Significant recent projects include:

• The San Francisco Giants purchased a Laserfiche Avante system with Laserfiche Quick Fields and Laserfiche Audit Trail to manage leasing contracts for box seats in its ticketing office. The franchise is considering extending use to the team’s finance office by integrating with its Salesforce CRM.
• Cliniqa, a medical diagnostics supplier headquartered in San Marcos, CA, acquired a 30-user Laserfiche Avante system with Quick Fields and Audit Trail to create a controlled, auditable records library for reference and document control.
• RSI, an Anaheim-based cabinetry supplier to Lowe’s and Home Depot stores, is currently integrating Laserfiche with its JD Edwards accounting system in both its Orange County headquarters and Tijuana-based manufacturing plant.

Tom Ziencina, President of CPS, attributes the sales increases to the reseller’s ability to leverage enhancements to the Laserfiche ECM suite to win bigger and better deals. “Laserfiche has given us the tools to deliver tightly-integrated enterprise solutions to our clients and prospective customers,” he says. “Having custom scripting capabilities in Workflow specifically has created a lot of opportunity.”

Ziencina points to three East Coast healthcare agencies that have integrated Laserfiche with their payroll systems to manage 200,000 Medicare/Medicaid transactions each month. A California city that upgraded to Rio last year is currently considering a similar payroll system integration for use by its police department.

Greg Heim, Vice President of CPS, adds, “Laserfiche enables us to implement a consultative selling strategy to provide customers with the nuanced, end-to-end ECM functionality that their mission-critical business processes require.”

He cites a recent RFP in which the reseller was able to fulfill a requirement to capture and process handwritten documents by including integration with a third-party ICR application using Quick Fields’ “Custom Process” add-on. “It’s not the only feature that helped us, but it’s one of the many tools we have to be more competitive when seeking enterprise opportunities,” Heim says.

Peak Performance’s largest sale to date is also its most recent: a 200-user Rio deal with La Plata County, CO, that closed on November 22.

According to Jen Harris, Solution Specialist for Peak Performance, La Plata County purchased Laserfiche to establish an ECM standard for use by all departments. Harris says the need to replace a legacy PaperVision system that was incompatible with IE9 was the initial impetus for the sale, which Peak Performance was able to leverage into an enterprise opportunity.

“The RFP included a large data conversion and the ability to create several custom integrations, so offering the SDK and implementing a system allowing both production and test environments with unlimited servers made Rio the clear choice,” says Harris.

Additionally, La Plata saw the value of implementing Laserfiche ECM as a shared service for use by several departments. “They liked that the system would be easy to use while also maintaining county-wide standards and state-mandated compliance.” To that end, she says, transparent records management contributed significantly to the sale.

Implementation will begin in Administration, Finance and Human Resources, with plans to add a WebLink public portal after data conversion is complete.

“La Plata County shows how effectively Rio’s scalability and flexibility create a vision of ECM as an infrastructural foundation for shared services,” Harris says.

• TMD & Associates, a Phoenix-based RIA firm, purchased a Laserfiche Avante system with Junxure CRM integration and Web Access to bring different compliances in-house to mitigate risk and costs, concluding a 30-day sales process.
• Tuba City Regional Healthcare Corp. purchased a 25-user Laserfiche Avante system with Audit Trail, the SDK and Records Management to support medical records processing and records retention for HR, concluding a six-month sales process.

Phillip Downard, President of Thetacon, attributes Thetacon’s success to adopting a consultative sales methodology that cultivates vertical-specific sales strategies to address industry-specific compliance issues. “We’ve hosted numerous workshops educating customers and potential customers about the evolving challenges in their industries, as well as how Laserfiche offers the control and flexibility to help their organizations adapt their information management strategies to meet them. Compliance and operational issues related to compliance are very timely and pragmatic.”

Downard also credits Thetacon’s involvement with Phoenix area professional organizations like the FPA and MGMA as a key to the firm’s success. “Our recent success is the result of the relationships and awareness we’ve built up in these professional chapters over the last few years,” he adds. “It’s a lot of us listening to customers’ needs, and being able to follow-through with best practices. Compliance has been a big driver of that.”

• City of Boca Raton, FL, upgraded to Rio to extend deployment to its police department on a separate server while implementing Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME) and using Workflow in several new departments and processes.
• A Florida-based insurance company is upgrading to Rio to replace an Alchemy solution, implementing Workflow for claims processing and other internal business processes via an integration with the agency’s internally developed CMS.
• A state agency in Florida recently purchased an 80-user Avante system with RME to automate its mail room/central intake area, using Workflow to automate and audit expense reimbursement for thousands of government officials through an integration with the state’s financial system.

Donny Barstow, President of MCCi, attributes this success to what he calls “the complete buy-in” from the MCCi sales and marketing teams regarding the advantages of Rio and Avante, including Laserfiche Workflow. Says Barstow, “Even in the face of staff reductions, organizations continue to invest in software, and Workflow is helping us make the argument for purchasing Laserfiche.”

Adds Barstow, “We have seen an increase in complex opportunities driven by higher-level end users and IT staff. Internally, the pressure is to deliver more and better service to continue to generate strong referrals. That requires constant professional development on our part to be able to communicate and work at a higher level.”

To that end, every member of MCCi’s technical staff has at least one CPP certification. Collectively, the team holds all of them.

In addition, MCCi has also hosted nine user group workshops—averaging one a month—ranging from 40 attendees to individual consultations. “We are focused on proactively educating customers about what Rio and Avante have to offer, which is much better than being reactive,” he says. This has resulted in significantly more Rio sales: this month MCCi will install a new Rio system and upgrade another customer to Rio, in addition to closing several new Avante sales and upgrades.

“Volume license pricing, scalability, testing environments and operating shared service models—all of these have been important to each Rio customer,” Barstow explains. “Being able to incorporate these aspects of Rio into our basic presentation of the features and functionality of what Laserfiche has to offer has been essential to creating and closing larger and expandable opportunities.”

• Cabarrus County: Leveraging multiple servers, Workflow and expanded SharePoint deployment integrated with its Laserfiche/Northwoods system, while adding Finance, HR and Sheriff’s Departments.
• Haywood County: Establishing ECM as a shared service for enterprise process automation and records retention; expanding deployment from its Public Health Department to Finance and HR while replacing Docuware and ApplicationXtender.
• Onslow County: Replacing ApplicationXtender in Health, Finance and Department of Social Services, which will integrate Laserfiche as part of its recent Northwoods case management deployment.

Kevin Smith, President/CEO of One Source, attributes this success to the “cumulative effort” of year-long marketing efforts—including hosting 40 workshops and a two-day user conference last March that drew 120 attendees. “We have been very persistent in our messaging about the value of extending Laserfiche use from document imaging to ECM,” he says. “We’ve had very happy customers leaving a lot of automation and efficiency on the table. It’s taken a whole budget cycle, but counties are now talking about ECM as a shared service, and they’re leveraging Laserfiche to reduce head count as staff retire.”

Staff has also increased by 12%—with over half in technical and customer support. “As a result of improved and expanded support, we are also benefitting from a growing list of excellent references,” Smith says.

In the next month, the reseller expects to complete a 270-user Rio system shared by two counties; a new Avante system to a county leveraging Northwoods in its DSS; and also expand a fourth county’s current system to several new departments.

• Eastmont Towers: Following an eight-month sales process, this continuing care retirement community implemented a Laserfiche Rio system to automate and streamline patient charting utilizing Quick Fields and Workflow for multiple departments and processes. Future deployment will include integrations with Keane EMR, financial software systems and human resources applications.

• Educational Service Unit #3: BB again completed a sale by leveraging the scalability of Laserfiche Rio. “They were particularly interested in ERM and making document and records management available as a shared service to all the school districts within their jurisdiction,” says ECM Specialist Kathy Gentile. “Laserfiche Rio was the only solution that included the multiple servers and repositories necessary to do this.”

Gentile attributes BB’s success to leveraging Laserfiche Rio to complete deals, as well as partnering with Alabama’s Our Support Services to design and implement solutions that make extensive use of Quick Fields and Workflow. “This year we’ve focused on a more consultative sales methodology to show customers what bigger-picture ECM functionality looks like in their organizations,” Gentile says. “Rio has been instrumental in delivering this message, both in terms of value as well as scalability. We can sell organizations the purpose of ECM as well as the potential.”

“IT experts ‘get’ how flexible Laserfiche is to integrate into daily business processes, and we’ve streamlined our monthly Webinars to reflect that,” says Andrews. “Workflow design is something IT is taking ownership of, and every month we hear about new projects that get them closer to upgrading to Rio.”

Significant recent deals and projects include:6-6 VOM Ray Morgan Co

• Eureka City Schools: After a 6-week sales cycle, the schools implemented a 50-user Rio pilot system to support school district consolidation with Quick Fields and multiple servers.
• Placer County Courts: Added 15 licenses and Quick Fields Agent to automate traffic ticket review for judges; a 200-user Rio upgrade is anticipated by Q2 ’12.
• Kern County: Consolidation/expansion of existing system to replace departmental solutions in Superintendent’s Office, Superior Court and other offices.

• Aspire Zone Foundation: Qatar’s largest athletic foundation chose Laserfiche over competing FileNet, Documentum and Ever Team solutions. Itqan was chosen to implement a 100-user Rio system for all five of Aspire’s companies after showing Aspire how easily Rio could integrate with existing line-of-business applications.
• Qatar Financial Markets Authority: Laserfiche was chosen as the ECM standard for the agency—which oversees the nation’s securities exchange—due to Laserfiche’s localized Arabic interface and extensive SDK.
• Lekhwiya (Qatari Royal Internal Security Force): After a six-month sales campaign, Lekhwiya chose Laserfiche Avante with Web Access to standardize reports and provide secure, remote access to records.

