By 2007, CapitalCare’s decade of growth had the side effect of generating more paperwork than the group’s 14 offices could efficiently manage—at least not the way they had been. “We were on our fourth expansion in our central office building in Albany; our offices were running out of storage and our CBO had rooms of files and boxes everywhere. So we asked ourselves, ‘Why all this space for storage? Why all this time to find things?’” says Charles Hagstrand, CIO of CapitalCare. “After 10 years, we needed a solution to move us forward.”

Hagstrand envisioned a true enterprise content management (ECM) solution from the start, one that could manage CapitalCare’s spectrum of information needs, including 700,000 patient encounters a year being stored remotely to over 280,000 EOB documents generated annually, as well as other documents and business records associated with its various practices. Eventually shared back-office business processes would be automated, beginning with AP processing.

“Initially we looked at a lot of vendors who had products that handled specific document types, but we were looking for something that wouldn’t pigeonhole us,” recalls Hagstrand. “You see a lot of departmental applications in larger organizations. We wanted a single system that could fit a variety of needs in different departments, and that ultimately could grow with us.”Hagstrand found what CapitalCare was looking for when his evaluation team discovered Laserfiche through reseller JPI Data Resource. “It was the product’s versatility that really won us over,” he says. “We liked that Workflow was a push technology that could keep things moving more effectively.”

Adds Jason Wicks, business analyst, “Laserfiche was like one-stop shopping as far as addressing the range of projects we were looking at, from HR files to Accounting and through-processing contracts and invoices. It’s very flexible.”

Wicks worked with JPI and CapitalCare department heads to design and deploy a pilot 20-user Laserfiche system with Records Management Edition (RME) and Workflow. They mapped out a multi-phase implementation that would eventually include using RME to automate retention and compliance, as well as Workflow to route invoices from CapitalCare’s central business offices in Albany to the group’s various remote locations for AP processing.

The first order of business was addressing Hagstrand’s storage and access concerns. “We took the approach that we should start by working with the items that didn’t involve Workflow first,” Wicks says.

Implementation began with backlog conversion of a decade’s worth of historical files in the HR and Medical Management departments, “just taking paper and getting it in Laserfiche to get people used to archiving,” as Wicks puts it.

The impact was immediate. “Our first touch is our site managers who are working with our patient encounters—that totals over 700,000 documents a year,” Wicks explains. “We used to have to process those in our central business office, then send them back out to the sites to store for seven years. Now they’re all inputted when received from the site and accessed as needed through Laserfiche.”

Standardizing to streamline AP processing

The next phase of implementation deployed Workflow to help automate AP processing for CapitalCare’s accounting department—which has seen the number of sites it supports grow from 14 to 27 in the four years since Laserfiche was acquired in 2007.

“Before Laserfiche, AP processing wasn’t very efficient, nor was there a common practice for approving invoices,” Wicks explains. “Some bills were received at the site, approved and forwarded; others came to the CBO and were distributed for approval and return. Laserfiche allowed us to standardize the process, and that’s been a big time saver.”

Thanks to Laserfiche, turnaround time for AP processing was reduced from 7–10 days to 2–3:

• Invoices are now captured and sorted centrally using Quick Fields in CapitalCare’s Albany office.
• Workflow then automatically routes the invoices to the appropriate site managers, who are notified through email that they have a document to approve with a shortcut link to retrieve the document.
• Working in conjunction with a custom file export tool developed by JPI, approved documents are then automatically pushed from Laserfiche to CapitalCare’s Great Plains accounting system via QuickLinks and PaperSave.

“Accounting now knows what documents need approval and which documents are in a queue once the site has approved the document,” Wicks says. A backup copy of the exported document is created using Workflow, which, after 30 days, is automatically deleted by a Workflow activity.

The next phase, Wicks adds, will be to establish a centralized shared service center, where invoices will be processed directly from the central business office. “Workflow will set up queues for each of our sites’ accounting departments to process invoices,” he says.

An overall benefit, Wicks says, has come from the time saved making action items more available to site staff. “Although we have a separate solution to store patient medical information for continuity, middle management at each site—typically one or two employees—utilizes Laserfiche to access past patient encounters, approving invoices and coding corrections, and this has eliminated a lot of lag time.”

The future of the future: Workflow

Future projects are already slated—including implementing RME. “The functionality of Records Management Edition will assist with purging documents once they have reached their shelf life, while Audit Trail will help keep us in compliance,” Wicks says.

Hagstrand says even the IS Department has its own ideas for how to utilize the system. “We’re actually hoping to use Laserfiche to manage our service agreements, so we’ll be able to run queries and see what’s going to expire in the next year.”

