Martin Lovelace-Chandler's Laserfiche workstation

Born with a form of cerebral palsy that limits his motor skills and speech, Lovelace-Chandler has embraced technology with a purpose and passion in his life and career—at least as much as the technology has been able to keep up with the ambitions of the now-married father of two. “In college [in the late ‘90s], I really wanted to go into computers but I didn’t have a way to type or to use a mouse,” he says. After Lovelace-Chandler became an ASN client a decade ago, Dr. Vire had a great idea: to make ASN’s client files accessible to staff by scanning cumbersome paper files to disc. “It was just costing the agency storage every month. He asked me if I could help. I told him I can do anything on a computer if he just gets me the right equipment,” Lovelace-Chandler remembers.

The “right equipment” has changed a lot over the years. Realizing it needed a network solution to make scanned information more easily accessible to staff, ASN implemented a Canofile imaging system in 2006, but quickly found it fell short of its promise. Lack of indexing and usability meant ASN’s 20-plus case managers were still using three-inch thick paper files—sometimes three or four of them per client—which were time-consuming to locate and use and even more resource-consuming when it came to storage and auditing. It was “nightmare-ish stuff,” as Dr. Vire remembers. The one bright spot was that Lovelace-Chandler started using a combination keyboard and mouse that allowed him to program hotkey shortcuts—“macros and micros,” he calls them—that cut the keystrokes required to open up programs like Canonfile from 10 to two. “This allowed me to spend more time on the program itself and gave me total independence,” he says.

Over time, just as Lovelace-Chandler upgraded his communication device to a simpler and more comprehensive “Eco 14” model, ASN likewise upgraded to Laserfiche in 2008. The reason was twofold: “We wanted to be able to have all current and past files on Laserfiche so then it would be at everyone in the agency’s fingertips,” Lovelace-Chandler says. “We also wanted a program that would have a higher security feature after the HIPAA law went into effect.”

Although Dr. Vire admits that system adoption initially took time—not everyone was as attuned to the benefits of using technology as Lovelace-Chandler—the impact has been real.

“There was a time when, if we had a question about an individual’s plan from last year, we had to send someone to a storage unit and hope they could find the correct file, and then hope that the information was in the correct place. We almost always found the document, but the time invested was huge. We can now find that document in minutes rather than hours—and we’ve never had a water leak that left our Laserfiche files water-logged and unusable,” he says. “Laserfiche is definitely a time and money saver.”

For Lovelace-Chandler, a key benefit is how easily he can set up and administer ASN’s Laserfiche system for the case managers who use it on a daily basis. In addition to processing the 200 or so documents generated in the field every day, Lovelace-Chandler has added indexes for medical history, case manager notes and program plans, among other documents. “I’m able to use drop down lists for 98% of the fields,” he says. “It allows documents to be located faster and more efficiently.” And, he adds, securely.

“Laserfiche allows me to give only the people that should be seeing a certain region access. So for example, a case manager might have several consumers out of several regions, but that case manager only has access to each consumer that they are assigned—it’s a lot easier to them to access, and I love that security is set up differently,” he explains. “On Canofile any person could look up any consumer and see all their files. Now, with Laserfiche, I can assign that consumer just to who actually needs access. We also set up groups for each department. For example, Human Resources can’t access supported living files and vice-versa. We really like this because we can track who all is accessing all the files.”

He particularly likes Laserfiche’s support for Window Active Directory. “Almost every day I use the multi-media function to add employee names to the list.”

Another area of improvement has been auditing. As a healthcare services provider with funding and oversight from state and national agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services (which monitors HIPAA compliance), the Arkansas Department of Human Services and the Division of Developmental Disabilities Services, ASN is subject to frequent audits—as many as four per year. “We had an agency that told us that we had so many days to find documents or our agency would be fined. I was able to look up and send them every document they wanted. I would have spent twice the amount of time looking for the documents if we were still using Canofile,” Lovelace-Chandler says.

In addition to using Laserfiche for case management, Lovelace-Chandler also uses it to manage payroll, HR and AP processing. The plan, says Kevin Dickinson of ASN’s Laserfiche reseller, Preferred Office Products, is to implement Quick Fields, possibly even equipping case managers with netbooks to directly input their notes, freeing up Lovelace-Chandler’s time.

“I feel that having Laserfiche we will be able to do bigger and better things in the future. I also feel that it will help us greatly since our agency continues to expand,” says Lovelace-Chandler.

“I have been able to use Laserfiche more than any other program. With the features of Laserfiche it is an easier process to program my device and to use all the features that the program offers. I feel like Laserfiche could open a lot of doors for me or even people like me that have a physical disability,” he adds.