According to Mustafa Siddiqui, Head of Applications and Laserfiche Solutions, the sales increase has resulted from adopting a more consultative sales methodology. “Our success this year has come from positioning Laserfiche as the flexible, scalable ECM solution that adapts to meet an organization’s specific and changing needs,” Siddiqui says.

He mentions the Aspire Zone Foundation Rio project that will replace Aspire Logistics’ legacy Primavera Expedition construction management system while utilizing 10 workflows and establishing an ECM infrastructure. “We’re looking to close another 1,000 licenses in Q2,” Siddiqui adds.

The success has been good for Laserfiche’s profile in Qatar. “FileNet has traditionally been the prominent EDMS player, but we’re proving how relevant the Laserfiche Agile ECM messaging is to the market here,” he says. With the support of Muath Khatatbeh, CEO of parent company Itqan Holding, Siddiqui’s team added staff to establish its own separate Laserfiche division last quarter.

• Municipio de Monterrey: Expert Data expanded the city’s 15-user Avante system by implementing Quick Fields, Workflow, Audit Trail and Web Access to automate check and invoice processing in its Accounting Department.
• Grupo Materias Primas: This leading manufacturer of ceramic minerals chose Laserfiche over a competing Docuware solution because of Quick Fields Real Time Look-up’s ability to access a third-party database to meet compliance and functionality requirements.
• Grupo Agora: Expert Data closed a 15-user Avante deal with this prominent construction firm by developing an integration with its contract management software, and is now utilizing Web Access to deploy the system remotely.

According to Gasi Fayad, CEO of Expert Data, this recent pattern of success has been the result of embracing a consultative sales strategy that emphasized solutions, not products. “By focusing extensively on discovery and needs assessment, we’ve been able to tailor our demos in such a way to show that Laserfiche is a comprehensive answer to the problems a prospective client is facing,” he says.

“At the same time, we’ve been able to create a lot of opportunity, both with new and existing clients, to determine where Laserfiche can be more actively deployed to enhance and streamline business processes, and that’s also proven quite successful,” Fayad adds.

• Kaplan International Centers. AMI leveraged PDP partner Cambridge Conections’s Docs-on-the-Cloud to develop a 200-user Rio pilot system for the Fortune 500 company, beating out a competing CompuThink solution.
• City of San Luis Obispo. The reseller recently added Web Access to a 100-user Avante system as part of an ongoing implementation that includes EnerGov and ESRI GIS integrations.
• Northrop Grumman. AMI is completing a MSSQL-to-Oracle server upgrade and utilizing the Laserfiche SDK to complete customizations for the aerospace company.

According to President George Bandarian II, the increase in sales is the direct result of “embracing” Laserfiche agile ECM messaging to successfully present function-rich solutions with the flexibility to grow with a customer’s business. “We don’t sell ‘document management,’” says Bandarian. “Everything we talk about is related to process optimization.”

Bandarian adds that AMI has supported this message by promoting staff to Technical Support Specialist positions. As a result, AMI has become more competitive as an ECM provider, as evidenced by the success of the Kaplan International Centers project.

“We utilized PDP partner Docs-On-the-Cloud to implement a cloud-based pilot implementation to satisfy the company’s UK IT Director,” he says. “With the encouragement of Kaplan’s U.S. IT Director, we were then able to show his counterparts in Australia, New Zealand and Canada that Rio’s scalability made it the most efficient and cost-effective way to implement a global ECM standard for managing international student records and automating student onboarding.

“Our success is being able to create partnerships with our customers so they ultimately choose the best Laserfiche ECM solution for their needs,” Bandarian adds.

• Westerville, OH, City Schools Treasurer’s Office. GFC leveraged Quick Fields and PDP partner Cambridge Connections’ Docs-on-the-Cloud to close this deal in less than two months.
• St. Charles, IL, Community School District. The reseller also closed this 30-user Avante deal (including a WebLink public portal) in less than two months.
• Trans International. GFC upgraded this Wisconsin logistics company to Rio so it could take advantage of unlimited servers to deploy customized workflows enterprise-wide.

According to Scott Martin, ECM Supervisor at GFC, the increase in sales is the direct result of a two-year-old training program for sales representatives focusing on broader solutions selling. “Our VP of Sales Kelly Moran and our Director of Professional Services Jeff Dotzler developed ‘the Unified Sales Process’ that focuses on 10 different competencies offered by GFC, and we’ve made sure ‘ECM’ is high on that list.”

He adds, “Our reps aren’t just talking about copiers, they’re talking about document management, content management and professional services. We’re able to go into an opportunity—even with a customer we’ve had a hardware relationship with for 20 years—and start asking questions in a way that establishes Laserfiche as a flagship application that’s going to positively impact their business.”

As a result, Martin says, GFC, a leading Canon distributor, has become more competitive as an ECM provider, winning RFPs with Laserfiche alone. “We had a small construction company in Ohio where we were up against another copier distributor. We didn’t win the hardware business, but our sales rep went back in and wound up selling an Avante system,” he says.

Martin is confident that similar opportunities will result in an exponential sales increase for ’11. “With an emphasis on ECM and professional services as part of our core sales methodology, we are on track to more than double our Laserfiche revenue this year.”

Chuck Beard, president of DynaSource, credits a year-long sales strategy leveraging the high-visibility success of its Spindletop Mental Health and Retardation Services account (which uses Laserfiche and SharePoint to support its Anasazi EMR system) with closing the deal.

“We put our efforts into making the Spindletop account the best it could be—for the client and for us,” says Beard. This meant spending early 2010 expanding Spindletop’s use of Laserfiche to several non-clinical departments (HR, Accounting, Admissions, etc.) using Quick Fields, Workflow and Web Access.

Beard points out that a major catalyst for the sale to ETBHN was a presentation given by Spindletop CIO Jerry Carnley to a statewide group of 40 CIOs in June. “He had the enthusiasm and tenacity to say ‘Here’s what we’ve done, we need to get this out to everybody,’” Beard explains.

ETBHN spent the summer assessing solutions before choosing to adopt Rio—and the Laserfiche/SharePoint integration—for all its agencies in late December. “ETBHN wanted a standardized application for each department that would offer standardized deployment across locations,” Beard explains. “Out of multiple competitors, Laserfiche was the only one with a single point of contact to access patient records through SharePoint.”

Beard is confident DynaSource can continue to build on this exponential success in 2011. “We used to focus on implementing cookie-cutter solutions; this is more like whole bakeries,” he says. “Spindletop represented not only a county-wide opportunity, but one that’s now regional, statewide and, ultimately, national in scope.”

The impact has been significant, as Datamax recently closed several deals:

• BenefitMall, an insurance industry middleman serving over 7500 brokers, has purchased a Rio pilot system for its New Jersey office, with plans to deploy to all 15 of its markets serving two million clients.
• Taylor Olson Adkins Sralla & Elam, a Dallas-based law firm servicing local governments, is implementing a 34-user Avante system with a Trusted Edge email archiving solution from Laserfiche PDP partner FileTek.
• Ecom Atlantic, a multi-national trading company that imports over 75% of the coffee used by Starbucks, implemented 35 Workflows with over 250 outcomes in its global traffic department, and has plans to expand system use to all 30 Ecom offices in 30 countries in the next five years.

Jeff Flory, enterprise solutions consultant at Datamax, credits this success with having sales and technical staff capable of offering clients the scalable, end-to-end solutions the market demands. “BenefitMall, for example, was really a team effort,” he says. “Our business analysts were able to leverage Laserfiche’s open architecture and scalability to deliver exactly what the client asked for, using extensive integration with internally and externally hosted line-of-business applications.” The sales cycle, Flory notes, took place over the course of three meetings followed by a three-week implementation.

“By doubling the size of our staff this year we have been able to leverage the full capabilities of Laserfiche as a truly agile ECM solution that can scale and integrate to meet the content and business process management needs of any enterprise,” Flory concludes.

Last month, Mississauga-based Ricoh Canada landed a deal for a 100-user Rio system for the University of Toronto, the largest university in North America. The deal calls for implementation of Laserfiche RME and a WebLink public portal in the Faculty of Medicine, with more licenses to be added as more of the university’s 24 departments buy into the system.

According to Jason Frost, solutions consultant at Ricoh Canada, the sales cycle took six months, the result of what he calls a “beachhead strategy.”

“Besides being very large, the University of Toronto is also decentralized, so we spoke to as many departments as possible to create an awareness of the need for ECM,” Frost explains. “Once we established the initial Rio installation, we used the internal reference to generate more interest and establish confidence in the solution. Next, we’ll leverage Rio’s scalability to expand to the whole enterprise.”

Of the five departments Ricoh Canada spoke with, the Faculty of Medicine initiated the Rio purchase to automate its academic promotions process, which tracks and approves staff tenure.

“The academic promotions process illustrated the need for Rio’s core strengths: straightforward ECM coupled with agile BPM,” Frost adds. “There was a clear need to standardize and manage information on unorganized network drives, implement version control along with a records retention policy and automate the actual process with Workflow.”

Frost is confident that Ricoh will be able to expand the installation to the university’s other 24 departments, which are spread out over three campuses. “The academic promotions process touches every department, and we’ll be able to leverage the existing Rio license to deliver it as a shared service.”

He adds, “The initial Rio investment gave us a central platform, and we can now append additional repositories for various other departments. We’ll be able to focus on adding licenses, Quick Fields and professional services as we look to expand Laserfiche enterprise-wide.”

Recent deals include:

• Fideicomiso para el Ahorro de Energia Electrica, Mexico’s largest utility company, which implemented a 77-user Avante system with Audit Trail to oversee its waste resources. It plans to expand enterprise-wide for contract management using Workflow.
• Hipotecaria Su Casita, Mexico’s second largest mortgage company, took advantage of the “Cash for Clunkers” program to replace Max Image ECM with a Laserfiche system that includes Workflow and a WebLink public portal.
• Hoteles Cityexpress, the fastest-growing hotel chain in the country, is using the first-ever Laserfiche/SharePoint integration in Mexico to project manage new property expansion.