“The system keeps evolving as we bring on more documents and processes,” add Wicks, pointing out that Workflow will play a more leading role in future deployment. “I’d say we’re at the grassroots of pushing information between sites and departments. Right now, I’m looking at any situation where we have an opportunity to push documents and how we can utilize Laserfiche to automate additional functions between our practices and our central business office,” he continues, noting a recent meeting with a business unit to discuss improving billing and coding through automation. “Workflow has really worked out for us because we can take the visual process of scanning documents and apply that to designing workflows—it’s very intuitive.”

This versatility, says Wicks, is why Laserfiche use continues to evolve. That, and Wicks makes sure CapitalCare’s 50 named users know just what’s possible using the system that solved their initial storage problems.

Says Wicks, “We need to do more education within the company to say ‘This is a lot more than just a scanning solution’ and hold a ‘Did you know?’ session.”

• Copying and filing checks, purchase orders and invoices.
• Filing bank and vendor reconciliations and journal entries.
• Answering daily open records requests from vendors and departments district-wide.
• Making records available for auditors from internal, local and state agencies.

By 2008, file cabinets were taking up more and more space—and staff trips to look up records were taking up more and more staff time. Sheryl Davis, Superintendent for Business and Support Services, decided to do something about it. Davis had seen how different document types could be scanned, sorted, indexed and filed according to a customizable set of template fields using Laserfiche at a workshop held at the Region 12 Education Service Center (ESC Region 12). ESC Region 12 held the workshop in conjuction with their Laserfiche reseller, Bryan/College Station-based SMARTfiles, to introduce Laserfiche and its benefits for ISDs.

Davis was encouraged by the fact that ESC Region 12 (which serves WISD) was already successfully utilizing Laserfiche, and contacted SMARTfiles about acquiring a similar system in the WISD Accounting Department.

A scan in time saves nine

Initial implementation focused on automating how AP staff captured vendor information, and key to that was integrating Laserfiche with the District’s SunGard e-Finance software (formerly Pentamation). Utilizing Laserfiche Quick Fields advanced capture software, staff could now schedule regular processing sessions to automatically create Laserfiche files using the purchase order (PO) numbers, which then automatically fill-in vendor information from the SunGard system. The efficiency, says Cindy Shaver, Accounting and Payroll Coordinator, was immediate. “It saves us time because we don’t have to scan in the POs and create a file,” she says. Then, after paying the invoice, the scanned check and other supporting documentation are likewise added to the file—which is all accessible from a desktop.

WISD found that user adoption is not without its hiccups—or its remedies. “We had an employee that did not want to scan at first, as she thought it would consume her time,” Shaver recalls. “Once she saw the value in retrieving documents at her desktop and not having to retrieve them from a file cabinet and/or boxes from off-site, she became more willing to scan.”

Shaver admits she herself took a little time acclimating to the idea of paperless information automation. “When I first came on two years ago, I thought we’d need to create a full-time position to scan in all these documents, but that hasn’t been the case,” she says. After every check-run, the Accounts Payable Specialist scans in the checks and supporting documentation by PO, adding them to the file already created in Laserfiche. “It takes some time and monitoring to ensure that items are being scanned in weekly, but the result is this overall efficiency,” she says. “It’s absolutely wonderful to have this information on our computers versus going to a file cabinet, or a person’s office, or finding a missing document.”

The scanning process itself benefitted from some refinements. Initially, Shaver says, staff scanned in by invoice. “But one check could pay 30 invoices, which took time. So we reevaluated the process and started scanning by POs.” Now, almost three years later, the department has seen consistent long-term benefits. “We are able to retrieve documents quickly and are able to move files off-site sooner, which has freed up space in our department.”

As a principal end-user, AP Lead Gloriana Murry credits a short but optimistic learning curve with contributing to both the success of initial adoption, and leading to a broader scope of Laserfiche use. “It’s a very easy-to-use system,” she says. “It didn’t take much to open my eyes to what else we could use the system for.”

WISD’s Laserfiche reseller, SMARTfiles, intially provided staff with an eight-hour training session, followed by annual refresher courses. In addition, monthly newsletters and tips-and-tricks e-mails keep users up-to-date with new ways to increase efficiency. Staff have also taken advantage of online training courses available through the Laserfiche Certified Professional Program to further increase their knowledge base.

Shaver credits the flexibility of Laserfiche to add and customize template fields with expanding its use for more detailed audit information and accounting functions, including journal entries, bank reconciliations and documents/reports for outside auditors. “I created a template for journal entries very easily. I simplified the template to include ‘Journal Entry Number,’ ‘Description,’ ‘Period’ and ‘Year,’” she says. “Since I’m scanning them in, I no longer have to keep an actual file folder for them.”

