GLBA (the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act).
• Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), to assess the bank’s performance in meeting the community’s credit needs. Enforced by OTS, OCC, FRB and FDIC.

Nara Bank knew that an enterprise content management (ECM) solution could help accelerate audits, facilitate compliance and ease the e-discovery process—all while decreasing costs.

“With paper, it’s hard to keep track of the most current version of any given document,” says Chui, “and it’s impossible to ensure that people are following compliant processes each and every time they handle a record. With 20 branches, we were shipping paper all over the place, and those costs added up fast.”

Selecting Laserfiche

Because Nara Bank’s core accounting system is from Fiserv, the first place it looked for ECM recommendations was from Fiserv itself. Cost was the limiting factor with the ECM integration offered by a Fiserv partner, however, since Nara Bank would have been charged based on the number of its client accounts. “That kind of cost structure is okay for smaller banks,” says Chui. “But it’s not cost-effective for a larger bank that’s constantly growing.”

Chui had heard of Laserfiche in the past, and was attracted to the affordability and flexibility of the Laserfiche system. As she did more research, it quickly became clear that Laserfiche could both integrate with Fiserv and offer the kind of superior security that would carry Nara Bank through the audit and e-discovery processes unscathed.

“Laserfiche works with all kinds of government agencies,” explains Chui, “so it was pretty obvious that the granular security we needed to protect our data and ensure compliance was in place.”

In addition, Chui saw that Laserfiche had a team of expert engineers who could work with Nara Bank’s IT department to get the system up and running. “We have an IT team of ten people managing the bank’s network and telephony systems, as well as 100 different applications,” she says. “We just don’t have the resources to develop deep Laserfiche expertise, so it was important to us to have Laserfiche engineers on our side.”

Using Laserfiche

So far, Nara Bank has built central repositories to manage content related to three different functions, including:

• Deposits. New account checklists, signature cards, cash management service agreements, credit reports, account statements, wire transfer applications and more.
• Loans. Loan applications, credit reports, appraisal reports, title-related documents, personal financial statements, verifications of down payments and more.
• Human resources. Job applications, offer letters, background search results, W-4 forms, benefit enrollment forms, confidentiality agreements, annual review forms and more.

Content stored in these three repositories are accessible by authorized personnel across Nara Bank’s 20 branches.

The bank has also established a standardized capture process for all deposit and loan documents that relies heavily on Laserfiche Quick Fields, which automates processing for a high volume of information by capturing data from various formats and sorting documents according to custom criteria. Quick Fields automatically draws data from Nara’s Fiserv database in order to populate template field information in Laserfiche, reducing the amount of staff time spends transferring information between the two systems. By automating the capture process, Quick Fields reduces manual data entry and ensures the consistency, reliability and availability of information throughout the branch network.

The steps in the capture process are:

• Generate barcode cover sheet. Scanner operators at branch offices generate an account-specific barcode cover sheet using the Quick Fields barcode plug-in. The plug-in reads barcodes for automatic separation of batch scanned documents.
• Scan documents. Scanner operators at branch offices batch scan documents into a shared folder that can be accessed across the bank’s network.
• Process documents. An employee at the central office uses Quick Fields to process the scanned images from the branch offices.
• Verify documents. Quality assurance operators verify each document in the repository. Laserfiche Workflow routes verified documents to their final destination, while documents with issues are routed to an “Issues Remaining” folder. (Once the issues are resolved, QA operators change a template field to indicate that the status of the documents has been verified, and they are routed appropriately.)
• File documents. Documents are filed to their final locations in the central Laserfiche content repositories and remain there for archival and retrieval purposes.

“Laserfiche has brought greater efficiency and consistency to the way we handle content across our branch network,” says Chui. “Quick Fields reduces the amount of manual data processing necessary, and Workflow ensures that our employees don’t have an opportunity to do anything with the scanned documents that is outside of our approved and compliant policies and procedures.”

She continues, “Audit Trail keeps track of what our administrators are doing, along with the Laserfiche rights and privileges they’re granting to various employees. And the Records Management module allows us to easily adhere to our clearly-defined policy for records retention, which in turn helps with e-discovery.”

Future Plans

Although Nara Bank currently uses Laserfiche for deposits, loans, HR and some general archival for the legal, IT and procurement departments, it plans to continue rolling the system out across all departments enterprise-wide.

“Before we implemented Laserfiche, the bank was completely paper-based,” says Chui. “Ultimately, all of our paper-based processes will take place within Laserfiche, which provides centralized control over content and specialized workflows for each department’s business needs.”

Overall, Chui believes that Laserfiche has given Nara Bank a cost-effective and compliant way to keep important client information safe and secure. “Laserfiche is an affordable, flexible and user-friendly system that goes a long way in facilitating compliance.”

“For us, there’s a real link between operations and compliance,” explains Flourry.

The Need for Cost-Effective Compliance

This link between clunky compliance processes and operations highlighted existing operational challenges – and what they were costing the firm. Before Laserfiche, internal audits were only performed annually, which meant items could sit for a year before being reviewed. “We were spending a small fortune mailing documents back and forth,” adds Flourry. “We spent way too much time trying to figure out where something was in the process.”

Rehmann’s IT department was often backlogged with requests to make network drives at various offices available to compliance supervisors to access documents. “It was costly in terms of the amount of time support staff spent answering these requests,” says Technology Coordinator Katie Skoczylas.

That’s when the firm’s Chief Compliance Supervisor, Nancy Walls, recognized the need to centralize the firm’s information. With Walls’ encouragement, Flourry started researching document management and discovered Laserfiche through a “Technology Tools for Today” conference.

Through online Webinars, Patrick Welsch of Wisconsin-based Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital, Inc., showed Flourry and Skoczylas how Laserfiche could not only solve the firm’s paper issues through an integration with its Junxure CRM system, but also how it could automate and streamline costly business processes, including compliance, new account processing and auditing. Says Flourry, “At first it’s how to get rid of the filing cabinets. But then you see that you can take a document and track it and approve it and the ideas just start to snowball.”

The firm put together an internal review panel drawn from administrative support, advisors, compliance and operations staff to consider their options, and eventually chose Laserfiche. “We were able to show how Laserfiche would be embraced and used by everyone – not just one or two people,” says Flourry. “This really helped us when it came time to go to the board to ask for the big check.”

The Importance of Integration

Rehmann purchased Laserfiche in 2007 and immediately set out to image-enable the firm’s CRM, Junxure. “Integration is so important to us, I can’t emphasize it enough. It’s one of the first things we look at when considering new software, and frankly, we’ve found many programs claim they’ll integrate with Junxure, but they really don’t,” Flourry says.

Cities Digital developed an integration so staff can access documents stored in Laserfiche by just clicking a button in the familiar Junxure interface. “The link between Junxure and Laserfiche is seamless, which is what makes it so valuable,” says Flourry. “It’s simple enough that it doesn’t overwhelm our advisors, but complex enough to do everything we need.”

“Our advisors don’t want to know the fancy stuff in background just to find a copy of a letter, they just want to click on a button to open a client file,” Skoczylas adds. “But we like knowing when you move a document in Laserfiche to the client folder structure, it’s immediately available in Junxure.”

While the Junxure integration would take care of key content management concerns, Workflow showed Flourry and Skoczylas the real value of Laserfiche content management.

