As the second largest deathcare provider in the United States, Stewart Enterprises safeguards contracts pertaining to every aspect of funeral or cemetery services, from memorialization and property purchases to inscription details. In the past, when people passed away, contracts from funeral homes and cemeteries were permanently added to the millions of pages of records in each of the company’s regional storage centers.

Although Stewart Enterprises initially considered implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) solution in 2005, it failed to anticipate that its documents might incur damage. Unfortunately, when Hurricane Katrina struck later that year, the company’s New Orleans Records Management Center was hit and tens of thousands of documents were submerged for over a week.

“The hypothetical doomsday scenario became a reality for our organization,” says Pellegrin. “Unfortunately, we were not as forward-thinking at that time as we are now. Rather than accepting an initial ECM proposal for $175,000, we spent $1.5 million recovering and restoring our documents.”

Setting a Document Standard

Despite the loss, the disaster gave the organization the forward velocity it needed to go digital with Laserfiche ECM. “When implementing a new functional area, as soon as I put the Katrina pictures up, everyone is on board,” says Pellegrin. “When you talk about buy-in, it isn’t a hard sell.”

As a direct result of Hurricane Katrina, the company first digitized the records in its New Orleans Records Management Center. Before implementing ECM enterprise-wide, Pellegrin started discovery by physically walking through various company facilities and taking stock of employee processes, paper piles and organization structure—a preliminary step he recommends for anyone beginning a Laserfiche project.

“The sheer volume of documents involved in digitizing a record center astonished me,” he says. “Walk through a variety of departments and ask yourself, would it would be beneficial to management to see the documents and to have real-time tracking for every step in this process?”

These discoveries allowed Pellegrin to seize the opportunity to standardize records management across the company by upgrading to Laserfiche Rio. He rolled out digital archiving to the company’s other records centers in Miami, Dallas and Orlando, as well as individual facilities and corporate offices in 25 states and Puerto Rico.

Configuring Laserfiche Rio across multiple departments and integrating Laserfiche Quick Fields with the company’s contract number system and reporting systems transformed Stewart Enterprises’ Laserfiche ECM system from a simple disaster recovery plan to a flexible, yet central, point of control.

“We’re not looking at an individual person or process, we’re thinking enterprise-wide,” he says of the company’s IT strategy. “What we have noticed as a result of implementing Laserfiche is not only a more efficient process, but a structured workflow that can be implemented nationwide.”

Centralizing Contracts

Because Stewart Enterprises juggles different regulations on its contracts and facilities for every state in which it operates, Pellegrin sought a standard workflow that could track and store documents in compliance with these regulations while still offering fluid access to documentation when adjusting a client’s file.

Laserfiche Rio allowed the company to greatly restructure the contracts workflow. Using the Laserfiche SDK, Pellegrin configured Laserfiche Quick Fields to draw information between the company’s .NET point-of-sale applications and Laserfiche. This integration, along with standardized scanning methods and better quality control, led to much faster processing:

• 750 field employees now image documentation as .TIFF files onto a national network drive using Canon scanners.
• Laserfiche Import Agent then transfers those documents from the drive into the Laserfiche repository automatically, day and night.
• Laserfiche Quick Fields runs a real-time SQL search against the company’s account receivable contract system based on individual contract number.
• Laserfiche Quick Fields then indexes each document by geographic location, sorts and routes it to separate workflows depending on values identified in the SQL lookup.
• Users across the regional centers and corporate headquarters can route, process and update contracts using Laserfiche Workflow and Laserfiche Snapshot.

Prior to Laserfiche, these records centers contained vaults full of filing cabinets and shelves of manila folders that a contract research team mined during contract retrieval requests. With this system in place across all facilities, the company has already scanned more than 30 million pages from its document centers into Laserfiche’s digital repositories, repurposing filing cabinets into valuable real estate and saving thousands in paper costs. Now the company can scan, monitor and check the quality of its financial transactions, such as deposits, to better ensure compliance with each state’s regulations.

Enterprise-Sized Gains

Unlocking critical contract information from paper forms brought an unprecedented level of enterprise visibility to the company, which Pellegrin lauds as Laserfiche’s main asset. When Laserfiche Workflow creates a permanent record for storage, it also makes the contracts available for real-time access to over 1,000 employees nationwide via a Laserfiche WebLink Web portal.

Now, users ranging from executive vice presidents to customer service representatives can research the contracts and their indexes and status information with the click of the Laserfiche icon on their desktop.

“Giving real-time, simultaneous access to a variety of functional areas and hierarchies brought immediate value and efficiency to our organization,” explains Pellegrin.

For example, read-only access to contracts for the company’s audit department has eliminated travel costs during audits. The audit group may perform a facility audit without the facility knowing about it, right from their own computers.

“Laserfiche has allowed us to not only standardize our processes, but to easily monitor them as well. We now have access to empirical data about employees indicating efficiency, accuracy and completeness on a real-time basis,” notes Pellegrin.

Stewart Enterprises truly leverages the full scale of Laserfiche Rio, using it for everything from conversion and storage of microfilm records to streamlining and enhancing internal audit processes across the entire company.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche, I was virtually in the dark with respect to ECM. I didn’t have the slightest idea of the impact this one system could have throughout the organization. We’re changing the culture of our company in a span of three to six months at each record facility.”

The company faced four major challenges:

• Storage: Lack of space in the office for filing cabinets cost the company $650 a month to rent storage sheds. Temperatures inside the sheds often topped 110 degrees, degrading documents and discouraging retrieval by accounting employees.
• Decentralized Files: Every vehicle tow resulted in the creation of documents by multiple departments, each with their own filing methods—which meant accounting employees had to contact at least three departments to complete a vehicle file. From gathering vehicle photos from the sales department and inspections from the vehicle storage facility to tracking down titles in the title department, staff spent more time searching than billing.
• Security: Transferring files among departments compromised security and led to a proliferation of outdated copies.
• Customer Service: Spread-out storage and misfiled contracts made it difficult to deliver towing contracts to customers by 2:00 p.m. on the day following a tow, as outlined in vendor contracts.

“The vehicle could sometimes be moved to another storage or auction facility, and sometimes the files would not get to the new vehicle storage location,” notes Sheila Gallegos, project manager at United Road Towing.

The company put out a request for proposals for an enterprise content management (ECM) product that could:

• Quickly and easily scan documents.
• Read vehicle barcodes and file documents with minimal human effort.
• Perform quality checks on barcoded scans.

After reviewing RFP responses, United Road Towing saw that Laserfiche could easily set a company-wide standard to transition it away from inefficient paper-based processes.

“Laserfiche was the easiest to understand and the most user-friendly by far. Quick Fields and Workflow sessions were doing most the work, instead of our staff,” says Gallegos. “Most importantly, Laserfiche was an enterprise software solution, whereas the other vendors had to piece together other products to create the solution we were looking for.”

Gallegos led a three-month installation and in-depth training process which brought 73 employees in seven departments and seven locations—as well as 23 vendors—onto the Laserfiche system.

“Laserfiche has helped us streamline our processes, and it also helps us make sure that the processes are standardized from location to location,” she says.

Giving the Green Light to Better Records Management

The first step for United Road Towing was standardizing the documentation process from the time a vehicle hitches to a tow truck to when it leaves the tow lot—which brought immediate improvements in customer service and employee efficiency.

A custom integration between Quick Fields, Workflow and the company’s towing software now takes data from vehicle barcodes, driver invoices and customer-submitted documents across many departments for cradle-to-grave records management.

Because the towing software doesn’t contain an open database, the company worked with Laserfiche to create a custom Workflow script with an HTTP post. The script automatically pulls information from the towing software to fill in additional data in Quick Fields.

As outlined below, records management is now much simpler and more consistent:

• When the company tows a vehicle, the truck driver places a barcode sticker on the vehicle to identify it in the vehicle inventory and places a barcode sheet in the storage reports.
• Storage facility staff scans the barcode sheets into Laserfiche.
• Quick Fields reads the barcodes, places the inventory number into a field and saves the storage report in the Laserfiche repository.
• The custom Workflow script runs a session that searches the towing database using the barcode. Quick Fields then fills in additional template fields with retrieved information about the vehicle, such as the vehicle’s make, model, year and VIN number, as well as customer information and invoice and payment dates.
• When all fields are complete, the Workflow session electronically files the documents by tow date.

With the automated system, the average user can process five documents a minute. Each day, the company as a whole can easily process 1,500 customer documents and 500 driver invoices.

WebLink Revs Up Customer Service

The integration has also improved the availability of customer documents within the contractual one-day grace period. Prior to Laserfiche, one employee would collect 200 documents a day from the accounting department, scan the documents into a network folder, rename all the documents, move the documents to an FTP folder and then make the documents available to customers on a Website in PDF form. This time-intensive process often resulted in late documents and $75 in vendor fines for each delayed delivery.

With Laserfiche WebLink, an automated process ensures that customers can view documents on the same day of the tow—many hours before the deadline.

• When a towed vehicle is added to the storage inventory, storage facility employees scan documents from the drivers along with customer-supplied paperwork like driver licenses into a network folder.
• From the network folder, Quick Fields brings the documents into the Laserfiche repository and identifies the documents by reading their barcodes.
• The custom Workflow session retrieves the vehicle information from the towing software using the barcodes, and Quick Fields completes the template fields.
• The accounting office then e-mails digital invoice copies to customers.
• Quick Fields files the documents and automatically makes relevant documents, such as storage reports, driver licenses, private party impounds and pre-tow pictures of the vehicles, available for customers via WebLink.
• Customers can view the files related to their tow with an assigned, secure login.

This fast flow of information empowers United Road Towing as well as the customer. The customer may view the document on the same day as the tow, and United Road Towing now:

• Saves half a pallet of paper (50 boxes) per month.
• Eliminates $650 a month in off-site storage costs.
• No longer needs to train storage employees on a formerly laborious customer service process.

“In the past, a dedicated staff person spent eight hours completing this process. Now, it only takes 30 minutes to verify all the documents that were scanned,” says Gallegos.

Overhauled Processes Bring Big Benefits

United Road Towing counts centralized data as the most basic gain from Laserfiche, which has completely eliminated the company’s reliance on a carrier to move documents from remote sites to the main office.

The rewards multiply when it comes to customer satisfaction. “Now anyone who answers the phone can answer inquiries about the status of a vehicle by doing a simple search in Laserfiche,” notes Gallegos. “We used to have to transfer calls to the storage lot where the vehicle was stored.”