Other significant projects include:

• Grupo Parlamentario del Partido Accion Nacional, Mexico’s ruling political party, uses a 200-user Avante system with Workflow to manage and track legislative initiatives between President Felipe Calderon and the Mexican Parliament’s 52 senators.
• Registro Civil del Estado de Mexico, the civil registry for the State of Mexico, implemented Workflow and a WebLink public portal to make 13.3 million birth certificates available online in 250 offices, as well as through mobile devices and self-serve kiosks.

Carlos Landa, president and general manager of Apoint México, attributes this success to a sales strategy closely aligned with Laserfiche’s agile ECM messaging. “We’re able to build end-to-end solutions using Laserfiche that offer the most comprehensive functionality,” he says. He adds that recent custom automations include optical pens, forms capture, biometrics and smart phone applications.

Landa founded Apoint México in 2005 in a marketplace dominated by Documentum, but established himself as an ECM/BPM contender with a Run Smarter award-winning installation in the State of Guerrero. Integrating the state’s GIS with property tax information increased revenue 400% in Acapulco and 17 other municipalities. A state-wide vehicle registry using Laserfiche followed, as well as integrations with the state’s ERP system and Lotus Notes Domino in the state’s accounting offices.

“We became known as the Laserfiche reseller that could automate any process using any integration in any state,” Landa says.

As a result, Apoint México has become the go-to provider of Laserfiche-based business solutions to some of the country’s biggest names. “Mexico is an enterprise market,” Landa explains. “Normally, you sell Laserfiche to CIOs, but we sell to CEOs—it’s a different level of decision maker. By leveraging Laserfiche as a component of shared services, we’re engaging customers as consultative partners to improve their operations overall.”

In fact, One Source has had such success with the agile ECM message that it has increased its Laserfiche revenue by 52%. The North Carolina reseller has also raised new customer revenue by 170%.

These numbers reflect three significant recent sales:

• Durham County, which is expanding its Rio deployment. The county’s DSS agency will use Rio to manage active records, and its Public Health Department has integrated Rio with a new EMR system. The Health Department estimates that it will save $4 million as a result of moving to a new paperless facility.
• Person County DSS, which has purchased a 41-user Avante system and is integrating it with the department’s Northwoods case management system (a PDP partner).
• Craven County Health Department, which is integrating its new 12-user Avante system with a state-run EMR that will use Workflow to automatically create and populate patient charts.

According to Smith, these sales have all resulted from focusing on agile ECM messaging, specifically the value of Workflow. “Each of these clients is implementing some type of BPM solution where Laserfiche’s proven ability to integrate easily with other primary applications has been a big selling point,” he observes.

Smith notes that One Source has leveraged strategic partnerships with a number of complementary solutions providers. “We have tight partnerships with both PDP partners and other companies so there are as many people as possible looking for new prospects on our behalf.”

Finally, Smith says, One Source credits its recent success to investing in a year-long advanced sales training program while expanding administrative and technical staff. “The training allowed our whole team to focus on properly qualified prospects and reduced the amount of ‘free’ consulting we provide,” he says.

“The entire One Source team deserves credit for our success, especially David Swan, my senior sales consultant, whose efforts afforded me the time to develop our Laserfiche agile ECM strategy, which is giving us strong results.”

Since becoming a VAR this past January, Shaffer has expanded Laserfiche use in six school districts while
landing deals with two new accounts last month: the Allegheny Valley and Franklin Area school districts.

According to John Shaffer, president of Shaffer Technologies, the school districts purchased or expanded Laserfiche to add records management functionality to their electronic student management systems (SMS). Shaffer says that, prior to implementing Laserfiche RME, districts printed and stored records every semester to comply with state-mandated 99-year retention requirements. “Our customers welcomed the user-friendly records management functionality Laserfiche offers,” he says. In short, “They loved Snapshot.”

Key to his success, Shaffer explains, was positioning Laserfiche as a natural extension of districts’ SMS. To that end, the company is working with SMS providers CSIU and ProSoft to develop seamless integrations with Laserfiche. “Using Snapshot, the experience with the SMS remains the same,” Shaffer says.

Shaffer sees this initial success is part of a larger, phased sales strategy. “Managing student records is our foundation application,” he explains. “In phase two, Laserfiche will be extended to accounting departments. In phase three, Laserfiche will automate the processes and forms in HR departments.” Shaffer adds that he will work with PDP partner LincWare to develop e-form solutions.

Shaffer sees these initial sales as “the cornerstone of multi-year rollouts to make Laserfiche the number-one ECM choice for school districts because they address a variety of information and business process management needs in a manner that is comprehensive and user-friendly.”

To that end, he says, Shaffer Technologies will host its first state-wide Laserfiche workshop for school district information managers on Wednesday, August 18.

“Advisors tend to be very fiscally conservative, and don’t always understand the value of technology to their bottom line. But when they hear about how our clients have turned an $8,000 Laserfiche investment into a $45,000 ROI, that’s very compelling,” says Zaheer Master, president of AIS.

According to Master, the financial services industry is realizing the need to balance the efficiency of a paperless office with the ability to keep up with increasing compliance demands, and that’s where Laserfiche Avante is a perfect solution.

“I’ve been in several demos where I’ve been able to show a prospect how, in three clicks, I can take out my iPhone and use Web Access to look up a client’s information and e-mail it to them, securely, from their own server—not the cloud,” he says. “That’s been very effective.”

Master believes that AIS’ recent success is the culmination of long-term effort. “When the market took a downturn in 2008, we followed Laserfiche’s lead and kept up our sponsorship of local FPA chapters,” he says. “Now, you have the combination of the market rebounding, Laserfiche’s reputation in the financial vertical, and the coming compliance tsunami that Avante is so well-suited to help firms adapt to.”

According to McDonough, PPS’ IT Director became interested in Workflow after Duplitron created electronic lockboxes to batch claims documents using Quick Fields last year. “That brought us one step closer to automating the whole process,” he explains.

Actual Workflow implementation took place earlier this year as part of an upgrade to Laserfiche 8. “There were a lot of what I’d call ‘curveballs,’” says McDonough. “For instance, when we created the lockboxes, we split up the documents to be processed in Quick Fields based on their FSC coding, but that one lockbox had to remain intact—the documents could move but the folder couldn’t.”

Working with Laserfiche Presales Engineer Jonathon Kim as well as VAR Desk’s Lisa Durham and Jessica Smith, Duplitron configured Quick Fields and Workflow to fit the intricacies of PPS’s claims process—with significant results. “It use to take a day or two to process a claim; now it’s processed back in the batch folder within an hour,” McDonough says.

As a result, McDonough is confident Duplitron will be able to repeat this success with its other billing and coding clients. “We’ve already got four other clients using the electronic lockboxes to capture everything on the front end, so we can show them what PPS is doing and use that as a template.”

Meanwhile, PPS’s IT Director is impressed. “She’s worked in healthcare industry many years and never had a product that’s been able to do everything it says it can do.” Now, he adds, she’s asking how Workflow can be used as an accounting tool. “They want to use an exceptions report to reconcile claims, almost like a balance sheet,” McDonough says.

“This project has evolved has from a document management solution to a business process management solution—it’s true ECM from a claims perspective and BPM from a CFO/accounting point of view,” he concludes.

Scott Cowan, MVi’s vice president of sales, attributes MVi’s success to a combination of industry experience and industry-best functionality. “Every one of our senior consultants comes from at least 20 years of credit union data processing. So we’re familiar with prospects’ business processes and they trust us to tailor electronic solutions to their needs,” he says.

Cowan says business process management (BPM) played a significant role in MVi’s recent sales to Hawaii Community FCU and Integral CU Services. “Workflow, Audit Trail, Web Access—these were all huge. Quick Fields was the silver bullet. The discussion really takes off when we start talking about BPM.”

What differentiates MVi from other resellers, Cowan explains, is that MVi can help credit unions take advantage of Laserfiche as integrative middleware, connecting the ECM system to other software applications or components such as electronic document signing, Check21 integration and receipt capture systems. This method allows users to access information in the manner and environment in which they are most comfortable, helping them benefit from truly agile ECM.

“We’re able to enhance core Laserfiche functionality with our expertise,” Cowan says. “It’s a combination that’s helped us achieve great success.”

Beginning with the sale of a 100-user Rio ECM system to Avis Rent A Car in January, Nashua went on land deals for eight new Avante systems as well as numerous upgrades.

In comparison to Q1 ’09, Nashua:

• Increased total new sales by 200%.
• Boosted sales to new customers by 300%.
• Enhanced existing customer sales by 800%.

According to Ben Sheppard, manager of solutions consulting at Nashua, the exponential growth is the result of a three-year effort to train and support sales staff in taking a consultative sales approach. “We’re not only looking at what hardware the customer requires, but what their business processes are,” he says. “Instead of focusing on our traditional revenue streams, we’re saving the customer on operational costs.”

Sheppard is confident Nashua can build on its growing reputation as a BPM expert in the region. “Once you’ve proven you’re an expert in the BPM field, customers trust you to optimize their systems and processes,” he says.

“This requires a thorough understanding not only of the vertical markets, but also a deep understanding of horizontal business processes,” Sheppard continues. “We tend not to promote the product, but rather the solution in its entirety. In that sense, we’re able to position Laserfiche ECM as the engine that drives true end-to-end solutions.”

Specifically, ScanDoc has upgraded the hospital from a 20-seat United system to a 3000-user Rio implementation, which—in conjunction with Adobe Lifecycle products—will underpin the hospital’s new EMR system.