Paper-free means headache-free audits, records requests and reconciliation

The comprehensiveness and convenience of having vendor and other financial information in single, searchable repository has significantly impacted two major processes-slash-pains: answering open records requests and making information available to auditors. “Every day you’re bombarded with phone calls from people needing information from you,” says Murry. “In the past you had to get up and go to a file cabinet to look it up—if it was misfiled, you were on your own. Now I just save a copy to PDF and e-mail it off. It went from taking 15 minutes to less than two minutes. I’ll have campuses call and I’ll have them on the phone and say ‘Okay, it’s in your e-mail right now.’”

Shaver shares this story: “I had an open records request for all invoices that were paid to this one vendor for the last five years. For the first 2 ½ years—from before we implemented Laserfiche—for those, we had to track them down in off-site storage and then pay to have those files delivered. We then had to un-staple them and stand by the copier machine to make copies,” she says. “For the invoices from the 2 ½ years since Laserfiche was implemented, I searched by vendor, highlighted and saved it to a file and sent the file electronically, which saved paper, toner and valuable time.”

Between internal, local and state agencies, WISD’s financial records are subject to regular audits—at least 12 times a year—often without more than a few days lead time. “Our auditors usually provide us a list of maybe 200 invoices they wanted to review for testing purposes.” Shaver says. “We used to either pull the items for them or they would go through our files to pull it themselves. Now, I set them up with viewing-only access in Laserfiche, so they can review their selections in Laserfiche.

“They can also save paper by saving their selections to file versus printing as they, too, are trying to go paperless,” she adds. “I had one auditor comment how simple the process was for him to review and how much it sped up the process. Some of the auditors were fighting over the computer as we had stored all information for them in a special “Audit folder”—perhaps next year I will need to ensure they have another computer with Laserfiche so they don’t have to wait until the other auditor is finished with their testing.”

Another process that Shaver says significantly improved is reconciling the WISD fixed assets system with its SunGard system. “If there’s anything missing in our fixed asset program or SunGard, I just use Laserfiche to research the asset in question and make any corrections,” Shaver says. “It’s so easy, and I’m doing it from my desk.”

Now, she says, she can’t imagine life without Laserfiche. “If you take it away, it’s like you’re taking away my computer. It’s like going back to the Stone Age.”

Hello Payroll, goodbye nine filing cabinets

More recently, Shaver’s departmental duties have expanded to include the WISD Payroll Department—and all nine file cabinets worth of its personnel files. “One of the Account Payable Specialists was promoted to Payroll Specialist II position—she’s a strong advocate for Laserfiche and is looking forward to utilizing it for Payroll,” Shaver says. The department, she adds, is preparing to input personnel files into Laserfiche, including:

• Action sheets.
• Direct deposit forms.
• Payroll deduction forms.
• W-4 forms.

For her expanded duties, however, Shaver is already using Laserfiche. “Currently, I am scanning in all the payroll redistributions that I have prepared, because it enables me to keep track of the redistributions as well as to retrieve the documentation for the redistribution,” she says.

She says what has made Laserfiche so versatile for WISD has been its ease-of-use. “I’ve seen similar programs to Laserfiche, but nothing as simple to use,” Shaver offers. “We can set it up similarly to how we’re used to keeping out documents on our desktops.

“It’s so easy to use that when I joined the department as the system administrator, I picked it up right away. I think it says a lot about our success using Laserfiche that it is so easy and intuitive, because you can set it up however works best for you.”

The Facilities Services/Plant Management Department was using Laserfiche to digitize content like electrical drawings and floor plans, but other departments still relied on third-party storage and manual search methods. Filing, storing and locating records were not only extremely difficult processes, but also very time consuming.

“Managing primarily paper records in an organization of our size was often a slow, arduous and expensive task,” says Hiltz. “We were forced to rely on outside storage facilities, and manual workflow processes were extremely inefficient.”

In addition to eliminating the need for paper storage altogether by building a digital records repository, HWDSB also needed to improve its ability to readily locate records—both for faster customer service and easier compliance with government regulations.

Compliance Complications

The Ontario Ministry of Education requires a student’s records to be kept for five years after the student graduates, while other information is to be held for 55 years, including:

• Student transcripts.
• Special education information.
• Disciplinary records.
• Copies of diplomas and certifications.

In a district of 50,000 students and 7,000 employees, this amounted to an enormous quantity of records that were on paper, CD-ROMs or microfilm—often stored in boxes in basements of schools that had the extra space. “If someone graduated in 1960 and contacted us for a copy of their diploma, we had to take the time to manually search through each box until we found the record,” Hiltz explains.

