Serving Ada County, Boise County, Elmore County and Valley County, CDHD manages the Board of Health and the Community Health, Communicable Disease, Immunization, Reproductive Health and WIC Departments in addition to the Environmental Health Department. The planning and zoning authority of each county requires the Environmental Health Department to review every subdivision’s application for sewage permits, which can include:

• Test hole inspections for sewage installation.
• Plot plans.
• Building permits.
• Zoning certificates.

“Paper copies of the records were located in each county’s office, which made them difficult for us to access without a lot of copying and faxing,” Ross explains. Efficient storage, organization and access to the documents crucial to the permit process was compromised until CDHD decided to implement Laserfiche ECM.

Powering Permitting

After the previous director of CDHD saw Laserfiche featured at an environmental health conference in 2004 and was impressed with its agility, the department decided to implement the software later that same year. The initial objective was to find a program that could scan in past and present septic permits and applications, while providing central access to the records across all the offices in the health district.

Today, CDHD uses Laserfiche not just to scan and store permit documents, but also to enable external clients to access the information themselves using Laserfiche WebLink, which provides read-only access to records stored in the Laserfiche repository. Clients include:

• Realtors selling homes that need permit information for potential buyers and appraisers.
• Septic pumpers looking to access permit information to find the location of septic tanks for pumping.
• Septic installers who are on-site and legally in need of a copy of the permit before proceeding with the installation.

Although clients applying for permits are supposed to provide a copy of their permits to septic installers (permits are required on the job site at all times), this frequently doesn’t happen. In the past, installers would have to come into the department and wait for a copy of the appropriate paperwork to be located and copied, or sometimes faxed over from the appropriate county. “Locating permit information for clients sometimes took hours to accomplish,” says Mike Reno, Supervisor of Land Based Programs for CDHD. “It slowed things down for both us and them.”

He continues, “With Laserfiche, the installers and other external clients can view the permit online and print their own copy if needed. This saves our clerical and field staff a lot of time making copies of permits and faxing them over.”

Ross notes that CDHD saw a significant reduction in information requests from external clients and that they continue to decline—especially from realtors—as clients realize most of their questions can be answered by accessing Laserfiche WebLink through the department’s Webpage.

“The ability to access data that resides in other offices is extremely helpful. It’s my favorite feature,” Reno says. If for some reason clients are unable to access the internet and attain records themselves, Reno can pull up the permit information on his desktop and provide the information within minutes.

With secure and easy public access and more efficient staff response time, Ross is pleased to report that CDHD “can concentrate on customer service, not paperwork.”

Empowering the Enterprise

After the initial deployment of Laserfiche, several other offices within CDHD got on board with goals of streamlining their specific work processes. Because Laserfiche integrates so easily with CDHD’s custom applications—written in-house with Microsoft Visual FoxPro—it’s especially easy to use across multiple departments. Employees are able to access Laserfiche features in a familiar way, which means CDHD can keep training to a minimum while maximizing staff efficiency.

“We used the Laserfiche SDK to write code in our Visual FoxPro applications. The custom code allows users to click on ‘search’ or ‘scan’ buttons from within our custom applications to invoke Laserfiche, which then searches for related images or fills in the template fields for new scans,” Ross explains. “This eliminates the user’s need to manually open Laserfiche, manually search for related images or manually fill in any templates. In turn, it reduces the possibility of data entry errors and mismatched key fields.”

Ross explains that a number of CDHD departments rely on Laserfiche in the following ways:

• Land Development and Subdivisions scans and stores permit information.
• Child Care Inspections manages, approves and files inspections.
• Immunizations scans all client records to improve access and searchability.
• Accounting scans contracts and other documents for improved access and storage.

CDHD plans to make Food Inspections, Pool Inspections and Tuberculosis records available through Laserfiche next, while records for the Daycare and Food Establishment Inspections Departments will soon be available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink.

The transition to Laserfiche has been embraced across CDHD and has already yielded an incredible ROI in terms of staff time saved. Prior to Laserfiche, one to four staff members were required to spend 15 to 30 minutes researching each document request from both internal and external customers. Now, due to interdepartmental and public access to records via WebLink, requests for information are either handled by clients themselves, or quickly managed by the department through fax, e-mail or the Web.

In fact, Reno estimates that hundreds of hours of staff time have been saved thanks to Laserfiche.

CDHD also found another enormous benefit of implementing Laserfiche: a dramatic reduction in the cost of Quality Assurance (QA). “Prior to Laserfiche, we had to send someone to each county to assure the quality of data on the permit applications coming in. Outlying offices were required to make copies of applications and permits and then fax that material to the person conducting quality control of the data in the particular county. Now, we have one person who does all QA from their desktop in Laserfiche,” says Reno.

With one person able to quickly locate and manage the data for permits in multiple counties, Reno notes, “The quality of our data has improved and we have saved significantly on travel costs.”