Automating Compliance Logs: X’ing the Excel File

“Right away we started using Workflow for our correspondence, checks and securities logs,” Skoczylas says. “The Workflow Designer is so out of the box, anybody can create a workflow – you have these icons, you drag and drop, it’s done. It’s not something you have to wait six months to get implemented – it affects the user immediately.”

The effect was immediate when it came to automating the compliance department’s check log. “We used to have to make two copies of a check, then have 25 support staff from different regions cutting and pasting information into a single Excel file,” Skoczylas explains. Now staff scan checks into Laserfiche, eliminating both the two copies and the Excel file itself – and a daily process that took between 5-10 minutes per check. “With Workflow, the check log literally creates itself. It takes staff less than a minute – all they have to do is scan in the checks and the compliance supervisors can review them right from Laserfiche.”

The same goes for the 400 or so pieces of correspondence supervisors need to review every month, which compliance supervisors approve with a digital signature. Using the “Digital Signature Kit” from Cities Digital, “the compliance supervisor looks it up, highlights it, signs and dates it with a time stamp,” says Skoczylas.

Besides compliance, Workflow is also used to automate new account processing. Again, forms that used to spend weeks in the mail, sitting in piles on desks awaiting approval signatures now move automatically once a compliance supervisor’s single click approves them.

Return on Information

Three years since implementation, Flourry sees repurposing staff time as the biggest benefit of using Laserfiche. “We’ve brought on four new advisors in the last year but have not had to bring on any new administrative staff, so just in that respect, we’ve realized our ROI,” she says. “Our executives may not care how easy the Laserfiche file structure is, but when you tell them your administrative staff can do something in 20 minutes that used to take four hours, they can appreciate that.”

“I see so much value in how quickly and easily we can pull data out,” adds Skoczylas. “I had a request for discretionary agreements from all 13 offices, which used to take me weeks to put together. With Laserfiche, I just ran a report and sent them. That was a big moment for me.”

Having Laserfiche has also freed up Rehmann’s IT department to be more proactive. “Laserfiche has definitely alleviated the small things getting lost in the shuffle. Things like setting up a new user or an associate changing positions, now we can do all that from the central admin console right away– it’s not two weeks out anymore,” Skoczylas explains. “We can actually brainstorm and implement more workflows and think of more ways to utilize the software.”

For instance, Skoczylas developed an auto-naming tool that automatically names new documents once templates are applied. “It sounds small, but people used to set aside a day to get caught up on filing, so that’s huge,” Flourry says.

Flourry notes that having Laserfiche has also made the firm more competitive. “We’ve grown by merging with small firms, and one of the things that sells us is that we have these great business processes in place,” she says.

Prepared for the Coming Compliance Tsunami

Nowhere have these business process improvements been more valuable than in speeding up audits. “We had an audit scheduled to take three days, and it took less than half a day. We sat the auditors down with a terminal and said ‘Here’s everything you need from all our offices,’” Flourry says. “We look at it like, the less time the auditors are in your office, the fewer problems they’re going to find.”

Skoczylas believes that as time goes on, a bigger and bigger part the workday will be spent keeping up with increased compliance demands. “You hear about the compliance tsunami, and it’s coming this way. You’re not either not going to have the time to service your clients or you’re going to have to hire an outside firm. Or you can get Laserfiche.”

“I think right now, with all the change in our industry and loss of client confidence, the most important thing a firm can do is show how prompt and proactive it can be adapting, and for us Laserfiche is a big part of that,” Flourry adds. “We’ve seen other firms and we’re a step ahead of the game.”

As Renaissance staff explain, when an advisor is spending time searching through paperwork, that’s less time he or she has to focus on what the firm is known for: managing securities and investment plans, offering quality advisory services and helping with small business planning. “The more time advisors spend finding paperwork, the less time they have to spend building client relationships. We’re constantly trying to find ways to streamline processes so they don’t have to spend time doing administrative tasks.”

By implementing a Laserfiche enterprise content management system, Renaissance has easily helped its advisors to become more productive, by enabling advisors and staff to organize and manage account information and records quickly and securely. Before implementing Laserfiche, when a client wanted to modify their portfolio, an advisor would need to leave their desk, go downstairs to a storage room, locate the client’s paperwork, dig it out of the file cabinet, and then finally return to their desks to start making the necessary changes. Now, with Laserfiche, when a client calls, the advisor can immediately access account information and instantly satisfy information requests.

The result is a win-win: Renaissance’s advisors are more productive and clients are satisfied with faster, more comprehensive service.

Ease-of-Use Ensures 98% Success Rate

When Renaissance implemented Laserfiche ten years ago, the company only had 40 employees. Today, over 150 employees—including 100 advisors—use the system.

When Laserfiche was first implemented, the Team Services department held several large training classes in each of Renaissance’s three offices, as well as several one-on-one sessions, to get everybody comfortable with the system. Thanks to Laserfiche’s ease-of-use and Renaissance’s one-size-doesn’t-necessarily-fit-all training strategy, system adoption has been impressive.

Renaissance reports a 98% success rate with advisors switching from paper to Laserfiche. Some advisors still wanted their paper files, but staff believe that “Laserfiche is so easy to use that they’ve almost all adopted it. It’s a very user-friendly system.”

Laserfiche Lessens Compliance Risks

Renaissance’s move to Laserfiche made sense not only based on the time it took to work with paper, but also the compliance risks that came with it. The variety of services Renaissance provides led to competing compliance requirements with FINRA, SEC and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, as well as HIPAA. And when advisors met with clients, any notes they wrote down the firm was required to keep. With 100 advisors, that added up to a lot of paperwork.

Other paper-based processes included:

• Stock trading, which required trader tickets to be captured and stored on a daily basis.
• The new application process, which involved multiple forms.
• Internal employee documentation, including FINRA and SEC licensing files.
• Compliance department documents, including internal examinations.
• Quarterly investment reviews, including reports and advisors’ notes.

Since implementing Laserfiche, Audit Trail provides an extra layer of security. With Audit Trail, administrators easily track any modification of data stored in the Laserfiche repository, watermark sensitive documents and log any unsuccessful attempts to perform an action on a document. Audit Trail Reporter then filters, sorts and graphs audited data via a Web-based Audit Trail page which can be saved for later retrieval or sharing with others. Thanks to Laserfiche, audits that used to take days now take hours.

Staying Ahead of the Game

Based on the time and resource savings of Laserfiche, Renaissance staff believe it’s not a question of “if” other firms follow Renaissance’s lead, but “when.”

“We’re here to get in the game and stay a step ahead. The whole concept of streamlining your workflow and having your information centralized is the future of financial services.”

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.”

ASI has long recognized the business benefits of technology, having installed a competing document management system in 2001 to manage insurance applications. According to Vice President J.T. Perry, the old system performed admirably, but lacked the functionality to support future business growth. “At first,” he says, “we just wanted to image insurance applications and index them by the applicants’ account numbers. Our previous system worked fine for that, but it didn’t promote extra efficiency.”

Indeed, just inputting information into the system required two full-time staff members, devoted to scanning documents one at a time. Furthermore, ASI anticipated the need to assign additional metadata to documents, in case a staff member didn’t have an applicant’s account number handy. “We couldn’t tag documents with information like the applicant’s name or which agent signed them up,” Perry explains. “This restricted search capabilities and hindered development of any kind of workflow automation.”

The problems weren’t limited to inefficiency, either. “Our old system didn’t have very many built-in compliance features, because it was developed before Sarbanes-Oxley, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and other regulations were enacted,” Perry adds.