Likewise, Cunningham saw that RHC’s case management system could be made more agile. For starters, RHC’s 90 employees needed to find a better way to fulfill the information requests from over 3,400 court officers requesting client information from the agency. A legacy imaging system allowed staff to scan and attach documents to client records, but without a comprehensive search tool to locate specific documents or the ability to search by keywords, requests required a staff member to find the document in the case file, download it and attach it. Even more laborious was inputting information. Court papers and probation documents would need to be faxed in, re-scanned and manually inputted. “It didn’t just waste time, it wasted paper,” Cunningham says.

The logistics of real-time case management over three states was also a challenge. “Like any multi-state, multi-location business, we need access to files and data anywhere we’re doing business,” Cunningham says.

In March, Jeff Flory of Laserfiche reseller Datamax of Texas introduced Cunningham and the RHC staff to Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM). “The nature of RHC’s business is that it’s not only very paper intensive, but also very information dense,” Flory notes.

Flory showed RHC a Laserfiche Avante system with Workflow, Web Access and a WebLink public portal. Cunningham and his staff agreed Laserfiche was just what RHC’s case management system needed. For starters, Laserfiche’s full-text search and ability to locate individual documents within client folders would make case information that much easier to look up. But, Flory says, it was how Workflow would automate and simplify the capture process that convinced Cunningham of the real value of the Laserfiche solution.

“All a staff member has to do is fill out the template field using drop down lists and a couple of key fields, and then send the document. Workflow picks up the document, names it, and puts it in the right folder. For an organization like RHC, where many different users are scanning content themselves, this adds the assurance that all documents adhere to a consistent naming and foldering convention,” Flory says.

Cunningham was impressed. “I can have a staff member anywhere in Texas, in any court room, in any of 254 different counties, and all they need is a little road warrior scanner and a laptop. They can upload the court orders from wherever they are, and Workflow does the rest.”

Add to that the ability of Web Access to enable remote deployment and WebLink to allow the 3400 court officers requesting information to locate it themselves, and Laserfiche provides RHC with an ECM system agile enough to streamline its case management system.

Implementation is still ongoing, but already Cunningham is recognizing the long-term benefits. “Laserfiche will enable me to have a company-wide retention policy. We’re subject to audits by the IRS and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (who enforces HIPAA), as well as state regulatory authorities, and I can already foresee that first audit where we can pull up all the contract and court documents associated with the GPS and SCRAM system quickly and easily, right from Laserfiche. I’m going to be glad we have this. I look at it as corporate security.”

Next up, he says, RHC is looking at integrating its SCRAM system with Laserfiche to enable more active case management. “It’ll be just that one ID number and the user will have everything,” Cunningham says.

But even now, Cunningham adds, he’s satisfied. “I know I don’t want paper and Laserfiche helps me get rid of it,” he says. “I don’t want to have to spend a lot of time training anybody—I just want to be able to get my information when I need it, how I need it.”

• Providing in-home services to help homebound older people live in their own homes as long as possible.
• Helping active older people stay fit, healthy and involved through senior center programs and volunteer opportunities.
• Providing family caregivers the resources and support they need to maintain their own lives while caring for older loved ones.

But with 19,000 clients, CareLink was contending with a challenge of its own: filing, storing and accessing customer charts and other documentation in a timely and efficient manner.

Paper’s Pain Points

According to Luke Mattingly, CareLink’s chief operation officer, the agency employs 740 employees, with many of them providing home-based customer care. Some of these field employees live and work nearly 100 miles away from CareLink’s main office, which made filing and accessing customer charts a time-consuming and difficult task—one that took away from the face-to-face time they could spend with customers.

“Our employees are kind and compassionate people who entered this field in order to help senior citizens,” says Mattingly, “not spend hours filing and retrieving reports.”

In addition to staff productivity concerns, CareLink’s paper-based processes also caused delays when it came to funding. As a nonprofit, the agency receives funding from a variety of sources, including:

• Medicaid.
• Federal awards.
• State assistance.
• Private insurance companies.
• Personal donations.
• Private individuals (fee for service).

“We have thousands of customer charts and documents related to a variety of funding sources, and we get audited by third parties in conjunction with their funding requirements,” explains Mattingly. “Paper is just not conducive to quick and easy audits, particularly in the document collection phase.”

Electing to Go Electronic

In 2006, CareLink decided that enough was enough: the agency needed to find a solution that would allow it to do away with paper records and manage electronic content instead.