Ross, meanwhile, concludes, “The great thing about Laserfiche is that it grows with you. Even after you solve your initial problem it can do so much more than you imagined.”

Prior to the creation of the Central Contra Costa Sanitary District (CCCSD) in 1946, however, Contra Costa County—located east of San Francisco, CA—was in crisis. A post-war building boom had brought an influx of new residents, most of them relying on septic systems that didn’t take well to the area’s heavy adobe clay soil. With septic tanks overflowing and waterborne diseases such as typhoid becoming a potential threat, health authorities considered the polluted conditions in the county to be among the worst in California.

As a result, the CCCSD was formed as a special district, a sewer system and treatment plants were put in place, and the public received much-needed access to safe water and sanitation.

By 2002, CCCSD had expanded to meet the needs of 450,000 people by maintaining 1,500 miles of sewer lines and treating an average of 45 million gallons of wastewater per day. But with 56 years of service came 56 years of records—including permits, construction plans and Board documents. Storage space was at a premium, gaining access to information was difficult and time-consuming, and the district wanted to strengthen its disaster recovery plans.

“Over the years, CCCSD has created a reliable and efficient infrastructure to handle the wastewater needs of thousands of Central Contra Costa residents,” says John Phillips, IT systems analyst for CCCSD. “Laserfiche is helping to add similar efficiency and reliability to our IT infrastructure, allowing us to provide our staff with faster access to the content they need to do their jobs.”

Implementing ECM

The special district enlisted Laserfiche reseller ECS Imaging to build out its information management infrastructure with Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM).

The first department to implement Laserfiche was the Secretary of the District, which converted critical Board documents from CCCSD’s inception in 1946 through the present into an easily accessible, digital form. The Permits operation was next, with a much larger and more complicated filing backlog of permits and record drawings. This conversion process is still underway today.

“It was important for us to select a system that could handle many different forms of content,” says Phillips. “Documents are simple. Maps and drawings are where things get more complex.”

Today, permit job files (including maps and drawings) are scanned into Laserfiche offsite by ECS Imaging. This practice centralizes content management, reduces the need for physical storage space, minimizes wear and tear on the originals and enables convenient access to them by CCCSD employees.

Since 2002, many other departments have begun using Laserfiche to manage a wide variety of content, including:

• Maps and drawings (Engineering Support)
• Right of Way agreement files (Right of Way)
• Employee and retiree files (Human Resources)
• Standard operating procedures (Lab)
• Discharge permit documentation (Plant Operations)

Expanding ECM by Integrating GIS

To further improve information access, the special district expanded its use of Laserfiche by integrating it with CCCSD’s GIS system, AutoDesk MapGuide. The in-house integration grants engineers, permit counter staff and field maintenance crews instantaneous access to scanned permits and record drawings. This is particularly important for CCCSD’s field crews, which operate out of a separate facility without convenient access to paper records.

“Prior to the integration of Laserfiche and the GIS system, field crews were unable to access any of these records directly,” explains Carl Von Stetten, information systems analyst, Engineering Support, CCCSD. “They had to take the time to retrieve copies from a variety of filing rooms.”

To access scanned permits and record drawings, users simply double-click on a parcel or pipeline within a map, and then follow the links in the subsequent reports to content stored in the Laserfiche repository. According to Von Stetten, “This has eliminated time spent looking up hard copy permits and drawings and enabled our crews to be more productive in the field.”

Business Benefits

“Our deployment has focused on achieving specific business goals rather than on technical bells and whistles,” explains Phillips, “which is why we’ve had so much success.”

The key benefits CCCSD has realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche include:

• Increased efficiency. Today, all employees have easy online access to current and historical records, which are centralized in the Laserfiche repository. Access to additional content such as permits, HR files and operating procedures is granted to authorized users based on Laserfiche security protocol. Laserfiche search tools enable staff to locate information quickly, so time is no longer wasted on finding, copying and distributing content. The system has also reduced CCCSD’s need for storage space.
• Easy integration with GIS. By linking Laserfiche to its GIS system, CCCSD engineers, permit counter staff, and field maintenance crews can instantly access scanned permits and record drawings. This is a particular timesaver for CCCSD’s field crews, which operate out of a separate facility without convenient access to paper records.
• Improved disaster recovery. In the past, disaster protection focused on preserving and protecting vulnerable paper copies. The installation of Laserfiche, with redundant off-site storage, has greatly improved the district’s ability to protect historical and vital records. “We hope we never face an emergency that will demonstrate the benefits of having Laserfiche,” says Phillips, “but we have to be prepared.”

“My best advice for companies that want to extend their information management infrastructure with ECM is to talk to other users who’ve done what you’re trying to do,” concludes Phillips. “Leverage their experience to ease your implementation and achieve your goals.”