Ultimately, compliance was the impetus for switching to Laserfiche. After three months of due diligence failed to yield any results, ASI found their answer close to home. ”Our sister corporation, NFP Securities, Inc., has a large Laserfiche installation, and they face many of the same compliance issues as us,” Perry says. “They suggested we take a closer look at Laserfiche, because it works so well for them. We measured Laserfiche against many of the same compliance metrics that NFP uses, and it stood up better than anything we’d seen.”

While some first-time Laserfiche users need time to warm up to their new systems, Perry did so without hesitation—and so did ASI staff. Laserfiche brought them many new features, such as redaction tools, e-mailing directly from Laserfiche and drag-and-drop e-mail archival. “Previously,” Perry says, “we had to print e-mails, then scan them back in—which is really pretty silly, when you think about it.”

In addition to eliminating unnecessary scanning, ASI have made the remaining scanning much more efficient by using Quick Fields to automatically index imaged insurance applications. Staff simply sort documents by type, then insert separator sheets between the document stacks before loading them into the scanner. Using Zone OCR, Quick Fields reads the contents of the separator sheet to determine where to index the scanned documents.

Since the company’s founding in 1990, ASI’s proprietary software systems have become the backbone of their administrative services—and integration with Laserfiche has only made them more powerful. Because most insurance applications are handwritten, staff must read their contents and apply metadata manually. But now, when they enter information into their primary insurance software, the integration automatically applies that information to newly-scanned documents as Laserfiche template fields. This eliminates the need to enter the same information twice and gives staff more ways to search for the documents they need.

It’s a fairly simple integration—and such simplicity is part of what makes Laserfiche so attractive to ASI’s IT department. “Laserfiche is very powerful,” Perry says, “but it’s also very simple, from both a user and a technical perspective. We only needed six or seven hours to complete the integration. A colleague and I sat down and knocked it out—it was amazing.” Perry looks forward to further integrating the two systems so that staff can search the Laserfiche repository from their primary-use applications.

They’ll also use Workflow to automate their business processes—which would have been next to impossible with their old software. “Currently,“ says Perry, “after data entry’s complete, documents go right to their final destination. We’ll configure Workflow to route the new documents into our quality assurance process first.” ASI’s Laserfiche reseller has helped them set up the workflow, which they’ll enter into production within the next six months.

Because Quick Fields captures documents to the Laserfiche repository right away, staff can provide more responsive client service. As Perry explains: “If an insurance agent comes in and asks, ‘Where is my application in the process?’, we can tell them right away. Before Laserfiche, staff literally ran around looking through stacks of newly received documents.”

Members of the insurance industry are subject to rigorous audits from a variety of governing organizations, and ASI is no exception. That’s why Audit Trail plays such a big role in their compliance strategy. “We audit just about everything,” Perry says, “so that we can prove to auditors that we’re doing things right.” In addition to establishing granular security measures to prevent document deletion, ASI also meets recordkeeping requirements by publishing archived documents to read-only media using Laserfiche Plus.

Laserfiche administrative reporting tools also prove useful for tracking staff activity, through each stage of application processing. Moreover, ASI have started monitoring efficiency gains by tracking how many checks they process daily. While these metrics have only been in place for a short while, early returns indicate that Laserfiche has provided an excellent ROI. A part-time staff member now handles the scanning that formerly required two full-time employees. In labor costs alone, ASI have nearly recouped their Laserfiche investment, and Perry says they’ll do so completely within the year.

Perry projects further system expansion in the near future. The premiums accounting department is starting to process checks and payment stubs using Laserfiche, and Perry is interested in Checkmation, the electronic check processing add-on to Laserfiche that’s available from the Professional Developer Partnership program. Eventually, they’d like to submit checks to the bank electronically. And the policy issuing and fulfillment department is eager to automate the processes of creating and distributing those familiar policy information packets.

In the meantime, though, Perry and company are content with the new efficiency that Laserfiche has brought. “Laserfiche has given us everything we need,” he says. “It’s simple, it’s powerful and it’s secure.”

• Faster audits.
• Streamlined lending.
• Improved business continuity planning.
• More efficient processes for opening new accounts.
• A 33% reduction in hard copy document production and an 85% reduction in paper storage.

Original Pain Points: Data Storage and Accessibility

When Tato Munoz joined D.L. Evans as IT director in 1998, one of the first challenges he set out to tackle was the bank’s approach to data storage. “With the incredible amount of information we had, keeping everything accessible and knowing where it was all located at any given time was difficult,” he says.

At first, the bank considered simply finding a more efficient way to manage its paper-based documents. However, as Munoz explains, “That wasn’t really an option because we were filling up our secure storage facilities pretty fast.” At the time, the bank’s storage space included a 20×13 room, a 12×12 vault and an off-site warehouse. According to Munoz, “Keeping track of what was due for disposition, finding it in that crowded warehouse and then shredding it all was a nightmare.”

In addition to the headache associated with storing paper records, Munoz knew that paper was a frighteningly fragile medium, and he wanted to ensure that records would be accessible even in the face of tragedy or natural disaster. “If we gave documents to an auditor and he got into a car crash and the documents were destroyed, we had no back-ups,” he says. “It would have been extremely detrimental to our business.”

To break the bank’s reliance on paper records without breaking the IT budget, Munoz began investigating enterprise content management solutions.

Pioneering Laserfiche within a Banking Environment

It was September 15, 1904, when a group of enthusiastic and dedicated pioneer businessmen led by D. L. Evans met to organize and open the first bank in Cassia County, Idaho. But it was nearly a hundred years later that Tato Munoz brought that same pioneering spirit to the bank’s approach to content management.

“Back when we were evaluating content management systems, there were no other banks using Laserfiche,” says Munoz. “I saw what government, education and healthcare customers were doing with it, though, and I knew that we could realize the same benefits.”

According to Munoz, the deciding factors in selecting Laserfiche were reliability, security and ease of use. Chief among these, however, was ease of use. “It was clear that Laserfiche was very easy to implement and use,” says Munoz. “And now we have 10 years of experience to back that up!”

Streamlining Lending

When it came time to deploy the new Laserfiche content management system, D.L. Evans started with its consumer loan department, where loan packets routinely numbered 500 pages and frequently had to be photocopied as many as 20 times.

Originally, the bank planned to focus on converting loan applications and supporting documents into an electronic format on a day-forward basis, only back scanning about a year’s worth of files. It wasn’t long, however, before D.L. Evans decided to scan and store all existing loan records in Laserfiche. “Once we started processing our paperwork, everything was so quick and easy that we decided to go all the way back,” says Munoz. “We also extended our deployment into the commercial loan department pretty fast.”

Today, lending documents are generated electronically at the branch locations and captured into Laserfiche using Snapshot, which creates TIFF images of electronic documents for long-term archival—and eliminates the need to print paper documents in order to scan them into the system. Missing information, along with supporting paper documents, is later scanned into the system at the head office.

The bank has one centralized Laserfiche repository, which is critical for ensuring that staff from different branches can access and review lending materials at any time.

According to Munoz, “What used to be an extremely time-consuming, cumbersome process is now fast and easy, especially on the document retention side.” He adds, “We used to store one year’s worth of lending documents in a 12×12 vault. With Laserfiche, electronic document retention is unlimited, and our vault has been freed up to hold seven years’ worth of titles, which must be stored in a physical format per the FDIC.”

