Although the doctors’ attention is devoted to delivering excellent patient care, they recognize that if the medical group’s finances aren’t in order, their ability to continue serving patients is compromised. Therefore, they’ve charged their business office with employing the best people, processes and technology to optimize the revenue cycle and ensure the profitability of the practice.

Recession Brings Reimbursement Challenges

“The tough economy and changing California regulations have made it more and more difficult to collect payment in a timely manner,” explains Sue Kruger, Office Manager at Tri City. “Medicare and Medi-Cal pay only a fraction of the fee for emergency services, people who’ve lost their jobs and their health insurance oftentimes can’t pay for their care and private payers sometimes drag their heels.”

She notes that the group’s physicians treat an average of 6,000-7,000 patients a month. In terms of Tri City’s revenue:

• 27% comes from Medicare patients.
• 17-18% comes from Medi-Cal.
• A little over half comes from private insurers and self-pay accounts.

“Our employees have to work much harder to collect the same percentage of payment they did three or four years ago,” says Kruger. “If we didn’t have a paperless system, we’d absolutely have had to hire more staff.”

Integrating Content Management with Practice Management

After transitioning to a new practice management system—CPU’s MED/FM—in 2003, Tri City began thinking about how to get even more value out of that system. When CPU introduced an integration with Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM), Tri City jumped on board.

“Handling paper was a big expense that slowed our staff down,” says Kruger. “Our doctors recognized that purchasing Laserfiche would pay off in terms of staff productivity.”

J.R. Juiliano, Tri City’s IT Manager, explains, “We scan everything that’s related to patient encounters into Laserfiche. This includes demographic information, dictations, EOBs and correspondence from insurance companies.”

He notes that the hospital sends information to the medical group via an FTP site. “In the past, we just printed everything onsite.”

This, of course, was problematic on many levels:

• It was expensive.
• It was difficult to store.
• It was tough to retrieve in a timely manner.

“We have to keep patient information for seven years,” says Juiliano. “We used to rent four storage units at a facility that’s ten miles away. We kept a year’s worth of records onsite in a big filing room, but somebody had to go over to the storage units at least once a week.”

Kruger adds, “Efficient medical billing depends on keeping people in their seats so they can be productive. Manual tasks like retrieving paper records just aren’t the best use of employees’ time.”

Today, Tri City automates the document capture, indexing and filing processes with the following tools:

• Laserfiche Snapshot converts the electronic documents from the hospital’s FTP site into TIFF images and processes them using Laserfiche Quick Fields, a high-volume document capture and processing tool that automatically extracts metadata from the documents and files them in the Laserfiche repository—no printing or scanning required.
• Laserfiche Quick Fields also scans and processes paper EOBs and correspondence from insurance companies. Using optical character recognition (OCR), Quick Fields converts the scanned images into editable and searchable text, extracts metadata and files the documents in the repository.
• Laserfiche Import Agent captures and processes electronic faxes.

Verifiers, coders and payment entry staff work with dual screens, so they’re able to view a document on one screen while performing data entry into MED/FM on the other. With the MED/FM integration, documents are automatically attached to the appropriate patient records in the practice management system. When employees type a number into a specific field in MED/FM, Laserfiche opens the corresponding document. This ensures that employees don’t have to launch Laserfiche or toggle between screens to retrieve the documents they require.

Kruger explains that the integration keeps her staff in their seats. “Laserfiche makes our staff so efficient that we haven’t had to hire more people. In fact, we haven’t even replaced everyone who’s left.”

Visibility = Productivity

Documents—whether scanned or electronically imported—are time-stamped when they enter the Laserfiche repository so that the management team can measure staff productivity. Kruger explains, “If something comes in at eleven but doesn’t get finished until 4:30 pm, I can go to the person and ask, ‘What were you doing for those five and a half hours?’”

Juiliano appreciates how easy it is to run and store reports in Laserfiche. With Laserfiche Audit Trail, a monitoring and reporting tool, Tri City can create summaries of all actions taken on a particular document or record, making it much easier to prove compliance with HIPAA. “We can see who changed what when, where and why,” he explains.

In terms of other types of reports, Juliano says, “We run a lot of reports—collections reports, month-end reports, weekly reports. Even if we don’t run the report in Laserfiche, we store it there, which makes it easy to access and compare historical data with present trends.”

Lisa Newland, Tri City’s Assistant Manager, notes that the group’s RAC audits have gone smoothly thanks to Laserfiche’s instant search-and-retrieval capabilities. “Being able to instantly pull the information the RAC auditors want to see makes life so much easier than digging through filing cabinets or storage boxes.”

All in all, says Kruger, “Laserfiche is a great product. I don’t know how we ever got along without it.”

“The Art of Enabling the Government Enterprise with ECM” on November 16 and December 8 at 10:00 A.M. PT demonstrates how state and local governments (SLG) can streamline transactional content management and improve citizen services across their enterprises with expanded Laserfiche ECM systems.

Attend to learn how your organization can:

• Build an ECM foundation that moves beyond siloed applications and enables shared services.
• Cost-effectively meet SLG-specific governance, risk and compliance requirements.
• Automate cross-functional departmental applications, like case management and AP Processing, from the comfort of native applications.
• Trade in legacy document management systems for credit towards upgrades.

Sign up today!

• Install an ECM foundation that moves beyond siloed departmental document management applications.
• Cost-effectively meet county-specific governance, risk and compliance requirements.
• Deploy ECM as a shared service for any departmental application, including case management, permitting, accounts payable, HR onboarding and more.

Sign up today!

“Laserfiche is the perfect complement to our ongoing workflow improvements. It’s customized to meet FPA’s needs, is also compliance-oriented and easy to use,” said Curt Niepoth, FPA’s Associate Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer. “During our evaluation process, Laserfiche rose to the top because they provided the best solution for our organization by helping reduce administrative expenses and integrating well with our other systems.”

Chris Wacker, executive vice president at Laserfiche, said, “While other financial advisors struggle to find the time, money and staff to comply with industry requirements, advisors using Laserfiche are more efficient than ever before. The FPA shows industry-leading vision by providing their staff with the most agile content management solution on the market.”

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—including numerous investment advisors, financial advisors and broker-dealers—have used Laserfiche solutions to streamline document, records and business process management.

By digitizing paper archives, Laserfiche enables financial services professionals to find what they need in seconds, quickly prepare for audits and make better-informed decisions. Secure Web access enables information sharing with remote offices, business partners and clients, while comprehensive security options ensure compliance with government- and industry-mandated standards.

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

About FPA
The Financial Planning Association is the largest membership organization for personal financial planning experts in the U.S. and includes professionals from all backgrounds and business models. FPA members adhere to the highest standards of professional competence, ethical conduct and clear, complete disclosure to those they serve. Based in Denver, Colo., FPA works in alliance with academic leaders, legislative and regulatory bodies, financial services firms and consumer interest organizations. For more information about FPA, visit http://www.fpanet.org/ or call 800.322.4237.

• Financial Compliance and Automation: Financial Planning Association
• Financial Compliance: Fure Financial
• Land Records Management: Fresno County, CA

“In today’s economic and regulatory environment, having a well-planned approach to governance, risk and compliance is essential,” explained Phyllis Chen, Managing Director of Laserfiche International. “With fully integrated transparent records management functionality, Laserfiche ECM serves as a foundational component of GRC, allowing records managers to drive better business outcomes.”

Presentation attendees will learn how to:

• Use GRC to eliminate silos, redundancies and gaps within electronic records management.
• Promote consistency across departments, processes and systems.
• Optimize their ECM deployments with GRC standards in mind.

Laserfiche will be at stand #2 throughout the event to demonstrate its agile ECM and records management solutions and to hand out a new white paper entitled “GRC: A Framework for Organizational Sustainability.”

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 30,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

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

“We were about to cross the $25,000,000 AUM threshold for SEC registration. With that milestone also came the millstone of an SEC audit sometime during that first year of registration,” says Margaret Hubbard, CPA.

The firm identified a link between compliance and operational efficiency, and outlined their requirements accordingly:

1. SEC compliance proof.
2. Easy access to files.
3. Managing the sheer weight and volume of records even as a small firm.

The answer came later that year at a TD Ameritrade Institutional Conference Hubbard attended.

“Speakers there were talking about an industry-wide need for electronic document management and it rang true with us, both in terms of operational efficiency as well as simplifying compliance,” Hubbard recalls. Researching what other firms were using led Hubbard to Laserfiche. “We wanted a large, reputable solution provider with a lot of experience and excellent references,” she explains. “The biggest draw was that the U.S. government was using Laserfiche.”

Implementation took place over two days in late 2005. With five years of confirmations, monthly brokerage reports, forms and correspondence to input, as well as current paper-based processes to streamline, EMM looked to Laserfiche Quick Fields, especially its zone optical character recognition (Zone OCR) tools, to automate the capture process. Laserfiche installation was completed in a day, while fine-tuning the Quick Fields capture process took another day. “The operational improvement was immediate,” says Hubbard.

“Quick Fields became our file clerk”

“We had been manually filing every confirmation as it arrived by mail. After installing Laserfiche, we had the brokerage houses switch us to electronic delivery. Quick Fields became our file clerk,” says Hubbard.

EMM now receives a monthly download of client statements from its brokerage houses, which Quick Fields reads, processes and imports into each client’s Laserfiche file. “We used to get a heavy package by mail much later in the month than the current downloads are available. That took time and resources to sort through and file. If we ever needed to access a record, we had to locate the big fat file book by month, manually cross-index between alpha name and account number and then manually find the report by account number,” she explains.

“Now we get the information earlier, file it faster, find it instantly when needed, have a nice clear electronic copy if we need to print it out—which is rarely—and we don’t have to hurt ourselves moving all those bankers’ boxes.”

With Laserfiche now doing the heavy lifting, so to speak, the firm was able to use part-time help to complete backlog scanning and conversion of the five years’ worth of existing files over the course of the following year. That first year also marked another milestone/millstone: the first SEC audit of the newly-registered firm. Before Laserfiche, the process would have involved compiling paper files manually, taking staff time and resources that, to a small firm, significantly impact or distract from revenue-generating day-to-day operations.

With Laserfiche, Hubbard says, preparation was as simple as using the system’s comprehensive search functionality to respond to the auditor. “Our original need was really to successfully complete the SEC audit process, and that was more than met within a year of implementation when we had a very clean audit,” she says. “The auditor only stayed onsite half a day because we were able to almost instantly hand her everything she requested. We were able to clearly demonstrate our compliance with all regulations. Laserfiche was essential to that demonstration.”

Hubbard says the firm is encouraged with the improvements to both its day-to-day operations as well as the relative ease with which it proves compliance. EMM is now planning to implement a new CRM system (likely Junxure, according to Hubbard) in the second quarter of this year. A major selection consideration is the ease with which the chosen CRM system integrates with Laserfiche. “We’ve been consulting with Laserfiche and our reseller [Bits and Bytes Document Solutions of Dacula, GA] to help with our selection to make sure it integrates with our existing applications including our portfolio management software, Schwab Performance Technologies® PortfolioCenter®, and Microsoft® Outlook®.”

Proving the wisdom of implementing proven technology

Hubbard admits that the firm’s steps toward more automated business processes have belied a conservative approach to technology. But, she says, that’s all the part of the long-term vision: to be innovative—just with proven innovations.

“We seek to be second-generation adopters in terms of determining the best technology we need for our next level of growth,” she says. “We want solutions others have tested through trial and error so we don’t have to. None of us in our firm are techies, so we’ve learned we get more out of technology by working with proven solutions.”

The way Hubbard sees it, Laserfiche provides a modest-sized firm like EMM with the best of both worlds: industry-recognized success with the scalability to do more as the need arises and uses evolve. “Laserfiche has provided more power than we have been able to harness, and that’s exactly where we want to be. We discover more uses for the system monthly, and we’re confident that Laserfiche can more than keep up with our needs as we keep growing.”

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.”

Spire implemented Laserfiche to automate compliance, operations and trading processes at its 17 offices. “Many of our accounts are fee-based, so each day assets are delayed during transfer adds up quickly,” said Phillip Fournier, Spire’s Chief Administration Officer.

Today, Spire’s Operations Department is capable of processing direct and custodial business the same day—removing the delays and costs of overnight shipping.

Spire Investment Partners' Chief Administration Officer Phillip Fournier accepts the Run Smarter Award from Laserfiche Marketing Communications Manager Melissa Henley.

“We knew Laserfiche would enhance our operations center and create synergies between our field reps and our home office, but the smoothness of the system and the removal of friction has been remarkable. If we tried to remove Laserfiche, our reps would revolt,” concluded Fournier.

Other 2010 Run Smarter winners include: Central District Health Department of Boise, ID; City of Maple Grove, MN; Dallas Associated Dermatologists; Durham County, NC; ECOM Atlantic; ESSAR Group; Hamilton-Wentworth School Board; London Borough of Tower Hamlets; Long Beach Police Department; Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians; NE Metro Intermediate Schools; Pulte Mortgage; South Essex Partnership NHS Trust; Texas A&M University Kingsville; Virginia Port Authority; and Wythe County Community Hospital.

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 28,000 organizations worldwide use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

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 with an agile ECM system from Laserfiche has been a huge time saver.

“When you’re living in a paper world, it takes time to track down patients’ records. Laserfiche makes it instantaneous,” said Patty Hall, Wythe’s Privacy Officer and Director of Health Information Management (HIM).

With Laserfiche, outpatient EKGs and ER reports can be viewed electronically, charts are organized and accessible in a centralized location and patients’ Advance Directives can be identified immediately. In addition, the system facilitates HIPAA compliance with security controls that make it impossible for unauthorized people to view information they’re not allowed to see.

“I’ve been in HIM since 1986, and I have to tell you that having an agile ECM solution in place makes things so much easier,” said Hall.

Other 2010 Run Smarter winners include: Central District Health Department of Boise, ID; City of Maple Grove, MN; Dallas Associated Dermatologists; Durham County, NC; ECOM Atlantic; ESSAR Group; Hamilton-Wentworth School Board; London Borough of Tower Hamlets; Long Beach Police Department; Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians; NE Metro Intermediate Schools; Pulte Mortgage; South Essex Partnership NHS Trust; Spire Investment Partners, LLC; Texas A&M University Kingsville; and the Virginia Port Authority.

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 28,000 organizations worldwide use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

“In today’s economic and regulatory environment, having a well-planned approach to governance, risk and compliance (GRC) is essential,” explained Kimberly Samuelson, Director of Government Strategy at Laserfiche. “With DoD 5015.2-certified records management functionality, Laserfiche ECM serves as a foundational component of GRC, allowing records managers to drive better business outcomes.”

