But in terms of automating its paper‐based processes, the Commission has become progressively more proactive in its procedures and practices since implementing Laserfiche in 2002. Utilizing the powerful automated capture and search capabilities of Laserfiche as well as the WebLink public portal, the Commission began by revolutionizing its internal and external “e‐discovery” processes while increasing online transparency via its e‐Library. The launch of the e‐Library fulfilled a long‐standing desire to offer the public a searchable on‐line repository of every Commission ruling dating back to 1979. In addition, phase two of the e‐Library implementation was to provide, via its website, all of the financial disclosure statements required to be filed with the Commission by public officials and public employees.

The Need to Accelerate e-Discovery

In 2002 faced with the daunting and time intensive task of assembling case files to prepare for an upcoming trial, Commission staff knew there had to be a better more efficient way to prepare exhibits. Contino had a case that had over 35,000 pages of discovery documents. Long‐standing manual processes would have involved hiring a temporary employee to hand‐number each page and then copy all 35,000 pages for opposing counsel.

“That could easily take two weeks,” Contino says. “We had to generate some kind of numbering system so I could take a 35,000 page case file and refer to something on page 15,231 without going through every page to find it.”

With that goal in mind, the Commission issued a Request for Proposals for a document management solution. “We went through a pretty long and thorough vetting process with the Commonwealth’s list of preferred vendors, which included Laserfiche,” says Cynthia Lynch, the Commission’s Director for Administration. “A lot of the solutions we were shown were proprietary and costly. Laserfiche was an out‐of‐the box solution for all intents and purposes. It was a lot more economical and a lot more user‐friendly.”

The Commission ultimately purchased Laserfiche with Quick Fields advanced capture, including Bates numbering functionality, which immediately enhanced the Commission’s case preparation processes. Commission staff were able to scan in the thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of pages, which were then automatically electronically numbered. Then Commission attorneys could pick and choose the exhibits necessary and made them available to opposing counsel on read‐only CD’s with appropriate redactions applied. Commission attorneys could then simply drag and drop specific pages into their own sub‐folders, which Quick Fields could re‐process and re‐number for easier reference in the courtroom.

Improved Case Management Internally, a Transparent e-Library Externally

Contino immediately saw how Laserfiche’s capture and search functionality could be applied to managing the Commission’s history of rulings and opinions that dated back to its inception in 1979. “One thing I had been trying to do since the early ‘90s was move away from depending on institutional memory to find information in our rulings,” says Contino. “We realized that if we could use the search function to aid in our case management of our investigative files, we could use it to let the public search available rulings [via Laserfiche WebLink]. That became our e‐Library.” A year later, in 2004, the Commission added the Statements of Financial Interest that officials are required by state law to file annually, adding convenience to the transparency. “We were always big on transparency and making things available to the public,” Contino says. “The e‐Library made this more convenient for everyone.”

The challenge, explains IT Director Sean Firestine, was making information filed according to the Commission’s internal filing system available for public use. The solution was again Quick Fields. “We found Quick Fields could look through our database for first and last name, and sort files in alphabetical order so the public could use an ‘A‐Z’ list to look up information. Internally, the original paper documents continue to be filed according to our specific naming convention.”

Ensuring Continuity and Maximizing Resources with a Brief Bank

Contino says the ongoing benefit of using Laserfiche is the convenience it brings to the Commission’s day‐to‐day operations. “The fact that I can access any investigative file from my desk – evidence, reports, everything – saves a lot of time,” he says. As such, staff has been proactive in applying Laserfiche’s use to other business processes. “We keep thinking of ways we can utilize the system,” Contino says. Or as Firestine puts it, “John says ‘Hey, can we do this?’ And we usually can.”

For instance, the Commission has used Laserfiche to establish its own “brief bank.” “Over the course of 30 years, we’ve written thousands of legal briefs, which are now cataloged in Laserfiche,” Contino explains. “Brief‐writing is very time‐consuming. You’re given 30 days, but it can take the first two weeks just to do your research. Now we can potentially save a week’s worth of researching if it’s something we’ve already written about.”