The company’s five storage facilities follow the same procedures, but the company can shift tasks around depending on the available employees and their skill levels. For example, when a customer calls requesting paperwork from their insurance company to release the vehicle to a body shop or the police department inquires after proof of ownership forms, dispatch staff can now look up the related information in Laserfiche instead of relying on lot staff.

More employees can be cross-trained to complete work in multiple departments. Whenever the staff has downtime, employees input and check metadata in Laserfiche from any documents that don’t include barcodes. Recently, the company even changed its file clerk positions into quality assurance roles.

With Audit Trail, Gallegos can run a report that outlines which employees have accessed certain documents. Every month, she uses the report to check productivity and conduct any back-training
for employees based on their efficiency.

United Road Towing is close to completing an expansion to the corporate office in Illinois. Instead of spending money on overnight mailing costs, the company will now digitally send Department of Transportation documents to corporate employees via WebLink.

Other plans for growing United Road Towing’s Laserfiche system include:

• Using the Laserfiche Mobile iPad app to digitize the signed agreement binders that tow drivers currently carry in paper form. Capturing and storing the most current authorization forms will ensure that drivers remain in compliance with local regulations.
• Working with municipalities to write laws that standardize the authorizations needed to tow a vehicle and giving cities access to signed agreements via WebLink.
• Expanding the Laserfiche system to 11 additional sites to further standardize procedures and bring cradle-to-grave records management to the rest of the company.

“Laserfiche has helped to ensure that processes are consistent throughout the company while allowing us to improve processes and gain efficiencies,” Gallegos says. “It’s one of the best investments we’ve ever made.”

When two of the 10 departments in ECOM’s Dallas office came to Zandi with what she recognized as a need for an electronic document management system (EDMS) in August of 2009, she saw an opportunity to introduce full-scale ECM/BPM functionality into the company, one familiar process at a time.

“I’d been preaching the importance of using workflow and document imaging, but I didn’t have any business groups with that burning need,” she says. “Then a year ago our tax and real estate departments each came to us with some ideas about streamlining and automation, and we told them, ‘If all your documents were electronic, you could.’”

Hitting the Ground Running—with the Vision to Go the Distance

ECOM had a relationship with Jeff Flory of Dallas-area reseller Datamax Technology Group, who suggested Zandi look into Laserfiche as an ECM solution agile enough to answer ECOM’s pressing needs while also possessing the potential to expand in size and scope. “Laserfiche was easily the most user-friendly solution we looked at, but it was also scalable to meet more and bigger needs as we evolved the system,” Zandi recalls.

ECOM purchased a 25-user pilot system with Audit Trail and the Laserfiche SDK with an eye toward future integrations, expanded deployment and automated business processes —once the immediate document management fires had been put out.

“We had the vision for BPM and automation upfront,” she says. “The important part for me was the Workflow and the scalability. We started with the two departments that were on fire, and we’re capturing that momentum to implement Laserfiche in other departments. The system lends itself to that flexibility.”

First up were HR and Accounting. Zandi explains, “HR saw that it could use Laserfiche for archiving and historical information, while Accounting could jump in with day-forward scanning of active records.”

Operational improvements followed these departmental implementations. For example, “Our Treasury Department has a variety of companies depositing checks and money. Those checks are now automatically scanned, so that when the bank receives checks it no longer copies them—and a notification that the bank has the check is automatically printed in Laserfiche as well,” says Zandi.

Unanimous User Adoption, Magnanimous Enterprise Expansion

Building on this initial success, ECOM is now upgrading from its pilot system to Laserfiche Rio with a goal of standardizing content and business process management worldwide. “Rio makes sense for us because it gives us the flexibility to add servers and licenses incrementally, in whatever way we need to,” Zandi explains.

Currently, the system is being rolled out to more departments in ECOM’s Dallas headquarters—with unanimous adoption. “The familiar interface, being able to save searches, being able to use sticky notes—these are things that helped people catch on right away,” she says.

Zandi is confident that Laserfiche’s ease-of-use is paving the way for bigger and better things for the enterprise by encouraging users to do bigger and better things with their information. “Laserfiche is flexible enough that departments can implement it in a way that mirrors their current system, but once they’re comfortable, they can say, ‘I don’t even need a folder, now I can start thinking about changing my business,’” she says.

That change, she says, will come from implementing business process management (BPM) initiatives using Laserfiche Workflow. To that end:

• ECOM is working with Datamax to integrate Laserfiche with its Navision accounting software to set up distributed approval A/P processing for 10+ departments. Invoices will be automatically updated, then filed according to payment type and date using Workflow.
• The Real Estate Department is planning to integrate Laserfiche with its Timberline accounting system to update contracts and payment histories and file them automatically.
• The HR Department plans to integrate Laserfiche with its ADP system to automatically create and update personnel folders.

The most extensive—and potentially impactful—use of Workflow, however, is in ECOM’s Traffic Department, which is developing 35 workflows with up to 250 different outcomes. “I can’t even get my head around it!” jokes Zandi. She credits the simplicity of the Workflow Designer for lending itself to such an extensive deployment. “Workflow is created graphically—the Designer is essentially drag and drop, so you don’t have to know Fortran to use it.”

With an operational model and foundation in place, Zandi says ECOM is well on its way to standardizing its approach to content management worldwide using Laserfiche Rio. “This is where the scalability of Rio is so, so important,” she explains.

“Once we have integrations with the ERP up and running in our office, we can roll it out to our offices around the world literally overnight,” Zandi says. “We’re developing what has the potential to be the global, centralized ECM/BPM standard for the company’s business processes. Even before we’ve done all our analysis or know where that infrastructure will go and how our repositories will break out, we know Laserfiche has the scalability to do it.”

“We saw Laserfiche as a way to bring visibility, time-bound execution and accountability to our accounting business processes,” says Mandeep Singh, Head of Finance Shared Services at Essar.

Working with Laserfiche reseller Sigma-Tech India Pvt. Ltd, Essar Group initially purchased a 100-user Rio solution. What started as simply a way to centralize all finance-related information evolved into a full-scale ECM/BPM implementation.

According to Singh, “We started using Laserfiche primarily as a scanning and document management solution, but after experiencing the way Workflow and its integration capabilities could be used for our scanning operations, we scaled up use dramatically.”

Chandresh Sharma, Vice President at Sigma-Tech, worked with Essar business analysts to map out the end-to-end processes for finance and accounting functions. These processes were mapped in Laserfiche Workflow to validate vendor, customer, company and invoice information from the SAP masters, and ultimately route and approve invoices and contracts processed between Essar’s global business units and the Shared Service Center at its Mumbai headquarters.

Balancing Centralized and Decentralized Processes

“Laserfiche operates as part of a ‘hub and spoke’ model with the Shared Service Center as the hub and business geographies as the spokes, which connect to the central hub for document processing,” Singh explains.

A major operational benefit has been the ability to seamlessly balance centralized and decentralized processes using Laserfiche as both the hub and the spoke. “Financial Shared Services uses both models to fulfil transactions,” explains Singh.

• The centralized process approach is enabled by a central hub that accesses Laserfiche to process documents. Work allocation is assigned using Workflow, which detects exceptions to mapped data validation rules during the scanning process and provides notifications to responsible parties to resolve discrepancies. “This ensures that clean data is passed into the downstream operations of the financial services,” Singh says. A mail room solution is also in place to track and deliver transactions to Laserfiche, further accelerating the process and increasing productivity.
• The decentralized process approach uses Laserfiche deployed locally to establish remote common collection hubs at various offices across India (and eventually globally) through which vendors working with ESSAR can submit hard copies of transactions. “Laserfiche is run in a dedicated center and further downstream processes like scanning, indexing and quality assurance are carried out before being published to the SAP-DMS,” he adds.

International offices use an FTP route offline. “Here the SPOCs [single point of contact] submit their invoices to the FTP folder. From there it’s scheduled for automatic entry into the Laserfiche server using Laserfiche Import Agent. This enables further processing,” explains Singh.

In addition to streamlining accounting processes, Laserfiche has standardized work allocation enterprise-wide. “Operationally, work allocation is now defined based on certain parameters mapped in Laserfiche. For example, ‘Process Type,’ ‘Document Type,’ ‘Location Code,’ ‘Country Code,’ ‘Business Vertical,’ ‘Priority’ and others,” says Singh.

Shared Services, Enterprise Benefits

The benefits of using Laserfiche as part of the Shared Service Center have been both immediate and long-term:

1. Better throughput in terms of number of transactions per process associate.
2. Accelerated invoice turnaround times of less than an hour for urgent invoices across geographies and less than a day for normal invoices.
3. Increased visibility of daily transactions across 63 group companies. Laserfiche publishes a daily report to the business intelligence layer for companywide unified reporting.
4. Increased visibility of pending transactions in a categorized manner. Laserfiche Workflow notifies business process owners of necessary actions by way of mail alerts. “Moreover, we also unify these numbers with the Business intelligence Platform to provide better visibility,” says Singh.
5. Enhanced control environment through automatic system-end integrated validations with SAP-DMS using Vendor, Customer and Company Code checks for duplications or mismatches at the source stage itself. Laserfiche also does a validation for the key fields entered and runs a duplicate check across its database for any potential duplicates—which are then provided as reporting numbers and integrated with the BI platform.

The most ostensible benefit is obviously reducing invoice processing times from, on average, a matter of weeks into days and sometimes hours. But combined with increased transparency of business processes, Laserfiche has brought a new level of accountability to staff. With Laserfiche Audit Trail giving a step-by-step history of each action and user in the process, there are significant quality control and productivity benefits. Says Singh, “People think twice before performing a transaction.”

Though formal impact analysis will not be conducted until 2012, Singh estimates that Essar Group has realized a 40% return on its Laserfiche investment already, but foresees ongoing and expanding operational improvements. “Major ROI will come by de-skilling profiles deployed across companies for financial processes,” he explains.

Following the success of integration with SAP-DMS, Essar is now working with Sigma-Tech India to integrate Laserfiche (and SAP) with ARIBA financial software, as well as related procurement and e-invoicing modules to develop straight-through processing for accounts receivable, fixed assets, business expense reimbursements and income tax declaration. “We’re also now contemplating using [PDP partner] LincDoc for form-based workflow requirements,” Singh concludes.