After evaluating several systems, CareLink found that “Laserfiche had the features and operational capabilities we were looking for, including excellent security, comprehensive records management and ease of use.” Plus, adds Mattingly, “Laserfiche was offered by Datamax Micro, one of our long-time, trusted vendors, and we knew that we could count on them to implement the system according to our needs.”

How ECM Helps

Implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) solution has transformed the way CareLink handles customer information in a number of ways:

• Electronic customer charts increase employee efficiency. With Laserfiche, field employees no longer have to travel to the main office to retrieve and file customer charts, which greatly enhances their efficiency. They simply access Laserfiche via a Citrix connection and find and file electronic records in the Laserfiche repository. According to Mattingly, this ability to capture documents in the field saves significant staff time. With distributed capture, CareLink has created a five-day filing rule that ensures data is uploaded to Laserfiche on a regular basis. This keeps charts current and protects against the possibility of losing files due to local hard drive failures.
• Automated filing process increases organizational efficiency. Using Laserfiche Quick Fields and Workflow, CareLink has created a quick and easy way to capture, index and auto-file documents in its Laserfiche repository. “Quick Fields captures our customer charts, saves them to the correct location and extracts index field data from specific areas of our forms in order to pre-fill our templates. Workflow further enhances the process by automatically populating template data based on folder name/designation. The automated filing process has been marvelous at eliminating manual data entry and saving staff time,” Mattingly reveals.
• Enhanced security eases HIPAA concerns. Prior to implementing Laserfiche, customer charts were kept in a large file room where it was impossible to be 100% sure that personnel only had access to the records of their assigned customers. In addition, staff sometimes forgot to record when a file was removed for review. “The granular security controls in Laserfiche eliminate the possibility that employees can view customer files they’re not supposed to see,” says the COO. “The system also provides an audit trail so that administrators can easily see all the activity that’s taken place on any given file.”
• Easier access to information eases audits. “In conjunction with our funding requirements, CareLink is audited by third parties on a regular basis,” Mattingly explains. “Laserfiche sped up the process of retrieving documents when those entities show up unannounced.” The system has also simplified internal audits that are designed to ensure that various departments and individual employees are completing an appropriate amount of work. “With Laserfiche’s advanced search capabilities, we can quickly determine the number of documents filed by any employee or department during a given date range. This has been very helpful and saves us a lot of time,” Mattingly says.

But customer charting isn’t the only area of agency operations that has been enhanced by ECM. Finance uses Laserfiche to manage financial documents, check registers and payables invoices. The fundraising department uses it to keep track of content such as proposals and thank you letters. HR uses it to control personnel files, time sheets and employee training files. In addition, the repository also houses organizational policies and procedures, letters, correspondence and individual employee files.

“Laserfiche started out as a solution for electronic charting but it’s grown to encompass so much more,” Mattingly says.

Return on Investment

According to Mattingly, Laserfiche has enabled CareLink to cut its paper consumption in half. Over the past three years, paper savings and the reduction of off-site storage costs have completely covered the cost of purchasing the system. “Over the next seven years,” Mattingly states, “eliminating off-site storage entirely will offset the annual maintenance fees for Laserfiche.”

Mattingly reminds us, however, not to forget about the cost savings associated with the efficiency gains CareLink has gained through its use of Laserfiche: “We estimate a 40% efficiency gain for audits, for example, and our field staff has absolutely seen a productivity boost. Although we haven’t assigned these gains a dollar value, this is where the real savings lie.”

As a large community bank and federally-insured financial institution, Nara gets audited “all the time,” says IT Manager Mona Chui. “Keeping information secure and confidential is a top priority for us.”

According to Chui, audits are conducted by the following regulatory boards: the FDIC, the Federal Reserve Bank, the California Department of Financial Institutions and the Office of Thrift Supervision. The most frequent types of audits the bank faces include:

• Safety and soundness (FDIC), to assess the bank’s overall financial condition.
• Information Technology (FDIC), to evaluate the security of the bank’s electronic systems.
• Compliance, to gauge the bank’s compliance with consumer protection regulations such as the GLBA (the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act).
• Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), to assess the bank’s performance in meeting the community’s credit needs. Enforced by OTS, OCC, FRB and FDIC.

Nara Bank knew that an enterprise content management (ECM) solution could help accelerate audits, facilitate compliance and ease the e-discovery process—all while decreasing costs.

“With paper, it’s hard to keep track of the most current version of any given document,” says Chui, “and it’s impossible to ensure that people are following compliant processes each and every time they handle a record. With 20 branches, we were shipping paper all over the place, and those costs added up fast.”