Overhauling Old Methods

In an effort to overhaul its paper-based approach to content management, streamline processes in multiple departments and ease regulation compliance, Hiltz pushed for change. “The IT Department began an education campaign around content management. We held information sessions and group discussions to figure out how additional departments could use Laserfiche and if it was the right choice across the board.”

Turns out it was: Citing ease of use as the number-one selection criteria, Hiltz says that the scalability of Laserfiche allowed HWDSB to roll it out at a workable cost, expanding use by one department at a time.

“The biggest user of Laserfiche is the Director’s—or Superintendent’s—Office,” he says. There, the Director and other senior officials use Laserfiche on a daily basis, not only as a mechanism for storing records, but also to manage:

• Committee meetings and minutes.
• Trustee meeting agendas.
• Ontario policies and procedures.

Hiltz’s own IT Department also uses Laserfiche to manage its forms, invoices, purchase orders and records. Rather than wait for other departments to respond to information requests—which entailed locating the information, making necessary copies and then sending them over—now Laserfiche allows authorized users to retrieve records themselves from the Laserfiche repository. “All of the departments working with Laserfiche are eliminating storage and getting rid of excess paper, but we’re also focusing on improving interdepartmental access to records and making them faster to retrieve.”

In addition to IT, Facilities and the Director’s Office, HWDSB deployed Laserfiche in Business Services as well. “Accounting, Payroll, Purchasing—they all use Laserfiche now. When it comes time for audits of our invoices and purchase orders, everything we need is easily accessible,” Hiltz explains. “Previously, we had to send this information to offsite storage, which made retrieval extremely difficult.”

Winning Results

HWDSB was pleased to see several immediate benefits after expanding its Laserfiche implementation, including:

• A reduction in the need for offsite storage.
• Optimization of office space.
• Easier compliance with government mandates and a streamlined auditing process.
• More efficient use of staff time.
• Quicker searchability and accessibility of records.

“Laserfiche has become a part of how people do their jobs on a daily basis,” Hiltz says. “It’s evident people are committed to using it—it’s just a more efficient way to operate.”

A substantial amount of paper has been removed from HWDSB’s offices as files can now be accessed from the secure Laserfiche repository, both optimizing much needed office space and allowing the staff to work more efficiently.

“Laserfiche has allowed our staff to work more productively, saving our Board money and providing us with the confidence that we can quickly access critically important documents when needed,” Hiltz continues. “Staff is able to complete tasks in a fraction of the time and reduce the possibility of lost or late arriving documents.”

Positive Projections

In addition to using Laserfiche for enterprise content management, Hiltz says that HWDSB is also working to develop a SharePoint Enterprise Portal, with plans to use Laserfiche as the ECM component to provide content management, search and retrieval and Workflow automation. The integration will enable staff—and eventually students and their parents—to access documents stored in the Laserfiche repository right from the portal, eliminating the need to launch Laserfiche separately or toggle between screens. Staff-related documents types will include:

• Staff benefit statements.
• Vacation requests.
• Professional development portfolios.
• Mileage requests and reimbursement claims.

Staff will be able to log into the portal from anywhere and search information stored in Laserfiche. “One of the keys to this integration is the ability to instantly search for documents. Laserfiche makes it so easy,” says Hiltz.

Although HWDB is still at the beginning stages of implementing Laserfiche Workflow, Hiltz says that the organization is planning to use the full range of BPM functionality. The Director’s Office is eager to use Agenda Manager, while the HR department is very interested in using Workflow to automate processes for job applications, benefits information and staff records. “Using Workflow to complete forms and requests, while integrating with the portal, will boost efficiency in paper-heavy departments like HR immensely,” Hiltz explains.

HWDSB also has plans to make Laserfiche a part of its education initiative called 21st Century Fluencies. “We’re asking, ‘How can teachers teach like they’ve never taught before?’ The classroom needs to prepare students for careers, and of course technology is a huge part of that,” says Hiltz. “Both students and teachers are adjusting to learning and teaching with technology, and Laserfiche is the perfect fit with the idea of paperless classrooms—where reference materials, student papers, grades and so on are accessed and organized electronically.”

Hiltz concludes that HWDSB decided to expand its Laserfiche implementation because it is “far superior” to other ECM systems. “Even if Laserfiche is implemented in individual departments at first, the benefits are clearly enterprise-wide. It’s definitely important to focus on working toward implementation across the entire organization.”

Part of how TS drives Cary’s business units is to, whenever possible, follow an internal shared services model. The challenge, Stice says, is accommodating “fairly dissimilar” business processes with the same technology foundation, so answering to these unique needs has made agility an important factor in infrastructure investments. “When we look at purchasing new applications, we want them to be flexible enough to meet departmental needs, but able to be tied together with everything else when we need it to be.”