According to Steve Livermore, managing director at ScanDocs, the NHS Trust hospital purchased Laserfiche to replace its legacy EDMS after recent changes in UK law made it possible for government healthcare agencies to work with outside vendors. ScanDoc established proof-of-concept with a year-long pilot implementation in the hospital’s Forensics department. There, Laserfiche outperformed the legacy system by keeping up with the department’s round-the-clock patient monitoring and scanning needs, amassing a repository of 500,000 documents over the course of the year.

Livermore adds that the Rio upgrade establishes Laserfiche as the ECM standard for the hospital’s business units as well as for its EMR system.

“As we continue our needs analyses, we’re finding a lot of back-office business processes that will benefit from having Workflow and Laserfiche as well,” Livermore explains. He adds that ScanDoc is also assisting in migrating content from the hospital’s legacy EDMS. Once the implementation is complete, he expects the Laserfiche system to store some 60 million documents.

Livermore sees other healthcare opportunities opening up as a result of the hospital’s deployment. “The NHS Trust’s choice of Laserfiche as the foundation of its EMR sends the message to the healthcare industry that Laserfiche is as IT-savvy as it is user-friendly,” he concludes.

The Road to Rio

According to Chandresh Sharma, vice president of solutions sales at Sigma-Tech, Essar became interested in Laserfiche Rio after seeing how capably the system would complement Microsoft SharePoint. Specifically, Essar wanted to integrate Rio with SharePoint to establish a shared service center for processing invoices.

A key selling point, Sharma says, was being able to show video examples of how Laserfiche integrates with SharePoint. “The videos really ‘broke the ice’ with the Essar CIOs,” Sharma says. “We were able to show how Laserfiche functionality could complement SharePoint, not overlap it.”

Sharma says he then showed how Laserfiche’s imaging functionality was an obvious fit for SharePoint’s capabilities. This led to more detailed demonstrations of Workflow and Quick Fields to address specific issues regarding Essar’s invoicing processes, namely how to avoid duplicating invoices.

The Workflow Designer, Sharma says, was instrumental to this part of the presentation. “One of the CIOs asked a really good question about how a third value could be added to a Workflow, and using the Workflow Designer I was able to set it up and publish it in less than ten minutes,” he says.

In the end, Essar was sold. The first phase of the implementation began last November with 100 users in the financial departments of 12 Essar companies. That number will grow to 500 by the time the implementation is complete early next year, and there are plans to eventually expand Rio into all 55 Essar companies in the future.

Achieving Success with Shared Services

Sharma says Sigma-Tech—and all Laserfiche resellers—can leverage the success of the Essar Rio implementation: “There is a remarkable shift in the market towards big corporations looking for shared service centers to centralize business processes. We see ‘Agile ECM Engineered with Laserfiche and SharePoint’ as a great enabler of that.”

In particular, Sharma believes that Workflow 8 and the SDK offer IT departments the flexibility and confidence “to establish shared services across their enterprise.” He also believes that Rio’s promise of unlimited servers bolsters confidence in Laserfiche. “The ability to create test environments is very important—and it allows us to be more competitive,” he concludes.

A recent Avante deal shows the effectiveness of this consultative approach. When Flory first contacted the prospect, the company’s knowledge of content management software was limited to a very basic four-user system. “It was the kind of thing a copier salesman was schlepping around—the ‘server’ was an XP Pro PC laptop,” he recalls. “They were really only prepared to invest about half of what it cost to purchase Avante.”

Business Value Beats the Basics

With two presentations in two weeks, Flory demonstrated to the company’s owner why investing substantially more in an Avante system and utilizing Workflow made more sense for his business. “I told him, ‘We can handle document management but you have bigger issues.’”

Flory set up a template and a workflow using the company’s documents. “In three steps they saw exactly how they’d process their orders and invoices,” he says. “The competitor talked about what his solution would do, but I showed them a real-world scenario.”

Flory also successfully demonstrated the system’s ease of use, which was important to the less technically inclined. “Everyone had their own ways of doing things, so I showed them how, if a user was unsure of something or did something incorrectly, another person could be notified to approve and correct it before it entered the workflow.”

Increasing the Size of the Sale

In addition to implementing a five-user Avante system, the company is now establishing its own network with the help of Datamax Texas’ Network Engineering and Strategic Applications teams to double the size of the sale.

“I have to credit our whole company for being able to capitalize on this opportunity,” says Flory. “It really came down to being able to communicate the difference between an XP Pro laptop and a full-blown server for what they really needed a system to do to positively impact their business.”

Weaving Workflow and Audit Trail into Your Sales Strategy

Datamax Texas’ strategy this year is to keep doing what worked so well last year: sell the efficacy of BPM and Workflow by addressing customer pain points with real-world demonstrations. “We’ve been able to position Workflow as such a necessary business tool that I’ve got a CFO and a VP of Financing at one company driving one of the upgrades,” Flory says. “They’re the ones saying, ‘Well, we’re already doing AP processing, what about Receivables?”

Datamax Texas also expects significant growth from financial services companies firming up their information management strategies in the face of changing regulations and oversight. “Compliance has been the big driver of our financial deals,” Flory says. “When you can say, ‘You have to show that you’ve reviewed every document—and Audit Trail does that,’ that’s very powerful.”

And—as Datamax Texas has proven—effective, for customer and reseller alike.

“There was one client we’d been talking to for several years, but when Hurricane Katrina hit four years ago and they wound up spending millions on document recovery, that’s when we started working with them,” Travis Gilbert, a solutions consultant with Image Tek, recalls. “The CFO wanted to take the system nationwide, so we spent a month white boarding a workflow for their Miami location. When they saw how that worked, they were ready to roll it out to the rest of the country.”

The system grew to where it is now, processing 2,000 contracts a week between 400 branches, five regional processing centers and company headquarters, replacing a labyrinth of fax lines and paperwork and compressing a weeks-long process into a matter of days. “It’s literally their lifeline,” says Travis. “It can’t go down.”

A huge part of Image Tek’s success, according to Image Tek President and Founder Allen Gilbert, is winning over IT staff. “Once IT sees how the system works, once it is handling their work orders and purchasing slips, they see that Laserfiche is not making more work for them,” says Allen. “Our support package is a promise of that.”

Having buy-in from IT has spurred many of Image Tek’s recent sales, as well as upgrades of Workflow and Web Access. “A major selling point of Web Access for us is that it eliminates the need for all these IT support upgrades on every workstation,” says Travis.

In fact, Image Tek’s IT-savvy approach has culminated in the conversion of an upgrade to Laserfiche 8 into a budgeted Rio upgrade for 2010 with the company that first engaged Image Tek following Katrina. According to Travis, Image Tek was able to leverage IT staff’s needs into what is now a budgeted Rio upgrade with the promise of unlimited servers.

“The company trains IT staff to support their system, but they had no place to run test environments without buying more servers,” he explains. “So it became cost-effective for them upgrade to Rio and buy licenses for everyone upfront instead of adding another 10 here and there,” Travis explains. “With their own licenses, staff members can now create test environments for what they want to do in the future. They’re getting more out of the system and it’s a good push for us.”

The constant in the relationship—besides more and bigger deployments—has been customer contact. As Travis puts it, “It comes down to us having ideas and them being willing to buy.”

“Us having ideas,” Image Tek has found, is even more valuable in a savvier marketplace. “We’re not replacing as many systems as we did before,” Allen says. “People are doing more research on their own.”

Image Tek’s response has been to be more competitive: the company waives its professional services rates for needs assessments. “It’s more important for them to get something from us than pay us to see if they want to get something. Once we get in, they’ll pay us our rate,” Travis explains.

The end result, Allen says, is still being able to show the value of the technology investment. “When we talk about ROI, we point to the increase in productivity because employees are not spending all their time looking for things. We’ve been able to position it as ‘natural attrition’—existing staff is going to be so much more efficient that when someone retires or leaves the organization, there’s no need to replace them.”

eDocsAlaska founder Pam Barnes did just that. She hired additional staff, including a full-time technical staff member and an office manager. “It was definitely a leap of faith, but I took it,” she says. “But that growth helped me respond to my market, and positioned me for upcoming opportunities.” To sharpen her message, she adds, she attended Laserfiche Advanced Sales training and sent her team to technical trainings as well.

With time to dig deeper into the needs of her existing customers, she was able to land her first Rio upgrade, expanding the Laserfiche system used by the Anchorage-based South Central Foundation (SCF), which manages and administers a kaleidoscope of programs, research, grants and health services dedicated to the wellness of Alaska’s indigenous peoples, enterprise-wide.

SCF purchased Laserfiche in 2006 as a pilot for two departments; other departments and divisions became interested over time. By 2008, she says, Workflow made sense. “A huge pain point within SCF’s business was its contracts approval process,” Barnes begins. “The complete review process spanned 17 potential approvers, but they couldn’t track documents within the process across their huge campus, resulting in delays. [That approval process] touches every different department—including HR, Compliance and Legal—and managers trying to get contracts approved in a timely manner were all feeling the pain.”

Working with Laserfiche Presales Engineer Jonathan Kim, Barnes analyzed SCF’s contracts approval process and the types of documentation it involved, and developed and presented a customized Workflow solution. “My rule is to demo Laserfiche always using the client’s documents—never a general presentation—because in gathering the appropriate documents, I learn exactly what they really need to see,” Barnes says. The targeted demonstration clearly illustrated how the process would benefit from automation within Laserfiche, winning the support of administrators and users alike. “Momentum was building,” she says. But, as she’d soon learn, there’s a difference between “building” and “built”—about 18 months, in fact.

“I did four demos over a year-and-a-half period. It felt more like ten,” Barnes laughs. “I’d get a call from the person spearheading the initiative, and he’d say, ‘You’ll never believe this, but the team wants to see it again.’ But in that process of reproving Workflow over and over, the customer came to a real understanding of the product and a real belief and comfort with what it could do.”