Lynch adds that the Commission’s Laserfiche system is also an integral part of the agency’s overall Continuity of Government Plan. “Anything that used to be solely on paper is scanned into Laserfiche has become part of our daily and nightly back‐up,” she says.

The Value of Upgrading to Avante ECM

The latest chapter in the Commission’s evolving use of Laserfiche is its recent upgrade to a Laserfiche Avante ECM system, which includes Workflow business process management, Web Access and Audit Trail. “For us, the benefit of upgrading to Avante is that we were able to get Web Access and Workflow reasonably inexpensively,” says Contino.

Since upgrading to Laserfiche Avante with Web Access at the end of 2009, the Commission has continued to find even more ways to utilize and maximize its use of Laserfiche. This includes providing the Pittsburgh office with the ability to input information into Laserfiche directly – saving paper, labor and overnight delivery fees. This improvement has already proved to be a significant cost‐saver, giving the Pittsburgh office the ability to scan their documents directly into the Laserfiche repository, instead of overnighting the paper files to the Harrisburg office for scanning and processing duplicating efforts.

“We keep thinking of new ways we can use the Laserfiche system,” Contino says. The Commission’s proactive thinking is paying off: greater efficiency plays a significant role in the agency’s ability to fulfill its mandate – despite operating with 20% less staff.

Firestine has begun working with the agency’s reseller, Full Circle Solutions Group, to set up a Workflow to automate proofreading and editing opinions between investigators and supervisors. Contino says the actual cost savings have not been compiled, but says the addition of Web Access – like the e‐Discovery, e‐Library transparency, internal brief bank, and Continuity of Government plan – provides another example of the agency fulfilling another mandate: to maximize its resources in an era of decreased operating revenues.

“We’re in a situation where doing more with less is key right now,” says Contino. “We’ve been operating with 20% less staff this year, but we still have a mandate to fill. Anything that allows us to utilize existing systems instead of hiring more individuals, and that allows us to pursue our mandate and be compliant, helps us continue our operations and serve the interests of the Commonwealth more effectively.”

As the state regulatory agency charged with protecting citizens’ health and safety, the Medical Board regulates the practice of medicine in Texas by licensure, discipline and education. It has a legislative mandate to file and track all complaints filed on any doctor licensed in the state—typically hundreds of them a year.

In the past, investigating all of those complaints led to the creation of thousands and thousands of paper documents that could be used in legal proceedings, and shipping and storing them all was a considerable drain on the agency’s resources. Staff members could injure themselves moving boxes of records around, and it could still take hours to find the exact paper document that was required for a legal hearing.

“The ability to retrieve information on demand is critical to legal proceedings and the agency as a whole,” says Anthony Merritt, a systems analyst with the Texas Medical Board. “At times our staff had boxes stacked up to the ceiling all around the office, just to have the appropriate documents on hand when they were needed. It was crazy. They knew there had to be a better way.”

Fits and Starts

The agency deduced that digitizing the documentation associated with complaints was the way to go, and it started by simply uploading and storing content on a number of different file servers. Managing content this way, however, turned out to be a nightmare: Files resided on different servers, and various departments were saving different versions of documents in their own network spots. There was no consistency. There was excessive redundancy. Worst of all, there was no way for an employee to guarantee that the document he was working with was really in its most current form.

Next, the agency opted to install a document management solution from FileNet. It worked well for a while, but as the agency grew and began to offer more services over the Internet, the existing system just couldn’t keep up. Customizing it to different departments’ needs required hiring a contract programmer, which made the cost of upgrading, customizing and maintaining the FileNet solution too high. According to Merritt, the system’s interface was cumbersome, and due to its limited features, “people were starting to avoid using it entirely.”

Comprehensive, Cost-effective Content Management

Once again faced with an untenable system for handling content, The Medical Board reviewed its alternatives and decided that replacing FileNet with Laserfiche—with its more comprehensive capabilities, lower maintenance costs and easier administration—was worth the upfront investment. “Laserfiche nearly tripled our ability to capture and process complaint documents,” explains Merritt. “It saves us time and energy every day.”