Selecting Laserfiche

Because Nara Bank’s core accounting system is from Fiserv, the first place it looked for ECM recommendations was from Fiserv itself. Cost was the limiting factor with the ECM integration offered by a Fiserv partner, however, since Nara Bank would have been charged based on the number of its client accounts. “That kind of cost structure is okay for smaller banks,” says Chui. “But it’s not cost-effective for a larger bank that’s constantly growing.”

Chui had heard of Laserfiche in the past, and was attracted to the affordability and flexibility of the Laserfiche system. As she did more research, it quickly became clear that Laserfiche could both integrate with Fiserv and offer the kind of superior security that would carry Nara Bank through the audit and e-discovery processes unscathed.

“Laserfiche works with all kinds of government agencies,” explains Chui, “so it was pretty obvious that the granular security we needed to protect our data and ensure compliance was in place.”

In addition, Chui saw that Laserfiche had a team of expert engineers who could work with Nara Bank’s IT department to get the system up and running. “We have an IT team of ten people managing the bank’s network and telephony systems, as well as 100 different applications,” she says. “We just don’t have the resources to develop deep Laserfiche expertise, so it was important to us to have Laserfiche engineers on our side.”

Using Laserfiche

So far, Nara Bank has built central repositories to manage content related to three different functions, including:

• Deposits. New account checklists, signature cards, cash management service agreements, credit reports, account statements, wire transfer applications and more.
• Loans. Loan applications, credit reports, appraisal reports, title-related documents, personal financial statements, verifications of down payments and more.
• Human resources. Job applications, offer letters, background search results, W-4 forms, benefit enrollment forms, confidentiality agreements, annual review forms and more.

Content stored in these three repositories are accessible by authorized personnel across Nara Bank’s 20 branches.

The bank has also established a standardized capture process for all deposit and loan documents that relies heavily on Laserfiche Quick Fields, which automates processing for a high volume of information by capturing data from various formats and sorting documents according to custom criteria. Quick Fields automatically draws data from Nara’s Fiserv database in order to populate template field information in Laserfiche, reducing the amount of staff time spends transferring information between the two systems. By automating the capture process, Quick Fields reduces manual data entry and ensures the consistency, reliability and availability of information throughout the branch network.

The steps in the capture process are:

• Generate barcode cover sheet. Scanner operators at branch offices generate an account-specific barcode cover sheet using the Quick Fields barcode plug-in. The plug-in reads barcodes for automatic separation of batch scanned documents.
• Scan documents. Scanner operators at branch offices batch scan documents into a shared folder that can be accessed across the bank’s network.
• Process documents. An employee at the central office uses Quick Fields to process the scanned images from the branch offices.
• Verify documents. Quality assurance operators verify each document in the repository. Laserfiche Workflow routes verified documents to their final destination, while documents with issues are routed to an “Issues Remaining” folder. (Once the issues are resolved, QA operators change a template field to indicate that the status of the documents has been verified, and they are routed appropriately.)
• File documents. Documents are filed to their final locations in the central Laserfiche content repositories and remain there for archival and retrieval purposes.

“Laserfiche has brought greater efficiency and consistency to the way we handle content across our branch network,” says Chui. “Quick Fields reduces the amount of manual data processing necessary, and Workflow ensures that our employees don’t have an opportunity to do anything with the scanned documents that is outside of our approved and compliant policies and procedures.”

She continues, “Audit Trail keeps track of what our administrators are doing, along with the Laserfiche rights and privileges they’re granting to various employees. And the Records Management module allows us to easily adhere to our clearly-defined policy for records retention, which in turn helps with e-discovery.”

Future Plans

Although Nara Bank currently uses Laserfiche for deposits, loans, HR and some general archival for the legal, IT and procurement departments, it plans to continue rolling the system out across all departments enterprise-wide.

“Before we implemented Laserfiche, the bank was completely paper-based,” says Chui. “Ultimately, all of our paper-based processes will take place within Laserfiche, which provides centralized control over content and specialized workflows for each department’s business needs.”

Overall, Chui believes that Laserfiche has given Nara Bank a cost-effective and compliant way to keep important client information safe and secure. “Laserfiche is an affordable, flexible and user-friendly system that goes a long way in facilitating compliance.”

“I’ve been in HIM since 1986,” explains Patty Hall, privacy officer and director of HIM at Wythe County Community Hospital, a 100-bed facility located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, “and I have to tell you that having an electronic solution makes things so much easier.”

A transplant from a hospital in Illinois, where she had worked with electronic health records for years, Hall was determined to decrease Wythe’s dependence on paper and improve the ease with which clinical, clerical and billing staff could access the patient information they need.