The upside of such an exhaustive sale cycle was that it created excitement about Laserfiche to other departments—and a demand for an enterprise-wide Rio system. “I originally quoted [the upgrade] as just a couple more databases, Workflow and some more users. But then other departments started seeing the potential for the software and the idea sort of built its own momentum—this whole enterprise-wide global capability. Really, Rio sold itself, because it wasn’t much more than what I’d originally proposed once these other departments became interested,” she says. “Now with the ability to have multiple workflows, and the multiple servers to set up test environments, Rio just makes sense.”

Especially to SCF’s IT Department. “When they realized they could get the SDK [formerly Toolkit] and build their own applications,” she says, “that was key to them being able to take this and run.”

In retrospect, Barnes credits the Rio sale to a combination of her expertise and having the patience to allow SCF to grow into the need for a larger system. “I don’t think I could have placed Laserfiche into 15 departments as an initial sale there,” she admits. “Some companies are a slow ship to turn. But once I bring it in and it succeeds brilliantly, that small initial implementation expands into a whole new crop of opportunities in five years.”

As Workflow broadens the Laserfiche footprint in SCF, she says the crop’s growing that much faster. “Right now, we’re dealing with the immediate need—the contract workflow we quoted as part of the purchase, and implementation in five different departments,” Barnes says. “But already we’re seeing this momentum with other departments and groups managing programs for bettering native health that want the system, so we’re excited about the potential ahead!” And with new technical staff, constant contact with her customers and her sharpened skills—patience chief amongst them—Barnes and eDocsAlaska are ready for the potential ahead as well.

Kevin Smith, senior vice president and a founder of OSDS, explains. “We try to cultivate key partnerships to expand our offerings to counties,” he says. “Once the footprint is there, we want to grow the client into an enterprise customer and expand the scope of project throughout all county departments.”

The strategy’s also made good business sense operationally, says Smith. “We expand our reach without expanding our internal sales team, which keeps our overhead reasonable. Ultimately, it has resulted in growth for all of us, despite the current economy.”

Being part of an agile ECM ecosystem can make for pragmatic partnerships. In other territories, Ohio-based Northwoods Consulting Partners usually partners with another provider. But as Smith—and Northwoods—learned, when opportunity knocks, it can take one hand to open the door and another to shake its hand. “We kept running into [Northwoods], and we liked the solutions they were offering,” Smith says. “They realized our customer base and reputation were well-established, so we worked with them to present their comprehensive automation solutions, including advanced touch screen capture and e-forms, to a few of our current customers and those early adopters drove this recent momentum.”

Similar integrated pairings with Laserfiche PDP partners Energov, GeoDocs and Datanow Affinity have driven recent sales as well, while a fruitful partnership with ADI has made OSDS a leading Laserfiche VAR in the financial services sector. “We highly value our strategic partnerships,” Smith says. “They help to set us apart from competitors focused solely on scanning and retrieval systems.”

Another factor that sets OSDS apart, says Smith, are the IT-friendly qualities of Laserfiche 8, which he notes have been especially useful in winning over IT departments. “Some of them don’t believe us when we say we’re going to done by the end of the week with the initial implementation,” he says. “Then we train them, and they become believers. With Laserfiche, they can be as independent as they want to be, since administration is all graphically driven and they don’t have to code. The last thing they want to think is they’re going to be nickeled and dimed every time they want to add a user or make a minor modification to the system.”

These new county footprints are the first steps to enterprise installations, a vision Smith has had since the beginning. As he told the Laserfiche VARNews last year, “When we became a Laserfiche VAR in 1998, we believed in the enterprise approach, but the markets we were targeting weren’t ready for it yet.” But as OSDS’ recent success with county social service departments proves, the market is indeed warming up to the idea—it just takes getting your foot(print) in the door.

Key to this success, says Brian James, founder of the Micro division of DataMax Micro, has been a sales strategy that leverages Workflow as a powerful business analytic tool that embraces Avante’s named-user licensing. “I like to present ourselves as business analysts,” James begins. “I explain how Avante gives you a specific user at application log-in with certain rights and abilities to be more accountable in the workflow that we design. That’s a big one when we talk to managers and owners who know deep down there’s a lot of waste – not just expense with couriers and file cabinets.”

It’s this sense of perspective he says – selling the impact of and investment in each empowered named-user within an organization – that can carry the Laserfiche message enterprise-wide.

“Even with Rio, we’re still keeping it simple, but in an enterprise presentation,” James adds. “I can ask, ‘If you can make [an employee’s] job more pleasant – how important would that be to your overall growth? What would be the efficiency, the productivity gains – for a single price – that would give your staff this feature set with Web Access, Audit Trail and Workflow.’ Well, you get all that – and document imaging, too!”

This empowered-user methodology has resulted in significant successes, most recently the Arkansas Supreme Court, Southeast Arkansas College (SEARK) and Conway Corporation, a growing municipality integrating Laserfiche with its GIS system (see “Sales Tip”). Each win, James points out, owes to lengthy periods of discovery and needs assessment that drill down to very specific pain points to be alleviated. In the case of the Arkansas Supreme Court, for example, state law mandated that all Court resolutions be made public record – which they were, in the form of massive leather-bound volumes. Jones found that $250,000 a year was being spent on printing and binding the volumes, and answered with a 10 user Avante system and a SMART Doc camera using PhotoDocs to capture the history of state resolutions with a Public Portal to make it all accessible.

With SEARC, the sales cycle took a year, but, as James found, the wait was worth it. “We started in their Records Department where most pain existed. In one month we tripled the amount of users,” he recalls. “We just implemented Workflow. Literally within 24-36 hours of their last training we had proposals on the table to double what we did – when the college comes up with funding.”

One of the advantages James’ team had working for it on the SEARK deal is that DataMax Micro is also a copier dealership. “When we have all cylinders hitting I can position new copiers and printers with Laserfiche and then bundle that with a printing solution to manage their prints,” he explains. “It’s a very, very unique umbrella – to cover imaging and printer needs, but then be able to talk about Laserfiche increasing productivity as well.” He offers an example: “SEARC had a budget to replace 20 copiers and printers, and I was able to go in and show them that, with those funds, we could not only do that, but go one step further with an imaging product and Workflow to track it all.”

Key to selling an enterprise-scalable solution, he says, is being able to set realistic goals and expectations. “I’ve seen other presentations where the reseller says ‘You deploy this and you’re going to get this.’ I concentrate on the single user. I’m going to tell them how much time I’m going to spend with each user to make sure they understand and use these features, as a way to guarantee that investment in the user,” James says.

“When people ask me to compare Laserfiche to other solution, I get ‘em away from comparisons and feature sets. I show them how graceful it looks, how simple it is to deploy and use, how it’s going to change the way their organization performs,” he offers. “’Let’s talk about what are we really trying to do – you’re going to have a strong foundation built on our imaging, and then training and a workflow that empowers that user to be their best,’” Jones says. “You can look at a hundred products and nobody’s going to tell them that.”

• Doubled her sales.
• Sold the first-ever commercial Rio system in her region.
• Built a loyal, vocal customer base.
• Pushed beyond her comfort zone to working with bigger solutions.
• Worked with her Laserfiche regional team closely in moving into the Business Process management model.
• Strengthened sales support and customer communications when Jessica Mathes joined the Paper-Lite Team.
• Laid a solid technical support foundation by signing on with varDesk.

What’s more, she’s done it in Indiana, an area hard hit by the current U.S. economic downturn.

So how does Mathes account for this significant success? By doing things differently, she says. “I made provisions for growth,” she explains. Jessica Mathes now handles customer support and has increased outreach with a monthly newsletter called “Lite News….Tools that work for you.” Jessica has a regular blog and also is re-working Paper-Lite’s website. “That freed me up to do what I do best – get in front of the customer,” Mathes says.

Nancy Mathes, Owner of Paper-Lite

She’s also contracted varDesk, the IT support service of Laserfiche reseller STG, which she credits with helping her land the first-ever commercial Rio installation in the Midwest, to the convenience store chain Circle K. “Having somebody who could build integrations and help with the migrations from 7 to 8 to Rio was really important,” she says, “I wouldn’t be able to have that kind of account without that quality of field support.”

The Circle K Rio sale is significant for two reasons: it represents the value of investing time and resources into existing customers, and also the evolution of a solution from storage and retrieval to ECM. “We started scanning their terminated employee files into an archive system almost 10 years ago” Mathes remembers. “Now we are integrating Laserfiche into their business processes.”

Mathes’ sensitivity to the cumbersome complexity of records keeping comes from the fact that she’s a former records manager herself. “I’m coming at sales through a record manager’s point of view. We don’t talk about software, we’re talking about their records, their livelihood,” she says.

With this approach, Mathes has built a very strong, very vocal customer base, one that’s kept her thriving despite the otherwise bleak economic conditions. The opportunities are out there, she says. “A new manufacturing customer saw how they could become more efficient and cut costs by implementing Laserfiche despite a down turn in their business due to the poor economy.”

“I think one of the areas we really need to focus on is e-discovery,” Mathes says. “In Indiana, e-discovery laws went into effect last year where attorneys have to supply electronically stored information,” she says. These new laws require a greater need for authentication and transparency that can more easily be met when utilizing Laserfiche as their document management system. Mathes believes that Laserfiche is that needed “key element” in meeting the many requirements in storing ESI (electronically stored information).

Even though Paper-Lite is a relatively small company, its thinking hasn’t been. “We strongly believe that you either have to make a commitment to growth and allocate the necessary resources or risk being eliminated as a viable document management resource in today’s complex business environment,” Mathes says.