Expanding Laserfiche throughout the Organization

Building on the success of Laserfiche within the consumer and commercial lending departments, D.L. Evans soon rolled the system out to departments enterprise-wide, including:

• New Accounts, where staff streamlines document capture for 258 different types of documents, including signature cards, CD applications and ATM requests, using Quick Fields.
• Tellers, who automatically access client documentation from the Laserfiche repository through an integration with EZTeller, the bank’s branch automation software.
• Human Resources, where staff uses Laserfiche to securely manage confidential employee information.
• A/R and A/P, whose staff tracks and stores incoming and outgoing invoices.

When asked whether there have been any issues with user adoption, Munoz laughs and replies, “Yeah, we’ve got a little problem with adoption: Once people see Laserfiche and how easy it is to access information that’s in the system, they want to use it for more and more things. Our problem is that people like it too much!”

In fact, over the past year, the bank implemented Quick Fields in response to the new account desk’s requests to streamline its processes by automating data capture and eliminating the need to populate template fields manually. With 258 different types of forms brought into the system via both Snapshot and manual scanning, “the new account desk uses Quick Fields extensively,” says Munoz. “They run approximately 450 Quick Fields sessions every night on all kinds of documents, including signature cards, CD applications, ATM requests and so on.”

For tellers, Laserfiche has become a significant part of their daily business processes due to an integration with EZTeller, the bank’s branch automation software. EZTeller links ups with Laserfiche, automatically pulling up relevant documents stored in the repository so that customer service is faster and more efficient. HR staff, meanwhile, particularly appreciates the ability to easily and automatically redact confidential employee information using Laserfiche’s secure black-out and white-out redactions. Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable digitize all of their invoices, making them simultaneously accessible to multiple people and easier to keep track of.

Laserfiche has also shored up D.L. Evans’ data retention and compliance policies. And it’s cut down the time it takes to perform external FDIC audits and internal audits by approximately 50%. “We give our auditors encrypted USB drives with all of the electronic documentation they need to review, so they can complete most of their work off-site,” explains Munoz.

“Audits used to take three to four weeks,” he continues. “Now they take two weeks at the most.”

In terms of security and disaster recovery, Munoz says that all of the bank’s information “is encrypted and backed up to disk. Laserfiche is mirrored on an external drive that we pull out once a week and store offsite as an encrypted drive. The system’s images and SQL database are also mirrored and continually sent out to another location via the network. I never worry about security, and I never worry about business continuity anymore, either.”

With ten years of savings and streamlined processes in multiple departments under its belt, the bank is now considering adding Laserfiche Workflow to its arsenal for improving institutional efficiency.

From a Supporting Application to a Critical One

Overall, using Laserfiche has “changed the way we do business,” Munoz explains. “It’s changed our mindset and streamlined all of our processes. In the past, people used to think, ‘If I don’t have it on paper, it’s no good.’ That way of thinking has totally shifted, and now it’s more like: ‘If it’s not electronic, it’s not as accessible, it’s not as affordable, it’s not as secure.”

A happy early adopter of Laserfiche content management in the banking space, Munoz concludes, “Laserfiche went from being a supporting application in a couple of departments to being a critical one enterprise-wide. It’s a great product and we’ve been extremely satisfied.”

That meant finding a way to help staff keep up with processing the 50,000 pages of statements that arrived in the mail each month, adding to the 20 years of back files spread out over 400 square feet of file cabinet space that had already spilled over into two storage lockers filled with statements and account records.

“We decided to go paperless,” says Mike Adams, Cambridge’s Director of Information Technology, who turned to Laserfiche reseller Gordon Flesch Company to help tailor a solution that could capture the up to 50,000 pages and merge them seamlessly with the firm’s own business processes and existing information systems. “When they recommended Laserfiche, we decided to go for it.”

“Going for it,” meant capturing the maximum amount of information per page at the point of entry, and that required configuring Laserfiche Quick Fields to accommodate the 100 different formats of broker statements arriving every month. Adams and Cambridge’s IT developers used the Laserfiche SDK, which, with its powerful integration tools, sample C# and Visual Basic.NET source code, allowed them to create custom connections between Lotus Notes/Domino, the firm’s CRM, and Quick Fields. As Adams explains, once a document is scanned into Quick Fields, Zone OCR and Pattern Matching match it using one of the 90 broker and bank statement sessions. “Quick Fields recognizes the broker account number on each document and populates the Laserfiche template fields with information from Lotus Notes/Domino and our portfolio management  software,” he says. Adams’ team also created custom scanner profiles to use for each broker’s forms that would optimize scanning on documents with, say, background anti-tampering lines or colors that would otherwise reduce OCR accuracy.

The effect of this enhanced automated capture was pronounced and immediate. Cambridge was already required to reconcile incoming statements with their internal accounting system within 14 days; just processing the incoming statements could take up to three days. But thanks to the custom connections Adams’ IT team built for Quick Fields, this now could all be done in a single day. “We get our statements processed and viewable in Laserfiche in less time than it used to take to sort the paper before,” Adams says. “It used to take up to three days with our old information management system, now they’re in the database and the information’s in use the same day it arrives. To date we have scanned 1.8 million pages.”

Cambridge has recently upgraded to Quick Fields 8 to turn what was a multi-step process into a single one during an actual Quick Fields session. “We want to take full advantage of the new real-time capabilities for database matching,” he says. “We want to move custom scripting out of Quick Fields and use Quick Fields Agent to extract data as documents are being scanned at the point of capture instead of post scanning.”

Besides providing better service to its customers, Cambridge has proven itself a valuable contributor to the Laserfiche Community. Adams notes some of the firm’s staff are members of the new GFC Laserfiche User Group in the Columbus area. Adams adds that Cambridge will be publishing its Quick Fields template files for other registered investment advisors to use, with details and specifications available at his class in the Industry Solutions track at this year’s Laserfiche Institute Conference January 11-13 in Los Angeles.

Cambridge is also a member of the Laserfiche Professional Development Partnership (PDP) program. “Gordon Flesch Company suggested that there was a demand among their clients for more custom programs,” explains Adams. “We plan to keep developing these tools to integrate Laserfiche directly into the menus of applications such as Great Plains and Auto CAD. We have everything we need,” he says, “but we are looking to help other Laserfiche users. Everyone wins.”

No one as much as Cambridge staff themselves. Staffers can process 35-60 pages a minute, with an error rate of less than 0.5%, and whatever errors do occur are automatically corrected through a series of tools built to correct common OCR mistakes. Misfiled and lost documents have been reduced to virtually zero. The process is so efficient, the firm has implemented all tasks without additional staff. Additionally, Cambridge has reclaimed 400 square feet of file cabinet space and two storage lockers, since Laserfiche allows for off-site storage backup – meeting SEC and broker dealer contingency plan requirements. The efficiency is so cost-effective, Adams says Cambridge has realized its ROI in less than one year after implementing Laserfiche.

For his part, Adams credits the company’s success so far with being able to take full advantage of the expanded functionality of Quick Fields using the Laserfiche SDK to automate and enhance very unique and important business processes.

“I like that Laserfiche has an SDK available and that it works well. A number of programs don’t have one available,” Adams says. “It’s malleable to all sorts of enterprise applications.”

Kowal Investment Group, LLC is a fee-based financial advisor from Waukesha, WI, that has specialized in financial planning and investment advising for over 35 years. The firm manages nearly $200 million in assets and also hosts a weekly financial advice radio show called “The Retirement Clinic.” But just as baby boomers looking into retirement look to Kowal for advice, Kowal itself began looking to retire its old way of filing paper. “We knew we wanted to move toward the paperless office,” explains Michelle Rossi-Weida, Operations and Compliance Manager for Kowal. “Just in terms of better organization and also the cost savings paying for file space, as well as making people’s jobs easier and more productive.”

