“In this volatile economy, Laserfiche is committed to providing stress-free ECM solutions that are easy to implement, easy to administer and easy to use,” said Brian LaPointe, Vice President of Strategic Solutions at Laserfiche. “As such, we’re offering free massages for EDUCAUSE attendees to reflect our commitment to making life easier for IT and administrative decision makers at colleges and universities.”

Laserfiche solves business problems across campus, facilitating everything from student records management to facilities management, HR onboarding and disaster recovery planning. “Laserfiche takes a synchronized approach to content management, easing the burden on IT staff while eliminating departmental information silos,” said LaPointe.

Laserfiche will be on hand at booth #1619 throughout the event to demonstrate its software solutions for higher education, provide free massages and distribute copies of customer success stories featuring USC and Texas A&M. Laserfiche will also host a reception on Wednesday, October 19, from 6:00 – 8:00 pm ET at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown.

During the reception, Laserfiche will present John Hermes, CTO and Vice President of IT at Oklahoma Christian University, with a Visionary Award for using Laserfiche to streamline processes across campus. Hermes kicked off the Laserfiche project by enabling students to complete and submit financial aid documents through a student portal; next, he’ll implement the system in Admissions and the Business Office. In 2012, he plans to bring the Registrar’s Office and the Office of Student Life onboard.

“From a leadership perspective, implementing a product like Laserfiche and having an entire office up and running proficiently on the system within just a few days speaks volumes,” said Hermes. “IT staff was very impressed with the ease of administration and how smoothly the implementation has gone.”

About Laserfiche

Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. Since 1987, more than 30,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and institutions of higher education—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

Laserfiche provides colleges and universities with an ECM solution that can be centrally regulated by the IT department and easily configured for each department’s unique business processes. Schools such as Texas A&M, the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of Utah use Laserfiche to increase collaboration and information sharing between departments, automate core business processes and minimize ongoing maintenance demands for IT personnel.

Laserfiche®, Run Smarter® and Compulink® are registered trademarks of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

• Medical Billing: Pre Billing Consultants
• Accounts Payable: Indigo North Health
• Land Records Management: Bremer County, IA
• RIA Compliance: Level Four Group

But with state facilities in College Station, TX, a major USDA entomology research laboratory, and members of the department’s graduate faculty stationed in nine major agricultural areas in the state, sharing information efficiently had become problematic for department staff.

Beginning in 2004, different programs and departments within TAMU began investigating document management solutions in order to more efficiently and cost-effectively share information—not to mention save space. Ultimately, they chose a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) solution to securely store paper, implement business process management and eliminate file cabinets.

Currently, nearly 1,200 staff in 10 departments and divisions within TAMU use Laserfiche.

The Department of Entomology was introduced to ECM by Business Administrator Roberta Priesmeyer, who had read an article on document imaging during a business trip. She thought that an ECM system could help the department with administrative functions, and after learning about Laserfiche, she says that she couldn’t conceivably consider any other competitor due to the enormous difference in cost.

Laserfiche’s ease of use was a major selling point for the department; Priesmeyer reports that its user interface is simple to master, which increases staff adoption.

Once the system was installed, staff created a digital filing structure which replicated the department’s paper-based system. Before Laserfiche, department staff had difficulty finding documents if employees were unavailable, on vacation or had left. With Laserfiche, filing is standardized, so information retrieval is simple. Kathy Seaton, a staff member in the accounting department, previously had to return a vendor’s call after manually searching cabinets and folders. What previously took 30-45 minutes and several phone calls now takes 30 seconds and a single phone call.

IT Director Dr. Mark Wright believes that Laserfiche hasn’t just made life easier on the department head, but also for staff. “Staff really are happier as a result of their ability to increase productivity without expending more effort,” he says.

In addition, Laserfiche enables the department to adhere to their records retention schedule much more easily, something that was nearly impossible with paper. “It really helps us keep the auditors happy,” adds Wright.

With Laserfiche, researchers can easily access reprints that previously required them to spend up to half a day sifting through files to retrieve a single document. Laserfiche’s optical character recognition (OCR) capability and unified metadata model have allowed the department to virtually eliminate this necessary but inefficient use of time. Since 2007, peer review articles have increased by 11.7%, with total faculty publications increasing by 22.4%. In fact, Department of Entomology tenured and tenure track faculty rank #1 in term of peer-review publication output in the US (from data published by the Chronicles of Higher Education).

To further conserve space, the department plans to eventually add accounts for faculty members who each use 4-5 file cabinets to store their publications, to make researching even easier.

Due to the University’s Vision 2020 plan, the department has been hiring more professors, and Laserfiche is indirectly helping them reach this goal by freeing up office space formerly used for storage. Since implementing Laserfiche, the department has removed almost 40 file cabinets, creating enough space for a new office and laboratory.

The department expected to receive an initial ROI of $54,000, but actually achieved an ROI of $272,000. ROI is tracked in areas as varied as staff costs, the cost of lost files, consumables, storage, current and proposed purchases, and lease tax savings.

ROI mainly derives from savings on accounting staff ($7,385), professional staff ($4,865) and management positions ($10,597). The department also reclaimed nearly $1,000 in storage space and nearly $1,000 in monthly printing and distribution costs, for a total monthly savings of over $22,000.

In five years, the department estimates they will save nearly $1.4 million from their Laserfiche implementation.