He offers a recent example of consulting with a distribution company working between multiple locations around the world. “We knew if we just looked at Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable, there wouldn’t be enough there to justify the cost [of a Laserfiche system]. But through our AP/AR discovery, we were able to see who else touched these documents. That took us to their Logistics department. We kept asking questions and that took us to their Marketing department,” Gangl says. “The customer didn’t expect us to look at it – and they didn’t want to look at it – but that’s what it took to show them the real value and viability of investing in a Laserfiche system.”

This approach has yielded significant success: IKON is responsible for two Rio installations at Canadian financial institutions already, and continues to do especially well servicing the government vertical. One large Canadian municipality for instance, has been an IKON customer for five years, and is currently in the process of a major upgrade to Laserfiche 8, both for its ability to integrate with an agenda management solution, and for its ability to track and service the hundreds of freedom of information requests that come in daily from lobbyists and citizens seeking information. Gangl credits the new annotation and redaction features of Laserfiche 8 as being especially helpful to the sale. “Laserfiche 8 makes the solution simple because the components that used to require extreme customization on our part are now embedded.”

He also credits his team of 13 systems analysts and six solutions consultants. “We have a thorough understanding of dealing with heavily regulated industries including government, as well as compliance issues related to paper and electronic media,” he says. IKON has also invested heavily in sponsoring user education programs. In the last few months, the company hosted regional trainings on-site at the City of Niagara Falls and the Town of Okotoks, as well as attended the AMCTO (Association of Municipal Clerks and Treasurers of Ontario) Conference last June.

“Regional workshops are a great opportunity for customers to see that there’s a community of users out there, they’re not operating on an island. They appreciate sharing ideas and it’s another way customers get to know what the product does,” says Gangl. “For us, it’s a good way for our systems analysts to brush up on their skills without having to take them out of the field for an extended period.”

He offers some advice for resellers: “VARs have to break out of that Laserfiche-as-an-electronic-file-cabinet mentality. These things alone are not going to get you Rio sales. The customer is looking for more than that, they want to talk about collaboration and business process management.”

Key to that discussion, he says, is the inclusion of Workflow in the Rio and Avante licensing model, at least as far as the IKON process-automation strategy is concerned. “With Rio and Avante, your uptake and adoption is going to be that much greater when that collaborative/BPM capability is there. [The cost of] Laserfiche and the server, that just becomes peripheral when Workflow gets embedded,” he says. “You can base your whole sales approach around what big processes you can automate.”

“In the past, we’ve always had a specific topic, like ‘Document Management’ or ‘Business Process Automation,” Leaton explains. “‘Cost’ was simply themed around how all the technology solutions we offer can save costs. Whereas last year we might have been talking about compliance and disaster recovery, now the biggest driver is efficiencies.”

Leaton credits the success of “Cost” with being able to talk to financial services companies in their own language. “We’ve developed a very good understanding over the years of how these organizations operate, where their pain is and where most of their inefficiencies are,” he says. “The key is to have a clear understanding of your client’s business processes and apply technology solutions with ‘real world experience’ to meet their individual requirements.”

Key to that “real world experience,” he’s found, has been real world technical support. MBS has made investing in its support relationships key to ongoing success—both its own and its clients. Leaton and Julie Hammonds founded MBS in January of 2008, combining their 41 years of industry experience to strike out on their own after careers with another reseller. “We believed we could offer a better service to our customers,” Leaton says simply.

Their strategy’s working: MBS has already surpassed last year’s Laserfiche sales figures in just the first half of 2009, already qualifying for the Winners Circle. They expect to double that by the end of the year.

But Leaton admits it hasn’t been easy. “We had no idea what was about to happen with the global economy!” he says of striking out on the eve of 2008’s financial meltdown. But Leaton and Hammonds did know about the very real value of superior technical support to a financial services industry that was already facing enough challenges without having to add technical hurdles to the list.

“Given that most of our customers are global financial institutions, we have to have experienced technicians to not just provide support, but also the expertise to integrate with other applications,” Leaton says. “Laserfiche also gives us the ability to easily integrate with other applications, which adds more value to the overall solution.”

Leaton sees Laserfiche Avante as especially aligned with MBS’ strategy of reaching any-sized financial services companies with technology-driven cost efficiency. “A lot of our prospects are smaller businesses, and with Avante we are now able to offer workflow to them, where previously it would not have been cost effective,” he says. “Avante dramatically increases our offering, giving us a very comprehensive product suite to cover most eventualities.”

Between its investment in superior support services and its timely message of technology-driven cost efficiency, Manx Business Solutions has managed to succeed at a time when others might only survive.

“We have seen that with financial organizations, if they’re making money, then they are obviously happy and not too bothered about changing their infrastructure,” Leaton offers. “Now times are tougher, so they are far more open to listen to how technology can help them work smarter. So we see the current climate as a big opportunity!”

Phelps credits much of his success to his extensive marketing efforts. “When money’s tight, organizations are not necessarily looking for the best price, but the best value. That’s where your customer stories, case studies, and references all lend credibility to your sales process,” he explains. “People want to pick the supplier who everyone knows was a wise choice, a product that works, and a product they know how to use.”

He’s been blogging about document management for three years, while utilizing YouTube to post his own instructional videos. “I had a person contact me about my online demo. It turns out it was a Laserfiche VAR in South Africa and I was able to help him make the demo available to his prospects,” recalls Phelps. “That shows the power and magic of this technology where two VARs from totally different continents can help one another.”

He also uses e-newsletters, seminars, user groups, mini-websites and auto-responders. But, Phelps says the most important marketing tools are his case studies, where users like Laserfiche Luminary Dick Crumb, CIO of Shoreview, MN, detail their success working with Solbrekk.

“Posting these stories on the web and linking them to Laserfiche’s website helps build brand awareness to the search engines and helps prospects find Laserfiche and its VARs,” he adds.

Phelps himself first became aware of Laserfiche from enthusiastic users over a decade ago. While researching cost-effective replacements for a client’s outdated microfiche system, he discovered another organization using Laserfiche five hours away. “They were so excited they wanted me to drop everything. ‘It would be worth it,’ they said. ‘You’ve just got to see this software.’”

He saved himself the trip and instead called Laserfiche. After several conversations, he not only purchased Laserfiche for his client, he became his area’s reseller as well.

“In those early days it was really important to educate our prospects on the basic concepts of document imaging. They’d never seen anything like Google; they were totally amazed at the ability to search their documents for any word or phrase,” he says. “It was educate, educate, educate.”

Especially in the current economy, he says, it still is.

“More than ever we need to help prospects understand the power of a real document management system. You’d think users know the difference between Laserfiche and a product that attaches PDF’s to their proprietary system,” Phelps says.

“In fact, I think now, more than at any time, it is important to help clients clear away the noise and find a solution that will help them run their businesses more effectively.”

With the addition of two World Bank-sponsored government projects, the Ghana Immigration Service and the Ghana Land Administration Project, Josanti InfoImaging has earned its place in the Laserfiche Winners Circle for the first time this year.

Joseph Amoh-Anti founded Josanti InfoImaging five years ago upon returning to Ghana after working as a technical consultant for Boeing in the U.S. and Toronto Dominion Bank (now TD Canada Trust).

While living in the U.S., he explored business opportunities to bring home to Africa, deciding on document management and Laserfiche in particular, “because it was so user-friendly,” Amoh-Anti says. He found a mentor in Vicki Pattle of VP Consulting. “She encouraged me to become a Laserfiche VAR,” he explains. “VP Consulting was and is my inspiration.”

Amoh-Anti had originally envisioned Josanti as a sister operation to VPC in Ghana. But he returned to find the market too underdeveloped to support it. “Electronic document management had no real precedent – most people working with paper had very little computer knowledge and there was no legislative backing for the practice,” he notes.

Instead, he provided ancillary information management solutions while educating prospective businesses – mostly banks and insurance companies – about the benefits of going paperless. “One needs patience, perseverance, focus, and above all extra resources for survival,” he says of the burgeoning document management market in Ghana. “The sales cycle can be quite long; you could be out of business before the customer is ready to implement.” Some accounts, he notes, have taken over four years to land.

Still, Amoh-Anti was encouraged by the response his Laserfiche presentations received, even if it didn’t always result in sales. “What we’ve realized in that time is that any business that saw Laserfiche would call us back, because they saw how Laserfiche holds the ultimate answer to matters of business continuity,” he says.

But by concentrating so much on the technical capabilities of Laserfiche, Josanti had neglected to market itself. “I think that’s why it took us so long to get into the Winners Circle,” Amoh-Anti says. “We probably were complacent since we knew we had the best business solution; we thought it would speak for itself. Our marketing efforts had no sales and functional focus and were highly technical, so they only reached a limited audience in organizations.”

Now, Josanti has formulated a marketing message to address efficiency, functionality and business continuity with positive results, most prominently in the financial sector. The company is now expanding its reach into other West African countries with an opportunity on the Q2 horizon in neighboring Liberia.

“It’s a clear fact that Laserfiche’s guided marketing practices are sure ways of hassle-free success – if you just simply embrace and practice them. Interestingly, they apply to all economies whether developed, developing or less-developed,” Amoh-Anti observes. “We have business partners, around the world but Laserfiche is the only one that offers a marketing plan workbook, proposal guidelines and all the relevant marketing materials.”

Besides its marketing, Josanti is also building its educational presence. User competency is still a major variable to the success of a technology company in West Africa, so Amoh-Anti’s 17-member staff will welcome seven new hires this month to help handle everything from backlog conversion and project management to Laserfiche training classes for his massive government projects. “Our hope is that one day we’ll become the Laserfiche Regional Center in Africa and our training facility will be an affiliate of the Laserfiche Institute,” he says.

In the meantime, he can enjoy that his persistence has carried Josanti InfoImaging into the Winners Circle.