Martin Lovelace-Chandler's Laserfiche workstation

Born with a form of cerebral palsy that limits his motor skills and speech, Lovelace-Chandler has embraced technology with a purpose and passion in his life and career—at least as much as the technology has been able to keep up with the ambitions of the now-married father of two. “In college [in the late ‘90s], I really wanted to go into computers but I didn’t have a way to type or to use a mouse,” he says. After Lovelace-Chandler became an ASN client a decade ago, Dr. Vire had a great idea: to make ASN’s client files accessible to staff by scanning cumbersome paper files to disc. “It was just costing the agency storage every month. He asked me if I could help. I told him I can do anything on a computer if he just gets me the right equipment,” Lovelace-Chandler remembers.

The “right equipment” has changed a lot over the years. Realizing it needed a network solution to make scanned information more easily accessible to staff, ASN implemented a Canofile imaging system in 2006, but quickly found it fell short of its promise. Lack of indexing and usability meant ASN’s 20-plus case managers were still using three-inch thick paper files—sometimes three or four of them per client—which were time-consuming to locate and use and even more resource-consuming when it came to storage and auditing. It was “nightmare-ish stuff,” as Dr. Vire remembers. The one bright spot was that Lovelace-Chandler started using a combination keyboard and mouse that allowed him to program hotkey shortcuts—“macros and micros,” he calls them—that cut the keystrokes required to open up programs like Canonfile from 10 to two. “This allowed me to spend more time on the program itself and gave me total independence,” he says.

Over time, just as Lovelace-Chandler upgraded his communication device to a simpler and more comprehensive “Eco 14” model, ASN likewise upgraded to Laserfiche in 2008. The reason was twofold: “We wanted to be able to have all current and past files on Laserfiche so then it would be at everyone in the agency’s fingertips,” Lovelace-Chandler says. “We also wanted a program that would have a higher security feature after the HIPAA law went into effect.”

Although Dr. Vire admits that system adoption initially took time—not everyone was as attuned to the benefits of using technology as Lovelace-Chandler—the impact has been real.

“There was a time when, if we had a question about an individual’s plan from last year, we had to send someone to a storage unit and hope they could find the correct file, and then hope that the information was in the correct place. We almost always found the document, but the time invested was huge. We can now find that document in minutes rather than hours—and we’ve never had a water leak that left our Laserfiche files water-logged and unusable,” he says. “Laserfiche is definitely a time and money saver.”

For Lovelace-Chandler, a key benefit is how easily he can set up and administer ASN’s Laserfiche system for the case managers who use it on a daily basis. In addition to processing the 200 or so documents generated in the field every day, Lovelace-Chandler has added indexes for medical history, case manager notes and program plans, among other documents. “I’m able to use drop down lists for 98% of the fields,” he says. “It allows documents to be located faster and more efficiently.” And, he adds, securely.

“Laserfiche allows me to give only the people that should be seeing a certain region access. So for example, a case manager might have several consumers out of several regions, but that case manager only has access to each consumer that they are assigned—it’s a lot easier to them to access, and I love that security is set up differently,” he explains. “On Canofile any person could look up any consumer and see all their files. Now, with Laserfiche, I can assign that consumer just to who actually needs access. We also set up groups for each department. For example, Human Resources can’t access supported living files and vice-versa. We really like this because we can track who all is accessing all the files.”

He particularly likes Laserfiche’s support for Window Active Directory. “Almost every day I use the multi-media function to add employee names to the list.”

Another area of improvement has been auditing. As a healthcare services provider with funding and oversight from state and national agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services (which monitors HIPAA compliance), the Arkansas Department of Human Services and the Division of Developmental Disabilities Services, ASN is subject to frequent audits—as many as four per year. “We had an agency that told us that we had so many days to find documents or our agency would be fined. I was able to look up and send them every document they wanted. I would have spent twice the amount of time looking for the documents if we were still using Canofile,” Lovelace-Chandler says.

In addition to using Laserfiche for case management, Lovelace-Chandler also uses it to manage payroll, HR and AP processing. The plan, says Kevin Dickinson of ASN’s Laserfiche reseller, Preferred Office Products, is to implement Quick Fields, possibly even equipping case managers with netbooks to directly input their notes, freeing up Lovelace-Chandler’s time.

“I feel that having Laserfiche we will be able to do bigger and better things in the future. I also feel that it will help us greatly since our agency continues to expand,” says Lovelace-Chandler.

“I have been able to use Laserfiche more than any other program. With the features of Laserfiche it is an easier process to program my device and to use all the features that the program offers. I feel like Laserfiche could open a lot of doors for me or even people like me that have a physical disability,” he adds.

• Accelerating and automating the effort and time it takes to manage and mobilize 4,000-plus subcontractors to respond to a disaster.
• Reducing processing time for debris load tickets, which track the actual clean-up effort, by 1/3.

As Michael Hansen, asset manager at Ceres, explains, it was during its response to Katrina that the Minnesota-based company first saw how Laserfiche could bring efficiency to its processes—and value to its business. Besides managing thousands of sub-contractors’ contracts, insurance and payment data, Ceres’ primary business process using Laserfiche was to catalog the hundreds of thousands of debris load tickets it collected to verify and invoice its clean-up efforts.

“We recognized record management and retention would be a monstrous task, so we began scanning job tickets remotely from Louisiana,” Hansen explains. “But as the job wrapped up, we also knew that the data we’d collected needed to be shared across the company.”

Hansen and Controller Jeff Zahn developed a plan to tie together a new Citrix cloud server network with the company’s new VoIP telecom system in December 2007. Reseller ENS helped move the Laserfiche database to the company’s Minnesota server farm in February 2008. Now load tickets and contractor information scanned in the Louisiana office were instantly available to the Minnesota office.

“Prior to this, we had to use company couriers or ship documents and hope that they made it intact,” Hansen says. “A lost box of information could mean tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of dollars of lost revenue.”

In June 2008, the company saw just how beneficial these improvements were when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) wanted to audit the actual debris load tickets and billing invoices from the Katrina project. “Normally this meant an Army auditor would be at the office for weeks, reviewing paper records,” Hansen says.

For a job the size of Katrina, that meant the USACE auditor would be wading through more than 500,000 debris load tickets. “Envision a room 30 feet long by 12 feet wide with both walls stacked to the top—that was one of our ticket rooms coming out of Katrina,” explains Ceres IS/IT Supervisor Tim Zanor. “To make it even worse, nine times out of ten, out of the 500,000 load tickets, the auditor would want to pull the documents from the bottom of a stack.”

Zanor configured the Laserfiche Katrina volume so the USACE could access the Katrina load tickets—and only the Katrina load tickets—to perform a major portion of the audit remotely through Ceres’ Citrix cloud network. “Both parties recognized this would be a great cost-saver, since multiple people could access records from multiple locations at the same time, for a true cross-audit of records,” says Hansen. “It also allowed the auditors the ability to do rapid searches for specific documents—something they just couldn’t do with paper documents.”

As a result, Ceres received an “Outstanding” performance evaluation from the USCAE. What’s more, the networked use of Laserfiche factored in Ceres’ quicker, more cost-effective responses to Hurricanes Dolly, Gustav and Ike.

Hansen and Zanor point to the use of Laserfiche by the Ceres Storm Department to mobilize subcontractors and coordinate respond to Hurricane Ike in 2009. “We have a database of over 4,000 subcontractors, and each one has a file of their company’s documents, which can be 30 pages,” Zanor says.

“When Ike hit, we got the call at 7:00 P.M. that we needed to have 75 trucks to Galveston by 6:00 A.M. To respond that rapidly, we had to first geographically search and qualify subcontractors, then get on the phone with them,” Hansen explains. “By midnight, thanks to Laserfiche, we already had a list of 150 ready. In the past, we’d still be making calls at 3:00 A.M.” What’s more, adds Zanor, was that each subcontractor already had their insurance and driver’s license information verified compliant with DOT and FEMA regulations, stored in Laserfiche.

Once on site, Laserfiche has also slashed processing time for debris load tickets—cutting labor costs and ultimately improving Ceres’ relationships with the company’s subcontractors. “During Gustav and Ike, we were actually able to process load tickets in about 1/3 of the time than it took during Katrina,” Zanor says. “We’re imaging 2,000-3,000 load documents a day from the site, so they’re available to the rest of the company the next day. In years past, they’d have sat on that site, waiting to be transported,” Hansen adds. “Right away, we cut our labor costs. Plus we’re able to pay our subcontractors faster, and have access at multiple locations to the actual load tickets in the event of any discrepancies.”

Though their use of Laserfiche has grown organically—“I refer to our system as ‘an octopus in training’ because we have our Storm Division, Construction Division, Property Management and Mulch & Soils Manufacturing companies all on it,” quips Zanor—it’s the balance of centralized administrative control and local flexibility that he continues to find value in.

“To me, security is really the biggest benefit of using Laserfiche,” Zanor says. “A supervisor in Indiana may need to get ahold of insurance documents and we can make sure that’s all he sees—just the insurance files, not HR or contract files.”

Future plans, Hansen and Zanor say, are all about business process management. “We upgraded to Avante because it includes Workflow, which we’ve already implemented in our accounting process to facilitate invoice approvals by managers and staff in remote project locations. We intend to utilize it for contract management, especially with our construction project process, in order to image-enable our Maxwell cost accounting system,” says Hansen. “We just want to be able to give our users that higher level of efficiency.”

As a contract manufacturing company that specializes in medical device implants and surgical instruments, precision is a chief concern for RMS. For over forty years, the company has ensured the accuracy and quality of its products, spurring expansion and business growth. But as the organization grew, some of its processes failed to evolve along with it.

“As a contract manufacturer, we fulfill a substantial number of jobs every year,” explains Michael Eklund, information systems coordinator at RMS. “We used to place all of the order information into a file folder and pass it around to multiple teams throughout our 155,000 square foot machine shop. As you can probably guess, files went missing and people spent a lot of time trying to track them down.”

In order to improve the efficiency of its manufacturing processes, RMS began to look for a technology solution that would:

• Store information in a reliable, consistent form.
• Electronically route orders to multiple manufacturing teams.
• Increase employee accountability and decrease wasted time.
• Automate repetitive manual tasks.
• Guarantee that essential, job-related information could always be found.

After considering multiple technology vendors, RMS selected Laserfiche because of its comprehensive capture, search and workflow functionality, as well as the strength of Laserfiche reseller Crabtree Companies.

Leveraging Laserfiche Workflow for Business Process Management

RMS relies heavily on Workflow to accelerate shared business processes across its plants in Minnesota and Tennessee. “Our biggest accomplishment is our ‘green folder system,’” says Eklund. “It’s what we use to distribute the information that’s necessary for creating every instrument and every device.”