Shortly after deployment in early 2004, staff began scanning job files and the benefit was as obvious as it was immediate. “Retrieval. No question at all. My number one benefit is retrieval,” Howell says. “We had an employee at this end of the building, that whenever they needed an invoice, had to go to the other end, go into a banker’s box, then make a copy, then put everything back up. To find an invoice start to finish, took 20 minutes. Now, it takes five minutes, tops.”

In the process of deploying Laserfiche, Howell says, CCUA has developed “folders within folders” to sort and group the myriad financial documents and as-built drawings for each file, assigning a team of two people to scan and review, with a third staffer assigned spot-checking newly-created files for quality control. While the Engineering Department has been scanning job files since the beginning, both the Finance and Billing Departments now also employ scanning personnel. Says Howell, “Not only are they scanning customer payment information, but also ‘turn-on/turn-off’ requests, change of addresses – we scan all those requests. It just makes for better, more complete customer service having a record like that.”

These days 139 office and outside personnel access documents in Laserfiche, while 25-30 staff use it on a daily basis to either scan in CCUA documents or use Laserfiche for efficient retrieval of documents without leaving their workspaces. Ongoing backlog conversion efforts are continuing each day– thanks in no small part to a growing need for a disaster recovery plan in CCUA’s hurricane-prone part of the country, as well as Florida’s “Sunshine” Law, which mandates public access to records.

“Beginning in 2008, CCUA made it a priority to go back to [files from] 2005,” Howell says, adding that staff have made files from 2006-on their priority for this year. “We’re in Florida, so we’re looking at crisis management and disaster recovery if there’s a natural disaster. CCUA’s main concern is that we want current project files protected – that’s what keeps us operational,” he adds. “It’s not the files from 10-15 years ago, but the ones from the past two years that are very important.” Another benefit, Howell says, is that financial audits that used to mean hours and sometimes days of digging out records can now be done in an afternoon. “Instead of staff going to the filing cabinets to retrieve files, our auditors’ can go directly into Laserfiche to access and retrieve the required documents – they love it.”

Howell has long been a fan of using Laserfiche administrative tools to monitor productivity and manage long-term projects. Since implementing Audit Trail in 2006, Howell says he’s been able to maximize productivity. “I can make Excel spreadsheets and graphs from Laserfiche reports and see how we’re progressing on any of CCUA’s scanning projects.” This kind of oversight and responsiveness has made CCUA agile in a way not usually associated with a governmental entity. For instance, even in the midst of the recent economic slowdown, CCUA has not had to lay off any of its 139 staff members. Rather, using powerful reporting tools – Laserfiche among them – administrators have been able to minimize bottlenecks and re-assign staff where needed to ensure sustainable productivity evenly throughout the organization. As CCUA knows well, business is best when staff and information can flow as efficiently as the water service it provides.

That all changed when Laserfiche provided the district with a high-speed, Web-based content management system that’s catching the eye of other districts across the state.

“It’s like going from black and white TV with rabbit ear antennae to HDTV and satellites,” says district manager Tim Baker. “It’s an enormous leap forward in our typical way of doing business.”

The real estate boom of the 1990s had swamped Baker’s staff with septic system and well permit applications as a wave of real estate brokers and developers, second home owners and retirees began to move into this once-rural section of Virginia. New residents were accustomed to near-instantaneous information access, and West Piedmont’s antiquated filing system wasn’t up to the task, requiring equal parts of luck and experience to find anything.

Marking the exact location of these facilities in West Piedmont and surrounding areas was crucial to beginning any new development. Without knowing the exact locations of old septic systems and leech fields, it’s unsafe to dig new ones. Unfortunately, due to the district’s hodgepodge filing system, locating them meant laboriously combing through file cabinets in an attempt to find the requested information.

It was a paperwork bottleneck. Baker and his staff knew they needed a solution, but it had to be affordable, easy to implement and easy to operate. In 2000, West Piedmont business director Charles Toothman came back from a technology trade show convinced that Laserfiche was the solution, and the district’s request for contractors’ bids went out soon after.

West Piedmont was soon scanning thousands of well and septic system permits into a Laserfiche system serving the district’s three Health Department offices. Generations of paper records and a byzantine filing system quickly gave way to a password-protected digital repository.

Health district inspectors used to spend hours, or even days, looking through cabinets crammed full of permits filed by subdivision name, mobile home park name, owner’s name or tax map number. Now, inspectors can use any or all of that information to instantly retrieve the files they need.

“It would take staff hours pulling paper to find these things; now we can find them in about 30 seconds,” Baker says. “Even if we don’t have the document a client’s looking for, we can tell them so right away, rather than searching for a day or two and coming up empty. Laserfiche just saves everybody so much time.”