“I had a very specific idea of what I wanted in a content management solution,” she says, “and I worked very closely with the team at EMI Imaging [a Laserfiche reseller] to make sure that they could accommodate my requirements.”

Convincing Corporate

Hall was quickly sold on Laserfiche due to its rich functionality and affordable cost, but convincing Wythe’s parent company of the system’s merits was a tougher nut to crack. “LifePoint Hospitals uses a different content management solution, and they were fairly adamant at first that we should go with the system they had in place,” she says.

According to Hall, EMI made the difference by designing a very detailed, highly customized demo for the representatives from LifePoint. “After the demo, the lady from corporate headquarters told me that she’d come out to Virginia with the intention of nixing the Laserfiche proposal, but after the demo, she just didn’t see a way to say no; it was such a perfect fit for our needs.”

Wythe purchased its Laserfiche system in August 2009. In less than a year, the hospital’s repository has grown to manage more than 2,152,886 pages of records. “Working with EMI, we were able to deploy Laserfiche very quickly,” explains Hall. “Today, nearly 100 of our 415 employees use Laserfiche to some extent.”

Leaving the Paper World Behind

In 2009, Wythe had a total of 7,200 inpatients and 37,300 outpatients, performing 3,300 same-day surgeries and treating 15,000 people in the ER. With so many patients coming through the doors, digitizing medical records has been a huge time saver. “Many of our ER patients, in particular, come back more than once,” says Hall. “When you’re living in a paper world, it takes time to track down their records. Laserfiche makes it instantaneous.”

Although some technology solutions require intensive staff training, the HIM director notes that Laserfiche is pretty much the exact opposite. “Laserfiche is very user friendly. If you know how to use Microsoft Windows, you can use this system. For some of the less tech-savvy staff, we conducted 15-minute training sessions. That’s really all anybody needed to get up and running.”

Laserfiche delivers a number of benefits on the clinical side, including:

• Electronic EKGs. Physicians log directly into Laserfiche, where they can view labs, radiology reports, EKGs and ER reports for outpatients and ER visitors. (Inpatient charts are not yet being managed by Laserfiche.) “Having the EKGs in Laserfiche is a big benefit for our doctors,” Hall explains. “While our Meditech system makes labs and radiology reports available electronically, the EKGs don’t have a place in any other software application. To have them accessible through Laserfiche, in a crisp image, is fantastic.”
• Centralized Charts. Hall also acknowledges that having a centralized digital chart available through one interface (Laserfiche) makes it easier and faster to access all of the information relevant to any given patient. Labs, EKGs and radiology reports are batch scanned and captured electronically using Laserfiche Quick Fields, a high-volume capture tool that automatically sorts, stores and creates folder paths for these documents in Wythe’s Laserfiche repository. Charts are tabbed and separated into sections that make it fast and easy for doctors to locate the type of information they need.
• Quick Digital Searches. Kim Newman, the HIM department’s lead operations technician, notes that the optical character recognition (OCR) process available through Laserfiche translates printed words into alphanumeric characters that the system indexes for full-text search, giving Wythe the opportunity to search for specific documents using a keyword or phrase. This capability has come in particularly handy when radiology reports were misfiled. “Searching by the patient’s medical record number enabled me to quickly find the missing report and save it to the correct chart. If this had happened before we implemented Laserfiche, we may have had to spend hours and hours searching through every chart processed on a particular day of service, and even then we may never have found the misfiled report. Laserfiche OCR is a real timesaving tool!”
• Easy-to-Access Advance Directives. In addition to the patient charts, the hospital’s HIM department has created a folder for Advance Directives, organized by patient name. Having these important documents in Laserfiche is particularly useful in the case of emergencies. In the past, paper copies may not have been discovered quickly enough to make an emergency patient’s wishes known to medical staff. With Laserfiche, a simple search rapidly reveals whether or not a patient has an Advance Directive on file; if such a document exists, the patient’s preferences are immediately identified and honored.

Back-Office Benefits

But it’s not just the clinical staff that benefits from Laserfiche; the patient access (registration) department, the business (finance) office and the lab director (who is in charge of compliance), all use Laserfiche, too.

“Before Laserfiche, Patient Access made four copies of each patient’s records; now they make none,” says Hall. She also notes that the hospital now sends its ER billing information to its outside billing company electronically, adding to the cost savings Wythe realizes on printing, storing and mailing paper documents.

Facilitating Compliance

As the hospital’s privacy officer, Hall is responsible for investigating HIPAA complaints. Laserfiche Audit Trail, which tracks repository activity and provides a Web-based interface for running detailed reports on the tracked information, allows her to monitor all system activity—who looked at various records, what time records were viewed, whether any changes were made, etc.

