Since implementing Laserfiche in 2007, Collin County, TX, home to the Dallas/Fort Worth area’s fastest-growing northeast suburbs, has enjoyed enterprise-wide success automating and integrating its business processes. But as Records Manager Margaret Anderson points out, it’s been as a direct result of equally enterprise-wide pre-planning working with the county’s myriad departments.

The County saw its population increase nearly 50%—from nearly 500,000 in 2000 to 725,000 by 2007—straining the county’s infrastructure. As Anderson puts it, “The exponential growth rate of our county is reflected in the increased demand for essential county services.” The governing body of the county, the Commissioners Court, then issued a strategic direction to improve efficiency and customer service. “This caused us to look at an enterprise solution to managing our records with emphasis on migrating to electronic records,” she explains. “We had to reduce our paper and microfilm records volume.”
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“We were an early adopter of many technologies, but not document management,” admits Alan Levitz, President and CEO of GCG Financial, Inc. “It was hard for me to envision it working effectively, because I was concerned about flexibility and searchability.”

Levitz’s father, Robert, founded GCG Financial, then called the Greater Chicago Group, Inc. in 1975. Alan joined in 1983, and his brothers David and Rick soon followed. Alan’s now president and CEO; David and Rick are both executive vice presidents. But GCG is hardly a small family operation—the firm manages 83 producers who sell insurance, investment and benefits, most of them split between Bannockburn, and Oakbrook IL, and Denver, CO. “As our offices don’t share the same physical location, it was important to standardize the services we provide to both groups,” says Levitz.
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Win-win situations are not good enough for information technology staff in Marshall, part of Minnesota’s Lyon County. They’ve got to have win-win, win-win.

That’s because the Marshall school district, its city hall, municipal utility department and the Lyon County government all have built their IT infrastructures around Laserfiche. So when one part of the quartet undertakes improvements to Laserfiche, everybody benefits—and it seems that the improvements aren’t stopping any time soon.

“That’s the thing about Laserfiche,” says Todd Pickthorn, an IT expert with the Marshall School District. “Once you’ve completed one project with Laserfiche, your eyes open up to the new projects that are possible. That’s been the case with all the agencies we’re working with. When one makes an improvement, everybody reaps the rewards.”
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Many financial advisors consider technology an expense, no matter how necessary. Joseph Salpietro of Xpyria Investment Advisors felt the same way, until he came to a crucial realization.

“We always figured we’d have to hire more people to create the efficiency we needed,” he says. “We’d talked about needing two or three administrators over the next five or so years at a cost of, say, $30,000-40,000 each. And when we found out that we didn’t have to hire those people to help us with the paper chase—well, that’s a smart business decision.”

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In Bakersfield, CA, a town known for its agriculture, manufacturing and petroleum extraction and refining is now known for something different: its innovative technology.

As the fastest-growing city in the United States with a population of over 250,000, Bakersfield was experiencing an explosion of records. “We wanted a document management system to store public documents in a secure, easily searchable manner,” says IT Director Bob Trammell. “We chose Laserfiche because of its pricing and how easy it was to search for and retrieve documents.”

“I had already installed Laserfiche in a city where I was previously employed, so I was very familiar with it,” Trammell adds. “That was eleven years ago, and today all 19 departments in the city, as well as thousands of citizens, use Laserfiche.”
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Think of the paperwork challenges of a typical registered investment advisory (RIA) firm—new account forms, quarterly and annual statements, client agreements, and floods of general correspondence, all of which must be maintained in compliance with a host of regulations. Now imagine an RIA that’s also registered with a broker-dealer. And that offers retirement planning. And, for good measure, that sells insurance. Finally, picture this company’s paperwork spread out across 13 regional offices in two states.

Have a headache yet? If not, you probably at least have some sympathy for Rehmann Financial. With 60 associates located throughout Michigan and Florida, the rapidly growing wealth management firm faced a formidable information management challenge. But with Laserfiche document and business process management at the heart of its technology platform, Rehmann Financial has standardized business processes, enabled effortless information exchange and, within just a few months, achieved significant cost savings over their former paper-based business model.
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Charlottesville, VA is consistently voted one of America’s best cities to live, marked as it is by its deep history (birthplace of three U.S. presidents) and its college-town charm (home to the University of Virginia). But when it came to records management, Charlottesville’s paper history held little charm for the city staff left dealing with its outdated and overgrown filing system.