“I love Laserfiche,” Priesmeyer says. “I’d fight anyone who tried to take it away from me. Choosing it is literally the best decision I’ve ever made.”

As a contract manufacturing company that specializes in medical device implants and surgical instruments, precision is a chief concern for RMS. For over forty years, the company has ensured the accuracy and quality of its products, spurring expansion and business growth. But as the organization grew, some of its processes failed to evolve along with it.

“As a contract manufacturer, we fulfill a substantial number of jobs every year,” explains Michael Eklund, information systems coordinator at RMS. “We used to place all of the order information into a file folder and pass it around to multiple teams throughout our 155,000 square foot machine shop. As you can probably guess, files went missing and people spent a lot of time trying to track them down.”

In order to improve the efficiency of its manufacturing processes, RMS began to look for a technology solution that would:

• Store information in a reliable, consistent form.
• Electronically route orders to multiple manufacturing teams.
• Increase employee accountability and decrease wasted time.
• Automate repetitive manual tasks.
• Guarantee that essential, job-related information could always be found.

After considering multiple technology vendors, RMS selected Laserfiche because of its comprehensive capture, search and workflow functionality, as well as the strength of Laserfiche reseller Crabtree Companies.

Leveraging Laserfiche Workflow for Business Process Management

RMS relies heavily on Workflow to accelerate shared business processes across its plants in Minnesota and Tennessee. “Our biggest accomplishment is our ‘green folder system,’” says Eklund. “It’s what we use to distribute the information that’s necessary for creating every instrument and every device.”

As the first step in constructing the green folder system, key RMS stakeholders came together to define and standardize the sequence of steps necessary to electronically distribute new order information to machinists and engineers.

“From a management perspective, developing the green folder system helped us to identify inefficiency and created consensus around the best way to eliminate it,” says Eklund. “It was clear that using Laserfiche Workflow to electronically route information was the best way to accomplish our goals.”

Using Workflow’s graphical user interface, RMS configured the system to perform activities based on the newly defined steps and sequence. When a new product is requisitioned:

• Order information including POs, prints, quotes, and manufacturing data is scanned into Laserfiche.
• Order information is electronically—and automatically—delivered to the departments involved in the manufacturing process.
• Department heads digitally sign off on the information.
• Supervisors can log into Laserfiche and see which departments have acknowledged receipt of the information.

“In the past,” says Eklund, “employees would physically walk hard copy folders between departments on the plant floor. It was hard to figure out which departments had seen what, and where exactly each order was in the manufacturing process. Thanks to Workflow, information now has a clear and consistent path around the factory floor. It never gets lost and it’s easy to track exactly what’s going on at any given time.”

Today, RMS has eight major workflows in effect across the company. According to Eklund, it only took a matter of weeks to get the primary workflow written and running. “From an IT perspective,” he says, “one of the best features is how easy it is to change and test the various workflows. Four of our major workflows could halt production if they stopped working properly. Because it’s so easy to make adjustments, we never have to worry about downtime.”

Ensuring Access and Saving Time with WebLink and Quick Fields

Aside from using Workflow to automate and streamline key business processes, RMS employs Laserfiche WebLink to provide employees with immediate access to job-critical information; it also leverages Quick Fields to cut down on manual data entry and save staff time.

WebLink is a secure Web publishing tool that distributes information to authorized users. Designed to protect the core content repository, WebLink prevents users from altering, deleting or tampering with digital data. At RMS, WebLink has made life much easier for machinists, who now have instant access to engineering blueprints and specs from virtually any computer on the factory floor.

“Prior to Laserfiche, our machinists had to wait for engineers to show them the prints and specs for the various parts they were responsible for producing,” explains Eklund. “Today they can access that information directly. It saves a lot of time.”

Quick Fields is another time-saving tool for the company, one that enables automated data capture and indexing. According to Eklund, the company uses Quick Fields for a variety of tasks, including:

• Creating Device History Records (DHR). Contract medical device manufacturers are mandated by the FDA to create and preserve DHRs indefinitely. Employees used to generate these records manually, and because RMS processes so many jobs each year, this meant hundreds of hours of employee time spent on data entry. Today, the company includes barcodes on job-related paperwork so that when a device is shipped, a DHR is automatically generated by scanning the barcode and ensuring that the record is properly named.
• Electronically filing accounts payable paperwork. RMS uses barcodes on accounts payable paperwork so that it is electronically filed after it is scanned into the system. This practice saves the accounting department two hours every Friday.

RMS also appreciates how much more quickly employees across the company can locate indexed information contained in the Laserfiche repository. “Nobody has to search through filing cabinets anymore,” says Eklund. “With Laserfiche, it only takes 30 seconds to find exactly what you need.”

Moving Forward

Although Eklund acknowledges that it is difficult to put a dollar amount on the savings RMS has experienced over the last four years as a result of implementing Laserfiche, he believes that the company recouped its initial investment within the first year.

To get the most out of the system, the company is currently in the process of upgrading to Laserfiche 8, which features:

• Greater interoperability with Microsoft Office applications.
• An enhanced system architecture that simplifies firewall configuration and improves performance over wide-area networks.
• A redesigned Workflow module that’s built on the Windows Workflow Foundation engine and uses the .NET framework.

Eklund’s parting advice to IT professionals who are interested in implementing Laserfiche is to “be patient. Users will follow your lead once they realize how good the system is. Laserfiche is the heartbeat of our company. It’s a great system to administer, and a great system to use.”