However, Hall notes that the security controls in Laserfiche make it virtually impossible for unauthorized people to view information they are not allowed to access. “We limit access to the content in our repository based on folders,” she says. “For example, the patient access department doesn’t see the same things our physicians do.”

Corporate audits conducted by LifePoint are also much simpler now that Laserfiche is in place. With Laserfiche, the hospital is able to grant auditors secure access to a folder containing all of the documentation that needs to be reviewed. “Laserfiche allows us to prepare for audits on very short notice,” explains Hall. “It’s a lot easier than finding and copying paper documents and putting them in the mail.”

What’s Next

Wythe is currently in the process of implementing Laserfiche in the physical therapy department, and it hopes to tackle inpatient records before too long. Hall is also interested in adding electronic signature functionality to Laserfiche. Although her department doesn’t currently have the budget for it, she’s hoping to get money approved for it next year.

Overall, though, Hall sees Laserfiche as “a much larger solution for the hospital. This isn’t just something that the HIM department can benefit from; it would be a great thing for departments like HR and credentialing, and for the hospital as a whole.”

• Accelerating and automating the effort and time it takes to manage and mobilize 4,000-plus subcontractors to respond to a disaster.
• Reducing processing time for debris load tickets, which track the actual clean-up effort, by 1/3.

As Michael Hansen, asset manager at Ceres, explains, it was during its response to Katrina that the Minnesota-based company first saw how Laserfiche could bring efficiency to its processes—and value to its business. Besides managing thousands of sub-contractors’ contracts, insurance and payment data, Ceres’ primary business process using Laserfiche was to catalog the hundreds of thousands of debris load tickets it collected to verify and invoice its clean-up efforts.

“We recognized record management and retention would be a monstrous task, so we began scanning job tickets remotely from Louisiana,” Hansen explains. “But as the job wrapped up, we also knew that the data we’d collected needed to be shared across the company.”

Hansen and Controller Jeff Zahn developed a plan to tie together a new Citrix cloud server network with the company’s new VoIP telecom system in December 2007. Reseller ENS helped move the Laserfiche database to the company’s Minnesota server farm in February 2008. Now load tickets and contractor information scanned in the Louisiana office were instantly available to the Minnesota office.

“Prior to this, we had to use company couriers or ship documents and hope that they made it intact,” Hansen says. “A lost box of information could mean tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of dollars of lost revenue.”

In June 2008, the company saw just how beneficial these improvements were when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) wanted to audit the actual debris load tickets and billing invoices from the Katrina project. “Normally this meant an Army auditor would be at the office for weeks, reviewing paper records,” Hansen says.

For a job the size of Katrina, that meant the USACE auditor would be wading through more than 500,000 debris load tickets. “Envision a room 30 feet long by 12 feet wide with both walls stacked to the top—that was one of our ticket rooms coming out of Katrina,” explains Ceres IS/IT Supervisor Tim Zanor. “To make it even worse, nine times out of ten, out of the 500,000 load tickets, the auditor would want to pull the documents from the bottom of a stack.”

Zanor configured the Laserfiche Katrina volume so the USACE could access the Katrina load tickets—and only the Katrina load tickets—to perform a major portion of the audit remotely through Ceres’ Citrix cloud network. “Both parties recognized this would be a great cost-saver, since multiple people could access records from multiple locations at the same time, for a true cross-audit of records,” says Hansen. “It also allowed the auditors the ability to do rapid searches for specific documents—something they just couldn’t do with paper documents.”

As a result, Ceres received an “Outstanding” performance evaluation from the USCAE. What’s more, the networked use of Laserfiche factored in Ceres’ quicker, more cost-effective responses to Hurricanes Dolly, Gustav and Ike.

Hansen and Zanor point to the use of Laserfiche by the Ceres Storm Department to mobilize subcontractors and coordinate respond to Hurricane Ike in 2009. “We have a database of over 4,000 subcontractors, and each one has a file of their company’s documents, which can be 30 pages,” Zanor says.

“When Ike hit, we got the call at 7:00 P.M. that we needed to have 75 trucks to Galveston by 6:00 A.M. To respond that rapidly, we had to first geographically search and qualify subcontractors, then get on the phone with them,” Hansen explains. “By midnight, thanks to Laserfiche, we already had a list of 150 ready. In the past, we’d still be making calls at 3:00 A.M.” What’s more, adds Zanor, was that each subcontractor already had their insurance and driver’s license information verified compliant with DOT and FEMA regulations, stored in Laserfiche.