Merritt says Laserfiche’s key difference was its customizability to meet the agency’s specific needs. “There were multiple methods to input information into the system. With Quick Fields, we can manipulate the pages we scan in an automated fashion, while Web Access and WebLink allow us to serve documents to our off-site staff and consultants via the internet,” he says. “We’ve customized our system to cut costs dramatically by using less staff time, and ultimately create a better workflow for our agency.”

Specific benefits the Texas Medical Board has realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche include:

• Multi-file format capture. Because Laserfiche has the flexibility to capture multiple types of enterprise content, Medical Board staff are able to scan and store any file provided by the public, including image files, Microsoft Office documents and DVD media.
• Accelerated scanning. Laserfiche reseller DocuData Solutions set up scanning stations that assimilate thousands of documents into Laserfiche in a matter of minutes, saving massive amounts of employee time and storage space.
• Quick and easy data extraction. Laserfiche Quick Fields extracts information from scanned documents and automatically tags them with metadata (including the Bates Numbers required by the agency’s lawyers), enabling instant search and retrieval without adding extra work.
• Flexible file folders. The top-down file structure makes it easy to navigate the Laserfiche content repository, and unlike FileNet, the folder structure in Laserfiche can easily be altered to reflect changes in the way the agency processes documents or organizes itself.
• Granular security features. Rights and permissions based on department and individual job tasks free the IT department from having to constantly guard and monitor the system—while still ensuring that confidential consumer information is protected.
• Remote access. Laserfiche Web Access gives Board members the ability to log into their secure laptops and review all of the relevant case materials through their Web browsers—any time, anywhere, without having to lug boxes of paper records into meetings or rely heavily on support from IT staff.

“With Laserfiche, the Texas Medical Board settles consumer complaints more quickly, allowing us to continually meet our legislative goals,” concludes Merritt. “This is definitely a case where technology has made life easier for us.”

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?”

From that starting point, document management has become an integral part of Commission operations, adding significantly to its public education and information capabilities and becoming a valued productivity tool.

The Commission’s most prominent digital initiative is its e-Library, a searchable online repository of every Commission ruling dating back to 1979, and all of the financial disclosure statements required to be filed with the State Ethics Commission by public officials and public employees. The library gets an average of more than 2,500 visitors each month.

“The page numbering issue was just unacceptable,” says Contino, an attorney who has been executive director of the commission since 1987. “The last straw was what we had to do to fulfill the requirement that we provide the opposing attorneys in a big case with copies of all of our files.

“There were 20-25,000 pages of documents. It took a temporary employee more than two weeks just to hand number the pages. This was in addition to making copies. You couldn’t help thinking, ‘There has to be a better way.’”

By the time the next big case came along, the Commission had brought in a scalable document management system, powered by Laserfiche software. This time, the page numbering was accomplished electronically by a customized software module. Instead of sending a truckload of files to the opposing attorneys, the Commission was now able to hand them two CDs containing unalterable images of several thousand pages of files. The opposing attorneys were then able to find what they needed with ease since files were organized into folders with exhibits numbered just as they would be in hard copy format.

“Once we saw how well the new approach handled this task, we looked for other ways to use it,” Contino recalls. “One of my biggest goals since coming to the Commission in the mid-1980s was to make it easier for citizens to see and use our rulings.

“Using the Laserfiche Web publisher, we were able to put every ruling going back to 1979, plus all statements of financial interest filed with the Commission, directly online in searchable form. It was exactly what we wanted and turned out to be a far simpler matter than we had expected.”

“The e-Library is now a critical asset in fulfilling the educational portion of our mission which, in our view, is as important as our roles as investigators and as the compliance agency for financial disclosure information. Providing the public with ease of accessibility to public documents is an important aspect of the role of the State Ethics Commission.”

In addition to its external roles in dealing with outside attorneys and the e-Library, digital document management is now an integral part of the daily work of many of the Commission’s 21 employees, including Executive Director Contino. Every investigative file is now scanned and indexed in a secure Laserfiche database where they are available to authorized personnel. As a disaster recovery measure, all documents scanned and stored in the Laserfiche document management system are part of the Commission’s daily/nightly/weekly back-ups which are routinely taken off site. The Commission even has one key employee, an attorney who works with the investigative unit, who starts his work day in Laserfiche. From there, he is able to work with and share searchable copies of all his work, including emails.