Laserfiche automates records and document management to ensure the standardization and reliability of information assets. Laserfiche Records Management Edition is a DoD 5015.2-certified solution that enables records managers to create a secure file plan and manage retention schedules without interfering with any department’s line of business.

Laserfiche will be on hand at booth #432 throughout the event to demonstrate its agile ECM and records management solutions and hand out the new white paper on GRC.

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 28,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

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

A former change management analyst at Bank of America, Slack had seen technological innovation drive efficiency, from automating input and reconciliation processes using MS Excel to capitalizing on the use of e-mail and the internet in BofA business processes.

When Slack came to Keane, he began to analyze where automation could have the biggest impact. “I looked at it like this: we’re a small shop, so we don’t have entire divisions or departments. We have people—seven people. So we need to leverage technology as best we can,” he says.

Slack initially focused on the need for a common repository for staff to share thoughts and ideas from their research—and the various media it came from, including:

• Handwritten notes
• E-mails
• Reports from the Web
• Bloomberg charts
• 10-k filings
• And more.

So he launched the search for a content management solution.

On the Hunt

“Our technology support services partner gave us a couple of ideas. I talked to our prime broker, and I talked to compliance experts in the industry about what firms like ours were using,” he recalls. “Laserfiche was one of the five or six referrals we got, so I Googled it.”

Slack was then referred to John Caso of reseller One Source Document Solutions, Inc., which already had a strong presence in North Carolina’s financial services industry. Caso showed Keane staff how Laserfiche could automate the firm’s process for storing and sharing research, as well as its client records.

“Our discussion wasn’t about things like compliance and client service at first. We just wanted a better way to share research other than e-mails in Outlook,” Slack admits. “But when John started asking about our large collection of filing cabinets, he hit upon the biggest need in our office.”

The biggest need was to free up space in Keane’s modest offices. Six file cabinets worth of information—almost one cabinet for each employee—certainly weren’t helping achieve that goal.

“Those six cabinets contained the first eight years of our business. We knew as we kept growing, there would be more and more paperwork,” recalls Slack.

He adds, “Those filing cabinets contained the only copies of our information, so if a fire had ripped through our offices, it would have been quite difficult to replace all the documents, especially for a firm our size. That’s when the discussion turned to business continuity.”

Moving Forward with Laserfiche

The firm purchased an 11-user Laserfiche Avante system in July 2008. The hardest part of implementation, Slack admits, was getting the firm’s small but diverse staff to agree on a standardized naming and filing convention for the research-sharing process. Once the research folders were set up, Slack says, automating the active client folders was the easy part.

“We already had an efficient process and detailed file folders that we were able to mimic in Laserfiche,” he offers. “It may have taken a bit to get the investment folks to retrain their working habits and thought processes, but once they did, learning the Laserfiche product itself was very easy.”

Backlog conversion of a decade’s worth of client information was likewise relatively easy, requiring only a few months of part-time student help. “Now,” Slack says, “we can scan in every document received, file it away in client-specific folders in Laserfiche, and our entire network drive is backed up remotely by our tech support firm. We still file the originals in cabinets, but there are backup copies available.”

Enhancing Client Service

As Keane’s staff began using Laserfiche, it became clear the system’s value was not limited to disaster recovery. “The primary advantage is having all client-specific information available in a heartbeat, accessible from each desktop in our office,” Slack says.

“When clients call with questions, we can pull up those files immediately and provide the answer in that same conversation. Not only that, but we can pull a copy of the document they’re asking about, and e-mail it to the client within seconds—usually while we’re still on the phone with them,” he says. “It’s imperative to have a complete picture in terms of client history, and using Laserfiche, we have that right at our fingertips.”

Slack credits Laserfiche for soothing skittish clients’ fears in the wake of recent market fluctuations. “Our clients aren’t institutions, they’re individuals. They’re not just interested in numbers and charts, they value the kind of relationship we have with them. If we don’t provide good client service, there’s no performance in the world that will keep those clients invested with us,” he says.

“During this last market blip in 2008, it would have been easy for them to get scared and take their money out. Being able to pull up a caller’s information and click and drag it into an e-mail speaks volumes about how much we care for our clients’ wants and needs. It really helped take our client service to the next level.”

Responding to Regulatory Changes

Now, with recent regulatory changes all but guaranteeing more oversight by the SEC and other regulatory agencies, Slack sees Laserfiche playing a more significant role in audit preparation and maintaining compliance logs.

“Dodd-Frank gives oversight authority to the SEC, but it still leaves a lot of gray areas as to some of the specifics that will be required of us. But, we know we’ll be required to register with the SEC by July 2011 and we know that the SEC will come audit us on a regular basis. Laserfiche will help us to be organized and prepared for that inevitability,” Slack says.

“We made the choice to keep all working documents on the network drive, but all other documents in Laserfiche. So, it provides peace of mind knowing that all my documents are easily accessible, effectively filed and efficiently searchable. All the required books and records are there, and can easily be transferred to a CD or zip drive for the SEC’s reference.”

Onward and Upward

Slack sees continuing value in using Laserfiche to adapt not only to new challenges, but new success as well.

“At Keane Capital, we describe ourselves as ‘value investors,’ which also carries over to the way we run our business. The Laserfiche Avante system was a very affordable option for us, but I look at its value as more than cost savings,” Slack explains.

“Laserfiche allows us to grow the business. It scales from one to 1,000 clients in a way that allows us to handle the work using the same efficient processes.”

“The regulatory challenges that Dodd-Frank has ushered in include new SEC and FINRA requirements, more frequent audits and more detailed reporting,” said Welsh. “Many financial advisors are nervous about the impact these changes will have on their business, but with the right technology, they will not only master these challenges, they’ll achieve a substantial ROI.”

During his presentation, Welsh will highlight the most relevant parts of the reform bill and provide an overview of the many ways that enterprise content management (ECM) software can help financial advisors adapt, including:

• Records management automation that lowers the cost of SEC and FINRA compliance.
• Powerful security features that protect confidential client information.
• Robust document management functionality that eliminates the need for paper files.

“All across the country, successful financial advisors are using Laserfiche to decrease the amount of time and money they spend on compliance,” said Welsh. “Laserfiche streamlines audits, simplifies recordkeeping and automates the disclosure process, contributing significantly to these advisors’ profitability and growth.”

Conference attendees who attend the breakfast or stop by the Laserfiche booth (#215) will receive a new white paper titled “What Financial Advisors Need to Know about the Dodd-Frank Act.”

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 28,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system gives financial advisors the ability to simplify regulatory compliance, improve profitability and limit exposure to civil and criminal liability. It allows advisors to prepare for audits more easily and ensure compliance with multiple state, SEC and FINRA regulations—all while accelerating business processes and making staff more efficient.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

• More state oversight for advisors with less than $100 million in assets under management.
• Increased scrutiny from the SEC for larger advisory firms.
• Increased supervision from FINRA.
• Fiduciary standard for broker-dealers.
• Additional disclosure and reporting.

“The Dodd-Frank Act will have a profound impact on financial advisors’ costs, compliance programs and productivity. But far too many advisors are unaware of all the implications for their business,” said Chris Wacker, executive vice president at Laserfiche. “We wrote this paper to bring clarity to the market, and to show advisors that with the right technology, they can increase profitability even in the face of massive regulatory change.”

The white paper highlights the most relevant parts of the reform bill for financial advisors and provides an overview of the many ways that ECM software can help them adapt, including streamlining audits, simplifying recordkeeping and automating the disclosure process.

“Successful financial advisors across the country choose Laserfiche to decrease the amount of time and money they devote to compliance,” said Wacker. “They also benefit from powerful security features that protect confidential client information, imaging capabilities that enable them to eliminate paper waste and workflow functionality that allows them to improve efficiency across the firm.”

You may download the white paper at: http://www.laserfiche.com/docs/white_papers/FinancialAdvisors_Dodd-Frank_Act.pdf

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 28,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system gives financial advisors the ability to simplify regulatory compliance, improve profitability and limit exposure to civil and criminal liability. It allows advisors to prepare for audits more easily and ensure compliance with multiple state, SEC and FINRA regulations—all while accelerating business processes and making staff more efficient.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

During the session, Laserfiche Compliance Director Jeffrey Green will discuss how agile ECM technology will help financial advisors adapt to the sweeping regulatory changes outlined in the Dodd-Frank Act, including:

• More state oversight for advisors with less than $100 AUM.
• Increased scrutiny from the SEC for larger advisory firms.
• Increased supervision from FINRA.

“The regulatory changes that financial advisors are facing in the wake of the Dodd-Frank Act’s passage amount to two main things: More frequent audits and more detailed reporting,” said Green. “Without a solid electronic records management strategy in place, advisors’ costs are going to increase and their productivity is going to go down.”

Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) systems include imaging capabilities that enable advisory firms to eliminate paper waste; records management automation that lowers the cost of compliance; powerful security features that protect confidential client information; comprehensive auditing and reporting capabilities that monitor all system activity; and workflow functionality that enables advisors to automate standard business processes.

“Laserfiche ECM systems have been proven to improve compliance, efficiency and profitability at advisory firms across the country,” said Green. “In the face of Dodd-Frank’s regulatory overhaul, it will be the advisors who proactively invest in technology to improve the efficiency of their compliance programs and everyday operations who will realize a disproportionate share of the growth.”

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 28,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system gives financial advisors the ability to simplify regulatory compliance, improve profitability and limit exposure to civil and criminal liability. It allows advisors to prepare for audits more easily and ensure compliance with multiple state, SEC and FINRA regulations—all while accelerating business processes and making staff more efficient.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

As Jennifer L. Litchfield, IT Manager at Palladium, remembers it, onboarding more than 1,000 accounts all at once left almost no time to learn a new electronic document management system in their new Norfolk, VA, offices—even as the need to implement one to ensure the breakaway firm could hit the ground running was clear.

“We added $1 billion in assets under management within three months, so we needed to have everything come together very quickly,” Litchfield recalls. Experiences from a prior firm had proven how cumbersome and costly paper was, from the staff effort to file and find information to the yearly accumulation of paper that took up valuable—and expensive—space. “We used to have six or seven employees spend two full weeks every year just merging each client’s file with the historical files, purging information where appropriate, and making room for the next year’s paperwork,” she says.

As owners of their new firm, Palladium’s principals knew that the right technology would make a long-term difference. “We wanted to start off our new company with smart decisions when it came to technology and electronic document management,” Litchfield says. “We made decisions that required upfront commitments of time and money, but produced ongoing savings of both.”

“We needed it to be user-friendly, customizable to our needs, and manageable on-site.”

The search for a document management system began with three criteria in mind—and one given: value. “We needed it to be user-friendly, customizable to our needs, and manageable on-site,” Litchfield explains. “Cost is always a consideration, so we were looking for a balance between use and cost while considering long-term scalability.”

Litchfield was referred to Laserfiche through the Advent Users Group, a resource made up of companies that use the portfolio management products from Advent Software. John Caso, solutions consultant at Laserfiche reseller One Source Document Solutions, Inc., showed Palladium how Laserfiche:

• Enabled users to process and store documents according to customizable template fields.
• Offered multiple searching options using those templates as well as full-text keyword searches.

Litchfield invited users from each department to the demonstration for their feedback. Each, she says, agreed Laserfiche was the most user-friendly solution they’d looked at.

“Managers wanted to be able to answer client questions over the phone, so they liked how we could set up the Laserfiche system to feel like their paper files, with the same tabs as the old paper files. The client service administrators really appreciated the advanced search capabilities that helped them find documents quickly and easily,” Litchfield recalls. “Other solutions seemed like they had a pretty big learning curve; Laserfiche is a product that you can open up and it’s immediately apparent how you use it.”

The advanced searching, Litchfield adds, would play a significant role from a compliance perspective as well, allowing easier auditing and monitoring of documents. “Our compliance officer really needs to be able to slice and dice information, and it was clear Laserfiche was the right choice. Plus everyone would be using the same system, on the same server, so everything’s in one place. From a technology, disaster recovery, and business continuity standpoint, this was important.”

Long-term, Litchfield and fellow staff agreed Laserfiche was flexible and scalable enough to grow with the firm. “We liked how we could set up the folder structure like our paper files and then change it at a later date,” she says. “We have ever-changing needs and it was important to have a product that could grow and change with us.”

Palladium purchased Laserfiche in May 2008; implementation took place over a two-day period. “We opened in late January, so by then we already had the bulk of the accounts on our portfolio accounting system,” Litchfield explains. “We had onsite support for those first two days to get Laserfiche up and running and train users and administrators. We didn’t have a backlog of information, so that helped.

“We just set the system up, set up individual scanners and got the users trained so that they could start working in the system right away,” she adds.

Improving the Day-to Day, Keeping Pace with Compliance

Since then, Litchfield says, Laserfiche has been instrumental in streamlining the day-to-day operations of the firm. “I hear all the time from our client service administrators how much they love using Laserfiche as opposed to the old way of filing paperwork. Every day, they scan all account documents into the system so all the original paperwork and correspondence is in a single location. We don’t have to worry about the storage space and cost for paper documents, or the annual clean up and purging of those documents,” she explains.

“Besides our client folders, we also maintain other folders within Laserfiche with information that cannot be changed, including marketing and compliance folders. Because we store copies of custodial statements in Laserfiche, we don’t have to keep those hard copies onsite. The only hard copies we keep are our original signed agreements,” she adds. “Our onsite storage is minimal.”

In the future, Litchfield says the firm is looking forward to the advanced search functionality that will come with upgrading to Laserfiche 8. “Everything is changing in our industry, and compliance is such a huge part of that,” she says. “Our compliance officer is one of our biggest Laserfiche users. Because she needs to be able to search for multiple criteria, being able to search throughout the file structures , as well as the further capabilities that are available with upgrading to Laserfiche 8, will be a big step forward for compliance.

“We use Laserfiche a lot for in-house verification, so having what we call that ‘wildcard’ capability to search according to a manager’s code, that’s a great oversight tool for auditing,” Litchfield adds. “Also, if we have auditors in house, we need to be able to get information to them immediately—not in three days or four days. Having these features available shows us that Laserfiche is keeping an eye on the changing environment and is adapting to keep pace.”

Along with their upgrade to Laserfiche 8, the firm is investigating implementing Workflow business process management. “We’d love to automate a lot of our processes that cross departments. Where we currently use Outlook or walk paper around, each person could sign off on a section of a document in the workflow and automatically the next person would get an e-mail saying it’s ready for them. We could move paperwork through much more effectively and efficiently,” Litchfield says.

“The ability to integrate [Laserfiche] with our portfolio management software is a big step forward. This will make the opening of new accounts a single point of entry, where fields will be populated automatically directly to Laserfiche. Additionally, allowing us to monitor personal trading within the firm from a compliance standpoint is another improvement. Automating that process will save time and money,” she adds.