Stice offers the town’s GIS system as an example. “Everything we do is geo-spatial,” he explains. “Addresses are used and shared by departments. But where the Engineering Department does business by project number, Planning uses case numbers.” The challenge, he says, is finding a way to accommodate the unique ways individual departments work with information, while still providing a common foundation to link that information together across departments.

“We want the business to drive the software, not the software to drive the business,” Stice concludes.

The Need: Uniting Content and Contract Management

This was the mindset in 2003 when Rodney Overton, one of Cary’s three business analysts, first looked at content management to manage the over 300 contract documents received annually by the Town Clerk’s Office. Town staff was accessing contract documents by traveling to the clerk’s office, having the clerk look up reference numbers from an AS/400-based Contract Control System (CCS), then locating the paper contract from a labyrinth of file cabinets and making copies. The search was on for a more efficient way.

Overton was aware that many North Carolina municipalities already were using Laserfiche as their enterprise content management system, so he contacted Kevin Smith of Laserfiche reseller One Source Document Solutions to learn more. Smith demonstrated how, using Laserfiche, staff in the clerk’s office could scan and store contracts while making them available to town staff—even multiple staff simultaneously—right from their desktop computers. Overton recalls easing staff concerns following a prior experience with a cumbersome imaging system. “Laserfiche had an easy-to-use Windows look and feel everyone could see themselves using,” he recalls. For his part, he liked how Laserfiche Web Access could create URL shortcuts to documents. “I saw tremendous potential for integration with a lot of our primary departmental applications as we rolled it out.”

In spring 2003, implementation took place in the Clerk’s Office. The Engineering Department followed a month later, presenting the challenges of larger document volume as well as different types of documents. Laserfiche’s ability to categorize documents according to several template fields proved significantly effective. “We started out with about 15 template fields, which we’ve narrowed down to about seven that we use today,” Overton says. “In 2007, ‘Project Number’ and ‘Document Type’ fields became very useful as we began to find ways to integrate Laserfiche with our GIS software, MapInfo.”

Rounding out this initial deployment, One Source assisted the Cary Police Department with a massive migration of some 190,000 documents from its legacy imaging system to its own volume within the Laserfiche repository. Since then, the Cary Police Department hasn’t looked back, adding more than 10,000 documents a year to its Laserfiche system.

System Integrations “Just a Click Away”

A 2006 upgrade to Laserfiche 7.2 brought with it enhanced opportunities to integrate Laserfiche with line-of-business applications. “Laserfiche 7.2 allowed you to save searches; we felt that if you could save a search in Web Access, then you should be able to execute a search using a URL link,” Overton says. “Through testing, research and help from One Source, we were able to create a URL search where we could pass search information from a simple browser shortcut and have Web Access perform a search and pull up the desired documents.”

Overton soon wrote an AS/400 CL program that uses the Contract Control Number in the Contract Control system to display a contract in Web Access. While the user is viewing contract information on the Contract Control System, all they need to do is press a hotkey to initiate a Web Access search that displays the contract image in detail.

“Now users don’t even have to log into Laserfiche—with the press of button they can see all related documents for a contract,” he says.

A few months later, Overton developed another “hotkey” integration for Cary’s MapInfo GIS software. The ability to search across multiple templates, such as the clerk’s as well as engineering departments’, is helpful to bring up all documents for projects outlined in MapInfo. With this integration, a MapInfo user only needs to click an address, select a project and a search is launched that pulls up a list of all related project documents in Web Access—quickly focusing searches in a town where, “everything is geo-centric,” as TS Director Stice puts it.

To simplify multi-template searches, Overton—along with co-workers Wilson Farrell and Ken Guttman—created a small internal website to perform central searches using Web Access. “So instead of running into character limitations with MapInfo when we have more than one template search, we can pass critical information to an internal website to launch the remaining portion of the script,” says Overton. “This helps tremendously in minimizing the character length of the URL needed for integrating into other applications.”

Creating a Standard for Imaging—and Image-Enablement

This image enablement has proven so useful Overton says he’s now looking at ways to integrate Laserfiche with the Police Department’s RMS software as well as the Accounting Department’s Sungard Public Sector financial software. “Sungard has an imaging interface that was built specifically around a few select products on the market,” he says. “Now, with the ease of use and flexibility of Laserfiche, we hope to utilize this part of the Sungard interface to integrate the two.” Overton says that after taking part in the inaugural Eastern North Carolina State Laserfiche Users Group earlier this year, he’s looking forward to sharing his experience with fellow users.

“From our User Group meetings, I know lots of municipalities here in the Southeast that have both Sungard Public Sector and Laserfiche software,” he says. “So having that network of fellow users is very helpful in terms of sharing experience and ideas.”