For example, she says, an everyday business process like new account opening mandated a flurry of paperwork and duplication, consuming valuable time, space and resources to manage it. “If we had a person opening an account, he would need to fill out a form and then we would copy it; if it was a double-sided form, that meant making two single-sided sheets so we could fax it,” she explains. “Once it was faxable, we would send the forms one at a time to be opened.” Plus, she adds, each file had to be copied at least twice—once for the client and once for the firm’s records. This process created unnecessary duplicates that filled 20 filing cabinets, taking up valuable office space and increasing overhead costs.

At the recommendation of a firm using Laserfiche to manage its information and business processes, Rossi-Weida contacted Patrick Welsch from Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital, Inc. for a demonstration. Working from a short-list of approved vendors handed down by Kowal’s former broker-dealer, Rossi-Weida then whittled it down to four providers, ultimately choosing Laserfiche, she says, for three main reasons: Laserfiche’s ease of integration with ACT!, Kowal’s contact management software; its ease of use; and the fact that the software interface allowed the repository’s folder structure to mimic the filing system firm staff were already used to working with.

One question that did come up in the consideration process was the choice between going with a Web-based hosted solution or a system Kowal would own itself. Rossi-Weida says the fact that the ACT! integration was only an option with the Kowal-owned Laserfiche was a compelling factor. The other reason, says Rossi-Weida, was the peace of mind of knowing the firm’s information was not only safe and secure, but in the firm’s possession. “The biggest issue for us, being an independent firm, is what happens to your information if something happens to that company?” she says. “If something happened to a Web provider whose services we were using, how could we recover that information from them? We feel more secure with the Kowal-owned Laserfiche.”

But as Kowal staff soon found, a system that offers sophisticated security doesn’t have to be complicated for the user. Cities Digital spent a day training the staff and with that, they were off. “We were struck by how easy Laserfiche was to use and how easily we were able to duplicate our old file structure,” says Rossi-Weida. “That was really nice.”

Cities Digital’s LaserACT integration allows users to browse, scan, import and export the client folders stored in Laserfiche from within a tab inside ACT!, which made implementation relatively simple because employees were already familiar with the ACT! interface. Before Laserfiche, whenever an advisor needed information from a file he or she would need to go into ACT! to look up the client record and then ask the client service team to retrieve the paper file to get the rest of the information. Now the advisors can click on a button in ACT! that pulls information from the Laserfiche repository and view all their clients’ information instantly. What once took five to ten minutes of staff time is now done at each advisor’s desk in a matter of seconds. “It’s so simple, even an advisor can do it!” laughs Rossi-Weida.

Having Laserfiche also makes Kowal 100% compliant with SEC regulations, a major concern for firms facing increased regulatory oversight and visits from auditors. Audit Trail allows administrators to regularly review user activity, assess the effectiveness of internal control mechanisms and demonstrate regulatory compliance. Using Laserfiche also expedites audits by producing reports of all the actions taken on a particular document. “Laserfiche makes audits easy,” says Rossi-Weida. “Auditors can come in and sit down at a computer and I don’t have to go grab a bunch of different files. They can just click through everything they want. I think it makes them much more efficient from their standpoint as well.”

Though Rossi-Weida says the firm has yet to face a major audit since implementing Laserfiche, it is reaping the benefits of a progressively paperless environment. “We’ve gotten rid of 20% of our paper processes,” she says. “Before we needed to make two copies of each form so we could send the original to the client. We went from two copies to no copies. It’s great.” She adds the firm will repurpose the space that once housed the filing cabinets into offices for new employees.

In fact, Kowal’s experience with Laserfiche has been so successful, it’s inspired the firm’s new broker-dealer to ask Cities Digital to talk to other advisors. “We were sort of pioneers within the broker-dealer network because they didn’t have a lot of offices that were using electronic storage. They were very impressed,” Rossi-Weida says. “They asked if they could have Cities Digital present to other advisors within the broker dealer.”

Can the “Paper Retirement Clinic” radio show be far behind?

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?”

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.

For Murphy, his previous experience integrating two large broker-dealers had shown how the right technology ultimately leads to success. “If you want to succeed in this business, you’ve got to get great technology,” he says. “Using technology not only defensively, but offensively, is very near and dear to my heart.”

Murphy and Phillip Fournier, Spire’s Chief Operating Officer, went on the offensive and decided to invest in a document management system. They chose Laserfiche not just to manage paper, but also as a tool to cut costs and increase services—which would eventually help recruit both clients and advisors.

Murphy says that, at first, just the idea of a new system and way of doing things intimidated the firm’s advisors. “How many people have said ‘paperless’ in front of advisors and had them say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’? That’s where we started,” he admits.

But, once apprehensive advisors, and more importantly, their sales and service assistants, began using Laserfiche and saw how easy and efficient it was, implementation and initial roll-out went smoothly.

National Sales Director Paul Murphy

Murphy credits the training his staff received from the firm’s Laserfiche reseller, One Source/ADI, for easing the implementation process. “I can’t say enough good things about the training. The results are great.” In the 18 months since the firm implemented Laserfiche, Spire has scanned documents from approximately 80% of their offices – with nearly all of their advisors and staff using the system regularly.

“The goal,” says Murphy, “is to apply technology to make work easier. Efficient process flow obviously increases efficiency. If everyone is more efficient, they’re happier. If they’re happier, they’re more productive. If they’re more productive, you’re more profitable.”

With Laserfiche, Murphy immediately noticed that Service Assistants and back office personnel were able to respond to client inquiries much more efficiently. Laserfiche is the way to make them more productive,” says Murphy. “We’re very happy that our staff is better able to process workflow and therefore better able to support our Consultants.”

And the benefits extend to firm staff preparing for audits. Instead of digging through storage boxes and file cabinets for a few days, Spire staff are able to find information in seconds. Laserfiche also helps the firm comply with SEC requirements, as they use Audit Trail to record any and all transactions and communications that take place in the Laserfiche repository.

“We’ve already been through an SEC audit with Laserfiche in place,” says Murphy. “And it was a dream.”

The Power of Recruiting with Technology

In addition to saving filing time and storage space, Spire Investment Partners found a unique way to use Laserfiche: to recruit new advisors. When sitting down with a broker who is considering going independent, Murphy demonstrates Spire’s efficiency with Laserfiche, to everyone’s amazement. “The power of having this technology is just overwhelming. It’s been an absolutely terrific resource for us,” he says.

Murphy adds that having a virtual office capability is a huge recruiting advantage. “It increases the value of your company and makes it that much more attractive.” According to Murphy, the advisors he’s demonstrated Laserfiche for are astounded at how easily it streamlines account opening, compliance review, archiving and regulatory processes. “It means we have a tremendous advantage,” he says. “Laserfiche is yet another way that we differentiate ourselves from our competitors.”

For advisors who are looking to move to the independent space, Murphy points out the advantages smaller firms with Laserfiche have over larger firms, including increased customer service and satisfaction. “Moving assets to the smaller, more nimble, more agile independent space can deliver every investment solution needed,” says Murphy. “ In our case, the client will have access to better, faster, and more updated technology that allows you to run your business better and faster with increased efficiency.”