Declaring Independence from Its B-D – and its ECM

Laserfiche was not the firm’s first ECM solution—but it was its first successful one. “Two years ago, our broker-dealer at the time came to us as one of their two branch offices in the whole country they were going to let beta test their document management system. I jumped on it, thinking this has got to be better than having a file clerk in a room all day,” recalls Marcy Gitterman, director of IT & HR.

Trouble was, with no folder hierarchy and searching limited only to template fields, the legacy system was creating as many problems as it was meant to solve. “It was just a really cumbersome program to use,” she says. As the firm prepared to switch broker-dealers to Fidelity, only one of 19 staff had actually scanned their paperwork into the system. Gitterman was frustrated, but optimistic. “I knew there had to be something else out there that would work,” she says.

The firm’s principals, meanwhile, just wanted something people would actually use. “At one point, we were just talking about scanning everything to PDF ourselves and storing it on a hard drive, but I was really against that,” Gitterman says. “We needed something a lot more robust—the fact that PDFs can be altered wouldn’t help with security or compliance.”

Laserfiche, turns out, was one of the ECM providers on Fidelity’s short list of recommended solutions. Jeffrey Gitterman was aware of Laserfiche from local FPA chapter meetings, as well as from hearing about it from colleagues who used it. “It’s just a name we kept hearing a lot,” he says. When Zaheer Master, president of Laserfiche reseller Accelerated Information Systems, presented a Laserfiche solution tailored to the firm’s dual registry, Gitterman knew he was working with the right company—and that he’d actually use the software.

“I avoid technology like the plague, so ease of use was for me the number one priority. How easily can our new employees use it? How easy is it for me to use it?” Gitterman says. “Laserfiche could take our paper filing system—the one we’ve been using successfully since 1996—and transpose it to a Windows-type environment we were comfortable with.

“But what really impressed us about Laserfiche was the way our reseller presented it. The other solutions we looked at were totally reactionary—they just said ‘this is how you get rid of paper.’ Our reseller presented Laserfiche in a way that said, ‘Okay, now that your information’s automated, here’s how you’ll need to set this up to get the most out of it and here’s how you do it,’” he adds.

Implementation took place over two months. Says Master, “We showed them how they needed to separate the RIA side of their business from the B-D side for FINRA and SEC compliance. We also showed them how using metadata, you could set up a template field search with a cut-off date or destruction date to easily enforce a retention policy. I think the important thing to realize with ECM is that just because it’s easy to keep everything, doesn’t mean you necessarily want to.”

The space saving alone, Marcy says, was a relief. “We look at the hundreds of square feet we’d been devoting to our file room—it just gets crazy. And half of those files you’ll never see, but you have to keep for compliance,” she says. “Now we get our space back and now all we have to do is shoot something through the scanner so we don’t have to touch it again. It’s that simple.”

The flexibility to segregate information and customize user access to certain folders was not only effective, she says, it was easy. “In the old system, we would have to hire a support person to do that. Now we can set up permissions to assign access,” Gitterman says. “We use Laserfiche for client files, HR files, benefits, payroll, you name it, so the ability to lock down some files versus other files is really helpful.”

She adds, “Laserfiche doesn’t just say it’s user-friendly, it is.”

Automated Compliance – Even at 2 AM

While having more accessible information is a benefit, Gitterman & Associates have also realized that automated information is more useful information. “We do a lot of our compliance right in Laserfiche,” Marcy says. “Instead of our reps having to make copies of client correspondence, they scan them in and it’s automatically submitted to our Chief Compliance Officer in a folder only they have access to. Then we set up a stamping process so the compliance officer can tell the rep that it’s been approved.”

This automation has paid off in faster service for financial advisors. “One of the nice things is that if our CCO is on the road, it’s not like it has to wait a week if it’s something that needs to be pre-approved. He doesn’t have to look for a fax machine or find time to respond during business hours, he can just log into Laserfiche at 2 AM.”

For his part, Jeffrey agrees. “Laserfiche is a huge help from a compliance side.”

But Gitterman says it’s the little things that make using Laserfiche an effective part of everyday business. “The fact that I can redact a line in a memo, and then send it in a secure e-mail—these are the kinds of things I like. I don’t have to ask someone how to do it, I can just do it.”

He sees the potential for Laserfiche to make audits more hassle-free. “I just went through six months of FINRA audits and I can tell you it was painful. They basically put me out of business for six months. If we had already had Laserfiche, it wouldn’t have been a tenth of the nightmare it was,” he says. “Now that we have Laserfiche, even though an auditor can come and say they want to see incoming correspondence from a certain date range, we can have everything for them in 30 seconds. That’s going to be huge for us.”

Marcy says now that the firm is enjoying its first taste of content management efficiency, she is eager to see what Workflow can do to automate business process management. “Right now our CRM integrates with our e-mail system—I’d like to see it integrated with Laserfiche as well,” she says. “And our internal processing department will be able to automatically route documents to our principals to approve from anywhere, instead of having them wait in a folder on a desk—that’ll be nice.”

As nice, says Jeffrey, is that the Gitterman & Associates Wealth Management has found an ECM system that’s finally living up to its potential—and uncovering new potential in the process(es). “Of all the new software we’ve gotten in the last few months, this is everyone’s favorite,” he says. “Laserfiche did what it promised to do. None of the other software did.”

• 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.”

“For us, there’s a real link between operations and compliance,” explains Flourry.

The Need for Cost-Effective Compliance

This link between clunky compliance processes and operations highlighted existing operational challenges – and what they were costing the firm. Before Laserfiche, internal audits were only performed annually, which meant items could sit for a year before being reviewed. “We were spending a small fortune mailing documents back and forth,” adds Flourry. “We spent way too much time trying to figure out where something was in the process.”

Rehmann’s IT department was often backlogged with requests to make network drives at various offices available to compliance supervisors to access documents. “It was costly in terms of the amount of time support staff spent answering these requests,” says Technology Coordinator Katie Skoczylas.

That’s when the firm’s Chief Compliance Supervisor, Nancy Walls, recognized the need to centralize the firm’s information. With Walls’ encouragement, Flourry started researching document management and discovered Laserfiche through a “Technology Tools for Today” conference.

Through online Webinars, Patrick Welsch of Wisconsin-based Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital, Inc., showed Flourry and Skoczylas how Laserfiche could not only solve the firm’s paper issues through an integration with its Junxure CRM system, but also how it could automate and streamline costly business processes, including compliance, new account processing and auditing. Says Flourry, “At first it’s how to get rid of the filing cabinets. But then you see that you can take a document and track it and approve it and the ideas just start to snowball.”

The firm put together an internal review panel drawn from administrative support, advisors, compliance and operations staff to consider their options, and eventually chose Laserfiche. “We were able to show how Laserfiche would be embraced and used by everyone – not just one or two people,” says Flourry. “This really helped us when it came time to go to the board to ask for the big check.”

The Importance of Integration

Rehmann purchased Laserfiche in 2007 and immediately set out to image-enable the firm’s CRM, Junxure. “Integration is so important to us, I can’t emphasize it enough. It’s one of the first things we look at when considering new software, and frankly, we’ve found many programs claim they’ll integrate with Junxure, but they really don’t,” Flourry says.

Cities Digital developed an integration so staff can access documents stored in Laserfiche by just clicking a button in the familiar Junxure interface. “The link between Junxure and Laserfiche is seamless, which is what makes it so valuable,” says Flourry. “It’s simple enough that it doesn’t overwhelm our advisors, but complex enough to do everything we need.”

“Our advisors don’t want to know the fancy stuff in background just to find a copy of a letter, they just want to click on a button to open a client file,” Skoczylas adds. “But we like knowing when you move a document in Laserfiche to the client folder structure, it’s immediately available in Junxure.”

While the Junxure integration would take care of key content management concerns, Workflow showed Flourry and Skoczylas the real value of Laserfiche content management.

Automating Compliance Logs: X’ing the Excel File

“Right away we started using Workflow for our correspondence, checks and securities logs,” Skoczylas says. “The Workflow Designer is so out of the box, anybody can create a workflow – you have these icons, you drag and drop, it’s done. It’s not something you have to wait six months to get implemented – it affects the user immediately.”

The effect was immediate when it came to automating the compliance department’s check log. “We used to have to make two copies of a check, then have 25 support staff from different regions cutting and pasting information into a single Excel file,” Skoczylas explains. Now staff scan checks into Laserfiche, eliminating both the two copies and the Excel file itself – and a daily process that took between 5-10 minutes per check. “With Workflow, the check log literally creates itself. It takes staff less than a minute – all they have to do is scan in the checks and the compliance supervisors can review them right from Laserfiche.”

The same goes for the 400 or so pieces of correspondence supervisors need to review every month, which compliance supervisors approve with a digital signature. Using the “Digital Signature Kit” from Cities Digital, “the compliance supervisor looks it up, highlights it, signs and dates it with a time stamp,” says Skoczylas.

Besides compliance, Workflow is also used to automate new account processing. Again, forms that used to spend weeks in the mail, sitting in piles on desks awaiting approval signatures now move automatically once a compliance supervisor’s single click approves them.

Return on Information

Three years since implementation, Flourry sees repurposing staff time as the biggest benefit of using Laserfiche. “We’ve brought on four new advisors in the last year but have not had to bring on any new administrative staff, so just in that respect, we’ve realized our ROI,” she says. “Our executives may not care how easy the Laserfiche file structure is, but when you tell them your administrative staff can do something in 20 minutes that used to take four hours, they can appreciate that.”

“I see so much value in how quickly and easily we can pull data out,” adds Skoczylas. “I had a request for discretionary agreements from all 13 offices, which used to take me weeks to put together. With Laserfiche, I just ran a report and sent them. That was a big moment for me.”

Having Laserfiche has also freed up Rehmann’s IT department to be more proactive. “Laserfiche has definitely alleviated the small things getting lost in the shuffle. Things like setting up a new user or an associate changing positions, now we can do all that from the central admin console right away– it’s not two weeks out anymore,” Skoczylas explains. “We can actually brainstorm and implement more workflows and think of more ways to utilize the software.”

For instance, Skoczylas developed an auto-naming tool that automatically names new documents once templates are applied. “It sounds small, but people used to set aside a day to get caught up on filing, so that’s huge,” Flourry says.

Flourry notes that having Laserfiche has also made the firm more competitive. “We’ve grown by merging with small firms, and one of the things that sells us is that we have these great business processes in place,” she says.

Prepared for the Coming Compliance Tsunami

Nowhere have these business process improvements been more valuable than in speeding up audits. “We had an audit scheduled to take three days, and it took less than half a day. We sat the auditors down with a terminal and said ‘Here’s everything you need from all our offices,’” Flourry says. “We look at it like, the less time the auditors are in your office, the fewer problems they’re going to find.”

Skoczylas believes that as time goes on, a bigger and bigger part the workday will be spent keeping up with increased compliance demands. “You hear about the compliance tsunami, and it’s coming this way. You’re not either not going to have the time to service your clients or you’re going to have to hire an outside firm. Or you can get Laserfiche.”

“I think right now, with all the change in our industry and loss of client confidence, the most important thing a firm can do is show how prompt and proactive it can be adapting, and for us Laserfiche is a big part of that,” Flourry adds. “We’ve seen other firms and we’re a step ahead of the game.”

ASI has long recognized the business benefits of technology, having installed a competing document management system in 2001 to manage insurance applications. According to Vice President J.T. Perry, the old system performed admirably, but lacked the functionality to support future business growth. “At first,” he says, “we just wanted to image insurance applications and index them by the applicants’ account numbers. Our previous system worked fine for that, but it didn’t promote extra efficiency.”

Indeed, just inputting information into the system required two full-time staff members, devoted to scanning documents one at a time. Furthermore, ASI anticipated the need to assign additional metadata to documents, in case a staff member didn’t have an applicant’s account number handy. “We couldn’t tag documents with information like the applicant’s name or which agent signed them up,” Perry explains. “This restricted search capabilities and hindered development of any kind of workflow automation.”

The problems weren’t limited to inefficiency, either. “Our old system didn’t have very many built-in compliance features, because it was developed before Sarbanes-Oxley, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and other regulations were enacted,” Perry adds.

Ultimately, compliance was the impetus for switching to Laserfiche. After three months of due diligence failed to yield any results, ASI found their answer close to home. ”Our sister corporation, NFP Securities, Inc., has a large Laserfiche installation, and they face many of the same compliance issues as us,” Perry says. “They suggested we take a closer look at Laserfiche, because it works so well for them. We measured Laserfiche against many of the same compliance metrics that NFP uses, and it stood up better than anything we’d seen.”

While some first-time Laserfiche users need time to warm up to their new systems, Perry did so without hesitation—and so did ASI staff. Laserfiche brought them many new features, such as redaction tools, e-mailing directly from Laserfiche and drag-and-drop e-mail archival. “Previously,” Perry says, “we had to print e-mails, then scan them back in—which is really pretty silly, when you think about it.”

In addition to eliminating unnecessary scanning, ASI have made the remaining scanning much more efficient by using Quick Fields to automatically index imaged insurance applications. Staff simply sort documents by type, then insert separator sheets between the document stacks before loading them into the scanner. Using Zone OCR, Quick Fields reads the contents of the separator sheet to determine where to index the scanned documents.

Since the company’s founding in 1990, ASI’s proprietary software systems have become the backbone of their administrative services—and integration with Laserfiche has only made them more powerful. Because most insurance applications are handwritten, staff must read their contents and apply metadata manually. But now, when they enter information into their primary insurance software, the integration automatically applies that information to newly-scanned documents as Laserfiche template fields. This eliminates the need to enter the same information twice and gives staff more ways to search for the documents they need.

It’s a fairly simple integration—and such simplicity is part of what makes Laserfiche so attractive to ASI’s IT department. “Laserfiche is very powerful,” Perry says, “but it’s also very simple, from both a user and a technical perspective. We only needed six or seven hours to complete the integration. A colleague and I sat down and knocked it out—it was amazing.” Perry looks forward to further integrating the two systems so that staff can search the Laserfiche repository from their primary-use applications.

They’ll also use Workflow to automate their business processes—which would have been next to impossible with their old software. “Currently,“ says Perry, “after data entry’s complete, documents go right to their final destination. We’ll configure Workflow to route the new documents into our quality assurance process first.” ASI’s Laserfiche reseller has helped them set up the workflow, which they’ll enter into production within the next six months.