And it ends up being more cost-effective, too, he adds. “You’re talking about tremendous cost savings when you don’t have to consult with a third party to write an integration. For our MapInfo integration, if we had to hire a consultant, it would have been at least $10,000, if not more. Multiply that per application and the savings can really add up,” Overton says. “The way we are able to link to documents in Laserfiche from another application really makes a difference in terms of value and functionality.”

As such, Laserfiche has become the integrative middleware used by several departments to access and share content. Besides Engineering, the Town Clerk’s office and the Police Department, the Parks and Recreation and Planning Departments have also implemented Laserfiche, with plans to expand to the Accounting Department as well as Inspections and Permits.

“Laserfiche has become a strategic application,” Stice says. “It’s the standard we use to manage paper and it’s the only one we use to access that information and tie it to other information.”

Tying that information together, Overton notes, has proven its value both in terms of saving IT resources, but also in the value of enhanced functionality to deliver shared services. “Laserfiche’s Web Access has made integration just a click away,” he says.

Recognizing the Value of Agility Early On

When CIO Richard “Dick” Aldridge joined Charles County’s IT department 10 years ago he brought a career-long belief in the value of IT-driven initiatives with him. He started by transitioning his staff from procedural RPG programming to object-oriented programming, buying his staff textbooks and leading self-study courses. “I knew we could be more than a green screen county running AS400,” he says. By 2001, IT staff had written their own program for residents to pay water bills and property taxes online.

To Aldridge, it wasn’t the “how?” that mattered, but the “why?” The answer was “Agility.” “Agility is something we have done since day one with our Website,” Aldridge says. “Businesses and constituents want to see how you’re spending their tax money, so when we increase the level of service and convenience we can offer, they benefit from that agility.”

Last year, for instance, this proactive approach resulted in a 350+ mile I-Net fiber-optic network built in conjunction with a local cable TV provider. I-Net not only gives 102 county locations high-speed internet access, it saves Charles County $250,000 a year by eliminating T1 lines and centralized servers, freeing up staff and space.

Discovering the Need for Data Governance

Against this backdrop of IT-driven initiatives, Aldridge saw the county had a growing problem with its enterprise risk management strategy – or lack thereof.

In a presentation to administrators at the Maryland Association of Counties, Aldridge spelled out the problem: “The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley regulations initially served as a wake-up call for formalized document retention policies to meet compliance requirements. But regulatory demands and the number of documents produced daily continue to grow. So a solid document management process is a necessity.”

Aldridge explains: “I actually started selling the idea of a document management system early – I mean really early – back in 2003. We didn’t have to see the lawsuits to know the prospects were there.”

In the meantime, the county’s exponential population growth – from 32,000 to 150,000 in the last 20 years – increasingly made paper-based processes a problem. A series of disasters from 2002-2004, including a tornado, a fire, and hurricane, highlighted the need for a content management system. “We lost a building with a ton of paperwork that people had filed to get housing. Then the county commissioners themselves realized they could have lost their minutes, which they’re supposed to keep forever,” Aldridge says.

“Our basic discovery was that we just had a tremendous amount of paper,” he adds.

Documents were discovered in old service stations, even water towers. There were horror stories of staff members who, while searching for documents, were bitten by paper mites. While waiting for their annual audit, the Accounting Department would find its hallways clogged with boxes of invoices and AR documents. Aldridge was frustrated. “It just irritated me for all our technology, this was happening every year.”

Back in 2005, Aldridge had actually brought a content management solution before the County Commissioners (“We didn’t know about Laserfiche yet,” he says). “I knew my staff could use it, but I could not get buy in,” he says. “People just did not want to let go of their paper.” Cost was an even bigger issue, he says: when the commissioners saw the mid-six-figure price tag, they clutched their pocketbooks almost as tightly as their paper.

Getting Buy-In: The Bake-off That was No Cakewalk

With the 2007 election of new County Commissioners came the opportunity for Aldridge to re-visit its need for enterprise-wide document management. This time, Aldridge and his staff formed a likewise enterprise-wide committee from all eight county departments. “This went a long way to ensure user buy-in,” he says.

Then the real work began: comprehensive, day-long presentations by each vendor using county documents and processes to show exactly how their solution would be used. “We called it ‘the bake-off’ because we didn’t want the vendors to describe their solution, we wanted to taste it,” says Aldridge.

Virginia based reseller Unity Business Systems presented Laserfiche to unanimous approval. “Laserfiche looked like the Windows environment we’re used to using, so our committee members understood what they were seeing,” explains IT Application Manager Evelyn Jacobson.