Says Amoh-Anti, “The future for Laserfiche in Africa can only be brighter.” Especially now that Josanti’s marketing efforts are helping to light the way.

Nashua Ltd. makes massive strides selling BPM by first getting its foot in the door.

“Simplify your sale by addressing a single process,” says Ben Sheppard, Solutions Consulting Manager. “You make the capital outlay and risk to the customer so much smaller. Find their pain first – find the financial drivers within that process causing the pain – then start your up-selling. Then constantly re-visit and show your customer and other departments more features and benefits.”

This approach has landed high-profile accounts Petroleum Agencies of South Africa, Rand Mutual Assurance and Sun International since Nashua became South Africa’s largest Laserfiche distributor in 2007. Nashua enjoyed Winners Circle sales the last two years, on its way to the million dollar mark in ‘09.

“We’ve focused on horizontal business processes before we started attacking specific vertical markets,” Sheppard explains. “We got to know all the pains associated with AP processes, HR processes, etc. This is a very safe approach, as we could apply these processes into whatever vertical we find ourselves in.”

Nashua, coincidentally, is also South Africa’s largest Ricoh dealer, which creates Laserfiche opportunities that broaden Nashua’s revenue stream. “By integrating our software into the customer’s business processes, we can earn more of the customer’s IT and operational wallet – not only their printing revenue,” he says. “The cherry on top is that we are not bullied by the customer on pricing which is normally our biggest challenge.”

Then the account can be expanded into more products and professional services. Sheppard offers a recent example:

“Our sales manager pulls up a report of customers doing more than 10K prints a month and offers to come in – at no charge – to find out why they’re printing so much. Then we find high volume print processes and show that by implementing Laserfiche as a BPM tool, they will not only save on printing costs, but increase their efficiencies in the departments concerned. A major tip here is to win over the users who will benefit most from this efficiency, find out from them what would make their lives easier. Once you’ve addressed their immediate need, don’t complicate it – sell one process, then up-sell and earn money on professional services. We found that we had more profit by selling at a reasonable cost, and then earn ongoing revenue from professional services. In fact, the customer I’m referring to has subsequently grown into Quick Fields for scanning services, forms overlay, automated capturing with barcodes and POD return reports.”

Sheppard estimates bundled sales now account for about 20% of Nashua’s Laserfiche business. “We’re pleased enough with this early return that from here on we expect the benefits will pay off.”

Nashua was a natural to sell Laserfiche: its main office was its own best customer. “We started off by using Laserfiche in our own processes like POD’s HR and contracts,” Sheppard explains. “The model was then pushed down into the franchises to make everyone see the benefits and increase in efficiencies. Our sales and technical support staff were all trained at the same time.” The consultative selling, he’s found, is best split between tech support and sales staff. “Someone who can easily spot a process, properly document it with ‘drivers’ and build systems often isn’t as geared towards selling,” he says. “We’d rather train people up in a sales support role, and use them to support the ‘closers.’”

Because Nashua is so successful selling BPM solutions, Sheppard is especially excited about Rio and Avante.

“With Avante, we’re now able to sell features rather than users,” he says. “Traditionally we battled to justify modules like Workflow and Web Access. With Avante we found that we only have to make the customers aware of their own pains, and then show them how we’ll solve it. The ROI with Avante is very easy, but the trick is, as I’ve been saying, sell it into a single process, and then do up-selling afterwards.”

Workflow 8, of course, is all about automating single processes, so not surprisingly, Sheppard is excited about its possibilities. “The inclusion of Workflow 8 with Avante makes our marketing strategy easy,” he says. “We’ve actually created standard HR, AP, POD and other standard ‘Workflow Templates’ we sell with Avante, which we then sell professional services and training to customize.”

Customers, he says, are also inspired by Workflow 8. “We found customers running ISO Quality Standards can take business processes designed in Workflow 8 Designer, and use this as their ISO process in their ISO Management System. Change requests are done directly on Workflow 8 Designer.”

The future as Sheppard sees it, is Nashua pioneering BPM solutions in South Africa – even to non-Ricoh customers.

“Laserfiche and Nashua share a vision. We sell enhancement and streamlining of business processes – hence most of our recent sales included Workflow. We’ve try not so sell just search and retrieval solutions because archiving is an added advantage the customer will have automatically,” he says. “Our approach is that even if you don’t own Nashua equipment, Nashua will make even our opposition’s machines work better for your business with our solutions.”

That’s what Unity Business Systems (UBS) is doing – albeit with a slight twist. Over the past two years, the Virginia-based reseller has made its technical support staff the sweetheart of its sales effort: technical staff now account for 15% of sales.

“Plain and simple, it’s our techs being aware of their surroundings,” explains Joe Kennedy, UBS Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “They’re our eyes and ears. They can be with a customer and say ‘It’s great how you’re using the system to keep records, but we can put them in a more formal structure with Records Management.’ They can whip out their laptop and do a demo right there and leave with an order.”

It’s this kind of simple but effective innovation that made UBS one of the original five Winners Circle resellers in Cabo 11 years ago—and that made UBS a first-time million dollar reseller when the Winners Circle returned there this year. Key to recent success has been the vision of UBS President Carl Long, who bought the company from founder Gordon Reams in 2006. Changing hands at the onset of a contracting market was a risk, Kennedy admits, but it also mandated success in a market where others merely survive. “Q1 ’07 was a struggle, there’s no denying that,” he says. “But it gave everyone in the company a stake in us succeeding.”

Especially tech support. In fact, the newest addition to the UBS sales arsenal is longtime installations specialist Bob Pell. Pell has been with UBS 12 years, earning the trust and confidence of customers along the way. Last December, UBS began formally leveraging Pell’s expertise with a new title: Technical Pre-Sales Engineer. “Bob moved over to a sales position, essentially,” Kennedy begins. “One of the things he does is set-up visits to our existing customers to talk to them about how they can maximize and expand their system. We just give them Bob for a half-day for free.”

The logic, Kennedy explains, is that Pell can reach customers in a way traditional selling can’t. “Instead of a salesperson saying ‘Here’s what I have,’ it’s an expert saying ‘Let me show you how to do this.’ Customers know him and Bills knows their systems because he installed them. They take what he says almost as gospel.”

That message has translated into solid business. UBS has implemented 50-plus electronic content management systems in local governments in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware and Washington, D.C.—with over three thousand total users. Last year, UBS installed the first Rio system in the United States in the Norfolk City Schools while growing its roster of new government accounts like the Cities of Alexandria and Fairfax. With this steady but expanding growth, UBS’ seven-digit success makes the reseller a top candidate for VAR of the Year at next year’s Winners Circle.

But for as bottom-line as all this success sounds—and being a first-time million dollar reseller in ’08 is certainly an accomplishment in itself—UBS is also a great champion of the Laserfiche Community. UBS supports five regional user groups, devoting one of its systems consultants, John Lane, to coordinating the company’s involvement in meetings and events. “They can usually get us to buy them lunch,” Kennedy jokes. But for the price of lunch, UBS can take advantage of new messaging opportunities. “One of the things John’s tasked with is getting us speaking engagements with these folks,” he says. “We’re always finding a way to come out and give a Workflow demo. It’s like when we do tradeshows. I figure if we’re going pay $750 to have a table, we should be able to get 20 minutes to talk, so people can talk to us at the table afterwards.”

There’s no opportunity that UBS can’t turn into a pulpit to preach the benefits of Laserfiche from. Kennedy remembers being asked to speak for a BRITE user group about integrating with Laserfiche. “Essentially, I turned it into a seminar about how to enhance your ERP system using Laserfiche.”

UBS’s real talent, it seems, is being able to make Laserfiche everybody’s sweetheart.

“Simply because we understood that the need of the organizations did not go away,” explains Harvey Burgess, RBDSL Managing Director. “When we did not succeed it was not ‘No,’ it was more often just ‘Not now.’ We re-evaluated our client’s needs to establish what was affordable and what was necessary. At the consultation stage we could pitch our solution at the correct level to make the offer a viable first phase solution.”

It’s this confidence that’s afforded RBDSL the luxury of optimism in ’09. But getting there has not been without its risks. When we heard from Burgess and his team last March, the firm had been enjoying sizable success in all verticals, as evidenced by its recent sale of Europe’s first-ever Rio installation to the Royal Saudi Embassy in London for 125-plus users. But RBDSL has found its sweet spot specializing on independent advisers and financial providers in mortgages and investments. “By concentrating our efforts we became experts in the IFA and other financial service markets; we could provide reference sites to clients of a similar nature and demonstrate how Laserfiche empowered other IFAs with its features and the benefits they were likely to gain as a result.”

Another key to this success, Burgess says, was being able to expand existing customers’ Laserfiche systems from document management to business process management. “With Workflow 8.0, we have realized a whole new potential for the Laserfiche solution. The flexibility and depth of capability, including integration with Microsoft, has enabled us to promote Laserfiche as automating active work in progress–as well as offering electronic filing. This is not just in paper-intensive environments, it’s also in handling email, web forms and Word correspondence. Promoting Web Access is also a hot button,” he adds. “It’s always easier to sell to existing customers, especially because an initial Laserfiche sale is usually smaller-scale and departmental. Also it supports the increasing demands within organizations to deliver flexible working.”

Selling is synonymous with demonstrating, and Burgess’ team has become an, if not the, industry leader. “We maintained that if we could demonstrate the features of Laserfiche we would make the sale 95 times out of 100. We could in all cases reassure potential users that the learning curve wasn’t as steep as imagined,” he says. “Yet when demonstrating to Administrators or Directors we could demonstrate the corporate security necessary for all types of business, from SMEs as well as Government sector enterprises and that Laserfiche was capable of delivering on all key drivers.”