Because Quick Fields captures documents to the Laserfiche repository right away, staff can provide more responsive client service. As Perry explains: “If an insurance agent comes in and asks, ‘Where is my application in the process?’, we can tell them right away. Before Laserfiche, staff literally ran around looking through stacks of newly received documents.”

Members of the insurance industry are subject to rigorous audits from a variety of governing organizations, and ASI is no exception. That’s why Audit Trail plays such a big role in their compliance strategy. “We audit just about everything,” Perry says, “so that we can prove to auditors that we’re doing things right.” In addition to establishing granular security measures to prevent document deletion, ASI also meets recordkeeping requirements by publishing archived documents to read-only media using Laserfiche Plus.

Laserfiche administrative reporting tools also prove useful for tracking staff activity, through each stage of application processing. Moreover, ASI have started monitoring efficiency gains by tracking how many checks they process daily. While these metrics have only been in place for a short while, early returns indicate that Laserfiche has provided an excellent ROI. A part-time staff member now handles the scanning that formerly required two full-time employees. In labor costs alone, ASI have nearly recouped their Laserfiche investment, and Perry says they’ll do so completely within the year.

Perry projects further system expansion in the near future. The premiums accounting department is starting to process checks and payment stubs using Laserfiche, and Perry is interested in Checkmation, the electronic check processing add-on to Laserfiche that’s available from the Professional Developer Partnership program. Eventually, they’d like to submit checks to the bank electronically. And the policy issuing and fulfillment department is eager to automate the processes of creating and distributing those familiar policy information packets.

In the meantime, though, Perry and company are content with the new efficiency that Laserfiche has brought. “Laserfiche has given us everything we need,” he says. “It’s simple, it’s powerful and it’s secure.”

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?

Shortly after deployment in early 2004, staff began scanning job files and the benefit was as obvious as it was immediate. “Retrieval. No question at all. My number one benefit is retrieval,” Howell says. “We had an employee at this end of the building, that whenever they needed an invoice, had to go to the other end, go into a banker’s box, then make a copy, then put everything back up. To find an invoice start to finish, took 20 minutes. Now, it takes five minutes, tops.”

In the process of deploying Laserfiche, Howell says, CCUA has developed “folders within folders” to sort and group the myriad financial documents and as-built drawings for each file, assigning a team of two people to scan and review, with a third staffer assigned spot-checking newly-created files for quality control. While the Engineering Department has been scanning job files since the beginning, both the Finance and Billing Departments now also employ scanning personnel. Says Howell, “Not only are they scanning customer payment information, but also ‘turn-on/turn-off’ requests, change of addresses – we scan all those requests. It just makes for better, more complete customer service having a record like that.”

These days 139 office and outside personnel access documents in Laserfiche, while 25-30 staff use it on a daily basis to either scan in CCUA documents or use Laserfiche for efficient retrieval of documents without leaving their workspaces. Ongoing backlog conversion efforts are continuing each day– thanks in no small part to a growing need for a disaster recovery plan in CCUA’s hurricane-prone part of the country, as well as Florida’s “Sunshine” Law, which mandates public access to records.

“Beginning in 2008, CCUA made it a priority to go back to [files from] 2005,” Howell says, adding that staff have made files from 2006-on their priority for this year. “We’re in Florida, so we’re looking at crisis management and disaster recovery if there’s a natural disaster. CCUA’s main concern is that we want current project files protected – that’s what keeps us operational,” he adds. “It’s not the files from 10-15 years ago, but the ones from the past two years that are very important.” Another benefit, Howell says, is that financial audits that used to mean hours and sometimes days of digging out records can now be done in an afternoon. “Instead of staff going to the filing cabinets to retrieve files, our auditors’ can go directly into Laserfiche to access and retrieve the required documents – they love it.”

Howell has long been a fan of using Laserfiche administrative tools to monitor productivity and manage long-term projects. Since implementing Audit Trail in 2006, Howell says he’s been able to maximize productivity. “I can make Excel spreadsheets and graphs from Laserfiche reports and see how we’re progressing on any of CCUA’s scanning projects.” This kind of oversight and responsiveness has made CCUA agile in a way not usually associated with a governmental entity. For instance, even in the midst of the recent economic slowdown, CCUA has not had to lay off any of its 139 staff members. Rather, using powerful reporting tools – Laserfiche among them – administrators have been able to minimize bottlenecks and re-assign staff where needed to ensure sustainable productivity evenly throughout the organization. As CCUA knows well, business is best when staff and information can flow as efficiently as the water service it provides.

TFA was also concerned about the delay of processing transactions submitted by mail and the regulatory challenges of retention requirements.

However, with TFA Synergy, a comprehensive paperless business platform that incorporates the Laserfiche® document management solution, TFA is well-positioned to overcome these challenges and provide more responsive—and cost-effective—client service.

In their search for a document management solution, TFA “first set criteria for searching for strategic partners,” says TFA IT manager Julius Baldueza. “We knew that the right partner had to be committed to working with financial services organizations with a specific focus on broker/dealers, have the existing technology ready, and offer a Web-based solution that we could quickly deploy to all our representatives.”

Because Laserfiche met all these criteria, TFA chose it as the foundation of TFA Synergy, which offers automated new account processing, Web-based document management, an e-Signature solution and automated compliance review. “The document management solution from Laserfiche fits right into the existing business models of our representatives and OSJ managers,” says Baldueza.

“TFA Synergy is financial advisor-friendly, compliance-oriented and seamless in operation,” says Sandy Brown, TFA President and Chief Executive Officer. “It helps our current and future financial advisors save money through reduced administrative expenses, and frees them up to spend more time with clients by eliminating the hours spent filling out forms and tracking down paper files.”

“With TFA Synergy, we’ve improved service from the front office to the back office,” Baldueza adds. “Streamlined processes eliminated the inefficient manual workflows. At this point, 90% of our business is processed through Laserfiche.”

The TFA Synergy paperless office platform is available through the TFA representative Web site, making it accessible from anywhere with a Web connection. For compliance purposes, representatives can view only their own clients’ information, which is sorted into file folders that satisfy Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) retention requirements.

When a representative scans in a document, a template is assigned to it, after which Laserfiche Workflow™ routes the document into the proper folder based on the template choice. Workflow then automatically routes new business to the OSJ manager for approval and e-mails the OSJ manager that an application is pending review.

Once the OSJ manager has reviewed and approved the new business, the packet of new business is submitted to the home office for processing. If an application is rejected, Workflow e-mails it to the OSJ manager with a sticky-note annotation identifying the missing information. After the OSJ manager has corrected the application the word “resubmitted” is added to the document name and it’s resubmitted to the home office.

“Essentially, we now have a shared virtual file cabinet between the representative, the OSJ and the home office,” Baldueza says. “Everyone accesses the same documents, which creates a shared point of reference. If a rep has a question, they know that an OSJ or home office staff member is looking at exactly the same information.”

It may seem that a sophisticated system like TFA Synergy would require a significant amount of development, but that wasn’t the case. Within months of purchasing Laserfiche, the beta of the new system was ready to launch to field testers. The system was then rolled out to offices across the country, and by 2007, 90% of TFA regional offices were up and running with the new system. Home office staff and sales assistants all participated in training, with home office staff then moving on to train staff in the field offices. “You need to involve the leading sales offices in your beta testing,” Baldueza says. “They will definitely tell you what you need to know. And, they appreciate being asked.”

TFA expected they would have to deal with managing change, especially among their representatives. “It was new technology, and people are often leery about that,” Baldueza remembers. “We also had to adjust our operational roles to accommodate the new system, both in our home office and in our OSJ branches.”

In many cases, the expectations of the system significantly differed from the reality. “We expected that remote capture would cause operational problems, but we’ve found an error rate of less than 10 percent,” Baldueza says. “We thought the technology might prove too difficult, but the Field finds it very easy to use. Furthermore, we thought it might conflict with existing field operational procedures, but instead, our OSJ managers saw a huge benefit and really drove field adoption.”

OSJ managers especially appreciate the SEC books and records feature. “Through our virtual office, OSJ managers can fully review books and records of the representatives they supervise,” Baldueza says. “They can literally do most of the audit right from their office. This saves them time and money. While they still have to travel to the offices to review signage and other items, they can review more offices in a day because they do not have to spend the time looking at a myriad of file folders.

“Our largest OSJ branch office supervises 96 offices with one or two representatives in each location,” Baldueza continues. “Before TFA Synergy was implemented an OSJ branch office had two OSJ managers just to conduct audits. Now, one OSJ manager travels, and the other stays in the office to approve orders, which means faster service for their representatives.”

And the benefits stretch beyond faster, more cost-effective audits—Baldueza offers the example of an OSJ manager who now rents out the office space that his file cabinets used to occupy, at a price of $110 per square foot.

Besides the benefits TFA expected—elimination of lost paperwork, reduction in representatives’ faxing and mailing costs, and speedier approvals—Laserfiche has delivered some unintended perks. “Although we didn’t expect to reduce OSJ audit costs,” Baldueza says, “we eliminated more than half of our home office scanning, because the reps do it now. And we definitely have managed out-of-office OSJ approvals a lot more effectively, because when an OSJ manager is out of the office, that business is directly routed to the home office for approval by one of our principals, so representatives experience no delay in service.”

Overall, the rollout of TFA Synergy, including the document management solution, has been a success with everyone from representatives and OSJ managers to home office staff. “We’ve had an extraordinarily high adoption of TFA Synergy,” says Baldueza. “We find our reps are offering suggestions to add additional functionality to the system. They really notice how TFA Synergy improves their ability to provide better service to their clients.”

Important documentation was often, as Desiree Brown, Faculty Services Coordinator, puts it, “floating out there.” Factor in the potential for breach of confidentiality for sensitive and confidential faculty personnel files, and it was clear that a new solution was in order.

The need for greater speed and efficiency became more pronounced when Provost Marty Levine starting making increasingly specialized queries of faculty records that emphasized the need for more data-driven accessibility. “He’d want to see, say for instance, what female faculty members had been promoted in the last five years,” Haugland explains.

Laserfiche was chosen both for its ease-of-use, but also its ease of customization, which was essential to an office working with 17 different schools campus-wide. Initially, adoption was sluggish until a former Dean of the Engineering School became the high-level administrator, which underscored the need to have buy-in from the top down. “We were very fortunate in terms of having management on the project that was very IT-friendly,” says Haugland.

Brown notes that the Provost’s Office was a perfect pilot office for Laserfiche implementation owing to the fact that her office had already been scanning all incoming mail for a year before installing Laserfiche. “We had a cultural acceptance in our office—no one was afraid of going electronic,” she says.

For her part, Brown kept initial implementation manageable and recognizable, beginning with just one school’s set of records, and “looking at them like they were in a file cabinet only on my desk.”

Owing to the volume of files their office was required to keep as the university’s custodian of faculty records, Brown already had a working knowledge of what document management could do—and pretty soon she’d found out how much better Laserfiche could do it. “In the hard files we had a cheat sheet already that kind of summarized what information we’d usually need to see right away. But some of these files could be 300 pages, so if we needed to find something specific it was still a lot of work,” she says. “We had been using something in-house to scan in records, but you could only retrieve them in three categories. Laserfiche just gave us so many more options, especially when you want to search for one particular thing in a hundred page document.”

But trying to come up with a system that was as centrally controllable as it was locally accessible—the classic ECM paradox—presented its own challenges. On an IT level and user level, this active document management technology had to reconcile the Provost’s needs to centralize and standardize records while simultaneously accommodating the individual schools’ unique filing systems and primary applications. Payroll, for instance, was centralized, but not personnel records, which were left to individual departments.

Ease of use was a major factor, Haugland says, for two reasons: First, the system would be needed for multiple and continuous access. Secondly, staff members using the system ranged from Ph.D’s to administrative assistants, and even within those parameters, computer savvy varied wildly from gadget-philes to technophobes. “Believe it or not, we have people at USC who don’t even read e-mail,” laughs Haugland.

Key to resolving both issues was establishing what Brown refers to as “the gold files”—a master set of faculty records that would serve as the gold standard for all schools, eliminating the inefficiencies and redundancies of duplication.

“I call them ‘the gold files’ because it’s such gold to me,” Brown explains with a laugh. What gives them their shine is their standardized field template, which Brown helped design based on the naming conventions and filing habits of each of the respective schools and colleges. “That’s the beauty of Laserfiche, you can customize it,” she says. This helped allow a thorough application of Quick Fields to index and file incoming paperwork. “We were able to do all our own scanning in-house,” she adds. The custom template, for instance, allows Brown to update faculty status say, from on sabbatical to active, instantly.

It didn’t take long for Brown to all but eliminate paper from her desk. “Anything that comes in, I scan it, then pass it along as an e-mail,” she says. “The great thing is that I have a record on my desktop.”

The benefits, say Haugland and Brown, range from the simple (cutting down on inter-office mail, reducing storage and processing costs) to the profound (disaster recovery, transparency and compliance).

When she’s asked about ROI, Brown hesitates to limit her response to just a number because so many of the benefits are as qualitative as they are quantitative. “I like this question because I want to laugh—in a good way,” she says. “Something that used to take me ten minutes to find, now it’s a matter of seconds. The time saving is substantial. A lot of the benefits are subjective, but turnaround times, compliance – we know we’re better than we were.”

So do the other schools and offices, who’ve had positive experience interacting with the gold files. “Our office is the custodian for all faculty records. We have to ‘mirror’ all the files, so we have all 17 schools’ personnel records in our office,” Haugland explains. “Now they’re checking their files against our ‘gold files.’”

Many now use Laserfiche themselves, including Marshall School of Business, Keck School of Medicine, Career and Protective Services, and Facility Management.

“People that were afraid of the scanner saw that we were green and more secure and we weren’t losing anything,” Brown offers.

“Disaster recovery has really been the catalyst for enterprise-wide adoption of Laserfiche,” Haugland says. “All institutions of higher education – especially when it comes to stimulus funding – are facing higher compliance issues. We’re able to report accurately and quickly, and that affects everybody.”

Cosentino founded Financial Foundations in 2001, and by 2006, the firm had doubled in size, with assets under management of $135 million. Although he is the sole owner of Financial Foundations, Cosentino was still aware that digital document management would benefit his firm just as much as a larger one. “In fact, I knew we had to implement an electronic filing system if we were going to continue to grow,” he says.

When Cosentino began looking for a digital document management solution, he consulted his technology advisor. They went to visit other financial advisors using Laserfiche to see how they used the system and how it fit into their existing work processes. All the users he spoke with raved about how easy Laserfiche was to learn and how well it worked with their business, which was crucial. “The fact that so many other financial advisors used Laserfiche was the number one reason I chose it,” he says. “The ease of use and the way it fit into my existing business were definite factors, but seeing how well Laserfiche worked for other financial advisors was really the key.”