“We are a small agency with a major mandate,” says Contino. “Digital archiving has enabled us to streamline a number of complex processes. People do not want to do business with hard copies any more so you can expect this trend to spread and become more the norm everywhere.”

The Commission’s Laserfiche database now includes more than 300,000 imaged pages of documents. According to IT Manager Sean Firestine, future plans for Laserfiche include broader usage in the Harrisburg office and deployment to a satellite office in Pittsburgh.

Engle Business Systems, a Laserfiche Value Added Reseller based in Elizabethtown, PA, assisted Firestine in designing and installing the initial Laserfiche solution and provides continuing strategy and technical support.

According to Information Services Officer Beverly Strickland, Laserfiche Web Access™ is changing the way the DWQ’s regional offices do business, enabling multi-site access to large-scale maps and building permit applications.

State law requires developers to obtain development permits before moving forward with a project. Sound planning is critical to building new facilities while preserving local wetland ecosystems. With that in mind, the DWQ reviews building permit applications to ensure that developers follow environmentally-friendly policies before, during and after construction.

Prior to installing Laserfiche, this was a cumbersome process that involved filing development plans, supporting documents, maps and photos of all sizes in the DWQ’s central office in Raleigh, the state’s capital. Before the central office could issue approvals, however, all these documents had to be physically transported to regional offices, where staff could review them and provide locally-relevant information not available to staff in Raleigh.

Due to the large size and complexity of the documents, circulating them between offices was costly and time-consuming. A 41-cent stamp can’t cover maps of wetlands and storm water-runoff patterns, erosion control proposals and wetland restoration plans. “The size of the file depends on the scope of the project, but if, say, a project involves a road crossing 50 streams, the application could be huge,” says Strickland. “If a project involves restoration, it requires a restoration plan, which can be 300 pages long.”

With an eye towards preserving the environment—in terms of both local construction and natural resources—Strickland implemented a Laserfiche solution, and staff immediately got to work scanning and indexing applications as they were received.

Web Access enables staff in regional offices to open entire application files from a password-secured Website. That means no more copying, faxing or mailing documents the size of the state flag. “We process 2,000 applications a year,” Strickland says. “Photographs, topographical maps, large-scale engineering maps, storm and flood maps are all now instantly available to the regional offices as soon as we scan them in.”

While the Laserfiche Client and Web Access have made for a lot less paper and time spent handling it, Strickland says the DWQ has greater plans for Laserfiche. The next step is for regional office staff to map development-affected areas with handheld GPS devices, and then upload that information into maps stored in Laserfiche.

“Being able to pull GPS points on-site will give us a better feel for where the affected areas actually are,” Strickland says. “That will help us make better-informed decisions about what’s going into our water, how much damage is being done, and how to correct the problem.”

In addition, Strickland hopes to install Audit Trail™ to keep a running tab of who accesses the DWQ’s files and when they do it. But for now, she says, the DWQ is happy to have improved its quality of operations—and thus, the quality of the local environment. “Right now, we’re just trying to make our business processes quicker with Laserfiche, and I have been very, very pleased so far.”

It’s all possible thanks to Laserfiche WebLink™. Texas marine patrols, and other authorized users, can instantly access boat registration and licensing information on suspect vessels—whether they’re on the high seas or on terra firma.

Laserfiche has also dramatically improved operational efficiency at the division office, says Gilmore. Registration and licensing files can be up to 50 pages long, and every week, the division receives dozens of requests for such files. Before installing Laserfiche, staff had to manually retrieve, copy and then fax or mail requested files—often to multiple recipients. Now, they instantly call up electronic versions, then e-mail them to requestors.

“Once the documents are in the Laserfiche system, requests are so easy to process, ” Gilmore says. “It saves a lot of time and effort in logistics alone.”