Besides its user-friendliness, Jacobson says the county purchased Laserfiche ECM both for its cost-effectiveness but also the fact that so many other municipalities were using it – including over 40 of her fellow Digital Cities and Counties winners. “The first thing all the commissioners and administrators asked was, ‘Where else is this being used?’ And being able to point to so many other municipalities like [nearby] Fairfax County who had gone through this same process and chosen it gave the commissioners an immediate confidence in Laserfiche.”

Planning an Information Management Strategy with an Eye Towards Interoperability

Aldridge’s vision for the new system was to get rid of its immediate paper problems, but do so in a way that mitigated future compliance risk:

• The county purchased Laserfiche Records Management Edition specifically for its ability to automate back-end records retention schedules in accordance with Maryland’s state archiving policies, while still allowing users the flexibility to search and access records easily. (Easily enough, in fact, that the county’s Accounting Chief will act as Records Manager until an RM position is created.)
• The Accounting Department now uses Quick Fields to automate capture of invoices and Laserfiche Workflow to automate AP processing. “It’s all done using barcodes now so there’s no manual entry any more – they love it,” Jacobson says. “Since its implementation, we’ve received weekly requests from Accounting to add additional users to the Laserfiche system.”
• Laserfiche implementation continues in the Planning and Growth Management department, as well as HR and  the Commissioners’ office.
• The county’s plan, says Jacobson, is to integrate Laserfiche with the county’s New World Systems public administration software in such a way that a Laserfiche button will allow staff to access documents and run reports from the current applications they’re already using. “Unity Business Systems did a really good job of showing us how Laserfiche would interface with our current systems,” she explains. “That was one of the things we liked about Laserfiche. Our technical staff can integrate it with our enterprise software as well as our internally developed Web applications. It’s very open, and we won’t have to pay for consulting every time we want to do something.”

What makes this even more noteworthy is that Charles County will do this, as it has with all its other IT-driven innovations, with a staff of just 22 – about half the staff other municipalities its size employ.

For Aldridge, the potential interoperability Laserfiche offers will become even more significant as the county rolls out its Transparency Web Portal this month as part of the County Commissioners’ transparency-in-government initiative, which was originated only last August. “We’re very Web-based – we don’t want to put applications on people’s computers,” Aldridge begins, noting the entire Transparency Web Portal itself took the county only a month to implement.

“One of the things we liked about Laserfiche was it offered a tremendous capability to put a button on our Transparency Web Portal. The vision is that we’re not only able to store the record and automatically apply retention to it, but we’ll be able to point people to the Transparency Web Portal so they can see where their tax money is being spent,” Aldridge says.

“I’ll use that to get number nine,” he laughs, confident in Charles County’s ability to keep winning Digital County awards again – and again. “The Transparency Web Portal will help us win eight next year – and then when we add Laserfiche to that, that’ll be nine,” he laughs. “Then I’m going to retire.”

Dennis Raulie, Manager of Administrative Computing Technology Services, recognized that the university had outgrown its existing document management system. He realized that what staff really needed was an enterprise content management solution that would comply with the university’s records management retention schedules, better secure documents and decrease the cost of handling paper.

Raulie saw a demo by Laserfiche reseller SMARTfiles and was impressed. “Other document management systems didn’t fulfill our needs very well, while others just seemed rudimentary,” he recalls.

Raulie also listened to what his users had to say about Laserfiche. “They liked the simplicity and speed. They also liked the ease of use and how powerful it was in being able to find information. Laserfiche was also much more intuitive than what they were used to,” he remembers.

With his users’ approval and confidence in Laserfiche’s robust functionality, TAMU-CC chose Laserfiche. Says Raulie, “With Laserfiche’s direct, accomplished and ingenious approach, we knew we’d be able to provide state-of-the-art service to our client base.”

After reviewing the areas that could be most improved in the shortest amount of time, Raulie focused first on development of a system to streamline the University’s BPP/FAMIS report distribution – a process that generates a lot of information, and, in some cases, a lot of unnecessary paper. “The BPP/FAMIS feeds are mainframe listings that consist of several small ‘reportlets’ that are bundled into one file,” explains Programmer III Michael Williamson. These reportlets, Raulie adds, contain information that must be stored in Laserfiche as well as several pages of less useful information, such as security listings that are in some cases blank. “Some of these reports need to be seen, but don’t need to be kept,” he adds. “However, to the printer, it’s all the same. All the reports would be printed when they came in – sometimes as many as 60 data forms a day.”