At Financial Foundations, nobody misses their old paper-based processes. “It’s not just the ease of finding things, but the ease of putting things in,” Cosentino points out. “Now we scan, shred and toss all our paper. Desks are neater, there’s less clutter, and the piles of paper are completely gone.”

A key concern was not just eliminating paper, but also complying with increasingly strict FINRA and SEC regulations for retention and documentation. “With compliance the way it is, there were up to ten forms per client, and it was out of control,” he says. “The amount of paper is completely prohibitive.”

Financial Foundations is also using Laserfiche for more than just storing client records; their repository also serves as a centralized resource for everything from accounts payable to staff training. “All of our back-office processes are stored in Laserfiche,” he says. “Our staff can use the back-office folder to store information and retrieve the ‘how-to’s’ that will allow them to learn more, including all the processes for what they need to know and how to do it. This is a use I couldn’t have anticipated.”

Since implementing Laserfiche, Financial Foundations has grown, not just in staff, but also in clients. “With Laserfiche’s scalability, we’ll be able to grow more, and even faster,” Cosentino says. “Eventually, I’d like to open a branch office, and Web Access will aid with that. We’ll easily be able to create a centralized resource without duplicating our efforts. We can take advantage of Laserfiche’s connectivity and capabilities to create a centralized repository without the cost of setting it up.”

Back office staff are working so much more efficiently that Cosentino is also looking into buying another advisor’s book of business. “We’ll scan the information into Laserfiche and move it over,” he says. “In this industry, when you take on another advisor’s clients, that means all the applications and account forms too, and you have to have that back-office capability. If you’re going to grow by acquiring other practices, you have to transfer accounts, and without this capability, it would be nearly impossible to do without hiring on a significant number of staff. Laserfiche helps you grow in an easier, more cost-efficient way.”

Cosentino believes that growth will continue to be key for his firm as more and more sole proprietors begin to consider retirement. “Personally, I believe that over the next five, ten, even fifteen years, you’ll see a lot of integration and consolidation, and Laserfiche will aid with that,” he continues.

“There are so many one-person shops out there. They may have between $30-40 million in assets, but they don’t have a succession plan. Laserfiche works well as a succession plan, because the ability to easily transfer data increases the value of your business.”

Cosentino doesn’t doubt the value of Laserfiche to his business. “Absolutely, if you have Laserfiche, your business is worth more. If you don’t have it, tough luck, because clearly, you will have to implement a digital document management solution eventually, just to keep up.

“It may cost me up front, but in the long run, I will be in a better competitive position,” he adds.

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

When Levitz began investigating document management solutions, he surveyed his broker/dealer network about solutions they were using. A few were already satisfied Laserfiche users. “Because we’re semi-independent, we were free to make our own technology decision. Other firms that were using Laserfiche see it as a great solution. For us, it was a common-sense decision, a real no-brainer.”

To deploy Laserfiche, GCG used what Levitz calls a “phased but quick implementation,” where the firm “focused on fixing small things instead of large things.” The firm began scanning individual business files, then on to advisor and administrative files, compliance files, new investment business files, new group files and finally HR files.

“Taking baby steps at first is what made our implementation a success,” Levitz adds. “You have to start small if you want to be successful when you eventually go big.”

The firm employs a full-time staff member to scan documents, which Levitz finds helps processing move faster, while Human Resources, Licensing and the Group Department all handle their own scanning, which saved the firm from having to hire additional staff. And because GCG began with day-forward scanning, its business processes were paperless immediately. “Eventually we’ll get to back-scanning,” Levitz says. “It just wasn’t an immediate priority.”

What was an immediate priority was finding a way to integrate Laserfiche into their daily work processes. Working with their Laserfiche reseller, Cities Digital, Inc., GCG designed an integration with the two databases, EZData’s SmartOffice and Zywave’s Brokerage Builder, that support their primary business lines. With this integration, staff use a “hot key” to pull information from the database into Laserfiche. Because the file structure in Laserfiche mimics the file structure of their databases and original hard file system, staff have found it very easy to work with, according to Levitz.

In fact, Levitz speaks highly of Cities Digital’s support. “They’re more than just a reseller, they have been a business partner,” he says. “We couldn’t ask for more from them. They’re awesome, and they’ve really made our lives easier.”

He emphasizes the importance of working with a reseller that understands the financial services industry. “Cities Digital works with a lot of financial services firms, so they were able to provide us with a folder structure so we didn’t have to spend the time creating one ourselves,” Levitz explains. “ We continually send them our document archives on CD, which satisfies the SEC’s third-party download retention requirements. And they’ve really spent the time to understand how we operate, so they can help us become more efficient.”

But before Cities Digital could understand how to improve their business processes, Levitz adds, he had to first understand them. “Speed is very important for our advisors,” he says. “Any way you can reduce the time lags and the cost of paper processing is vital.”

What Levitz immediately realized was that Laserfiche could automate new business processing. When an order arrives, it’s immediately scanned into Laserfiche. Workflow files the documents to the correct subfolder within the individual client folder, then routes it to a principal for approval. The principal approves the order by signing on a secure digital signature pad – another Cities Digital custom integration, which, remarks Cities Digital CEO Patrick Welsch, enables compliance officers to approve documents more efficiently, regardless of where they’re working. And, finally, Workflow automatically routes the approved order paperwork to GCG’s broker-dealer for processing.

Welsch believes that GCG’s willingness to challenge accepted business processes was key to their success. “GCG has a dedicated spirit of innovation,” he says. “Their relentless search for efficiency gains brought about many creative solutions. We love working with customers like GCG that push the envelope and challenge us to create unique applications to solve new problems.”

Levitz is continuing to search for those creative applications for the firm’s Laserfiche system. Since attending the 2009 Laserfiche Institute Conference, Levitz says he realizes how much more Workflow could do. “There’s a whole new world out there with Workflow that we need to get to. We’ve done three workflows already, but I dreamed up 20 more in the two days of the conference,” he laughs. “Laserfiche is really a piece of clay. The question comes down to, ‘What can we do with it?’

What started as a flexible document management solution has transformed the very way GCG manages its business processes. “Laserfiche has become the center of our operations. It’s helped us define and refine our work processes,” Levitz says. “We recently lost a key staff member, and it wasn’t nearly as devastating as we thought it would be. Two or three years ago, that would have been an entirely different story.”

In fact, Laserfiche has streamlined operations so much, Levitz realized advisors no longer needed individual assistants. Instead, GCG restructured its support staff into a “pod system,” with one pod focused on communications and another focused on new business processing. “Even though our advisors and support staff may not be in the same location, we were able to bring them together with technology,” he says. “It’s really a case of doing more with less.”

Though Levitz was able to cut down on operating costs, his advisors see Laserfiche as an investment in their time and effort, which has been key to Laserfiche being so unanimously adopted throughout the firm. “We told them, ‘We’re building this around you, and you can decide when you want to be a part of it,’” he says. “We gave people what they needed to make the right decision. When they saw that there wasn’t a single instance of Laserfiche losing information, eventually, they all bought in.”

Even though Laserfiche’s ease of use won over reluctant advisors, Levitz says the biggest revelation has been how powerful Laserfiche actually is. “When we first got Laserfiche, I was faced with rooms of skeptics, including my brothers. I thought, ‘Oh, it will file paper.’ But the reality is, to get the most out of the software, you have to think about what you should be doing that you aren’t.

“Now we can’t live without it.”

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

Pittsburgh, PA-based Xpyria had grown to ten full-time employees and two adjunct professionals since being incorporated in 1990. After joining the firm in 1996, Salpietro now serves as Xpyria’s president and CEO. The firm now manages approximately $400 million in assets for 140 clients in 14 states and three countries, providing investment and supervisory services to primarily institutional clients and high-net worth individuals.

Salpietro had been aware of the need for Xpyria to implement a document management solution since becoming an owner eight years ago. “It was always on our radar, but was never within reach,” he remembers. “But as our business evolved, it became more and more reasonable to pursue.”

Once faced with hiring more staff members to keep up with the paper chase, he realized Xpyria could simply use Laserfiche. “The technology was there, the expertise was there and it was applicable to our industry and the way we did business,” he says.

Xpyria needed Laserfiche to do two things. First, integrate with Advent Axys, the firm’s asset management platform, and Junxure, the firm’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Secondly, Laserfiche had to help Salpietro’s team minimize labor costs and maximize leverage, because while managing client records and documenting phone calls and e-mails were important, he didn’t want to pay his top earners to do it. “I always want to have talented people doing mission-critical, profitable work. What I don’t want to do is pay someone top dollar to file documents.”

Or spend all their time implementing new software.

When Salpietro and the Xpyria team investigated a competing document management system, they were disconcerted with the amount of effort staff would have to expend on developing the system. But once they met their Laserfiche reseller, One Source/ADI, they realized that they could turn most of their system’s development over to the experts.

President and CEO of Xpyria Investment Advisors, Joe Salpietro

“We were trying to figure out how to streamline our file trees, and they said, ‘Let us take a crack at it based on what we know about your industry and then you look at it.’ That’s what we needed,” Salpietro says. “Thanks to them, we only have one person functioning as a project manager instead of 10. I don’t want 10 people implementing Laserfiche—I want 10 people educated on Laserfiche and using Laserfiche, but I want them focused on our business, not on the technology behind it.

“Having a partner to ease the pain of implementation, especially one who understood our industry, was key, because the reality is that without a good service partner, things can fall apart very quickly,” he adds.

Salpietro worked with One Source/ADI, the firm’s reseller, to integrate Laserfiche, Junxure and Axys so staff could immediately improve client service. The results, he says, were instantaneous. “When we’re servicing our clients, I can access information in one or two keystrokes. I can retrieve correspondence from two years ago without moving from my desk,” he says. “And that just creates more time for me to handle additional client research, which ultimately helps the client and our performance.”

Salpietro also realized the firm’s paper storage would still be an issue, especially with respect to meeting SEC requirements. With One Source/ADI’s experience and Laserfiche’s reputation in the financial services industry, he felt confident that the firm’s Laserfiche solution would meet, if not exceed, SEC requirements. “I really didn’t want to spend too much grey matter figuring out what the SEC wanted and didn’t want in a technology solution.

“What Laserfiche has afforded us is the confidence that I’d have an advantage in audit time, when it next comes around,” he continues. “Compliance has always been a major challenge, but it’s become far more intense in the last five years. When the SEC used to come in 10 years ago, we’d pull the boxes they were looking for, and they had to spend the time going through the boxes. Now, they call you a week or two before they show up and ask for the specific information they want to see in electronic form. Everything else was swept to the sidelines for a week or two until we found everything. We didn’t want to go through that anymore.”

The SEC also requires the firm to store documents for three years on-site and then an additional four-to-ten years (depending on document type) off-site. “We’d ship stuff off to cold storage, but because you’re charged by the square foot, as you accumulate more and more documents, it gets pretty pricey,” Salpietro says. How pricey? “We were indirectly involved in litigation, where our records were subpoenaed by court order for another firm who was being sued, and it cost us over $1,500 to retrieve those documents—and we weren’t even a party to the case.”

Once Laserfiche was up and running, the firm started with day-forward scanning, and then moved on to capturing the three years’ worth of documents stored on-site. “I don’t have to send another box off-site for storage,” he says. “And it’s not just one box a year, it’s dozens of boxes. And that’s a big cost that’s going to go away.”

For 2009, Salpietro’s looking forward to implementing Workflow and Quick Fields to further streamline the firm’s repetitive work processes. “Eliminating the highest cost to my firm has never been my rent,” he says. “A lot of people think if you have an office in a metropolitan city, the highest cost to a business is infrastructure, and in that regard, it’s not. It’s the people I employ. So I’d rather have them doing mission-critical, profitable work.”

For firms considering implementing document management technology, Salpietro stresses the importance of choosing a quality local service provider to the success of his firm’s implementation.

“The lesson I’ve learned is that it’s all about the integrity of the organization you’re working with. And we’ve gotten the support we need from both our reseller and from Laserfiche,” he says. “The long term outcome will be just what we want.”

Regal Independent Financial Services Director Neil James and his co-directors were fighting a losing battle against rapidly-filling file cabinets and spiraling storage costs, all the while facing the strict compliance and retention pressures of operating in a highly-regulated environment. With files of up to 250 pages, easy searching was a priority, and physical storage space was at a premium.

Regal, a firm of financial advisers based in Bristol, offers advice to both individual and corporate clients on all aspects of financial planning, including pensions, investment and portfolio planning, life assurance, mortgages and general insurance. With eighteen advisers working remotely throughout Southern and South West England, as well as South Wales, James and his advisers needed a solution that would both allow secure remote access to documents and enable better management of paper records that were rapidly taking over the office.

As a whole-of-market, independent adviser, Regal is required by the FSA to store documentation of the entire research and sales process, from fact-finding documents, copies of insurance policies and correspondence to client illustrations—files so extensive that one four-drawer filing cabinet could only accommodate one to two hundred customers’ records. Staff wasted endless hours locating, copying, printing and faxing multiple copies, and audit preparedness was becoming more and more taxing.

“Every time we make a new sale, that equals hundreds of pieces of paper produced, copied and delivered,” says James. “Records often have to be kept for an infinite number of years.”

Any successful solution would have to be nimble enough to quickly and easily manage large volumes of paper while still ensuring compliance with strict FSA regulations. Enabling centralized access to files for remote workers was a priority, as Regal financial advisers working throughout the U.K. needed fast, effortless and dependable access to client records.

“Our goal was essentially to kill paper and eliminate the filing cabinets,” says James. Through a referral from CFS, his hardware supplier, he got in touch with Harvey Burgess of RB Document Solutions. Burgess recommended a Laserfiche document management system, primarily for its ability to securely protect documents while still permitting quick and easy access, even for remote users.

Regal purchased a multifunction machine and in no time had the new system up and running. It took a mere three days for Regal to implement Laserfiche. Almost instantly, piles of paper began to disappear as office space was reclaimed.

“Even with training to get people up to speed, there was a noticeable monetary benefit,” James recalls. “Because Laserfiche is Windows-based, it was much easier for staff to adapt to the new solution.”

Ending the paper chase created immediate, appreciable cost savings in both postage and labor. Documents that once had to be photocopied and faxed are now sent electronically. Regal’s Compliance Department requires the files from 10% of monthly sales to be provided for audit. Before Laserfiche, Regal copied, packaged and shipped each piece of paper. Now, they easily submit customer files via e-mail. “If you really look at it, they reckon Laserfiche saved 10% of gross revenue,” says James.

Regal also realized immediate space savings. Staff digitized and shredded 3,500 client files, eliminating almost 400,000 sheets of paper and nine filing cabinets. The space that used to house overflowing file cabinets is now home to two new desks. Off site deep storage is no more, saving monthly rent and staff time required to find documents.