“Life before Laserfiche was full of frustration,” remembers Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue and Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.
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For many businesses, the vision of a paperless office is often the driving force behind implementing digital document management. For Professional Planning Service of New Hampshire (PPS), going paperless while maintaining the separation between two distinct business interests was giving staff double vision. But by implementing a Laserfiche document management system, PPS has avoided mixing their two business’ documents during their transition to a paperless environment—and improved efficiency and service quality along the way. Full story »

For Mohave County, AZ, the third time was the charm for the county’s Records Manager to successfully implement Laserfiche enterprise-wide.

The dry-witted comedian Steven Wright once joked, “I’m so far ahead of my time, nobody’s there yet.” Mohave County Records Manager Chuck Chlarson can relate. He saw his two predecessors try without much success to implement an enterprise-wide records management system—despite a state mandate to do so—because of a lack of technical support and user buy-in. But as Chlarson has found, in Mohave County, being the third Records Manager is the ticket to success.
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When it comes to their firm’s infrastructure, many financial advisors rely on the same paper files they’ve been using since they joined the industry. For some advisors, letting go of their paper is an unfathomable hurdle.

But other advisors—and their firms—recognize the benefits of document management. From immediately eliminating clutter to long-term benefits such as saving time, space and money, the return on investment with document management is quite impressive.

Stage 2 Planning Partners is one of those innovative firms achieving their goals thanks to document management. Founded by Principal Josh Patrick in 1997, the firm offers wealth management services for owners of closely held businesses, individuals and groups, focusing on a variety of strategic and financial issues.
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Compared to other cities in Nevada, Boulder City is something of an anomaly. Unlike nearby Las Vegas and the rest of Henderson County, BC is relatively quaint, with a population of just 15,000.

“We’re close to Las Vegas, we’re close to the Hoover Dam, but we’re surrounded by 200 miles of land. It’s like a buffer around us,” explains City Clerk Pamella Malmstrom. “Clark County has been one the fastest growing counties in the country. We’ve taken steps to not grow so rapidly.”

But even as modest Boulder City seems buffered from the noisy neon of its neighbors, it still faced the same information management concerns as every other city in the state. Especially since late 2007, when the state legislature passed a resolution mandating that all government agencies in Nevada be able to honor requests for public records within five working days. Full story »

For financial advisors at Bond and Devick Financial Network, over twenty years of industry experience had given them a heightened awareness of the problems of a paper-based filing system. File cabinets took up almost 50 square feet of office space, and staff wasted time and money making multiple copies of the same document so advisors could have simultaneous access to information.

“We were dealing with an enormous amount of paper,” remembers Teresa Devick. “And the paper files concerned us greatly, mainly because if our office were ever damaged, our information would be completely unrecoverable.”

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Nestled along the Sheep River Valley in the heart of the Alberta Foothills, the town of Okotoks, AB, is the second-fastest growing community in Canada, with a 46 percent growth rate since 2001.

According to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Okotoks “can fairly call itself the greenest community in Canada, maybe the world,” as it is one of the first municipalities to establish growth targets balancing infrastructure development and environmental conservation. And true to its motto of “Historic Past, Sustainable Future,” Okotoks has received national and international recognition for its environmental initiatives, so it’s no surprise they turned to Laserfiche to reduce paper consumption. Full story »

Principal Mark Berger

Advisors at Berger Financial Group, Inc., (BFG) have always taken pride in providing sound advice and stellar client service, but when it came to their filing system, they knew that improvement was crucial.

“We had file cabinets that were using up valuable space,” says Principal Mark Berger, “not to mention the substantial administrative time required to keep each physical file up-to-date. We knew we needed to improve our filing to improve our efficiency.”

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Palm tree-shaped islands. The world’s tallest building. An indoor ski resort. In the past 30 years, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, has quickly blossomed from a regional business center to a global destination. But with 30 years of development comes 30 years of paperwork to manage—which is why Dubai chose a scalable, easy-to-implement Laserfiche solution to convert all of the city’s paper into digital format. Now, an extensive back-file conversion project is under way, with Laserfiche poised to take over day-forward scanning as well. Full story »