Once on site, Laserfiche has also slashed processing time for debris load tickets—cutting labor costs and ultimately improving Ceres’ relationships with the company’s subcontractors. “During Gustav and Ike, we were actually able to process load tickets in about 1/3 of the time than it took during Katrina,” Zanor says. “We’re imaging 2,000-3,000 load documents a day from the site, so they’re available to the rest of the company the next day. In years past, they’d have sat on that site, waiting to be transported,” Hansen adds. “Right away, we cut our labor costs. Plus we’re able to pay our subcontractors faster, and have access at multiple locations to the actual load tickets in the event of any discrepancies.”

Though their use of Laserfiche has grown organically—“I refer to our system as ‘an octopus in training’ because we have our Storm Division, Construction Division, Property Management and Mulch & Soils Manufacturing companies all on it,” quips Zanor—it’s the balance of centralized administrative control and local flexibility that he continues to find value in.

“To me, security is really the biggest benefit of using Laserfiche,” Zanor says. “A supervisor in Indiana may need to get ahold of insurance documents and we can make sure that’s all he sees—just the insurance files, not HR or contract files.”

Future plans, Hansen and Zanor say, are all about business process management. “We upgraded to Avante because it includes Workflow, which we’ve already implemented in our accounting process to facilitate invoice approvals by managers and staff in remote project locations. We intend to utilize it for contract management, especially with our construction project process, in order to image-enable our Maxwell cost accounting system,” says Hansen. “We just want to be able to give our users that higher level of efficiency.”

As Renaissance staff explain, when an advisor is spending time searching through paperwork, that’s less time he or she has to focus on what the firm is known for: managing securities and investment plans, offering quality advisory services and helping with small business planning. “The more time advisors spend finding paperwork, the less time they have to spend building client relationships. We’re constantly trying to find ways to streamline processes so they don’t have to spend time doing administrative tasks.”

By implementing a Laserfiche enterprise content management system, Renaissance has easily helped its advisors to become more productive, by enabling advisors and staff to organize and manage account information and records quickly and securely. Before implementing Laserfiche, when a client wanted to modify their portfolio, an advisor would need to leave their desk, go downstairs to a storage room, locate the client’s paperwork, dig it out of the file cabinet, and then finally return to their desks to start making the necessary changes. Now, with Laserfiche, when a client calls, the advisor can immediately access account information and instantly satisfy information requests.

The result is a win-win: Renaissance’s advisors are more productive and clients are satisfied with faster, more comprehensive service.

Ease-of-Use Ensures 98% Success Rate

When Renaissance implemented Laserfiche ten years ago, the company only had 40 employees. Today, over 150 employees—including 100 advisors—use the system.

When Laserfiche was first implemented, the Team Services department held several large training classes in each of Renaissance’s three offices, as well as several one-on-one sessions, to get everybody comfortable with the system. Thanks to Laserfiche’s ease-of-use and Renaissance’s one-size-doesn’t-necessarily-fit-all training strategy, system adoption has been impressive.

Renaissance reports a 98% success rate with advisors switching from paper to Laserfiche. Some advisors still wanted their paper files, but staff believe that “Laserfiche is so easy to use that they’ve almost all adopted it. It’s a very user-friendly system.”

Laserfiche Lessens Compliance Risks

Renaissance’s move to Laserfiche made sense not only based on the time it took to work with paper, but also the compliance risks that came with it. The variety of services Renaissance provides led to competing compliance requirements with FINRA, SEC and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, as well as HIPAA. And when advisors met with clients, any notes they wrote down the firm was required to keep. With 100 advisors, that added up to a lot of paperwork.

Other paper-based processes included:

• Stock trading, which required trader tickets to be captured and stored on a daily basis.
• The new application process, which involved multiple forms.
• Internal employee documentation, including FINRA and SEC licensing files.
• Compliance department documents, including internal examinations.
• Quarterly investment reviews, including reports and advisors’ notes.

Since implementing Laserfiche, Audit Trail provides an extra layer of security. With Audit Trail, administrators easily track any modification of data stored in the Laserfiche repository, watermark sensitive documents and log any unsuccessful attempts to perform an action on a document. Audit Trail Reporter then filters, sorts and graphs audited data via a Web-based Audit Trail page which can be saved for later retrieval or sharing with others. Thanks to Laserfiche, audits that used to take days now take hours.

Staying Ahead of the Game

Based on the time and resource savings of Laserfiche, Renaissance staff believe it’s not a question of “if” other firms follow Renaissance’s lead, but “when.”

“We’re here to get in the game and stay a step ahead. The whole concept of streamlining your workflow and having your information centralized is the future of financial services.”