The entire company accesses the central repository, with two administrative staff scanning and indexing all newly generated documents. Thanks to Laserfiche, filing is quick and easy and the supply chain process has been reduced to five simple steps.

In addition, the Laserfiche repository enables advisers working remotely to quickly access information located up to 100 kilometers away via virtual private network (VPN). Being able to instantly locate information like an applicant’s date of birth, mortgage details or the last date of policy review gives advisers an opportunity to re-visit their clients immediately, rather than waiting for files to arrive through the mail. Sales have increased, business has become more transparent and advisers are much more efficient in renewing business and keeping in contact with clients. Not only are advisers much happier, calling Laserfiche “a godsend” to their business, but clients are more satisfied too.

As a company, Regal has grown considerably since implementing Laserfiche and is now planning a move to larger offices. “The beauty of it is, when they were looking at premises, they didn’t have to consider storage or filing space,” Burgess remarks. “They just got to pick an office they liked.”

Have a headache yet? If not, you probably at least have some sympathy for Rehmann Financial. With 60 associates located throughout Michigan and Florida, the rapidly growing wealth management firm faced a formidable information management challenge. But with Laserfiche document and business process management at the heart of its technology platform, Rehmann Financial has standardized business processes, enabled effortless information exchange and, within just a few months, achieved significant cost savings over their former paper-based business model.

The challenge

Operations Manager Amy Flourry oversees Rehmann’s myriad wealth management efforts. “We’re very diverse, with many different specialists,” she says. “When you put all of us together, you get a lot of different ways of working.”

Rehmann’s kaleidoscopic business interests make it simple for clients to handle all their wealth management needs with one firm—but aren’t so conducive to managing operations cohesively.

“It was difficult to remain consistent,” Flourry continues. “We had local network drives where we could share some information, but they became a huge burden on our IT department to keep making different drives available in different locations.”

As often happens with firms spread out over regional offices, paper-based processes were hampering inter-office communication. “Our compliance department is located at our home office in Lansing [MI],” she explains, “but with staff in other offices, they needed to be able to do audits, review paperwork and perform quality control for multiple locations.”

Rehmann’s advisors also suffered from limitations on the accessibility of information. “Our advisors frequently meet with clients on-site rather than at the office,” she continues. “But regardless of location, they still need access to their client files and our marketing materials.”

Then there was the ubiquitous problem of dwindling storage space. “We’re growing so fast,” remarks Flourry, “and we were adding offices and filing cabinets to maintain our paperwork. Never mind the problems with accessing information—it’s just not cost-effective.”

The choice

Solving a broad-reaching challenge required input from each corner of the organization. So Rehmann assembled a team of administrative, compliance and IT staff, along with advisors of varying technical skill, to develop a detailed feature matrix for potential solutions. The top priorities were integration with Junxure, the firm’s CRM software, ease of use and customizability.

Operations Assistant Katie Rambo, who administers the firm’s numerous software systems, needed a way to centralize all of Rehmann’s information—while working with all of its daily-use applications.

“We have a saying around here,” she notes, “‘If it’s not in Junxure, it didn’t happen.’ So integration with Junxure was very important to us.”

And how did Laserfiche fare in that respect, compared to other solutions Rehmann considered? “Very well,” she laughs.

Laserfiche also stood out for its ease of use. “We knew we’d never be able to obtain buy-in from our staff if the systems weren’t easy to use,” remarks Flourry.

Adds Rambo, “Laserfiche looks and feels a lot like Windows, so we knew it would be familiar to our advisors. That has also made for a smooth transition from paper for our support staff.”

Rehmann was equally comfortable with its Laserfiche reseller, Cities Digital, Inc. “They really know the wealth management industry,” Flourry says, “and that knowledge was very important to us.”

After narrowing down the list of potential software solutions to three, the multi-departmental task force looked at the feature matrix and reached a unanimous conclusion. “We held a group vote,” Flourry says, “and everybody felt like Laserfiche would work best for us.”

The change

With just a few months of Laserfiche use under their belts, Rehmann staff have already made impressive strides. As Flourry puts it, “We have so many different advisors and professional staff and administrative staff, all with different ways of learning and levels of technical expertise. Overall, I’ve been really impressed at how quickly people have gotten used to it.”

Rehmann’s compliance department has seen the most immediate, discernible benefits since installing Laserfiche. As Flourry explains, “They’re now doing audits remotely, whereas before they would have to travel to all the other offices. We’re saving on mileage, hotel costs, time out of the office, meals—a whole laundry list of expenses that we’ve reduced just by using Laserfiche.”

Laserfiche Workflow has also simplified and accelerated client agreement approval. Staff at remote offices immediately scan client agreements into Laserfiche, upon which Workflow routes them for approval. Then it’s on to the OSJ, where they’re electronically signed. Finally, the agreements are routed to the home office. If the agreement is rejected, it enters another workflow for reprocessing. It’s a dramatic improvement from stamps, envelopes and wet signatures, and it’s helped drastically reduce the amount of paper involved in the firm’s operations. “It’s definitely more efficient,” Rambo says. “Instead of sending documents through the mail, everything gets routed through Laserfiche Workflow.“

But what about the thousands of paper client files generated pre-Laserfiche? Flourry and Rambo have cultivated a playful competition between regional offices to encourage back-file conversion. Flourry explains, “We might say to our Troy office, ‘Hey, the Grand Rapids office already has all their client agreements scanned into Laserfiche—are you going to let them beat you like that?’

“We’re incredibly competitive,” she laughs, “but in a good way. A productive way”.

Thanks to this encouragement, and an enterprise-wide enthusiasm for increasing efficiency, Laserfiche has caught on like wildfire among staff. But Laserfiche isn’t just popular with current Rehmann associates. “It’s highly attractive to other firms thinking about merging with us,” Rambo notes, “and to new and prospective staff. They love to see that we have processes and best practices in place, and that we have a progressive stance on implementing new technology.”

Then there’s a less alluring, but equally important benefit—the support of senior management for future technology initiatives. “Once they saw Laserfiche’s cost savings and return on investment,” Flourry says, “they were all over it. They’ve been incredibly supportive of going paperless.”

With their Laserfiche implementation experience fresh in their minds, Flourry and Rambo have a few words of advice to share with other advisory firms considering going paperless.

“At first, it can be a challenge to get people on board with using a new system,” Rambo says. “That’s why you really need to get input from people throughout your office. By bringing in others’ opinions, some really great ideas will emerge.

“Also, be flexible. We approached implementation expecting certain issues, but we ran into a completely different set of problems—not worse, just different.”

Flourry has this to say about taking the paperless plunge: “Just rip the Band-Aid off! The longer you wait to go paperless, the more work it takes. If you can adopt your system early on, when you have a manageable work load, it makes things so much easier.”

And despite Rehmann’s success so far, Flourry admits to having one regret. “I wish we’d done this sooner,” she laments. “If I could do it over again, I would have done this three or four years ago.”

In addition to providing estate, tax and investment planning services, PPS is also an office of supervisory jurisdiction (OSJ) of a major national broker-dealer, supervising 37 registered representatives. With a combined 40 years’ worth of account information to manage, it’s easy to imagine the mountainous paperwork that PPS had accumulated. For Business Processor Aimee Ellis, OSJ paperwork alone had become overwhelming. “We have to keep virtually every piece of paper related to each client,” she says, “so we had 24 cabinets full of paper files.”

PPS’ broker-dealer recognizes the challenges of managing so much information, and provides OSJs with a proprietary document management system. PPS could have easily chosen this system, avoiding implementation and maintenance costs altogether. But maintaining compliance—and staff sanity—required a system that could keep OSJ files separate from agreements, correspondence and reviews related to PPS’ other services. It wasn’t until attending a virtual seminar given by another firm facing a similar situation that Director of Operations Cindy Peckham saw the ideal solution to PPS’ problem.

Director of Operations Cindy Peckham

“When we saw what this firm was doing with Laserfiche, it was a real ‘lightbulb’ moment,” remembers Peckham. “We turned to each other and said, ‘These people are in the exact same situation, and they’re doing exactly what we want to do.’”

The key to maintaining the separation between OSJ and independent business activities was the Laserfiche platform’s granular security controls. By creating unique Laserfiche templates for each document type, then defining user-specific template viewing permissions, PPS ensures that staff from one business can’t view the other’s documents. Because Laserfiche access rights are based on Windows® Authentication, implementing and enforcing these security controls has been especially easy.

Dividing the two interests isn’t just a smart business practice; it also makes complying with industry, state and federal regulations much easier. “During our yearly audit by the broker-dealer, the auditor can sit down at a workstation and search the OSJ documents exclusively,” says Peckham. “Meanwhile, if the state were to request a piece of client correspondence, we’d be able to quickly retrieve the precise pages they were looking for.” Naturally, Laserfiche has also helped reduce the physical labor required to produce requested documents.

She has equal confidence in the firm’s disaster recovery strategy. In fact, with regards to compliance, Peckham believes it to be the biggest benefit that Laserfiche has delivered. Federal law mandates that financial services firms be able to resume operations within 48 hours of a disaster. “With Laserfiche,” she explains, “If the building were to burn down, we could be back up and running almost instantly.”

Digitizing active client files has led to a marked improvement in client service. Sondra Perry, administrative assistant, no longer has to keep clients waiting on the phone. “It’s easier and more efficient to fulfill client requests,” she says, “because we can pull up their information right away.” Aimee Ellis can now respond to representatives’ requests more quickly, given that she can retrieve OSJ documents right from her desktop. “In fact,” she says, “it’s faster to bring up documents in Laserfiche than it is to log in to the broker-dealer’s Website and retrieve them there.”

Peckham estimates that 10 to 15% of PPS’ business is now paperless, a figure that includes all new business activity since fully implementing Laserfiche in May 2007. “Whenever new activity occurs in a client file,” she explains, “our staff pull that client’s paper file and scan it into Laserfiche. From that point on, all of that client’s paperwork will be digitized immediately.” Gradually, staff will identify and digitize inactive files as well, until the last truckload of paper files gets driven away for off-site destruction.

When asked for advice on implementing digital document management, PPS staff unilaterally stress the importance of thorough planning, especially with regards to template setup. Says Perry, “If you have your paper-based filing system down pat, Laserfiche can replicate it exactly. That’s the great thing about Laserfiche: It doesn’t force you to change the way you work—it mirrors it instead.”

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

Stage 2 Planning Partners is one of those innovative firms achieving their goals thanks to document management. Founded by Principal Josh Patrick in 1997, the firm offers wealth management services for owners of closely held businesses, individuals and groups, focusing on a variety of strategic and financial issues.

“As a business owner myself, I understand the issues that are important to owners of private firms,” Patrick says. “So when I founded my own firm, I used my thirty years of experience as a business owner to build a successful wealth management and business consulting firm.”

And when it came to growing that success, Patrick knew that by utilizing technology, he’d be able to help his staff do more, more efficiently. “We chose Laserfiche because it’s really the acknowledged leader in document management for financial planners. Also, our broker-dealer, National Financial Partners, uses Laserfiche, and they highly recommend it.”

Prinicipal Josh Patrick

Yet while Patrick knew eliminating paperwork would bring benefits to his staff’s daily work processes, there was an even more simple reason for choosing Laserfiche: managing the firm’s growth, both current and planned.

“When we installed Laserfiche, we were in the middle of moving offices and adding additional reps to our staff,” Client Service Specialist Melissa Provost remembers. “With this growth came additional clients’ records to manage. As any financial planner can tell you, misfiling is always an issue, no matter how many clients you have. But of course the more clients you have, the more documents you have the chance to misfile.”

Provost, who joined the firm in 2001, has never known a workday without Laserfiche. “We installed Laserfiche two weeks after I started, so Laserfiche and I started at the same time,” she says. “I’m not sure that I’d want to know what things would be like without it.”

Provost remembers that when the firm installed their Laserfiche system, staff were immediately able to get up and running because installation and training were done much more quickly than she expected. “Within a day and a half, our system was ready to go. The first day was installation, and half of the second was training,” Provost says. “It really has to do with the fact that Laserfiche is so easy to learn.

“Recently, we hired a new part-time employee, and she caught right on,” she adds. “That really says something about how easy to use Laserfiche is, that even a part-time employee can quickly get up to speed with the system.”

Client Service Specialist Melissa Provost

Not only does Laserfiche require minimal resources to set up and learn, it also requires minimal resources to maintain. “If we have any problems with Laserfiche, I can usually take care of it myself,” Provost says. “I set up and manage accounts for our reps, so we don’t have to have onsite IT personnel to manage the system. If any major problem arises —which is a true rarity—then our reseller, One Source/ADI, takes care of it for us.”

For Provost, who provides support for the advisors at Stage 2 Planning, Laserfiche made everyday work processes much easier. “We scan everything into Laserfiche, from all client and compliance files to accounts receivable and accounts payable documents. Not only are documents easier to find in Laserfiche, they’re never misfiled,” she says.

And when home office staff or clients call looking for a document, Laserfiche provides a quick and easy solution to getting it to them. “One of the best things about Laserfiche is the e-mail feature,” Provost adds. “Instead of printing and then faxing or mailing a document, we just e-mail it right from Laserfiche—which saves both time and money.”

When it comes to saving time and money, Laserfiche has definitely lived up to expectations. Before installing Laserfiche, the firm had six large file cabinets to store client and compliance files. But now, there aren’t any file cabinets anywhere in the office, which was a huge money saver when it came to the company’s move to a new office. And the benefits don’t stop there.

“We recently had a part-time employee leave the company,” Provost says, “but thanks to Laserfiche, there wasn’t a critical need to go out and hire a replacement right away. Because we’re able to work so much more efficiently, we can do more in a day, so we were able to cover the extra workload while we took our time hiring the right person.”

Also, Laserfiche has paid off in faster, easier audits for the firm’s staff. Provost estimates that their last broker-dealer compliance audit went significantly faster than usual, all thanks to Laserfiche.

“During our last audit, instead of the auditor requesting documents and sitting and waiting while we found them, we gave them a desktop computer logged into Laserfiche,” she says. “We can easily search for any document they’d like to see, and bring it up almost instantaneously for them to look at right there on the computer.

“Normally, our audits last from about 8:30 A.M. until 12:00 P.M.,” Provost adds. “But with Laserfiche, we were done and the auditor was out the door by 10:30 A.M.”

Stage 2 Planning staff have realized what many Laserfiche users ultimately discover: that getting rid of paper is only the start of the benefits Laserfiche can bring. From faster audits to savings on office supplies and staffing, once Laserfiche becomes a part of daily business processes, the possibilities for saving time and money are nearly endless.