As the first step in constructing the green folder system, key RMS stakeholders came together to define and standardize the sequence of steps necessary to electronically distribute new order information to machinists and engineers.

“From a management perspective, developing the green folder system helped us to identify inefficiency and created consensus around the best way to eliminate it,” says Eklund. “It was clear that using Laserfiche Workflow to electronically route information was the best way to accomplish our goals.”

Using Workflow’s graphical user interface, RMS configured the system to perform activities based on the newly defined steps and sequence. When a new product is requisitioned:

• Order information including POs, prints, quotes, and manufacturing data is scanned into Laserfiche.
• Order information is electronically—and automatically—delivered to the departments involved in the manufacturing process.
• Department heads digitally sign off on the information.
• Supervisors can log into Laserfiche and see which departments have acknowledged receipt of the information.

“In the past,” says Eklund, “employees would physically walk hard copy folders between departments on the plant floor. It was hard to figure out which departments had seen what, and where exactly each order was in the manufacturing process. Thanks to Workflow, information now has a clear and consistent path around the factory floor. It never gets lost and it’s easy to track exactly what’s going on at any given time.”

Today, RMS has eight major workflows in effect across the company. According to Eklund, it only took a matter of weeks to get the primary workflow written and running. “From an IT perspective,” he says, “one of the best features is how easy it is to change and test the various workflows. Four of our major workflows could halt production if they stopped working properly. Because it’s so easy to make adjustments, we never have to worry about downtime.”

Ensuring Access and Saving Time with WebLink and Quick Fields

Aside from using Workflow to automate and streamline key business processes, RMS employs Laserfiche WebLink to provide employees with immediate access to job-critical information; it also leverages Quick Fields to cut down on manual data entry and save staff time.

WebLink is a secure Web publishing tool that distributes information to authorized users. Designed to protect the core content repository, WebLink prevents users from altering, deleting or tampering with digital data. At RMS, WebLink has made life much easier for machinists, who now have instant access to engineering blueprints and specs from virtually any computer on the factory floor.

“Prior to Laserfiche, our machinists had to wait for engineers to show them the prints and specs for the various parts they were responsible for producing,” explains Eklund. “Today they can access that information directly. It saves a lot of time.”

Quick Fields is another time-saving tool for the company, one that enables automated data capture and indexing. According to Eklund, the company uses Quick Fields for a variety of tasks, including:

• Creating Device History Records (DHR). Contract medical device manufacturers are mandated by the FDA to create and preserve DHRs indefinitely. Employees used to generate these records manually, and because RMS processes so many jobs each year, this meant hundreds of hours of employee time spent on data entry. Today, the company includes barcodes on job-related paperwork so that when a device is shipped, a DHR is automatically generated by scanning the barcode and ensuring that the record is properly named.
• Electronically filing accounts payable paperwork. RMS uses barcodes on accounts payable paperwork so that it is electronically filed after it is scanned into the system. This practice saves the accounting department two hours every Friday.

RMS also appreciates how much more quickly employees across the company can locate indexed information contained in the Laserfiche repository. “Nobody has to search through filing cabinets anymore,” says Eklund. “With Laserfiche, it only takes 30 seconds to find exactly what you need.”

Moving Forward

Although Eklund acknowledges that it is difficult to put a dollar amount on the savings RMS has experienced over the last four years as a result of implementing Laserfiche, he believes that the company recouped its initial investment within the first year.

To get the most out of the system, the company is currently in the process of upgrading to Laserfiche 8, which features:

• Greater interoperability with Microsoft Office applications.
• An enhanced system architecture that simplifies firewall configuration and improves performance over wide-area networks.
• A redesigned Workflow module that’s built on the Windows Workflow Foundation engine and uses the .NET framework.

Eklund’s parting advice to IT professionals who are interested in implementing Laserfiche is to “be patient. Users will follow your lead once they realize how good the system is. Laserfiche is the heartbeat of our company. It’s a great system to administer, and a great system to use.”

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.”

Malowney led the company’s search for a robust but equally secure document and records management solution, one that would fulfill—indeed, reconcile—the company’s need for central, secured control over its records and documents, but still allow staff and administrators the local flexibility to be able to manage, automate and use them in their processes. The system would have to scan and store information according to the specific retention schedules and regulatory requirements endemic to an energy company. But to be used efficiently, it would also have to align with existing with line-of-business applications to complement how staff were already working. Malowney made a list of system requirements: work seamlessly with terminal services, offer Web-based client access, allow for writing custom workflow activities, accommodate an extensible SQL database and integrate with Microsoft® Windows® Active Directory security.

Malowney and his team chose Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME) for its transparent, DoD 5015.2-certified records management platform, as well as Laserfiche Workflow for its .NET 3.0 framework, one that would enable seamless integration with the company’s existing line-of-business applications. “The DoD 5015.2 certification really underscored the records management credentials of the product,” says Malowney. “We felt confident that we would not encounter limitations in the software after implementation.” Plus, he adds, “Laserfiche not only satisfied our requirements, but was priced at a significant discount to the other solutions we looked at.”

Implementation capitalized on the automated capture capabilities of the Laserfiche Quick Fields module for scanning invoices. “Our deployment strategy has been to convert the most structured departments, like Accounts Payable, first, going for quick wins with extremely high ROI,” Malowney explains. Now, when new invoices enter the system, e-mail notifications are automatically sent to the responsible parties for review. These notifications contain a summary of the metadata and a link back to the document via the Laserfiche Web Access module for approval.

Likewise, automating the life cycle of contracts is now both more transparent and secure. “We’re not limited to filing legal documents just alphabetically anymore,” Malowney explains. “We can use dozens of metadata fields, which allows grouping by counterparty, contract type, effective date, status, and so on, depending on who and how the information needs to be retrieved and used.” Standard SQL server reporting generates a monthly “contracts calendar” highlighting agreements that are about to expire. Additionally, Laserfiche’s integration with Active Directory enables the company’s helpdesk to make consistent—and precise—security decisions using the same tools that manage the rest of the organization.

“We seem to come up with new and clever uses for the software all the time,” says Malowney. “Now we have five departments managing records in Laserfiche, and this has made information much more accessible within the organization.”

Now Malowney is in the process of automating Iberdrola Renewables’ records management using Laserfiche RME’s full capabilities, with plans to bring the company’s audited systems into Laserfiche for regulatory compliance by year’s end. As the company’s website puts it, “Structure yields flexibility,” and Laserfiche RME has given Iberdrola Renewables a powerful balance of both.

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.

“As an employer you always have to look at the bottom line and we did when we hired Derek,” says Bolt co-owner Jeff Nelson. “We knew we’d have to make some concessions, but in the long term, it’s more than worth it.”

The normally hard-to-hire are turning out to be the ideal candidates for the scanning that is the most labor intensive aspect of any office’s conversion from paper to electronic documents. Often millions of documents have to be converted into electronic images in order to build Laserfiche systems for paper-heavy government, healthcare and financial services organizations.

Patience and attention to detail top the job description. It turns out that people with disabilities, when allowed to work at their own pace, can flourish at these jobs—and, as a result, more and more Laserfiche resellers and users are giving them a chance to do so.

Laserfiche reseller Crabtree Companies, in Eagan, MN, was recognized by the state’s Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities for its employment of people with disabilities. Richland County New Hope Industries Inc., in Ohio, has placed up to a dozen of its developmentally disabled clients into scanning jobs for, among other large clients, the Ohio Lottery Commission.

Nelson got involved when he was contacted by the Indiana chapter of the AWS, a national organization dedicated to helping those living with disabilities find jobs. The organization proposed Bolt hire Paula, a local resident with cerebral palsy.

The agency provided Bolt with a six-week stipend to help Nelson with Paula’s early training, which was expected to be more lengthy than the company’s typical new hire. The stipend ran out before Paula got up to speed, Nelson says. However, Bolt stuck with Paula and its patience has paid off.

“We’ve learned with working with people like Paula that if you let them find their own way you realize one day they are productive individuals within the organization,” Nelson says. “If you’re willing to do a little extra work at the outset, there are tremendous benefits in the long run.”

Such success stories are oft repeated, according to AWS spokesperson Eden Gildea. Disabled employees have greater loyalty to their employers, she says, citing U.S. Department of Education statistics. They also have greater flexibility filling work shifts and they call in sick less often.

There are tax benefits as well. On average it costs a workplace $600 to accommodate a disabled employee; however half of any such expenses incurred—between $250 and $10,250—are tax deductible. An employer that hires an employee receiving Supplemental Security Income or who is a certified vocational rehabilitation participant may take a tax credit of up to 40% of the first $6,000 in first-year wages per qualifying employee. The maximum per employee credit is $2,400 in a given tax year.

“We’re finding that the state and federal tax incentives in this current economic climate are a big help for businesses interested in hiring the disabled,” Gildea says. “And it’s wonderful for the employees. Many times they’ve been turned down by other employers for lesser jobs. Getting a job like this, that they can handle, builds up their confidence and makes them feel like they are worth something.”

It makes the employer feel pretty good too. In Minnesota, Crabtree has inspired the company’s customers to follow suit, according company engineer Clayton Baer.

“These people are getting paid much more than, for example, janitorial services or bagging groceries in a supermarket,” Baer says. “You can’t believe the look on their faces when they get their paychecks. It has definitely been a success for us.”

After Paula worked out so well, Bolt decided to hire Derek, who has been working with the firm for six months and is doing a great job, Nelson says.

“We’ve had plenty of high school and college graduates who cut their teeth with us and then and move on,” Nelson says. “Derek and Paula are there when we need them.”

Scanning is a vital task particularly well suited for workers with disabilities, largely because it can be easily tailored to meet an individual’s needs and abilities. Paula is limited to document preparation, indexing and scanning, while Derek is being trained in computer programming.

“We look at an individual’s strengths and weaknesses and tailor the positions accordingly,” Nelson says. “That made us better able to take advantage of their abilities while still accommodating their disabilities. And there is still plenty of work for them.”

While hiring disabled makes good business sense for a number of reasons, Laserfiche resellers and customers alike say there is more than money motivating them.

“Paula is a ray of sunshine. When she walks into the office, it just puts a smile on everybody’s face,” Nelson says. “We’re a small organization and we can only do so much, but after our experiences with Paula and Derek, we’d like to do more.”

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.