For advisors who are considering going independent, or for broker-dealers who are investigating the possibilities of technology to enhance services and ultimately recruiting, Murphy suggests taking a look at the white papers and case studies available on the Laserfiche Website. For recruiting, he also suggests highlighting the increased efficiency, increased profitability, and the ease of complying with regulations that Laserfiche brings—and that makes the whole process easier. “Ultimately, it’s a profitable transaction. It’s a modest capital investment over a long-term boost, which also keeps you on the straight and narrow when it comes to regulatory issues.”

Murphy offers a simple conclusion. “You can’t recruit in this day and age without technology.”

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.”

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 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.”

Have a headache yet? If not, you probably at least have some sympathy for Rehmann Financial. With 60 associates located throughout Michigan and Florida, the rapidly growing wealth management firm faced a formidable information management challenge. But with Laserfiche document and business process management at the heart of its technology platform, Rehmann Financial has standardized business processes, enabled effortless information exchange and, within just a few months, achieved significant cost savings over their former paper-based business model.

The challenge

Operations Manager Amy Flourry oversees Rehmann’s myriad wealth management efforts. “We’re very diverse, with many different specialists,” she says. “When you put all of us together, you get a lot of different ways of working.”

Rehmann’s kaleidoscopic business interests make it simple for clients to handle all their wealth management needs with one firm—but aren’t so conducive to managing operations cohesively.

“It was difficult to remain consistent,” Flourry continues. “We had local network drives where we could share some information, but they became a huge burden on our IT department to keep making different drives available in different locations.”

As often happens with firms spread out over regional offices, paper-based processes were hampering inter-office communication. “Our compliance department is located at our home office in Lansing [MI],” she explains, “but with staff in other offices, they needed to be able to do audits, review paperwork and perform quality control for multiple locations.”

Rehmann’s advisors also suffered from limitations on the accessibility of information. “Our advisors frequently meet with clients on-site rather than at the office,” she continues. “But regardless of location, they still need access to their client files and our marketing materials.”

Then there was the ubiquitous problem of dwindling storage space. “We’re growing so fast,” remarks Flourry, “and we were adding offices and filing cabinets to maintain our paperwork. Never mind the problems with accessing information—it’s just not cost-effective.”

The choice

Solving a broad-reaching challenge required input from each corner of the organization. So Rehmann assembled a team of administrative, compliance and IT staff, along with advisors of varying technical skill, to develop a detailed feature matrix for potential solutions. The top priorities were integration with Junxure, the firm’s CRM software, ease of use and customizability.

Operations Assistant Katie Rambo, who administers the firm’s numerous software systems, needed a way to centralize all of Rehmann’s information—while working with all of its daily-use applications.

“We have a saying around here,” she notes, “‘If it’s not in Junxure, it didn’t happen.’ So integration with Junxure was very important to us.”

And how did Laserfiche fare in that respect, compared to other solutions Rehmann considered? “Very well,” she laughs.

Laserfiche also stood out for its ease of use. “We knew we’d never be able to obtain buy-in from our staff if the systems weren’t easy to use,” remarks Flourry.

Adds Rambo, “Laserfiche looks and feels a lot like Windows, so we knew it would be familiar to our advisors. That has also made for a smooth transition from paper for our support staff.”

Rehmann was equally comfortable with its Laserfiche reseller, Cities Digital, Inc. “They really know the wealth management industry,” Flourry says, “and that knowledge was very important to us.”

After narrowing down the list of potential software solutions to three, the multi-departmental task force looked at the feature matrix and reached a unanimous conclusion. “We held a group vote,” Flourry says, “and everybody felt like Laserfiche would work best for us.”

The change

With just a few months of Laserfiche use under their belts, Rehmann staff have already made impressive strides. As Flourry puts it, “We have so many different advisors and professional staff and administrative staff, all with different ways of learning and levels of technical expertise. Overall, I’ve been really impressed at how quickly people have gotten used to it.”

Rehmann’s compliance department has seen the most immediate, discernible benefits since installing Laserfiche. As Flourry explains, “They’re 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.”

Laserfiche Workflow has also simplified and accelerated client agreement approval. Staff at remote offices immediately scan client agreements into Laserfiche, upon which Workflow routes them for approval. Then it’s on to the OSJ, where they’re electronically signed. Finally, the agreements are routed to the home office. If the agreement is rejected, it enters another workflow for reprocessing. It’s a dramatic improvement from stamps, envelopes and wet signatures, and it’s helped drastically reduce the amount of paper involved in the firm’s operations. “It’s definitely more efficient,” Rambo says. “Instead of sending documents through the mail, everything gets routed through Laserfiche Workflow.“

But what about the thousands of paper client files generated pre-Laserfiche? Flourry and Rambo have cultivated a playful competition between regional offices to encourage back-file conversion. Flourry explains, “We might say to our Troy office, ‘Hey, the Grand Rapids office already has all their client agreements scanned into Laserfiche—are you going to let them beat you like that?’

“We’re incredibly competitive,” she laughs, “but in a good way. A productive way”.

Thanks to this encouragement, and an enterprise-wide enthusiasm for increasing efficiency, Laserfiche has caught on like wildfire among staff. But Laserfiche isn’t just popular with current Rehmann associates. “It’s highly attractive to other firms thinking about merging with us,” Rambo notes, “and to new and prospective staff. They love to see that we have processes and best practices in place, and that we have a progressive stance on implementing new technology.”

Then there’s a less alluring, but equally important benefit—the support of senior management for future technology initiatives. “Once they saw Laserfiche’s cost savings and return on investment,” Flourry says, “they were all over it. They’ve been incredibly supportive of going paperless.”

With their Laserfiche implementation experience fresh in their minds, Flourry and Rambo have a few words of advice to share with other advisory firms considering going paperless.

“At first, it can be a challenge to get people on board with using a new system,” Rambo says. “That’s why you really need to get input from people throughout your office. By bringing in others’ opinions, some really great ideas will emerge.

“Also, be flexible. We approached implementation expecting certain issues, but we ran into a completely different set of problems—not worse, just different.”

Flourry has this to say about taking the paperless plunge: “Just rip the Band-Aid off! The longer you wait to go paperless, the more work it takes. If you can adopt your system early on, when you have a manageable work load, it makes things so much easier.”

And despite Rehmann’s success so far, Flourry admits to having one regret. “I wish we’d done this sooner,” she laments. “If I could do it over again, I would have done this three or four years ago.”

In addition to providing estate, tax and investment planning services, PPS is also an office of supervisory jurisdiction (OSJ) of a major national broker-dealer, supervising 37 registered representatives. With a combined 40 years’ worth of account information to manage, it’s easy to imagine the mountainous paperwork that PPS had accumulated. For Business Processor Aimee Ellis, OSJ paperwork alone had become overwhelming. “We have to keep virtually every piece of paper related to each client,” she says, “so we had 24 cabinets full of paper files.”

PPS’ broker-dealer recognizes the challenges of managing so much information, and provides OSJs with a proprietary document management system. PPS could have easily chosen this system, avoiding implementation and maintenance costs altogether. But maintaining compliance—and staff sanity—required a system that could keep OSJ files separate from agreements, correspondence and reviews related to PPS’ other services. It wasn’t until attending a virtual seminar given by another firm facing a similar situation that Director of Operations Cindy Peckham saw the ideal solution to PPS’ problem.

Director of Operations Cindy Peckham

“When we saw what this firm was doing with Laserfiche, it was a real ‘lightbulb’ moment,” remembers Peckham. “We turned to each other and said, ‘These people are in the exact same situation, and they’re doing exactly what we want to do.’”