That’s not discounting the positive environmental impact the division has made since installing Laserfiche in 2003. In addition to active documents, the division stores licenses and registration documents dating back ten years, in accordance with Texas law. That translated into piles of paper and microfilm, which have been gradually reduced as more and more of these documents are stored and processed electronically.

Says Gilmore, “We’ve cut down dramatically on the amount of information we provide in hard-copy form, so there has been a big reduction in the amount of paper we use. That’s the primary benefit to our environment that Laserfiche has enabled.”

Of course, the division’s ultimate goal is to provide better public service. And Laserfiche has certainly helped in that department. “Now we can provide assistance right over the phone,” Gilmore says. “When a customer calls, we can get their information right then and there, whereas we once had to pull the information and call them back. That’s the thing I like most about Laserfiche, that it’s so easy to use.”

• More than $20 billion is invested, half in blue-chip stocks, the rest in government and corporate bonds and real estate;
• It’s expected to produce $1.5 billion a year, including a dividend for every man, woman and child who’s a legal resident of your state – making yours the only one of the 50 United States to give money to its residents instead of collecting money from them;
• and because we live in a litigious age, when stockholder lawsuits are as commonplace and familiar as the mailman,

It was just common sense for The Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation to install an electronic watchdog, Laserfiche, to keep an eye on its portfolio of stocks in thousands of corporations, domestic and foreign.

“We’re going to use Laserfiche document imaging to maintain a paper trail, a paperless paper trail.” said David Riccio, Information Systems Manager of the Alaska Permanent Fund, which collects and invests the royalty payments collected from oil companies extracting and exporting the oil from Alaska’s bountiful North Slope field.

Those payments, beginning in 1976, along with special appropriations and reinvestment of a portion of annual earnings transferred to principal to protect the Fund against inflation, had piled up to a total of more than $20 billion by December, 1996. Invested in a mammoth portfolio of stocks, bonds and commercial real estate, the investment pool has produced more than $14 billion in net income since its inception. Every fall the legislature appropriates a dividend, payable to every person who’s lived in the state for a year or more. In 1996, 542,000 Alaskans collected more than $1,100 apiece. The amount has not been under $900 since 1989.

But where there are stocks, there are stockholder lawsuits. According to Fund spokesman Jim Kelly, there are now 3,500 different issues in the Fund’s portfolio and some of them are involved in stockholder class-action litigation. “In order to receive its share of any settlement resulting from a lawsuit, the APFC must provide proof of ownership, of the stock during a certain period of time,” he said. “That’s where Laserfiche will come in. We intend to use the system to maintain electronic records of purchase and sale.”

When it is operational, a high-speed scanner will record the official confirmations of purchase or sale – “confirms” in Wall Street jargon — and then, when there’s an announcement of a stockholder suit against the management of a company in which the Fund is invested, it will be the work of a moment to type a few code numbers and letters into the Laserfiche system. Instantly, the confirm will appear on screen, alerting Fund management that they are entitled to a share of any settlement.

“Last year, we ended up with about $500,000 from class action litigation.” Mr. Kelly said. In 1995, according to a Fund statement, the amount was over $300,000; in 1994, it was $230,000, and in 1993, $250,000.

The Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation retained Mike Staso, of Alaska Computer Solutions, a Juneau company, to design and implement a document imaging system – the Fund’s first. He selected the imaging software and hardware. Document Technology, Inc., of Anchorage, a full-service imaging bureau, installed the system in the Fund’s offices in Juneau, last October 1996, and began scanning thousands of confirms and stock-custody reports into it, converting words on paper into electronic impulses.

That job is nearly complete: what had filled eight filing cabinets now resides in three 5 1/2-inch optical disks mounted in a “juke box” the size of a small office-type refrigerator. That juke box has bays that can accommodate 16 such disks, and the Fund purchased a second 16-bay box, in anticipation of expanding the system to cover other scanning-and-retrieval functions for other departments of the Fund.

“The APFC has always been a first-class corporation,” said Ellen Tingley, general manager of DTI, who is supervising the operation, “Using Laserfiche will reduce the processing time and enable the APFC to enhance the revenue obtained by the speedy retrieval of documentation for the Proof of Claim to the court. It will also provide a good recovery system in case of a fire.”