That success has snowballed. West Piedmont’s three district offices were soon networked together, enabling inspectors to access all the district’s permit files from any of the three offices. A Laserfiche WebLink public portal enables authorized personnel to access documents from anywhere in the state via the Internet. Baker says that soon, local zoning and building departments will be able to gain access through the password-driven security system included in the Laserfiche product suite.

Officials in other Virginia health districts have also shown an interest in the West Piedmont installations, so Baker will deliver a presentation at the biannual meeting of the health district department heads this spring. He suspects other districts could see the same benefits from Laserfiche that West Piedmont has.

“I am pretty familiar with most other health departments, and their filing systems are very similar to ours—at least the way ours used to be,” he says.

Indeed, Laserfiche could also work wonders with the other areas within the far-reaching responsibilities of the State Health Department. Says Adam Wright, a Laserfiche reseller who assisted West Piedmont with their installation, “The state provides many services, all of which could benefit greatly from this system.

“Your return on investment is so fast, it’s just a matter of months before you get your money back. I want people to really understand, there is a faster, more efficient way to do these things. Why not do it?”

In Minnesota, watershed districts are local, special-purpose units of government that work to solve and prevent water-related problems. The boundaries of each district follow those of a natural watershed and consist of land in which all water flows to one outlet, and districts are usually named after that watershed. They range in size from the Carnelian-Marine District with 43 square miles, to the Red Lake Watershed District with 5990 square miles.

The Rice Creek Watershed District has been managing the water in the lower Southeast corner of the state since 1972. Rice Creek, a tributary of the Mississippi River is approximately 28 miles long and drains a watershed of 201 square miles of Anoka, Hennepin, Ramsey and Washington counties. Portions of the district can be found in 28 municipalities.

State regulations mandate that government agencies maintain an historic record of files, so the District’s records room was drowning in paper files dating back to the District’s founding in 1972. Their almost half-century of records filled 20 filing cabinets and 45 additional bankers’ boxes, and files were growing at an alarming rate. And because the District had no disaster recovery backup plan, a fire or flood could wipe out nearly 40 years of records in an instant.

Rice Creek in Fridley, MN

Besides the massive backlog of unprotected files, the District’s paper-based building permit process created costly logistical deadlines. “When a new permit request came in, it was given a permit number and a file number and then sent to an outside engineering consulting firm 25 miles away,” says District Administrator Doug Thomas. “We would need to have it sent by courier or mail, or someone from their office would come pick it up – all which took up a lot of time. Since we have a permit deadline each month, time was a big issue.”

Rice Creek was among the first watershed districts to look into Laserfiche after hearing rave reviews from City of Shoreview‘s IS Manager, Dick Crumb. Crumb contacted Laserfiche reseller Larry Phelps from Solbrekk and suggested Phelps introduce Rice Creek’s staff to Laserfiche. (Check out a video of Crumb demonstrating Laserfiche to over 40 employees from 18 Minnesota cities here).

When Phelps showed Thomas and his staff how easily their paper could be scanned, indexed, managed and searched with Laserfiche, they were quick to implement. Ned Phillips, the person responsible for IT at the District, decided to purchase Laserfiche and a Canon 3080 scanner. He also added Import Agent so that staff could scan and import documents into Laserfiche right from their digital scanner and copier.

Rice Creek in Shoreview, MN

Today, Rice Creek scans all their current documents and are reaping the benefits of having documents close at hand. The permit application process in particular has been greatly streamlined.

“Each permit application is scanned immediately,” says Thomas. “Laserfiche creates a place where everyone can go electronically and work with that file without having to find the paper file, make a copy, and deal with paper boxes and spend hours making copies.”

And now engineers no longer have to wait for files to arrive by mail, which completely eliminates the rush to meet deadlines. “We gave the engineers their own licenses, so they can view a file immediately after it’s been scanned into Laserfiche. This definitely helped us to meet permit deadlines,” Thomas adds.

Disaster recovery is also no longer an issue. “Rather than having boxes and boxes in fireproof and waterproof hard storage—which can get pretty costly—our files are backed up in electronic form in Laserfiche,” says Thomas. “It is a far better information management system than paper.”

Adds Phillips, “We now have the peace of mind that our documents are now secure.”

Thomas offers the following advice to other administrators who might hesitate to make the investment needed to get their own Laserfiche system off the ground. “Most people worry about the initial investment and the labor involved with scanning,” he says. He suggests hiring an outside agency to handle all backlog conversion scanning, and to start scanning everyday business processes immediately. “Once it’s done, your day-to-day business processes become much more streamlined,” he says.

Now staff can’t imagine life without Laserfiche. “Just today, I had a call about a project in 1990,” says Thomas. “I was able to go into Laserfiche and find the engineer’s report for that project and use Laserfiche to e-mail the file directly to that person in 5 minutes.

“I can’t imagine how many hours would have gone into trying to find that same record if it were stored in files and boxes somewhere,” he adds.