The key to maintaining the separation between OSJ and independent business activities was the Laserfiche platform’s granular security controls. By creating unique Laserfiche templates for each document type, then defining user-specific template viewing permissions, PPS ensures that staff from one business can’t view the other’s documents. Because Laserfiche access rights are based on Windows® Authentication, implementing and enforcing these security controls has been especially easy.

Dividing the two interests isn’t just a smart business practice; it also makes complying with industry, state and federal regulations much easier. “During our yearly audit by the broker-dealer, the auditor can sit down at a workstation and search the OSJ documents exclusively,” says Peckham. “Meanwhile, if the state were to request a piece of client correspondence, we’d be able to quickly retrieve the precise pages they were looking for.” Naturally, Laserfiche has also helped reduce the physical labor required to produce requested documents.

She has equal confidence in the firm’s disaster recovery strategy. In fact, with regards to compliance, Peckham believes it to be the biggest benefit that Laserfiche has delivered. Federal law mandates that financial services firms be able to resume operations within 48 hours of a disaster. “With Laserfiche,” she explains, “If the building were to burn down, we could be back up and running almost instantly.”

Digitizing active client files has led to a marked improvement in client service. Sondra Perry, administrative assistant, no longer has to keep clients waiting on the phone. “It’s easier and more efficient to fulfill client requests,” she says, “because we can pull up their information right away.” Aimee Ellis can now respond to representatives’ requests more quickly, given that she can retrieve OSJ documents right from her desktop. “In fact,” she says, “it’s faster to bring up documents in Laserfiche than it is to log in to the broker-dealer’s Website and retrieve them there.”

Peckham estimates that 10 to 15% of PPS’ business is now paperless, a figure that includes all new business activity since fully implementing Laserfiche in May 2007. “Whenever new activity occurs in a client file,” she explains, “our staff pull that client’s paper file and scan it into Laserfiche. From that point on, all of that client’s paperwork will be digitized immediately.” Gradually, staff will identify and digitize inactive files as well, until the last truckload of paper files gets driven away for off-site destruction.

When asked for advice on implementing digital document management, PPS staff unilaterally stress the importance of thorough planning, especially with regards to template setup. Says Perry, “If you have your paper-based filing system down pat, Laserfiche can replicate it exactly. That’s the great thing about Laserfiche: It doesn’t force you to change the way you work—it mirrors it instead.”

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.”

“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.”

“He was amazed,” reports John Caso of Alternative Data Imaging of Johnson City, TN, the Laserfiche Value Added Reseller who implemented Laserfiche for Bingham and Hensley early this year. “He was truly impressed with how Laserfiche was improving productivity at Bingham and Hensley.”

Working closely with NFP, Caso and Alternative Data Imaging are now immersed in a phased implementation of Laserfiche United that will eventually touch every level of operations, including member firms. “We are completing the initial phase, which has focused on establishing the basic document imaging and scanning program,” Caso reports. “We are building NFP’s implementation of the Workflow Suite and will proceed methodically to put it into effect.”

In another phase of its Laserfiche implementation, NFP plans to add a Laserfiche WebLink-based repository to its password-protected website to provide member firms with searchable access to support documentation.

For the long term, NFP hopes to be dealing as paperlessly as possible with its member firms down the line, and with the brokerage houses and insurance companies that they work with up the line.

A subsidiary of New York City-based National Financial Partners, NFP and its member firms offer financial services, including financial advice and investment and insurance products, to individuals and corporations.

“We are in our files on a daily basis, and there was no way to easily see the individual files for any given client, and no way to easily separate non-qualified and qualified life insurance files, as dictated by regulations,” says Jeff Bingham. “We were and are solely dedicated to going paperless, but our system was not living up to expectations and was not giving us the solution that we needed.”

Decision makers at Bingham and Hensley became fans of Laserfiche® the minute they saw that its flexible file folder structure could emulate their existing filing system yet still help them solve the problems they faced. They could also store both archival and current client records in the Laserfiche repository, and electronic annotation tools would enable them to make comments on documents and files, just as they would add handwritten notes to paper-bound client files.

In addition to scanning paper documents into the Laserfiche repository, Bingham and Hensley stores proposal records there as well. Now, when they need a specific proposal that was created using one of their other financial planning applications, they can easily access the proposal from a central location—the client’s file in Laserfiche.

Bingham and Hensley’s short term goal was to eliminate their numerous file cabinets and storage boxes. Their long-term goal is to provide more efficient service to their clients, to spend less time looking for files and to more easily comply with government and industry regulations.

“Our Laserfiche reseller took the time to learn our filing system, to understand our specific needs and to assist us in developing an implementation plan that will enable us to realize our goals,” Bingham explains. “Without a doubt, that is one of the keys to successfully ‘going paperless’ in the financial services industry.”

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.”

Since its founding, F&M has experienced steady growth on its way to becoming a leading financial institution in Southern California. Henry Walker, chief executive officer and great-grandson of F&M founder C.J. Walker, saw continued success—and the resultant move to a new building—on the horizon. But with 100 years of success comes 100 years of accumulated manila folders, filing cabinets and banker’s boxes.

The FMB main office, located at 302 Pine Street in Long Beach, has been restored and preserved historically to maintain its 1922 charm.

“We have 22 branches and 26 departments,” Walker says, “so moving to a new building is a major task. We knew we needed to digitize our paper files just to make the move possible.”

A document management system was the logical solution, but there are many systems available. While it didn’t hurt that Laserfiche headquarters is just a stone’s throw from the F&M central office—both organizations call Long Beach, CA, home—Walker says that the major reason for choosing Laserfiche was its long history of helping organizations like his run more efficiently.

“The story of Laserfiche is very impressive,” he says, “as far as what they’ve done to develop their product over the last 20 years, and their list of customers.”

That experience came into play when it came time to scan boxes and boxes of signature cards, background checks, suspicious activity reports, enrollment forms and loan applications that were consuming valuable real estate. Prior to installing Laserfiche, F&M branches needed to either find ever-more creative ways to free up space or rent off-site storage for their paper documents. So far, over half a million pages have been scanned into the Laserfiche repository.

According to Roy Chung, the Laserfiche solutions engineer who’s overseeing the installation, going digital will pay the bank and its customers big dividends, both now and in the long run. “Digitizing these forms will eliminate digging through file cabinets for information—which could take days,” he says. “And by integrating Laserfiche with F&M’s bank management software, both branch and main-office staff will be able to access all these documents from the interface they’re used to working with.”

While some departments are in the midst of back-file conversion projects, others have moved right to day-forward scanning. Walker says that this practice will reduce branches’ operating costs while developing what he calls a “smaller branch model.”

(left to right) Daniel K. Walker, Kenneth G. Walker, and W. Henry Walker

Digitizing all these documents will not only reduce storage space needs, but also improve business processes for the entire organization. Connecting all of F&M’s branch offices to the central office using Web Access will improve communication between branches and promote more holistic customer service.

As Walker explains, “If a customer opens an account at one branch, but ends up doing business at another, all their information will be accessible, no matter where they are. We’ll reduce costs by shortening the time it takes to request information from another branch, and it will promote better record-keeping in general.”

As anyone who’s ever applied for a loan knows, a bank’s lending department is especially prone to paperwork bloat. Between appraisal orders, credit reports, approval statements and mandatory borrower notifications, a paper loan file can be inches thick. For F&M, however, the loan application process will become significantly more compact through the use of Laserfiche Workflow. As Debra Allen, vice president and credit administrator, explains, “No matter which branch takes a loan application, the lending and loan support departments will have instant access to the entire file—no more driving to the main office.