RBDSL’s success has also shown the value of expanding service, including the recent addition of an on-site training engineer, James Hobbs, to its modest eight-person staff. “We saw Laserfiche clients needed to be given constant support and mentoring,” explains Burgess. “This gives RBDSL another sales opportunity. If the users are happy and confident with the system, then it makes every future quarterly client consultation period a greater opportunity for expanding the volume of users and in the case of large corporation a much more realistic option to expand throughout the enterprise.”

In fact, the skills honed during the rough patches of ’08—expanding systems enterprise-wide, focusing on service, specializing in IFA solutions—have become the RBDSL battle strategy for ‘09

“Trying to part an IFA from their hard earned money is not the easiest thing in the world,” Burgess laughs, “but getting them to understand the benefits is much more effective.

“Our objective is to revisit our entire client base at the earliest opportunity in 2009. By proactively consulting with the clients regarding their Laserfiche usage, we will gain further valuable knowledge of whatever their own company needs. This will then enable us to create a corporate strategy for the client to evolve the Laserfiche system and when it makes sense to, expand the Laserfiche modules throughout the client organization.”

“We expect the condition of the economy to actually fuel our sales for two reasons,” Pefferle begins. “Number one, prospects will be putting extra effort in making sure they make the most responsible product selection. We believe that the more discovery and research is done, the probability of selecting our business becomes greater. Number two, we fully expect to see an increase in businesses seeking our products and services to reduce their costs and streamline their operations.”

“From a sales and marketing standpoint this economy makes our job easier. We already know that nearly every business and government agency will be looking to save money and reduce their costs. Those are the exact benefits that our solutions provide.”

Peelle’s had a year that backs up this kind of confidence. By the time you read this, the reseller will more than likely have crossed the $150,000 sales threshold to become a Winners Circle VAR for the first time. Success has come from high-profile accounts—the San Francisco Police Department among them—as well as many other Northern California municipalities, most recently Los Gatos. Pefferle expects ’09 to be even more fruitful. “Our overall sales volume and the percentage of Laserfiche sales have both increased steadily over the last couple of years. We absolutely expect our Laserfiche sales to increase next year,” he says.

“From a sales and marketing standpoint this economy makes our job easier. We already know that nearly every business and government agency will be looking to save money and reduce their costs. Those are the exact benefits that our solutions provide,” Pefferle explains. “We’ll be modifying our marketing messages to lead with stronger ROI statements, cost savings and efficiency. We see a lot of opportunity during times of change.”

The Peelle approach, Pefferle says, is aligned with the Laserfiche methodology of consultative selling. “We make every effort to educate and inform our prospects throughout the process, so we ultimately become an extension of our client’s operation.” This has been especially effective in branding Peelle Technologies as the go-to reseller for Bay Area municipalities. “Because we have a large city account base, we add a tremendous amount of credibility and value to the solutions we propose by presenting a wide range of options that our other clients have implemented.”

When Peelle Technologies was founded in 1996, focus at first was on service bureau opportunities. “But we quickly transitioned into a one-stop shop for both software and services, providing government clients with the ability to procure our scanning services through CMAS and MSA contracts,” Pefferle explains. “Government is our strongest vertical market, and we have seen the Laserfiche product suite dominate this marketplace. The majority of the Bay Area cities are either using Laserfiche or planning to use Laserfiche. This was actually a key factor in deciding to become a Laserfiche reseller.”

To listen to Pefferle explain it, Peelle Technologies is just the messenger; Laserfiche solutions are the real message: “Laserfiche does an excellent job of anticipating our client’s needs and enhancing the product to exceed their expectations.” At the same time, Peelle Technologies has proven adept at anticipating client expectations as they evolve. “In 2008 we saw a continuing trend towards the need for more complex, integrated document management solutions. We’ve installed more Workflow and electronic form-based systems and done far more integration work than in previous years,” Pefferle notes. “Laserfiche provided the products and development tools to build the systems our clients asked for—[the company’s] way ahead of the curve with respect to enhancing the product and adding the features that our clients want.”

It’s this kind of insight that has propelled Peelle Technologies to the Winners Circle, and this kind of confidence that will keep powering the reseller forward. “We’re very close to achieving the Winners Circle mark,” says Pefferle. But, he adds as humbly as he does proudly, “Our goal is not only to stay in the Winners Circle, but to improve our position every year.”

Since Arguz became a Laserfiche reseller in 2001, the mark of its success has been servicing enterprise-scale government solutions across Mexico.

Besides the Immigration Department, Arguz’s client list includes Pemex Exploracion y Produccion (Mexicos’ state-owned petroleum company and tenth largest revenue-producing gasoline producer in the world), as well as Gobierno del Estado de Durango, Guanajuato, Nuevo Leon, Yucatan (the state of Durangos, Guanajuatos, Nuevo Leon and Yucatan among others).

The Mexico City-based Arguz was actually founded in 1991 but didn’t become a Laserfiche VAR until 2001. “We decided to focus on a niche that wasn’t being explored at that time, and that was document imaging (DI),” explains Sergio Galvez, Director General. “Organizations didn’t really know anything about DI.”

Thanks to Galvez and Arguz, a growing number of them do. The Arguz brand was built on providing services for digitization, development and implementation, including sales, support, training and maintenance of everything related to digitization. In addition to Laserfiche, Arguz also offers co-branded solutions from its brand product line from Kodak, ReadSoft, Iris, Hitachi and HP.

Galvez says Arguz’s real equity is in its deep partnership with its clients as evidenced by its comprehensive analysis, implementation and support services.

“We don’t sell boxes¬ – we sell solutions,” he explains. “When we implement a system, we help the client with the entire process, planning, design, on-site digitalization, as well as any ad hoc software integration with Laserfiche. We explain to the customer all the processes involved in document imaging.” He adds that Arguz is also ISO9001-certified for record keeping and process management.

“I think a lot of the success we’ve had [with installations] is because we were able to analyze early on just what exactly the person actually using the system will need to use it for,” says Galvez.

INAMI, for instance, initially acquired its Laserfiche system in 2003 to archive its historical records. Soon the scope of its information management needs grew, and the department looked to transition into active records management solution. Galvez had been made aware of the then as-yet-unreleased Rio ECM system by Laserfiche Regional Manager Sandra Vila. Says Galvez, “We agreed right away Rio was a perfect fit, both for the licensing model it uses and how a level of security can be maintained through Active Directory, which is key in federal installations.”

He credits the pioneering sale—which took almost a year—with Arguz’s already-strong relationship with the department. “It was easy,” he says, “because INAMI trusts in Laserfiche because the system works.”

Of course, with the promise of going enterprise-wide comes the responsibility of making that promise a reality. “It’s an ongoing challenge,” Galvez says of INAMI’s Rio upgrade.

“We’ll start working with Laserfiche Workflow towards the middle of 2009,” he says confidently. “We’re going to spend the first quarter of the year sitting down and analyzing the way they work, and in middle 2009 we will start running the first workflow rules for the day-to-day operations.”

Galvez is confident Arguz could find its niche as Mexico’s go-to VAR for Rio ECM. “Rio’s just more cost-effective than Laserfiche Classic,” he says.

Next, he’s looking forward to the Laserfiche International Conference in January—and Arguz’s place among the top-performing VARs of the Winner’s Circle 2009.

As for parting words, Galvez offers this sage advice: “Know the functionality of the products, so you can thoroughly present it to your clients.”

So what exactly makes a VAR of the Month? Well, at MC Imaging Technologies General Manager Frank MacDonald thinks that “top-notch consulting, which is vital to customer satisfaction and retention is one major criterion.”

Clients look to the MC Imaging team for more than just software solutions: “Keeping the customer happy by providing outstanding service and exceptional software solutions like Laserfiche is how we meet our clients’ information management challenges,” MacDonald says, “and in this respect we are similar to most other VARs.” MacDonald further states: “At MC Imaging, consultants are dedicated to surpassing their clients’ expectations. Customer satisfaction makes our job worthwhile.”

London, Ont., Canada-based MC Imaging became a Laserfiche VAR in March 2003. “We had been selling another electronic document management system, but shortly after speaking with the Laserfiche Canadian Regional Manager we were convinced that joining the Laserfiche community was integral to our company’s business strategy and focus,” MacDonald recalls. “Within two months of signing up with Laserfiche we dropped the other software and began selling only Laserfiche solutions.”

As a former President of the ARMA Southwestern Ontario Chapter, MacDonald knows all too well the demands organizations face when it comes to managing records and information. “Clients want to know that best practices are being used in developing an electronic records program. Laserfiche does this and provides a products suite that is customizable and easy to learn and use,” MacDonald explains.

ARMA, an international authority on managing records and information, with approximately 11,000 members, is a huge proponent of electronic records management. With an estimated 90%-plus records being created daily, electronic and digital recording is a critical business issue. “This is where Laserfiche comes in, addressing the vital ramifications of an ongoing need for standards and best practices and legislative and regulatory updates that most organizations now face,” says MacDonald.

“In my term as ARMA president the hot topic was migrating to and dealing with electronic records, and it continues to be a mainstay on the digital records management radar,” MacDonald states. “I’m now giving back to the records profession, and Laserfiche is a part of that.”

MC Imaging offers a broad range of consulting services, including providing business analysts that meet with prospective clients to better grasp the account’s needs and the firm’s requirements. “Currently, we’re selling Rio and it’s an exciting time for us,” MacDonald says. “Showing customers how easy it is to move their information to Laserfiche, you provide a real differentiator, but first you have to understand their needs. This is where first-rate consulting practices are key.”

Looking ahead, MC Imaging intends to “Power Forward” at the 2009 Laserfiche Institute Conference. “We attend the annual conferences and find them extremely informative, especially for our technical staff,” MacDonald comments. “Each year we learn more about upcoming releases and upgrades, and I would highly recommend it to all VARs for it really does help to increase your sales potential, MacDonald exclaims. “I absolutely plan on attending again this year.”