“Before we undertook this project, we had 14 companies interested in exploring natural oil and gas deposits in our country, and now we have 60,” says PASA’s Sithembiso Ngubane. “We have to make sure they all play by the rules.”

Yet at the same time, PASA did not want to discourage interested applicants with burdensome paperwork, so it needed to make its application process as fast as it was thorough.

In each application, performance bonds have to be signed and credit histories also must be documented. Each company permitted to drill must also donate $150,000 for educational programs aimed at educating South Africans in exploration-related sciences.

And any company that’s allowed to sink exploratory wells must provide a plan to clean-up and restore damaged areas, in the event of a disaster. Mineral rights and royalty agreements must also be secured in iron-clad contracts.

There are many documents in each application that, once filled out, need to be instantly accessible to make sure all those agreements are adhered to when the exploration starts, Ngubane says.

From the start, it was clear that an electronic document management system was needed to keep it all straight. Any such system had to have a workflow module capacity with Web-based portal software options and sufficient security features to enable the database to go online without allowing public access. The system that could deliver all that at a reasonable price tag, Ngubane says, was Laserfiche.

It took a year before South Africa’s official record keeping agency, the National Archive and Records Service, would sign off on PASA’s plan to digitize its documents and records.

Ngubane says Laserfiche provided a secure database to manage PASA’s information assets, as well as streamline its processes. “Keeping all the contractual specifics in a friendly and secure electronic database will keep everybody aware of the agreements and commitments made,” he adds. “This way if there is a dispute over agreements, we can quickly pull the pertinent documents out of Laserfiche to settle it.”

With Laserfiche it is also more difficult for missed obligations to go unnoticed by PASA staff. When performance timelines are broken, Laserfiche notifies the system operator accordingly when the applicant’s file is opened, Ngubane says.

The system is still very much a work in progress. A GIS integration module is being developed that will tie spatial information into PASA’s current Laserfiche database. Once this takes place, PASA hopes to offer interested companies the ability to preliminarily explore South Africa’s oil and natural gas prospects online.

An electronic library of geology, hydrology, topography and myriad other data surveys that PASA scanned into Laserfiche will also be tied into the spatial information module, all of which will be made available to qualified prospectors through a secure Web-based portal. That will let tech savvy prospectors know early on if field exploration in South Africa is warranted.

Using Laserfiche, PASA will benefit from a much quicker turnaround time in responding to inquiries, another strong selling point for potential customers. And Laserfiche could eventually help cut millions off the cost of extracting natural oil and gas in South Africa, making the country even more attractive to prospectors—a big return on a comparatively small investment.

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.

“The paperwork created by one shipment of lumber could amount to over ten pages per packet,” she explains. “These customer order packets were passed through many hands in the corporate office before finally being filed in one of a dozen filing cabinets. That filing system gave way to several frustrations as the volume of files grew.”

Kennedy began looking for a document management system with three goals in mind:

1. Creating a paperless office with a “virtual filing cabinet” to back-up files daily and eliminate the fear of lost or damaged files—and having to store 60 bankers boxes a year of old customer and vendor invoices.
2. Making filing efficient. “Filing paper was considered a chore and was often put at the bottom of the list by our employees,” Kennedy explains. Needless to say, this led to both unorganized piles of paper and misfiled documents.
3. Bridging the communication gap between the divisions and offices.

At the same time, Kennedy knew a document management system would only work if people could use it. “I wanted a system that was easy to understand and would have a small learning curve when it came to training our employees.” Cost, of course, was a concern, but, as she explains, “Our company has always appreciated that there is a value to be placed on quality.”

Dana Kennedy brings Banks Hardwoods toward a paperless prosperity

She researched document management solutions on-line and discovered Laserfiche. “My next thought was that it would be great to have a local company available to buy from and turn to for support,” she explains. She localized her search, and found Laserfiche reseller Bolt Document Management.

Working with Bolt’s Jeff Nelson, Kennedy spent six months analyzing and testing workflow problems and solutions in various departments, including accounting, IT, sales and purchasing. “We tried very hard to sort out what documents we would scan and how to go about indexing those documents,” she offers. “Jeff was very patient through the whole process and never pressured us to hurry up and get this deal done. He knew I was hesitant about spending money on a system that upper management might view as just a glorified filing cabinet.”

To that end, Nelson supplied Kennedy with a list of Bolt’s Laserfiche clients in the area. “I was able to visit one of the companies and actually see the system in action. Even better, I was able to ask people who were actually using it how they liked it and what benefits they had seen. They were also able to tell me what their experience had been with Jeff and his team at Bolt,” she says.

“This was definitely the deciding factor that made us go with Laserfiche and Bolt,” Kennedy adds. “In our business, relationships are very important and we’ve built our reputation on ours. It was imperative to me, as well as my management, that before we invest in a new software system, we also feel comfortable with the company we are buying from and the support team we will be using.”

For Banks Hardwoods’ initial installation in late 2007, Kennedy limited training to a few key people. “This way we knew what the system was capable of and could use that knowledge to customize it to our needs.”

A month later, the whole office started learning how to access the information they needed. “We also have a very strong IT department that had been involved from the beginning so our need to have a lot of support from either Bolt or Laserfiche has been minimal,” she adds.

Kennedy met her initial goals—moving toward a paperless office, efficient filing, improved inter-office communication—almost instantaneously.

Amy Wickey enjoys the efficiency of scanning what used to be filed.

“We jumped in by scanning all new documents and stopped filing the paper right away,” she says. “It was hard to convince our data entry people to give up paper at first,” Kennedy admits, but adding a second desktop monitor eased the transition. “We have the scanned document in Laserfiche on one screen and the program they are inputting to on the other. Now they can’t imagine doing it any other way—they love it!”

This meant no more ten page customer order packets, plus scanning was being done much more quickly than the paper filing. “We have been able to increase our communications with our remote divisions as well as our production yard now that they are able to access documents online,” she adds. “The customer service department was very excited to be able to access invoicing packets from their desk rather than searching through files.” Plus, she notes, “There is a greater sense of security knowing that we have an electronic backup of all our documents in case of a loss to our office.”

But perhaps the most profound benefit of Laserfiche is how it naturally aligns with the environmental and financial sustainability at the heart of Banks Hardwoods’ continuing success.

“The Laserfiche system has really complemented our ‘Go Green’ methodology,” says Kennedy. “We’re constantly evaluating new and better ways to make our facilities and production more environmentally friendly and introducing this system has been a big step in reducing our paper usage.” Snapshot is the big paper-saver, she says, enabling staff to print reports and the e-mailed payable invoices directly in to Laserfiche.

Alyson Fortin uses dual monitors: one for the scan, one for the program.

The most visible sign of Banks Hardwoods’ improved sustainability is the smiles on all its employees’ faces. “There are two things that they say are their favorites about using Laserfiche,” Kennedy begins. “The first is how clean their desks are now that they are becoming more paperless. The second is how easy the system is to use and how quickly information can be accessed. Regardless of what stage the processing is in, we are always able to find the documents we need.”

As Banks Hardwoods has learned, sustainability comes in many forms.

“We depend on a natural resource, so we are constantly reinvesting in that resource—which is why we have made going paperless a priority in keeping our company as ‘green’ as possible,” says Kennedy. She says the cost savings realized in the year Banks Hardwood has been using Laserfiche is aligned with its company’s economic sustainability. “No matter what our market is doing, we have found that we have to think of our own resources as a company in terms of sustainability, and Laserfiche has been a big part of that.”

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.

This wasn’t a job for ring-bound notebooks. It would take a flexible document management software package and an installer that knew how to take advantage of that flexibility.

Champion Workflow Systems in Pine Brook, NJ, has 18 years’ experience in document solutions and network and Web services. Laserfiche is an industry pioneer whose document management software is helping thousands of government and business offices worldwide run more efficiently.

Robertet’s business applications—accounting, inventory, manufacturing and the like—ran on a MAPICS ERP with an IBM DB2 database. Champion wanted to install the Laserfiche Quick Fields™ Real-Time Lookup module to handle Robertet’s scanning and storage needs for the material safety data sheets.

That’s where the innovation came in. Quick Fields could automatically populate several document index fields simply by having users scan and type in a short product code number. The only problem is: Quick Fields doesn’t support DB2. There was no way to get the material safety data sheets into Robertet’s MAPICS DB2 without typing them in by hand.

“No problem,” said Gary Loew, Champion’s president. Working with Robertet Systems Manager Ed Lykins, Champion designed an interface between DB2 and Quick Fields that has Robertet staffers singing its praises.

They developed a table view in DB2 that contains all of the indexing information required to populate the Laserfiche template. The information required for indexing resides natively in the MAPICS DB2 database.

Any time a MAPICS transaction results in a relevant data change to the indexing information used by Real-Time Lookup, the view is updated, Loew says. Moreover, that updated view is automatically exported to a comma-separated variable file.

It is that CSV file that Real-Time Lookup utilizes for automating the material safety data sheet indexing process, Loew says. Employees need only enter a product code number. Real-Time Lookup accesses that number and looks up the remaining index information.

“Users love the fact that they are only required to make 3 mouse clicks and type a short code number. Quick Fields and Laserfiche take care of the rest,” Loew says. “This ensures minimal opportunity for data entry errors and standardized information in template fields.”

The emphasis on simplicity is not lost on Robertet staff trained on the new system, Lykins says. Simplicity was a prerequisite for the installation and Champion and Laserfiche came through with flying colors.

“One of the big things we needed from this system was it had to be easy to use, and Gary made sure it was,” Lykins says. “We didn’t want to have to train people for days to use this system. We needed to get the information on these documents fast and this system does that well.”

Champion is equally impressed with Laserfiche.

“It speaks very well of Laserfiche when you can make that much happen with so little effort,” says Loew. “It’s really a very efficient system that we installed there.”

On December 26, 2006, it was announced that the Star Tribune’s corporate parent, The McClatchy Company, had sold the newspaper effective March 7, 2007. With the sale, says Star Tribune Software Engineer Corrie Kuester, came a provision that the paper had just one year (now ticking down to nine months from the time of the announcement) to pull and replace all its legacy data and bolt-on financial systems from McClatchy. One of these systems was the Bluebird imaging software utilized by the Star Tribune’s Asset Management, Accounts Payable, and Travel & Expense systems.

The Star Tribune IT and business team had to move fast, narrowing down their choices within just two months, based primarily on cost and support considerations. They chose Laserfiche.