“While I love that Laserfiche got rid of the stacks of files I had to search through to find things, what really surprised me is how much time Laserfiche saves me,” Provost says. “I expected Laserfiche to make things more efficient—but not nearly to the degree it has.”

According to Administrative Analyst III Daniel Baker, Lynwood was looking for the technological answer to a variety of challenges. “The city environment was changing in a technological sense,” he recalls. “Community members wanted information quicker.”

Citizens weren’t the only ones with demands. Lynwood faced many of the classic challenges of working with paper documents: mounting shipping and handling costs, proliferating documents and dwindling storage space. City staff were growing tired of inefficient paper-based business processes, especially when it came to producing discovery for an influx of litigation. “We were spending a lot of our funding digging through loads of paper documents in response to discovery,” Baker remembers. “The City Attorney would assign short deadlines for finding documents for ongoing litigation, and if staff couldn’t find documents in time, the City could be penalized. That required staff to work a lot of overtime.”

These issues were overwhelming on their own, but were made even worse by Lynwood’s lack of an official records policy. “We needed to develop and maintain guidelines for an efficient records program,” According to City Manager Roger L. Haley. “Furthermore, we had no backup plan in case of fire, flood, earthquake or other disaster.”

Expanding Laserfiche proved to be more than an answer to any specific challenge; in fact, it empowered Lynwood to maximize the value of citizens’ tax dollars.

“The city has a responsibility to provide excellent customer service,” Haley continues, “including quick access to city records and improve service with today’s technology.”

Laserfiche’s tried-and-true document search, retrieval and distribution capabilities proved fit for the task—and for keeping costs down.

“Laserfiche has decreased our printing of paper documents by making it so easy to send files digitally,” Baker says. “The majority of agreements, letters, resolutions and other correspondence are now being e-mailed to vendors instead of mailing a printed copy, which reduces our dependence on the postal system and lowers costs.”

Baker also reports faster response times for records requests, such as resolutions and agendas, while finance department staff can confirm if bills were paid by looking up scanned checks. Staff members looking for copies of resolutions, agendas and agreements no longer trek to the City Clerk’s office, meaning staff productivity and efficiency have increased. “Documents are now at our fingertips instead of in a box in the basement,” Baker says.

Of course, even the most powerful software is only as useful as it is intuitive. That’s why ease of use played a major role in Lynwood’s purchasing decision—and why Laserfiche was the clear choice. “Laserfiche’s functionality is not only rich but easy to learn,” Baker says. “It gives people who aren’t very computer-savvy the confidence to use computer programs in the workplace.”

It’s no surprise that Lynwood would want to extend easy information access to the community. But while city staff quickly came to understand and appreciate Laserfiche, many citizens were hesitant to retrieve documents via Laserfiche rather than making pilgrimages to City Hall. “Many residents refused to change the way they were retrieving information, because they couldn’t understand how valuable a tool Laserfiche is,” Baker recounts.

Lynwood’s electronic document management team adroitly addressed customer concerns, taking Laserfiche’s user-friendliness to new heights with a custom WebLink interface.

“Most public document search engines come off as intimidating to the public, and as a result, few people use them,” Baker explains. “We wanted our approach to be user-friendly, with a likable theme to encourage use.”

Baker teamed with IT Technician Mike Ochoa and Graphic Technician Jamel Goodloe to create a public records portal with an emphasis on accessibility. “We wanted to people of all ages and experience levels to be able to search for documents,” Baker says. The resulting site, called My Doc Spot, features a public records mascot, Spot, who “fetches” agendas, minutes, resolutions, budgets, RFPs and agreements for Lynwood citizens.

Response to the records portal has been overwhelmingly positive, from both citizens and the city staff who formerly had to manually respond to records requests. In fact, My Doc Spot helped Lynwood fetch a coveted 2008 Laserfiche Run Smarter Award. Of course, it also helps that the city now has a codified records policy in place.

“Laserfiche has provided us with a system to cope with our records challenges while meeting ISO standards,” says Baker. “We can now easily classify, store and search for all our records, which satisfies the California Public Records Act,” he adds.

Laserfiche has also helped Lynwood overcome its increased litigation challenge, dramatically reducing the time it takes to respond to discovery requests. “With Laserfiche,” Baker notes, “we can look up what we need to find by a simple keyword search, with no added expense. And instead of giving attorneys binders of documents, we can give them their requested documents on CD.”

The most important benefit of the Laserfiche system, according to Baker, has been establishing and maintaining a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, Laserfiche centralizes all of Lynwood’s vital documents—including agendas, resolutions, printed checks and invoices, agreements, minutes, budgets, city maps, and public requests—for storage and regularly scheduled backup. “Our Laserfiche system makes it very easy to copy images to a DVD-R or tape and send them to a protected location,” Baker says.

Laserfiche went five-for-five in meeting all of the city’s information management challenges. But it’s the unexpected benefits—like increased staff morale and a decreased carbon footprint—that have been especially satisfying for Lynwood staff. “Our staff have definitely taken a liking to the Laserfiche system,” Baker reports. “Most use it to store all their vital and general correspondence, with the confidence that their files will never be lost. By using Laserfiche so much, we’re also promoting a paperless work environment, which in the long run will save resources and promote cleaner air.”

Baker doesn’t hesitate to recommend Laserfiche to his peers. “My advice to those looking to implement document management is this,” he says. “Laserfiche is a ground-breaking solution that gives you the ability to be more efficient, confident and reliable as an organization. Once we installed Laserfiche, our information management challenges soon became yesterday’s news.”

In 2003, the Jamestown City School District’s human resources department began investigating document management as a possible solution to managing an ever increasing amount of paper. The department’s six employees were responsible for managing personnel records, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, employment applications and reports regarding civil rights, unemployment and workers’ compensation, as well as all files relating to negotiations, arbitrations, grievances and meeting minutes of the district’s seven unions.

HIPAA requirements mandated that employee medical records must be segregated so only the HIPAA officer and benefits manager could access them, which required keeping these documents in separate file cabinets. And worst of all, there was no disaster plan in place, so if documents were destroyed, they would be impossible to replace.

But in 2004, the district received funding from the New York State Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund to hire a records management expert to examine the feasibility of implementing document management in the HR department. By 2005, a selection committee of the district’s HR director, IS director and records management coordinator were interviewing document management vendors.

“Although another vendor’s ‘unlimited user licenses’ offer was attractive from a fiscal standpoint, our selection committee was concerned that if the product wasn’t user friendly, unlimited licenses would not make the HR staff, or any other department’s employees, more willing to use it,” says Director of Human Resources and Records Management Officer Karen Briner-Peterson. “After a lot of research and deliberation, we decided Laserfiche would best suit our needs.”

J.M. Fletcher Elementary School

Once Laserfiche was installed, staff began with a pilot project to scan all personnel files into Laserfiche, with plans to eventually expand the project to other administrative areas and school buildings as resources and time allowed. The need for multiple file cabinets was immediately eliminated: staff designed their file structure to include five sub-folders (personnel, payroll, training, insurance and medical) set up so they could place security tags on confidential files. “Because all this information is confidential, we had to restrict access to everyone except the district superintendent and two of our assistant superintendents, who can access these documents through WebLink,” Briner-Peterson says.

And just as important is the peace of mind Briner-Peterson and her staff enjoy knowing Jamestown’s records are finally safe—come what may. “9/11 and Hurricane Katrina just proved the need to be able to continue running a business or government office immediately after a crisis,” she says. “Our largest concern was that we had no disaster plan in place. If water pipes broke or a fire started, we had no ability to recreate documents that could not be easily replaced.”

All of the district’s documents are retrievable through WebLink so that, in case of disaster, district maintenance employees, administrators and local police, fire and emergency personnel can immediately access information. In fact, Briner-Peterson is so confident in Laserfiche that she’s begun moving original hardcopy personnel offsite to the district’s new records storage facility. “Laserfiche is the foundation of our district disaster recovery plan,” she says. “Combined with our HR and payroll software, Laserfiche hasn’t just saved us time and money, but has also enabled us to be up and running at an offsite location within a matter of hours after a disaster.”

Beyond disaster recovery, some of the most noticeable benefits of using Laserfiche have come from staff expanding their use of the system into other areas, including managing e-discovery, tracking the history of provisions in collective bargaining agreements and handling FOIA requests.

Laserfiche has also been used to store and display large amounts of data in litigation. “We were able to import documents into Laserfiche, bringing more than 500 pages of documents to court for dramatic effect,” says Briner-Peterson. “During testimony, the information being testified to can be projected on a screen in the hearing room for the entire court to see. Due to discovery requirements, we are able to provide the judge and opposing counsel with all documents admitted into evidence stored on one CD instead of storage boxes.”

James Prendergast Library

Laserfiche has proven even more helpful in managing collective bargaining agreements between the district and its seven employee unions. At times, Briner-Peterson explains, a union may bring a grievance alleging violation of a contract provision or the parties must go to arbitration to define a word or phrase in a collective bargaining agreement. “Last year, I was asked by our Assistant Superintendent to determine a history on a particular contract provision,” she says. “By doing a word search in Laserfiche, within twenty minutes I’d printed out the appropriate pages of the contract provision as the language evolved from 1973 to the present. Before Laserfiche, this would have taken several hours, perhaps even longer.”

It’s equally easy for staff to quickly respond to the numerous FOIA requests they receive each year. “Sometimes documents must be disclosed under FOIA, but contain information that is confidential and can’t be disclosed,” Briner-Peterson explains. As the district’s Records Access Officer, she used to have to manually redact each document. First, she’d copy the document and use a marker to black out any confidential information. “But because print below these marks can still be seen, I’d have to make an additional photocopy to ensure that no redacted information could be read,” she sighs.

But now, Briner-Peterson simply uses Laserfiche’s redaction tool to securely—and clandestinely—remove any confidential information. “I really like the ability to use a white instead of a black redactor, because it’s impossible for the reader to see how many words in a sentence were removed,” she says. “Although it may seem trivial to anyone who doesn’t handle FOIA requests, using Laserfiche to store and redact our documents helps us prove that we used our best efforts to comply with the law.”

Jamestown is home to the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center.

Briner-Peterson and her staff have been so inspired by the utility of their document management system they’ve come up with even more ways to use Laserfiche throughout the district. “Our confidence in Laserfiche enables us to reach out to other departments—so we continue to find new and innovative ways to use it,” she says. In fact, in recognition of their innovative and creative use of their Laserfiche system, the Jamestown Public Schools HR team was recently awarded with the Laserfiche community’s prestigious Run Smarter Award.

Briner-Peterson believes that any Laserfiche user can enjoy the same success—as long as they invest the time up-front in proper planning. “We’d tell anyone to start in one department and deal with a workable amount of documents. We started with a small number of users and basic functionality, but we’ve added users and more advanced functionality as time goes by and our system becomes even more critical to our operations,” she says.

“Once you’ve had successes in one department and can prove to others that the system is user-friendly, functional and dependable, you’ll have departments knocking on your door,” she offers. “In our estimation, the best—and most unexpected—benefit of Laserfiche has been that we’ve been able to use it for so many things that no one on our selection committee ever could have envisioned.”

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

Devick had read about document management in an industry magazine, and had heard about it from colleagues who had implemented their own paperless offices. When she saw Laserfiche at the FPA Symposium in Minneapolis, however, it was clear that Bond and Devick had found their perfect solution.

“We knew we needed a cost-effective system that was easy to use,” Devick says. “Some of the other systems that met our specific criteria were cost-prohibitive, and they required changing our operating procedures. Laserfiche didn’t require us to change how we do business, and we could choose exactly the functionality we needed—no more, no less.”

Once Bond and Devick decided on Laserfiche, installation was “very quick,” according to Devick. Within eight months, the firm had fully transitioned from paper to digital files.

The Bond and Devick Minneapolis Team – RJ Devick, Andy Feterl, Rachel Halvorson, Kristine Bisanz and Sherry Duggan

“It helped that our reseller, Cities Digital, Inc., sent two staff to the office to train everyone the day our system was installed,” Devick says. “It only took a couple of hours for us to feel comfortable with Laserfiche. It’s extremely easy to use, so training—even for new users—takes very little effort.”

Devick also believes support from Cities Digital was crucial to their success. “Once we started using the system, they were always available to answer any questions,” she says. “Their customer service is truly second to none.”

Thanks to this training and support, Devick says, users were instantly more productive. “We immediately started scanning and importing client information, including e-mail correspondence, trade reports, contracts, holding reports, retirement analysis and basically anything else we could think of,” she says. “We also store our company information, such as our compliance reports, employee files, 401(k) plan documents and meeting minutes.

“The interesting thing is that filing our information in Laserfiche actually takes a little longer than filing a paper document, because we have to take a few seconds to enter template information and put it in the correct location,” she continues. “But the ability to access information once it is filed is just so much easier and quicker. We don’t have to dig through file folders and try and find just the piece of paper we need. And, because it’s stored digitally, it can be viewed by more than one person at a time.”

With locations in Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN, sharing information was a priority. “Because we handle sensitive and private information, we needed a secure system, but we also needed to become more efficient,” Devick says. “To create that efficiency, multiple people needed to be able to access the same document simultaneously, and we needed to access it through our client management software.”

To truly enhance efficiency, however, the firm worked with Cities Digital to integrate Laserfiche with their client relationship management (CRM) application, ACT!® “From an efficiency standpoint, it was an obvious need for us,” Devick says. “The ability to integrate Laserfiche with ACT! was a question we asked about immediately.

When an advisor or staff member is viewing a client contact in ACT!, they simply click a link button to pull up all the folders for that particular contact. “Integration between a CRM system and Laserfiche is essential for firms who want to maximize the value of their digitally stored information,” says Cities Digital CEO Patrick Welsch. “With this type of integration, staff don’t have to do anything differently than they’re already doing. They just pull up information stored in Laserfiche directly from the CRM application. It’s a tremendous time-saver, and helps staff respond to client questions much more quickly.”

“The pleasant surprise with Laserfiche is how simple it is to use. Once things are scanned in, anyone can find the information they’re looking for.”

Devick agrees. “From the users’ perspective, this is truly the most useful feature in Laserfiche,” she says.

“The integration has really helped our financial advisors provide better client service. When speaking with clients on the phone, our advisors can immediately view documents to answer questions. When they’re doing account review, they can instantly pull up reports that are generated and scanned into the system.”

And when a client calls and needs tax forms or statements sent to their accountant or lawyer, Laserfiche enables the firm’s staff to turn those requests around “almost immediately,” says Devick. Staff simply find the document in the Laserfiche repository and e-mail it with a simple right click.