“We have numerous support departments that exchange information throughout the entire loan process,” she elaborates. “These departments work together with the branch staff during the loan application, underwriting and approval processes. Workflow will automatically route this shared information between departments, from the point of loan application through loan closing.”

Laserfiche is well-known for increasing information accessibility. But its security features will ensure all that information’s integrity—a must for any financial institution. The security and compliance departments will rely on Audit Trail to monitor activity in the Laserfiche repository, gaining increased oversight through automated notifications of suspicious activity. Audit Trail’s Web reporting utility will also lower the labor and transportation costs of both internal and external auditing, because auditors will be able to audit branch offices remotely rather than on-site.

Not to be overlooked is Laserfiche’s contribution to F&M’s disaster recovery plan. Notes Walker, “We already had disaster recovery measures in place, but Laserfiche helps to strengthen them. Because customers’ critical documents are stored and backed up securely, we won’t have to salvage paper files or ask customers for new copies of their private information in case of a disaster.”

With the move set to happen this September, F&M is well on the way to establishing a technology-driven culture. “Almost every department will be using Laserfiche—250 to 300 users in all,” Walker reports.

Although F&M is still in the beginning stages of its Laserfiche implementation, the ease of installing their system bodes well for future results. “We put together a Laserfiche task force for this project,” Walker says, “and they’ve found it easy to implement. It’s pretty obvious that we’ll realize both cost savings and customer service improvements in the long run.”

“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.”

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.”

Bank of Scotland International, which is part of the HBOS Group, shares nearly one million customer documents with remote offices on the Isle of Man and Jersey, separated by 500 miles. With a few keystrokes, 225 employees on the islands can instantly access customer information, eliminating the old system of faxing queries between the islands.

Customers on six continents rely on the Bank of Scotland International for a wide variety of financial services, including wealth protection, estate planning, international movement of funds and access to investment opportunities.

Given the level of customer enquiries received daily, and the number of new accounts, Laserfiche was needed to help reduce workers’ reliance on paper and handle customer service faster and more efficiently.

“As we explored various document imaging systems, we knew our choice had to be cost-effective,” says Ranald Caldwell, Bank of Scotland International’s Director and Head of Operations. “Laserfiche will reduce our processing costs, improve disaster recovery and clearly enhance customer service. We forecast a full project payback within two years.”

Viking Office Systems Ltd. on the Isle of Man provided not only the Laserfiche solution, but also extensive training and implementation assistance. Viking officials recently accompanied Caldwell to Laserfiche corporate headquarters in Long Beach, CA, for advanced product training and strategic planning sessions.

“We set up a simple seven-step process to help the Bank of Scotland make the transition from paper-reliant to paper-free,” says Harvey Burgess of Viking. “Laserfiche has a solid reputation as an easy-to-use product. Our specially-designed plan gave employees time to get comfortable with the new software, but we also made sure things moved along efficiently to keep the Bank of Scotland on schedule with their proposed return on investment.”

“The installation of Laserfiche has significantly improved our ability to provide expedited service to our customers,” said Chengwen Zhuo, manager of the Bank of China’s accounting operations in New York. “With Laserfiche, important documents such as letters of credit, contracts, vouchers and checks are scanned and stored as electronic images on our secure network, giving authorized employees immediate access to the information.

In the past, critical documents were stored in file cabinets accessible to only two employees. Long delays could occur as information requests were processed, holding up the execution of important transactions. And messengers were often necessary to transport documents between offices.

According to Zhuo, bank employees learned the Laserfiche system quickly due to its intuitive interface. Now, employees needing access to information to process transactions have access to it on their computer desktop.

Zhuo credited the excellent service of Laserfiche value-added reseller AMI Paperless of Los Angeles for learning the New York offices’ needs and developing priorities for implementation. He said training sessions conducted by AMI were highly efficient and looks forward to evaluating additional Laserfiche modules to deal with other challenges.

Allen Adjamian, Business Development Manager for AMI, says, “Bank of China has reduced paper and linked their Accounting, General Management Office, Clearing, and Loan departments throughout the nation. They are an exciting and forward-thinking company to be partnered with.”

The New York installation follows the successful implementation of Laserfiche at the Bank of China’s west cost offices. Bank of China Los Angeles accounting manager Happy Liu said Laserfiche was selected for its ease of use and ability to meeting rigid banking compliance standards. He praised the excellent service provided by system integrator AMI of Los Angeles.

“From the beginning, we have collaborated with our customers and resellers to make Laserfiche the document imaging software people love to use,” said Nien-Ling Wacker, president and CEO. “The installation by Bank of China, a global financial leader, is gratifying since it shows our efforts are being well-received in the marketplace.”

But after a 12 month review of 32 software packages, Michael Sundberg, Commonwealth’s Due Diligence Officer, recommended Laserfiche to CIO Ed Bell, and the solution has been working well ever since.

Laserfiche Winners Circle VAR Duplitron of Brockton, MA, invited Commonwealth to a seminar in suburban Boston eighteen months ago. Duplitron director Steve Woolner and his team impressed Sundberg immediately. After certifying Laserfiche as compliant with SEC regulations, and reviewing Duplitron’s credentials as an outstanding solution provider, Sundberg agreed that Laserfiche and Duplitron were the right team for Commonwealth.

“My responsibilities include overseeing Commonwealth’s Help Desk, so I know what products are well received in our offices from Maine to Hawaii,” Sundberg says. “Laserfiche was rated by consultant Gartner Group as the kind of product we wanted, and once we saw a demonstration and studied its cost-effectiveness, we decided the fit was right for us.”

Laserfiche enables investment professionals to scan, store and retrieve client records electronically, speeding customer service while remaining compliant with SEC and FDIC records management requirements. Using Laserfiche, financial planners can eliminate expensive filing cabinets and end frustrating searches for missing paper.

“Laserfiche enables our financial planners to communicate with the home office electronically and access client statements, confirmations and other critical paperwork on the Web,” Sundberg says. “This gives the planners more time to actually run their businesses and take care of customers, instead of handling clerical duties.”

Sundberg says Commonwealth advisers appreciate Laserfiche’s ease of use and its non-proprietary file formats, as well as its ability to work with standard scanners and PCs. He adds that competitors’ products required users to buy specialized equipment and save files in formats that might not be accessible in the future. He was also impressed with Duplitron’s plan for implementing the system.

“Ed Bell and Mike Sundberg are sophisticated IT professionals who wanted assurances that their field offices would get the same level of service as headquarters,” Woolner says. “Because Duplitron has developed strong business relationships and friendships with top Laserfiche VARs around the country, I’ve been able to assign installations and follow-up service to them, knowing they’ll be taken care of in the same way as if we have done them ourselves.”

Commonwealth, a six-time Investment Advisor “Broker-Dealer of the Year” winner, is recognized industry-wide for its use of advanced technology to improve customer service and make its independent financial planners more productive. Sundberg appreciates Laserfiche’s Integrators Toolkit, allowing him to tie Laserfiche into other Commonwealth applications.

Laserfiche has aggressively pursued the financial services market in recent years, recognizing that document imaging technology offers broker-dealers a number of key customer service and productivity differentiators. Thousands of financial planners are using Laserfiche worldwide, often from wireless laptops, as they work with clients in their offices and homes.