“We decided on Laserfiche mostly because of cost,” Kuester says. “But our decision was also based on the fact that our local Laserfiche reseller Solbrekk had experience implementing document imaging with PeopleSoft financials. Plus they had a willingness to explore RightFax as a data collection vehicle for our Travel & Expense and Asset Management systems.”

Utilizing RightFax was critical to the Star Tribune, Kuester says, since its legacy workflow systems had heavily relied on RightFax for document collection, leftover from McClatchy’s nationwide presence.

“We needed an imaging partner that would work with us to ‘lift and load’ our existing processes from McClatchy and yet make our tight six-month implementation schedule without having to re-invent processing workflows,” he says.

The mid-August deadline to “lift and load” meant the project team had less than nine months to re-install the Star Tribune’s PeopleSoft HR and financial applications along with the associated bolt-on systems that had been developed over the previous 10 years. The newspaper, remember, had agreed to be off McClatchy’s system within a year.

The Star Tribune project team partnered with Oracle to strip the legacy systems and re-load the Star Tribune data into their newly acquired systems.

Where most Laserfiche users sing the praises of patient, phase-wise implementation gradually expanded over time from office to office or department to department, the Star Tribune didn’t have that luxury.

“Since all our data needed to be pulled all at once, our approach wasn’t focused on phases or how many people at a time, but how we could pull our data and insure we got it all,” Kuester says, “as well as assuring the knowledge transfer of the custom bolt-on systems that McClatchy had developed.”

The challenge they faced now was where they could store their data, since the Star Tribune’s new servers and databases wouldn’t be ready for the initial testing phases.

In the past, Kuester relays, any PeopleSoft upgrade at McClatchy was always hindered with the fact that Bluebird could only be linked to a production server, which negated proper testing. Oracle had supplied the Star Tribune with a lab environment to make multiple passes of extracting and loading data while the servers and databases were being installed, but the lab didn’t allow for testing the newspaper’s newly-acquired Laserfiche imaging processes.

Running smarter now meant the project team needed to use Laserfiche to hit the ground running.

“We opted to convert Bluebird to Laserfiche concurrent with performing multiple data extraction passes on our legacy data. Once the Bluebird data was converted to the Laserfiche server and test databases were built, then staff could test the imaging processes and their interaction with PeopleSoft,” says Kuester.

“It was Laserfiche’s search mechanism for retrieving documents from the image repository that now allowed us to access images from both our production and test databases,” he adds. This allowed the Star Tribune to test its workflow, document scanning, retrieval and custom coding changes in a test PeopleSoft environment without affecting the lab environment being utilized for its ‘lift and load’ testing.

“Basically, because of Laserfiche’s search function, we could develop the new custom code for linking Laserfiche to PeopleSoft in a separate database and could apply them to production after our final conversion,” Kuester says.

And then a funny thing happened on the Star Tribune’s way to becoming a Run Smarter winner: the August deadline was not only met, but during the migration process over 25,000 missing files were found. “My best guess is that they were files that were stored in Bluebird but were not linked to PeopleSoft due to business rules,” Kuester proffers. “Because they were not visible to PeopleSoft, they really were not accessible—but now they are right there in Laserfiche.”

Since then, the integration has gone well. Here’s how it works. Database fields in Oracle and SQL associate a PeopleSoft record with a Laserfiche document. By integrating PeopleSoft, RightFax, Oracle and Laserfiche, the Star Tribune is also able to automate workflow, such that, say, an expense report entered in PeopleSoft has a barcode, which RightFax sends to a network folder where Laserfiche Quick Fields Agent recognizes the barcode, files the receipt in Laserfiche and then notifies PeopleSoft that the expense can be reimbursed.

What started as an Accounts Payable solution is now being used by Circulation, HR, Asset Management and Interactive Media, with Laserfiche Records Manager on deck to manage contracts for the entire company.

“We’re still using Laserfiche within a departmental structure, with each department managing their own records’ life cycle,” Kuester adds. “We’ll be looking at Records Management Edition as we roll out Laserfiche to more departments.”

Still, despite the success making its implementation date, Laserfiche’s ongoing value to the Star Tribune is empowering its staff.

“Once people have an opportunity to see what some of the capabilities are, they are excited to begin using Laserfiche,” says Kuester. “Because it is easy to learn, users have found that they can become productive in a very short time.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite their good intentions, a non-profit business is still a business, and business-related complications arise. Auditors stop by at the end of the year. Vendors may call and say they haven’t received a check for a particular service.

In the past, such inquiries lead to chaotic searches in the accounting department of ACS’s Pennsylvania headquarters.

“We used to have all our checks and back-up documents on microfilm,” says Jerry Hilton, a retiree and part-time ACS staff member. “We could find a month pretty easily, but then we had to scroll through every check to find what we needed. It was very time-consuming.”

ACS installed Laserfiche in order to solve this problem. Now, checks are scanned in to a single repository, where ACS staff can organize them by month, date or vendor. Today, it takes Hilton about three seconds to find a check if he gets a call.

“I just type in the name of the caller, and there are the checks, right there with the back-up forms on the same document,” Hilton says.

ACS plans to expand Laserfiche to other areas of their very important operation. The field services department plans to implement Laserfiche in order to better manage fund-raising event records and treatment information, while HR plans to use the system to digitize employee files.

The key to Virgin’s success is a remarkably efficient online booking operation. While booking flights online is not a new concept, utilizing Portable Document Format (PDF) itineraries that double as tickets is a significant time-saver. Virgin travelers need only print out the PDF and bring it to the airport, and they receive a bar code on a printed slip of paper.

The need for Virgin to print paper tickets is eliminated, and travelers do not agonize over whether they will have a ticket waiting at the airport. The PDF is their ticket, and the corresponding bar code secures their seat on the plane from the moment their credit card is processed.

Laserfiche software maintains each customer’s information in a secure repository. The correct documents are instantly copied to Virgin servers as soon as the flight attendants’ Laserfiche-powered scanner reads the passenger’s bar code at the gate. The files are never dumped or re-loaded.

“As soon as the door closes on any flight, we know how much money is on that flight,” says Nick Brant, the head of IT at Virgin Blue in Australia. “Many older airlines with legacy systems can’t see those results for months.

“Too many companies use technology to cut their costs, but never pass the savings on to their customers,” Brant says. “We implemented Laserfiche with its bar- code reader so our customers would benefit from the software’s ease-of-use and efficiency.”

Laserfiche can be easily integrated into a wide variety of business environments. Manufacturers, financial professionals, healthcare offices and other organizations are managing their electronic documents and scanned images, old and new, with Laserfiche. The Snapshot feature instantly converts any electronic document to a TIFF file and adds it to the repository. The images are accessible by a variety of useful add-on tools, including Virgin’s bar-code scanning feature.

Virgin Blue Airlines picked Laserfiche and is making other savvy business decisions as it takes command of new markets. Several years after entering the market, Virgin Blue is on its way to becoming a leading airline in Australia, while many competitors have fallen by the wayside.

Instead of having to keep several copies of all its agreements on hand in each location, the company chose a digital document management solution from Laserfiche. Now, all the company’s information is stored electronically and, thanks to Laserfiche WebLink, is easily accessible to staff on the company¹s intranet.

Systems Engineer Ernie Pinchette says that once staff began using WebLink, they realized how much it would streamline their work processes and help them work more efficiently. They also realized that, with a few customizations, it would be even more effective.

“We wanted our system to be able to do multiple keyword searches, with the specific words highlighted in the documents, as in the standard Laserfiche Client. We also wanted to see the hit list and the individual documents in the same browser window,” Pinchette explains.

Pinchette was concerned that these customizations would involve significant investments of time and money. However, the Laserfiche reseller who installed Reliant’s system pointed out that neither was the case. In fact, these enhancements were included in the latest version of WebLink, which Reliant promptly installed.

Pinchette says that the new version of WebLink has made searching through the company’s 40,000-plus documents easier than ever. “The new version has definitely been a big advantage for us,” he adds.

When an order shipped, the accompanying paperwork first went to the company’s accounting and quality assurance departments for review. It then went to the file room. When a customer called with an order-related question, staff had to leave their desks and visit each of these locations in turn to search for the relevant document, while the customer waited on the phone. If the document was sitting on someone’s desk or had been misfiled, staff would have to undertake a more exhaustive search and return the customer’s call once they’d found the necessary information.

Recognizing that staff needed instant access to order-related documentation from their desktops, Brown’s CIO, Justin Lasley, began researching digital document management. Although Lasley and his colleagues quickly saw the benefits of scanning order-related paperwork, they had doubts about the manual data entry processes most systems relied on. “Our biggest concern was how to accurately associate metadata—such an invoice number and purchase order number—with each scanned image,” Lasley explains. “Most document management systems require manual entry of those values. This increases costs and does not necessarily guarantee a high level of accuracy.”

Laserfiche® quickly put these doubts to rest. When staff scan order-related paperwork into the Laserfiche repository, the Quick Fields™ module reads a bar code printed on each document. Quick Fields then uses this information to automatically populate the document’s template fields with the relevant metadata, which is retrieved from the company’s orders database. Thanks to this process, customer service staff can now quickly locate a document using any piece of information they have, including customer name, invoice number, sales order number, purchase order number, part number or ship date—without leaving their desks. “Now, our orders are easy to locate and retrieve, and important information can be relayed to customers more quickly,” Lasley says. “We’ve built our business on our ability to quickly respond to customer inquiries. Laserfiche helps us maintain that edge over our competitors.”

The ability to quickly locate orders also helps production personnel. “When we receive a repeat order, we refer to previous orders to review the processing instructions,” Lasley explains. “Because our production team can quickly find the original order in Laserfiche, they can provide instructions to the machine operators and shipping personnel without first having to look through a file cabinet. This helps us process orders quickly and accurately, and allows us to furnish a consistent product to customers.”

Laserfiche benefits staff and customers in other ways as well. For example, staff can quickly e-mail bills of lading, invoices and other documents to customers directly from the Laserfiche repository. Optical media publishing enables staff to easily transfer both individual documents and entire directories to disc, which greatly improves document portability and enhances business continuity planning. And, whereas the file room could only hold five years’ worth of orders, the Laserfiche repository has an unlimited storage capacity, meaning that Brown Metals can now build a comprehensive digital archive of all order-related documentation and correspondence.