Kowal Investment Group, LLC is a fee-based financial advisor from Waukesha, WI, that has specialized in financial planning and investment advising for over 35 years. The firm manages nearly $200 million in assets and also hosts a weekly financial advice radio show called “The Retirement Clinic.” But just as baby boomers looking into retirement look to Kowal for advice, Kowal itself began looking to retire its old way of filing paper. “We knew we wanted to move toward the paperless office,” explains Michelle Rossi-Weida, Operations and Compliance Manager for Kowal. “Just in terms of better organization and also the cost savings paying for file space, as well as making people’s jobs easier and more productive.”

For example, she says, an everyday business process like new account opening mandated a flurry of paperwork and duplication, consuming valuable time, space and resources to manage it. “If we had a person opening an account, he would need to fill out a form and then we would copy it; if it was a double-sided form, that meant making two single-sided sheets so we could fax it,” she explains. “Once it was faxable, we would send the forms one at a time to be opened.” Plus, she adds, each file had to be copied at least twice—once for the client and once for the firm’s records. This process created unnecessary duplicates that filled 20 filing cabinets, taking up valuable office space and increasing overhead costs.

At the recommendation of a firm using Laserfiche to manage its information and business processes, Rossi-Weida contacted Patrick Welsch from Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital, Inc. for a demonstration. Working from a short-list of approved vendors handed down by Kowal’s former broker-dealer, Rossi-Weida then whittled it down to four providers, ultimately choosing Laserfiche, she says, for three main reasons: Laserfiche’s ease of integration with ACT!, Kowal’s contact management software; its ease of use; and the fact that the software interface allowed the repository’s folder structure to mimic the filing system firm staff were already used to working with.

One question that did come up in the consideration process was the choice between going with a Web-based hosted solution or a system Kowal would own itself. Rossi-Weida says the fact that the ACT! integration was only an option with the Kowal-owned Laserfiche was a compelling factor. The other reason, says Rossi-Weida, was the peace of mind of knowing the firm’s information was not only safe and secure, but in the firm’s possession. “The biggest issue for us, being an independent firm, is what happens to your information if something happens to that company?” she says. “If something happened to a Web provider whose services we were using, how could we recover that information from them? We feel more secure with the Kowal-owned Laserfiche.”

But as Kowal staff soon found, a system that offers sophisticated security doesn’t have to be complicated for the user. Cities Digital spent a day training the staff and with that, they were off. “We were struck by how easy Laserfiche was to use and how easily we were able to duplicate our old file structure,” says Rossi-Weida. “That was really nice.”

Cities Digital’s LaserACT integration allows users to browse, scan, import and export the client folders stored in Laserfiche from within a tab inside ACT!, which made implementation relatively simple because employees were already familiar with the ACT! interface. Before Laserfiche, whenever an advisor needed information from a file he or she would need to go into ACT! to look up the client record and then ask the client service team to retrieve the paper file to get the rest of the information. Now the advisors can click on a button in ACT! that pulls information from the Laserfiche repository and view all their clients’ information instantly. What once took five to ten minutes of staff time is now done at each advisor’s desk in a matter of seconds. “It’s so simple, even an advisor can do it!” laughs Rossi-Weida.

Having Laserfiche also makes Kowal 100% compliant with SEC regulations, a major concern for firms facing increased regulatory oversight and visits from auditors. Audit Trail allows administrators to regularly review user activity, assess the effectiveness of internal control mechanisms and demonstrate regulatory compliance. Using Laserfiche also expedites audits by producing reports of all the actions taken on a particular document. “Laserfiche makes audits easy,” says Rossi-Weida. “Auditors can come in and sit down at a computer and I don’t have to go grab a bunch of different files. They can just click through everything they want. I think it makes them much more efficient from their standpoint as well.”

Though Rossi-Weida says the firm has yet to face a major audit since implementing Laserfiche, it is reaping the benefits of a progressively paperless environment. “We’ve gotten rid of 20% of our paper processes,” she says. “Before we needed to make two copies of each form so we could send the original to the client. We went from two copies to no copies. It’s great.” She adds the firm will repurpose the space that once housed the filing cabinets into offices for new employees.

In fact, Kowal’s experience with Laserfiche has been so successful, it’s inspired the firm’s new broker-dealer to ask Cities Digital to talk to other advisors. “We were sort of pioneers within the broker-dealer network because they didn’t have a lot of offices that were using electronic storage. They were very impressed,” Rossi-Weida says. “They asked if they could have Cities Digital present to other advisors within the broker dealer.”

Can the “Paper Retirement Clinic” radio show be far behind?