Iberdrola Renewables is one of North America’s leading providers of structured energy solutions for wholesale and large commercial and industrial customers. With over 9,300 megawatts of renewable energy in operation globally - and more than 2,800 megawatts of that being wind power located in the U.S. - the Portland, OR-based company is currently the world’s leading provider of wind power. Last year, Iberdrola Renewables created 15,000 jobs worldwide, while investing $2.2 billion in wind power in the US alone – up from $1.54 billion in 2007 – to become the second largest provider of wind power in the US since entering the market in 2006.

But the rapid growth of its renewable energy division in the last few years led to challenges managing its documents and records. “With each new energy project, we were increasing the number of relationships with private land owners, commercial suppliers, and government agencies,” explains Sean Malowney, a Senior Business Systems Analyst at the company. “This translated into a growing volume of invoices and contracts.”
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Derek is 27 and has cerebral palsy. He has a two-year college degree, but hasn’t held a steady job since graduation. He struggles to speak and can’t walk. Yet Laserfiche resellers Bolt Document Management gave him a job helping to build electronic document repositories throughout Indiana.

For Bolt and other Laserfiche resellers across the country, Derek and others like him have the right stuff for one of the most onerous tasks in document management: scanning paper files and turning them into electronic images.
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With its Democratic government firmly in place, South Africa has become one of the African nations with promising oil and natural gas reserves that are safe for legitimate exploration. The country has an estimated tens of trillion cubic feet of natural gas underneath its wildernesses—a resource that, properly tapped, could assist in nation building.

So the Petroleum Agency of South Africa (PASA) went on a global sales trip of sorts last year, trying to interest outside oil companies in the country’s natural gas reserves. PASA representatives visited Johannesburg, London, Houston, TX, and Long Beach, CA, and now the agency has plenty of potential investors applying for exploration acreage. The problem, however, was managing all the associated paperwork.
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When Banks Hardwoods, Inc. (BHI) was started in 1985, a single office housed its handful of employees in Elkhart, Indiana. In those days, expansion meant adding a manufacturing facility to kiln dry and plane the premium lumber it supplied to area builders.

Today, Banks Hardwoods has two manufacturing facilities in Michigan, another in Wisconsin, and a sales office in Arkansas employing upwards of 175 people. But as the business grew, says Dana Kennedy, Banks Hardwoods’ Controller, sawdust wasn’t the only wood by-product piling up around the organization.

“All this expansion means a huge amount of paperwork,” she says, “and the need for constant communication between the divisions.” When the company added its third division in Newberry, Michigan and saw a 20% increase in customers as a result, she felt the paper jam.
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Sometimes, a little innovation can go a long way. That’s the case with a recent Laserfiche installation with one of the world’s oldest makers of fragrances and flavors, Robertet.

The 150-year old firm needed some way to readily access some very important papers it kept in notebooks at its US headquarters. Many of its operations were completely computerized, but not information in the notebooks, which held safety specifications about the materials they buy to make perfumes smell sweeter and soft drinks taste better.

According to federal guidelines, those documents, called material safety data sheets, had to be stored for some 30 years and Robertet wanted a safer way to store them. The company also wanted an easy way to store new material safety data sheets that came into the offices from time to time, and it wanted them stored in a document management system that would automatically index them in a way that would make them easy to find and retrieve.
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Newspapers are used to working on tight deadlines, but nothing could have prepared 2008 Run Smarter Award winners the Star Tribune for the time-crunch the Minneapolis newspaper faced when it needed to replace its legacy document imaging system—one with no support or upgrade path—with one that could migrate massive databases from shared servers in less than a year. Full story »

Located at the southern shores of Chautauqua Lake, Jamestown, NY, is the largest city in picturesque Chautauqua County. The Jamestown Public Schools serve approximately 5,000 students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade at six neighborhood elementary schools, three middle schools and one comprehensive high school.

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

For attorneys, dealing with boxes and boxes of paper discovery documents is the norm. But as courts and prosecuting attorneys are beginning to provide documents digitally, defense attorneys can be caught unprepared.

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

If you’ve ever enrolled in an employer-sponsored voluntary insurance program, you know all about the stacks of paper that come with. It’s easy then to imagine the massive volume of paperwork that companies such as Seattle, WA-based Administrative Systems, Inc. (ASI) process behind the scenes. As a voluntary benefits administration firm, ASI handles thousands of documents every day for employers, carriers and other employee benefit providers. And now, thanks to their Laserfiche system, ASI staff are enjoying a few benefits of their own—reduced processing times, simplified compliance and faster access to information. Full story »

Donation-supported non-profit organizations need to keep general office expenses to a minimum. The American Cancer Society, in particular, is very committed to putting forth as much of their resources as possible to disease research, detection and treatment, as well as patient support. Full story »

A successful European airline is breaking into new global markets, with help from Laserfiche. When Virgin Airlines of Great Britain launched Virgin Blue in Australia, it chose Laserfiche to support its initiative of instantly scanning and retrieving passenger data. Full story »

As a leading provider of wholesale energy services, Reliant Energy must work within the guidelines set up by the state to ensure the proper operation of its 170 hydroelectric plants. Making sure those guidelines and agreements are readily available in case of an audit is imperative for keeping things running smoothly. Full story »

One of the best school districts in Louisiana is using Laserfiche enterprise-wide to manage its mission-critical information, including student and teacher records, board of education minutes, financial transactions and property inventories. Full story »

Teaching incarcerated and at-risk juveniles is the job of the Alternative Education division of the Los Angeles County Office of Education. Shuttling between courthouses, treatment facilities, juvenile halls and foster care, these teens and pre-teens often got lost in the system in the past.

Thanks to the instantaneous electronic transfer of their educational files, made possible by Laserfiche WebLink, these juveniles now are keeping up with schoolwork and counseling opportunities. This increases the likelihood of their eventual rehabilitation. Full story »

Brown Metals Company boasts the largest inventory of thin-gauge stainless steel coil on the West Coast. Thanks to an efficient supply chain and a highly-skilled workforce, Brown Metals can quickly process and ship orders of any size, from those weighing less than a pound to those that exceed ten tons. But as the company grew, keeping track of order-related paperwork became increasingly challenging—and had an adverse impact on employee productivity. Full story »