Although Lasley originally intended to use Laserfiche only for order-related documents, he soon realized that the system would help him solve other information management challenges as well. He started with customer specifications. “We have a number of customers who are ISO 9001-registered, and who have their own manufacturing specifications they ask us to adhere to,” he explains. “We receive these specifications in a variety of formats, including Microsoft® Word® documents, PDF files, faxes and e-mails. Our own ISO 9001 procedures require us to retain these documents, have them available for reference and distinguish between current and older versions. The manual system we were using to manage this information was not very convenient for our sales staff. Looking up customer requirements became daunting.”

Now, Brown stores all customer specification information in Laserfiche. When staff need to reference a specification, they simply log in to the repository and navigate to the customer’s folder. As customers submit updated specifications, staff use a custom template field to flag existing specifications as obsolete. Thanks to this flag, Brown can easily retain obsolete specifications for historical purposes, without causing confusion as to which set of specifications is current.

Lasley currently has plans to use Laserfiche to manage accounts payable documents, as well as the Word, Excel®, and Visio® files associated with the company’s own ISO 9001 registration. He’d also like to install the Laserfiche Workflow™ module to automate the document routing process. He feels Workflow will prove particularly useful in replacing the manual process that the shop traveler currently follows to collect information about an order—including weights, coil sizes and box dimensions—as it moves through the production process.

No matter how much he expands the system’s use, Lasley knows there’s one thing he won’t have to worry about: staff buy-in. “When we started our initial implementation, several users were not convinced that Laserfiche would bring value to our business,” he says. “We’d been using a manual filing system for years, and new systems can cause feelings of uncertainty.

“After they started using the software, however, these users saw its value,” he continues. “Customer service staff can quickly locate tracking numbers and other information for customers. Production personnel can easily retrieve order-processing instructions, which speeds the order fulfillment process and promotes greater accuracy. And everyone spends less time worrying about lost documents.”

Lasley recommends Laserfiche to other organizations that want to streamline business processes and build stronger long-term relationships with customers. “Laserfiche has definitely helped us increase employee productivity, provide better customer service and distinguish ourselves from the competition,” he says.

With business booming—and paperwork proliferating as a result—Arthur McKay needed to drastically reduce the amount of time it took to process project files, says Account Manager Ian Westwater. “Business was expanding,” he explains, “and the amount of paper documentation was increasing every day. In addition, storage space was at a premium.”

Westwater describes the days before implementing Laserfiche, when inefficiency plagued staff and consumed valuable time and resources: “We would search for documents, only to discover that on occasion they were filed incorrectly—or not at all.”

After considering several ways to make critical information accessible to staff, Arthur McKay chose a Laserfiche document management solution, placing special importance on support from Capital Solutions, their local Laserfiche reseller. “A key reason for choosing Laserfiche,” says Westwater, “was our confidence that our reseller would provide the correct solution to meet our needs.”

Not all staff members shared that confidence in the new system, however. This initial scepticism revealed the importance of communicating clearly during implementation. “Initially, some users did not have a full understanding of the system and the reasons for implementing it. However, with some further training, staff were quick to acknowledge how straightforward and user-friendly the system is.”

It wasn’t long after the additional training that staff began scanning documents into Laserfiche—and realising the benefits of having information at their fingertips. An average of 3,000 new documents, consisting of 10,000 pages, enter the Laserfiche repository every week.

For the staff who process these documents, Laserfiche has made a dramatic difference in the amount of time it takes to make them available across the firm. From engineering reports and time sheets to compliance certificates and risk assessments, each construction project generates a number of common documents. Thanks to the Quick Fields™ module’s automated forms-processing capabilities, staff now capture and index these documents in a matter of minutes, rather than the hours it took before Laserfiche.

“Staff scan documents into Laserfiche at all stages of an individual project as soon as possible,” Westwater explains. “Once a document becomes ‘live,’ staff can access it instantly, which greatly simplifies communication.”

The improved time-to-availability has proven critical to successfully completing projects on time. With branch offices located in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, and with work sites all over the U.K., it’s essential for staff to have fast access to project files, so they can communicate and collaborate quickly and effectively.

“Using the Laserfiche search tool to locate documents has greatly improved efficiency,” Westwater says, “not to mention the reduced stress and frustration.”

But staff aren’t the only ones taking advantage of instant information access. Westwater reports that clients themselves appreciate the convenience of quickly and securely viewing project files—which, thanks to the Web Access™ module, they can do from the work site, at their home or at the office. Web Access offers user-specific, password-protected remote access to the Laserfiche repository, so customers can check the status of their projects from anywhere with an Internet connection. “Being able to retrieve documents from Laserfiche gives our customers confidence that projects are proceeding according to plan,” he says.

Likewise, he notes, Laserfiche helps to give auditors confidence that Arthur McKay is operating in compliance with industry and government regulations. “The building services sector generates a large number of documents related to compliance and legislation, which are audited both by internal and external parties,” Westwater says. “Storing these files in Laserfiche allows auditors freedom of access to their requested information, along with an assurance that they are viewing authentic documents.”

In addition, Laserfiche helps Arthur McKay manage documents related to its numerous accreditations, including ISO 9001 (quality management) and 14001 (environmental management) standards. Through Laserfiche, certification parties can easily monitor live and archived documents to ensure that Arthur McKay employs consistent business processes and quality control measures. And with regards to environmentally-sound business practices, it certainly doesn’t hurt that Laserfiche has promoted a significant reduction in paper consumption.

Of course, the most important benefit of implementing Laserfiche has been the improved level of client service. “The ease with which stakeholders can view documents, and the confidence they have in the authenticity of the documents,” Westwater says, “have been the most positive results of implementing Laserfiche.”

Laserfiche has also improved staff’s ability to deliver more flexible, more responsive service. “We carry out a standard procedure for all projects,” Westwater explains. “However, some procedures must be adapted depending on the clients’ requests. By enabling clients to view project files in Laserfiche, we’ve simplified communication regarding these special requests.”

As more and more prospective customers get word of Arthur McKay’s quality of service, the company will only continue to grow. Along with the firm’s recent opening of their London office, staff at the Glasgow branch are preparing to move into a bigger office building, at which point the firm’s Laserfiche installation is set to expand. Until then, Arthur McKay will continue to enjoy the increased efficiency that Laserfiche has brought—and continue passing it on to clients in the form of better service.

“ALM joins the World Health Organization in its goal to eliminate Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) as a major world health problem,” says Eugene Wilson, Information and Budget Director of the organization.

Victims of Hansen’s disease are no longer isolated in “leper colonies.” They work, attend school, and take part in public affairs. In most cases, the disease becomes non-contagious a few days after the beginning of MDT treatment, and is cured in six months to two years.

American Leprosy Missions, supported by church and individual contributions, dispenses MDT to leprosy patients around the world, treating them in hospitals, at outdoor clinics and from the backs of medical vans. ALM also gives artificial limbs to the severely disabled; it bandages ulcerated hands and feet, performs diagnostic skin tests, teaches patients how to protect themselves from injury and infection. And it keeps mountains of records.

Record keeping threatened to overcome the organization at one time — until ALM discovered Laserfiche Document Imaging. With more than 20 oversize filing cabinets crammed with documents in several languages, it needed a filing and retrieval system that could enable multiple users at different PC screens to study the same document simultaneously. LRA Imaging Systems, of Greenville, studied ALM’s requirements and recommended Laserfiche NLM-2 document imaging software, inexpensively installed on a network linking many personal computers already in use at the ALM offices.

Paper documents which used to fill the filing cabinets are being run through digital scanners at a second or less per page. The electronic impulses are then laser-burned into CD-ROM disks. One disk can record 14,000 to 21,000 sheets of paper, or the contents of one filing cabinet. And any one of those thousands of documents can be called to the screen, or several screens, instantly, by an operator tapping a few keys.

If the document being scanned is printed or typed, it can be “OCR’d “-that is, the system reads it digitally and creates a full-text list of every word it contains. Then the operator can recall that document by typing a word or phrase in the original record. And if he/she is unsure of the spelling, a “fuzzy logic” feature allows for a given percent of error in search accuracy.

Finally, ALM plans to have LRA integrate Laserfiche with translation-aid software to facilitate dealing with documents that arrive in languages other than English. “If they can do this, it will be almost as miraculous as curing leprosy,” said Mr. Wilson.

“Before (Laserfiche) we used to print 1 million pages monthly, now we only print 200,000,” said Alessander Comandolli, Technology Analyst of Ceval. That 80% reduction has made quite an impact on Ceval (a branch of the Bunge Group in Argentina) the third largest soybean exporter in South America.

Before Laserfiche, employees were spending valuable time printing out documents for customers and staff, and allotting a great deal of time searching for customer information and records. They began looking for the answers to their paper problems.

Tortelli, a Laserfiche Value Added Reseller in Lagas, Brazil was the best choice, according to Comandolli. “Tortelli was the only company that presented an integrated and automated solution, without the need to have a technician administer the system.”

“The company’s employees really enjoy the speed in accessing information with Laserfiche,” said Comandolli. “Great aspects of the software include the fact that Laserfiche is non-proprietary and doesn’t clog up the network. Fewer pages are printed because now employees can find and print out the pages they need, not the entire document which was the norm.”

Ceval also installed Laserfiche WebLink, an Internet tool that allows users to scan their documents and put them right up on the Web without HTML coding, so even employees that don’t have Laserfiche installed on their computers can access important documents via the intranet.

Comandolli said he is quite satisfied with Laserfiche and the change it’s made. “Before Laserfiche the rule was to print. Now it is the exception.”

Trouble is, the family is growing–fast.

Founded a dozen years ago, the company now has major offices in five U.S. cities–San Francisco; Ontario, Calif. (near Los Angeles); Minneapolis; Dallas, and Chicago-and just a few months ago it became international, by opening an office in London.

“Though we’ve gotten a lot bigger, we’re not so big that we don’t care about the customer,” Information Systems Manager Scott Johnson said in an interview recently. “And we never will be. We cater to the customer in a way that really huge freight forwarders can’t. We’ll give you whatever you want, from same-day delivery, to delivery a month from today, if that’s what you need.”

Such individual service requires tight control of records. When Flight Masters was smaller, its dispatching crew had to keep an eye on 5,000 documents a month. That number now is up to 15,000 and growing. “But we’ve still got that small-customer attitude,” says Mr. Johnson. “When our customers call for status checks-where is my package right now ? — we’ve got to tell them.”

And that was where Laserfiche came in.