Often these reports were thousands of pages long, requiring a ream or two of paper a day to print. This system, Raulie says, didn’t just consume time, it also consumed money. “The paper-driven report distribution system is very expensive when you add up the costs of printers, fax machines, paper, toner, storage for these supplies and storage for printed archived reports,” he says. “These paper reports often are copied and saved by individuals along the paper trail, which duplicates the expenses, too. So we knew if we could move duplicating the existing paper-driven report system into a digital form that would reap huge benefits.”

To filter the important information from the non-essential information, Raulie, Williamson, and Systems Support Specialist I Bobby Martinez took inspiration from Rube Goldberg’s legacy of creating seemingly complex machines to achieve simple tasks. They created their own “Report Upload Bifurcation Engine” (R.U.B.E.), which processes continuous BFF/FAMIS report files, and splits them into individual reportlets as it does so. R.U.B.E. then distributes the resulting reports and data into a virtual staging area where Quick Fields reads the data, Zone OCRs the documents and distributes the information into the proper folders within Laserfiche.

This is significant, notes Raulie, because R.U.B.E filters out the information that only needs to be seen but not stored. R.U.B.E. recognizes what data needs to be kept according to records retention demands and sends them to Laserfiche, then sends the rest to Windows Share. The information is still available for viewing, but the reports do not need to be printed, thus saving more paper.

After R.U.B.E.’s initial success, Williamson turned to converting TAMU-CC’s legacy imaging data from its legacy document management database into Laserfiche through the “Legacy Image Translation Engine” – the L.I.T.E. R.U.B.E., naturally. Williamson wrote a custom process that accessed the University’s outdated document management system and pulled the stored data and metadata, processing it through Import Agent and sending it into the corresponding folders in Laserfiche. “The old system was flat, with lots of template fields,” Williamson explains. “It was not always useful and many end users did not know why these fields were being used.” The actual process of converting all the old information into Laserfiche allowed Raulie and his team to collaborate with end users to reevaluate what fields were needed, determine which fields were most useful, and eventually add those to Laserfiche templates. In fact, Raulie says, this conversion process occasioned the same kind of useful re-evaluation and determination of template fields with each of the University’s business units and their respective document types.

Change, of course, can be hard, no matter what kind of progress it promises. Raulie offers this advice deploying Laserfiche: aim for small victories at first to win internal champions to inspire organic adoption – not just demand it. Raulie targeted TAMU-CC’s Accounting Department, where hundreds of data forms a day were printed, scanned and manually indexed by student workers, as a process ripe for improvement. Before Laserfiche, Raulie notes, it was considered acceptable to be a month behind in the filing because there was so much that needed to be done. Since implementing Laserfiche and R.U.B.E., Raulie says, reportlets can be separated, converted, uploaded and placed into Laserfiche within minutes. Not surprisingly, Accounting is no longer a month behind in their filing – instead, they’re now working in real time. Even better, the department is now one of Laserfiche’s biggest champions. “Get people like that comfortably productive and enthusiastic,” advises Raulie. “They talk about the success and the word spreads.”

Adds Williamson, “When they see the light at the end of the tunnel, and they see their associates’ success and what they can do, that speaks volumes.”

Raulie also advises creating a test environment where users learning Laserfiche can experience the software at their own pace. “Build a ‘sandbox’ repository for users to play in and let them learn the controls,” he says. “You can’t learn to ride a bike unless you get on it, right?” Raulie also suggests obtaining administrative buy-in with regular progress updates. Soliciting department and unit managers for their input is also invaluable, he says, to increase group ownership of the project. “These are the team members who ‘know the flow.’ Their input is crucial.” Updating administrators with reports of the success and progress of the implementation is also a key component. “It’s not bragging if it’s true,” says Raulie. “After a while, it begins to take on a life of its own, and individuals talk about the ease of use and time savings.” Lastly, Raulie advises developing a strong working relationship with your reseller like the university did with SMARTfiles. “SMARTfiles offers training videos and other training materials that we make available to our users,” says Raulie. “Offer continuous training opportunities for your clients. If you think the price of training is too high, consider the price of ignorance.”

For other IT Developers interested in creating their own R.U.B.E. using the Laserfiche Software Developer’s Kit (SDK), Raulie says that with prior knowledge of Visual Basic, developers shouldn’t have any problems at all. “In the hands of someone who knows VB, it should be a snap,” he says. Williamson adds that it is easy to write code that formats legacy imaging data into the components required to drive Import Agent, so it can then distribute converted data into the appropriate folder.

TAMU-CC’s future plans include automating and streamlining business process management using Workflow, with Bobby Martinez acting as project manager. It will bring its challenges and its success, but perhaps most importantly, it will continue to make their end users happy users – like Payroll Manager Melissa Wright. When asked to sum up her success using Laserfiche, Wright simply replied, “Laserfiche is easy to use. I LOVE LASERFICHE!”