“For every shipment we send, we need someone at the other end to sign it off; that’s our proof that they received it.” Mr. Johnson says. “The receipt is what we go by. The airport agent sends it back, with his bill, and, until recently, another piece of paper went into our file cabinets. Then, if the customer wanted to see the receipt, we had to send it to him. It could take one person a couple of hours to find one piece of paper.”

Once a year, they’d transfer the files from the file cabinets (”huge file cabinets,” says Mr. Johnson) to corrugated-paper storage boxes on a truck loading dock at the corporate office headquarters in Eagan, Minn. They were destroyed after about three years.

“There was paper everywhere,” says Mr. Johnson. “That’s why, about a year ago, we started to investigate document imaging.”

After consulting Enterprise Network Systems in nearby Eagan, MN., they quickly settled on the Laserfiche system. In the Flight Masters corporate office, one clerk now controls records preservation and retrieval, tagging each invoice or receipt with index numbers and dates, source and destination data, and then slides it through a scanner, at a rate of 30 documents per minute. The images on the document are instantly converted into electronic impulses, and these are then preserved on CD-ROM disks-about 10,000 documents to a disk, Mr. Johnson says.

“Now we don’t destroy anything,” Mr. Johnson says. “We can get anything back, any time. That’s one big advantage to this system.”

Is there another?

“Oh yes, the biggest: Searching for a document and just within seconds, finding it. That right there pays for the system.”

Finally, as the sun rose, the chemist stood up, stretched and told the watchful agents: “That’s it. Everything’s okay.”

That night, Vice President Richard Nixon ate the same food at a state dinner in the hotel.

Stories like these are part of the folklore of Laucks Lab. Opened in 1908 to assay the gold being found in the Yukon-gold fields of Northwest Canada, it began what has been a steady pattern of growth when World War I started a few years later, and Oriental produce bound for Europe was diverted from the Suez Canal to Western-U.S. ports. Laucks’ scientists tested and certified raw and finished products for bacteriological or chemical contamination. In more recent years, the lab has taken on an important environmental role, by such activities as industrial waste studies or a recently-completed two-year study of the sediments dredged from Hong Kong harbor as a result of airport construction.

Laucks’ analyses are usually quantitative: exactly how many parts of mercury per million are in the tissues of a halibut? How much toxic metals could be leached from waste material in a landfill? Moreover, according to Mike Nelson, technical director, these tests are almost always undertaken in conjunction with some allowable limits by government regulation—which means the analysis must be prepared with an eye to possible admission in court.

“Very little of our work actually ends up in court, but practically all of it is litigious in nature,” Mr. Nelson said. “We have to verify on a regular basis that our method and performance meet certain criteria; and we have to keep records and documentation for auditors that prove we are doing this. If we can’t defend our results—prove that the numbers we reported are in fact an accurate representation from the sample we’re given—we’re in big trouble. We’re quite defensive in that area so we keep lots of documents. We put lots of things in our files. Attorneys are very comfortable with pieces of paper.”

To ease the paper glut, the lab about a year ago installed a powerful document-imaging system, developed by Laserfiche Document Imaging, Inc. of Long Beach, California. With Laserfiche, Laucks created a tracking system, under which a tracking number is assigned to a particular case; then all of the documents related to that case are run through a scanner—one sheet of paper per second or less—and electronic photocopies are stored permanently, for instant retrieval on up to five PC monitors, whenever the tracking number is tapped into the keyboard. One sheet of paper is retained, for legal purposes, in place of multiple copies formerly required.

“We have several projects where we’re doing that now,” Mr. Nelson said. “It’s actually been very helpful. As the time goes along, I’m sure it will provide an important saver of storage space for us. We’re moving along, one step at a time.”

“After looking at the existing paper-based filing system, it was obvious that it was difficult for them to get documents into the hands of appropriate parties fast enough,” said McDuff, who served as the project manager for the Laserfiche implementation at Hillwood. He carefully evaluated several document management systems, creating a matrix scorecard to visualize the cost and functionality of each system. The Hillwood project team ultimately chose Laserfiche based on its overall value and the fact that the system is modular and scalable, allowing companies like Hillwood to start with a relatively small installation and expand the system at their own pace.

“The scalability gave us the chance to get our feet wet while we got the system up and running. A lot of other solutions weren’t able to give us that option,” McDuff said. “The Laserfiche system is going to do nothing but grow.”

Another important consideration for the records department at Hillwood was maintaining the security of sensitive documents on the new system for years to come. Laserfiche’s proven track record with high-profile clients including the FBI and CIA gave Shuster the reassurance that the integrity of Hillwood’s documents would be protected for the long haul.

“Our goal was to find a tool that would complement our current records management processes, and at the same time position Hillwood to benefit from the latest technologies into the future,” Shuster said.

Getting the system up and running was a simple process. Hillwood staff members were trained on the software in small groups and over the phone. According to McDuff, Laserfiche’s use of the familiar Windows Explorer interface made it easy for Hillwood workers to catch on quickly, greatly minimizing any downtime caused by the training.

“For us, a big selling point was that there wasn’t a lot of change in the user environment to use the software,” McDuff said. “There was an overwhelming response from users within the company.”

Though it has been installed for just three months, the benefits of switching to Laserfiche are apparent. Rather than putting in a records request and waiting for the appropriate documents to be pulled and photocopied, qualified users can now access and search the entire Hillwood file repository directly from their desktops, saving time for everyone.

“Our associates using Laserfiche are very pleased with the accessibility of documents and information so quickly, knowing that eventually ‘all’ records will be indexed into Laserfiche, making everyone’s job easier and more efficient,” Shuster said. Laserfiche is already saving her about 50 hours per month, allowing the corporate records staff to focus on getting millions of pages of older “legacy” documents scanned into the system.

Hillwood’s use of Laserfiche to streamline operations mirrors a nationwide industry trend, as growing numbers of real estate development companies turn to document imaging to keep operating costs down and increase efficiency.

“Laserfiche has built a lot of inroads in development and construction. There certainly seems to be growing interest in the product within these industries,” said Cody Bettis, CEO of DocuNav Solutions, a Dallas-based Laserfiche reseller that handled the sale, installation and training of the Laserfiche system with Perot Systems and Hillwood. DocuNav has installed Laserfiche at dozens of organizations in a variety of industries ranging from financial services companies to local city governments. In recent years, DocuNav has been working with more clients in the real estate development industries, including one of the largest home developers in the country.

At Hillwood, Shuster has big plans to expand the Laserfiche system even further, which can be easily accomplished at a minimal cost thanks to the modular design of the software.

“At Hillwood we always strive to do our jobs with excellence and integrity. The Laserfiche product and its technology allow us to maintain that standard with more efficiency and effectiveness,” Shuster said.

And if telephone callers no longer have to be put on perma-hold while panicky clerks scurry to find a missing file—that’s a big step forward in client relations.

The Compensation Advisory Organization of Michigan (CAOM) took that step two years ago, when it converted its paper files to document imaging by Laserfiche. And, says Senior Vice President Jon Heikkinen: “We can’t say how much we’re pleased with it, it’s just been excellent, in our opinion.”

CAOM is a nonprofit service agency supported by the 200-some insurance companies— which supply a quarter-million Michigan employers with workers’ comp insurance, required by state law. It runs annual computer studies comparing individual employers’ loss experience against their premium rates; then it reduces rates for businesses with good safety records, and raises them for the higher-risk companies. Simply put, one of CAOM’s assignments is to make sure that safety pays in Michigan.

Another is to operate the Michigan Workers’ Compensation Placement Facility, an assigned-risk pool, to make sure that every employer, even those with high loss experience, can get some kind of insurance protection. About 10 percent of Michigan employers must take this relatively expensive high-risk insurance.

That’s not all. The organization also receives and files copies of each company’s workers’ comp policy; and makes them available, on demand, to the state Labor and Insurance Departments—thus making sure there are no uninsured employers. Finally, for the Insurance Bureau, it submits an annual report of the entire insurance program. All these functions added up to quite a big job for a staff of 45 persons, working desk-to-desk in one vast office nearly a quarter-acre in size. As Mr. Heikkinen put it recently:

“We had massive amounts of paper files. Companies or agents would telephone in to our client service area—say it was something about an application for [high risk] pool insurance. Well, the service person would not have a copy of that document on his desk; he’d have to go back in the file room, somewhere in 2,000 square feet of open-bay storage. Some of those files were 40 years old and still active. Anybody could request them; we’d have to come up with them.”

Misfiling was a continuing problem, Mr. Heikkinen said.

“It would be very crucial … quite a few people would have to go on a file search. They would spend half an afternoon looking for a single file. It might be sitting on some person’s desk or anywhere in the place… they’d spend a good part of an afternoon looking for an important file. That doesn’t happen any more, because with Laserfiche Document Imaging, we were able to reorganize our office. We threw out 250,000 files. We have a huge waste basket on wheels, probably twice as big as the average garbage can in somebody’s garage. We filled that thing and rolled it down to the dumpster— somebody counted—250 times. First, of course, they were all scanned into the Laserfiche document imaging system.”

The two-year changeover saved CAOM about 2,000 square feet of expensive storage space, Mr. Heikkinen said. The collection of side-by-side desks, filling a barn-like office has been reorganized into friendly clusters of private cubicles. Each cubicle has its own PC, and all are linked in a Local Area Network tied, through a server, into a “jukebox” CD-ROM player the size of a small office-type refrigerator. Now, when there is a call for a file, the clerk doesn’t leave his/her cubicle: a few key-taps and the document appears instantly on the clerk’s monitor screen. Up to 25 people can read the same document simultaneously, if they desire.

The system was planned and set up by Oak Soft Consulting, Inc., of Southfield, MI, a suburb of Detroit. “Terry Warns (president of Oak Soft) was a big, big asset to us.” Mr. Heikkinen said. Oak Soft has enjoyed a steady working relationship with CAOM. Oak Soft provides Laserfiche planning, installation and support for companies in the Midwest.

The CAOM executive said that originally, cost had been a troubling factor. “I’d had quotations from other companies in the six-figure range, for software alone,” he said. “I wasn’t going to go to my governing committee and say ‘Give me a million dollars and I’ll make the system work.’ I didn’t know whether it would work. Then Terry came along and said ‘Why don’t we start small, with this system that we can make work, for an initial investment of $50,000, including hardware and software—just five users, and, if you like it, we can expand from there ?’ So we did that. We made that initial investment of $50,000. And we liked it so much that we made another investment of $50,000 right after it. And we’re probably going to expand some more.

“Frankly, for the money we spent, I think we got a lot.”