“This is really the biggest benefit for our clients,” she says. “Of course they benefit from our increased security, but that’s more behind the scenes. What they really notice is that, with Laserfiche, we can simply e-mail the document right from the system. It doesn’t matter whether the external party uses Laserfiche, because the document is sent in either TIFF or PDF format, which they can open from their own computer.”

And at the office, it’s not just advisors and back office staff that appreciate the firm’s Laserfiche system. “Even our greeter, who works on client accounts, benefits from it,” Devick says. “She doesn’t have to leave the front desk to grab client files because she’s able to view them right from her computer. So we always have someone sitting at the front desk—which is much better from a customer service perspective.”

Storing documents in Laserfiche also helps Bond and Devick comply with regulatory requirements for disaster recovery and information security. “Storing all our documents electronically enables us to back up the data and keep it offsite,” Devick says. “And our system is encrypted and password-protected, which makes unauthorized access nearly impossible.”

Laserfiche has also enabled Bond and Devick to more easily comply with legal and broker-dealer retention requirements. “Since we are required to maintain much of our client data for seven years, we’ve eliminated more paper than we could have imagined when we started this process two years ago,” Devick says.

“It’s also simplified our audit process,” she adds. “It’s cut the time of our compliance audits down considerably, since the auditor can quickly and easily pull up any information they need.”

When an auditor is onsite, they can sit down at a computer and pull up any information they’re looking for on their own. “Auditors have never had a problem using the system,” she says.

Ultimately, Bond and Devick knew that optimizing business processes was the key to their ultimate success. “We didn’t really look at our Laserfiche system from a financial perspective, but as a necessity,” Devick says. “Being able to access our information is quickly is key, and so is the fact that we can easily share information both in and outside the office.

“I would highly recommend Laserfiche,” she continues. “The pleasant surprise with Laserfiche is how simple it is to use—it’s much easier than locating a hardcopy client file. Once things are scanned in, anyone can find the information they’re looking for.”

“We used to print out e-mails to conduct surveillance,” remembers Operations Manager Kelly Buda. “And when you consider we have over 260 representatives and home office staff, that was a lot of paper.”

Buda began investigating document management solutions, and, after a presentation by Laserfiche Solutions Group (LSG) consultant Jeffrey Green, was sold on going paperless. “I’d been pushing the paperless concept for almost four years, because I was the one looking at files and dealing with most of the paper,” Buda says. “Laserfiche looked promising, but it wasn’t until I met Jeffrey at a conference and spoke to him at greater length that we realized it could work for us.

“When Jeffrey came in to do a demo, Laserfiche really sold itself,” he continues. “With the Windows®-like file structure, it was easy to learn—in fact, the ease of use was its best feature. And Jeffrey made it so easy to understand. He really showed us what was possible.”

Green believes that for financial services firms, the benefits of eliminating paper are clear, with a compelling return on investment. “Most firms think digital solutions like this are complex, difficult to implement and prohibitively expensive, but I showed Workman Securities that a digital solution was more affordable than they thought it would be,” he says. “Ultimately, e-mail archival proved to be the most important component for them, so that’s where we started.”

Using Laserfiche’s open architecture and a combination of modules including Workflow™, Audit Trail™ and Quick Fields™, LSG developed an e-mail archival solution that perfectly met Workman Securities’ needs.

When e-mails and attachments are received by the firm’s e-mail server, they’re automatically sent to Laserfiche, converted to searchable TIFF files and indexed in the repository. E-mails with a high ratio of suspect terms, such as “promise,” “sure thing” and “guarantee” are flagged for compliance department review. If needed, Workflow is then able to automatically move these e-mails to a registered principal’s Laserfiche folder and notify them that e-mails are waiting for their review. The reviewer can then open, read and search flagged e-mails.

After the compliance department or a principal reviews the suspicious e-mail, Laserfiche records their approval in a template field. Audit Trail monitors and time-stamps these approvals along with all other repository activities, such as user logins, searches, document views and attempts to print. With this functionality, compliance staff can generate reports that clearly illustrate the identity of the reviewer, what communication they reviewed, the date of the review and whether the review was forwarded on for further examination.

Even with this sophisticated e-mail archival functionality, Workman Securities’ Laserfiche system took less than ninety days to implement. “The increase in our efficiency has been huge,” says Chief Compliance Officer Klaus Siepmann. “Instead of printing a random sample, suspicious e-mails are automatically sent to the compliance department or a supervisor for immediate review.

“In the compliance department, we’re really loving the e-mail system,” he adds.

About a month after Workman Securities implemented the e-mail capture, approval and archival system, SEC auditors arrived on their doorstep. “Thanks to this e-mail solution, the auditors noticed a definite improvement,” Green says.

“In the past, we used to give the auditors a four-foot stack of paper and let them spend a week going through it. But now we can sit an auditor down at a computer, show them the system and generate reports documenting the review process. It’s a lot more efficient for us, and for them,” adds Buda.

After successfully automating e-mail archival, Workman Securities decided to apply the same principles to order processing. Rather than passing copies of order paperwork back and forth, Workman Securities is implementing Laserfiche Workflow to streamline suitability approvals, improve order processing and speed up payment. Once mailroom staff scan new business paperwork into the Laserfiche repository, Workflow automatically routes it to a registered principal for suitability approval, to the operations department for order processing and, finally, to back-office staff for commissioning.

This automated process has already improved efficiency, but to truly maximize its benefits, Workman Securities plans to enable representatives to scan and submit business over the Web, using the Web Access thin client. They may also begin submitting business to clearing firms electronically. “Over ninety percent of our orders are checks and applications, which is why rolling out the solution to the field will be such a benefit,” Buda says. “Because they’ll be able to do their own scanning and access their files online, we think the reps will really like it.”

In fact, Workman Securities is planning on having Green attend their annual compliance meeting to demonstrate the system to the firm’s representatives, something that Buda believes will help their representatives visualize the possibilities of Laserfiche. “We’re a pretty low-tech bunch, generally speaking, but the system is just so easy to use. I’m sure Jeffrey’s demonstration will show our reps how simple it is, and how much it could benefit their practice.”

Buda feels that even though Workman Securities is just beginning to realize the benefits of their Laserfiche system, it’s the right solution for financial services firms like themselves. “I wouldn’t have a problem recommending Laserfiche,” he says. “When we started, we didn’t have an exact idea of what we wanted or what was even possible.

“We’ve just begun to test the limits of our system,” he adds, “but we know it can do so much more.”

“The philosophy behind many of our technology initiatives,” he explains, “is to present information on the Web, rather than face-to-face. Not only is it a whole lot less expensive, but it’s so much more convenient for citizens.”

Before implementing Laserfiche, completing everyday tasks was far from convenient. Jackson describes the working environment as “Paper, and lots of it. Our business processes were mostly manual and very costly, with regard to both lost productivity and excess paper consumption.”

Gaston County had another document management system in place when Jackson arrived, but it didn’t meet all of the organization’s business needs. “Our previous software lacked Web publishing and OCR capabilities,” he recalls, “and its architecture couldn’t scale to support our more ambitious initiatives or additional departments.”

Keeping in mind both present needs and future plans, Jackson authored an RFP, to which seven vendors responded. While two other solutions provided similar functionality to Laserfiche, none could match its cost-effectiveness. “Return on investment was probably our chief criterion,” he says. “Laserfiche offered the quickest ROI of all the potential solutions.”

It offered fast deployment as well. Within 6 weeks, the environmental health department had scanned paper records of over 55,000 septic system inspections dating back to 1955. Jackson gives much of the credit for Gaston County’s success to its Laserfiche reseller, One Source Document Solutions. “Our reseller has been great to work with, and they’re a great representative for Laserfiche as well,” he says.

The HR, finance and building inspection departments were also part of the pilot installation. “It was really a ‘first come, first served’ process,” Jackson says. “These departments really wanted to be the initial adopters of the new technology.”

In addition to these departmental champions, Laserfiche also found strong political support. Gaston County commissioners had recently passed a resolution enabling deployment of new e-government initiatives—many of which fell right into Laserfiche’s wheelhouse. “Our commissioners are very interested in using technology to reduce costs, so fortunately, we didn’t have major problems getting funding for our Laserfiche system,” Jackson says.

Deploying at the departmental level proved advantageous in convincing decision makers that Laserfiche would support their goals. “It allowed us to present concrete cost savings to commissioners,” Jackson recalls, “so they’d be on board with expanding the system. It also helped us persuade the few skeptical staff members that, when all is said and done, Laserfiche would make everyone’s jobs easier.”

Located on the banks of the Catawba River, the U.S. National Whitewater Center is the world's largest artificial whitewater river and an official U.S. Olympic Training Site.

It turned out that staff didn’t need much persuading at all. “The resistance to change has been far less than for other applications or new business processes,” he adds. “Employees all realize how tedious working with paper is, and that the opportunity to digitize will help them tremendously.”

Indeed, after just one year of using Laserfiche, staff and citizens have already realized many benefits. For example, Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME) has greatly simplified the way staff work with records series. “It’s very easy to establish new records series in RME,” Jackson says, “and when it comes to managing them, staff simply scan documents in and let the system worry about the rest.”

Beyond sophisticated behind-the-scenes records management, staff greatly benefit from one of the most basic Laserfiche functions. “Laserfiche gives staff the ability to search in so many different ways,” Jackson notes. “For research and information requests, it’s really reduced the amount of information staff need to find what they’re looking for.”

In a recent case study, the building inspections department documented just how much more efficient they’ve become thanks to Laserfiche searching. With 6,000 building permits filed yearly, staff spent an estimated five hours per day filing and handling research calls. Because they can now index and retrieve documents automatically with Laserfiche, they’ve reduced the time spent answering those calls by 75%—saving almost half a man-year of work.

And that’s just in a single department. “We know that once we start deploying to larger departments, the savings will mount up into the millions of dollars,” Jackson says.

From an IT perspective, Laserfiche offers many advantages to Jackson and his staff. First and foremost among these is ease of administration. “We’re a Windows®-based shop, so we really appreciate the way Laserfiche integrates with Active Directory®. That made it really easy to fit Laserfiche into our operating environment.”

Because deployment was so smooth, Laserfiche delivered quickly on its promises. “Many solutions have the potential to increase productivity or lower costs,” he adds, “but are very difficult to set up. With Laserfiche, the upfront investment to attain these kinds of benefits is very low.”

With such rapid results, it wasn’t long before other departments were lining up to request their own Laserfiche systems—a common occurrence among new Laserfiche users. “Once other departments saw the benefits that the pilot departments were reaping, they came to IT and said ‘sign us up,’” Jackson remembers.

In response to these departmental demands, the 2008 Gaston County IT strategic plan includes a major expansion of their Laserfiche system. Planned enhancements include integrating Laserfiche with their redesigned GIS system, so that staff and citizens can retrieve parcel information and tax histories. The emergency medical services department will begin storing patient records and ambulance call histories within Laserfiche—which will help answer HIPAA compliance challenges. Meanwhile, the county attorney’s office will use the Workflow™ module to simplify the contract review process by automatically routing contracts for approval.

Workflow will also play a major role in some very sophisticated e-government applications. “We’re developing Web forms that will send information straight to Workflow,” Jackson says. “For example, employment applications submitted online will go straight to HR for initial screening, then on to hiring departments, who will route back the applications of individuals they want to interview or extend offers to.” Similar technology will enable citizens to submit permit applications and pay taxes online as well. And the building inspection department, one of the earliest adopters of Laserfiche, has become the first county department to go paperless, after receiving state approval for self-warranty in May 2008.

Internal business process improvements notwithstanding, the number-one goal of implementing Laserfiche was to improve citizen service. The citizens’ response? “They love it,” Jackson says. “Having building inspection reports online has been a major success. They can’t believe how much time they save. Previously, they had to call us, come into the office or travel to an inspection site. Now, they have on-demand access to all that information.”

Not bad for the first year. But Jackson is gearing up for bigger and better things. “I knew that digital document management would be a major asset, not only in the short term, but also further on down the road. I really anticipate that, within five years, Laserfiche will become as widely-used as e-mail.”

But after a 12 month review of 32 software packages, Michael Sundberg, Commonwealth’s Due Diligence Officer, recommended Laserfiche to CIO Ed Bell, and the solution has been working well ever since.

Laserfiche Winners Circle VAR Duplitron of Brockton, MA, invited Commonwealth to a seminar in suburban Boston eighteen months ago. Duplitron director Steve Woolner and his team impressed Sundberg immediately. After certifying Laserfiche as compliant with SEC regulations, and reviewing Duplitron’s credentials as an outstanding solution provider, Sundberg agreed that Laserfiche and Duplitron were the right team for Commonwealth.

“My responsibilities include overseeing Commonwealth’s Help Desk, so I know what products are well received in our offices from Maine to Hawaii,” Sundberg says. “Laserfiche was rated by consultant Gartner Group as the kind of product we wanted, and once we saw a demonstration and studied its cost-effectiveness, we decided the fit was right for us.”

Laserfiche enables investment professionals to scan, store and retrieve client records electronically, speeding customer service while remaining compliant with SEC and FDIC records management requirements. Using Laserfiche, financial planners can eliminate expensive filing cabinets and end frustrating searches for missing paper.

“Laserfiche enables our financial planners to communicate with the home office electronically and access client statements, confirmations and other critical paperwork on the Web,” Sundberg says. “This gives the planners more time to actually run their businesses and take care of customers, instead of handling clerical duties.”

Sundberg says Commonwealth advisers appreciate Laserfiche’s ease of use and its non-proprietary file formats, as well as its ability to work with standard scanners and PCs. He adds that competitors’ products required users to buy specialized equipment and save files in formats that might not be accessible in the future. He was also impressed with Duplitron’s plan for implementing the system.

“Ed Bell and Mike Sundberg are sophisticated IT professionals who wanted assurances that their field offices would get the same level of service as headquarters,” Woolner says. “Because Duplitron has developed strong business relationships and friendships with top Laserfiche VARs around the country, I’ve been able to assign installations and follow-up service to them, knowing they’ll be taken care of in the same way as if we have done them ourselves.”

Commonwealth, a six-time Investment Advisor “Broker-Dealer of the Year” winner, is recognized industry-wide for its use of advanced technology to improve customer service and make its independent financial planners more productive. Sundberg appreciates Laserfiche’s Integrators Toolkit, allowing him to tie Laserfiche into other Commonwealth applications.

Laserfiche has aggressively pursued the financial services market in recent years, recognizing that document imaging technology offers broker-dealers a number of key customer service and productivity differentiators. Thousands of financial planners are using Laserfiche worldwide, often from wireless laptops, as they work with clients in their offices and homes.

When an order shipped, the accompanying paperwork first went to the company’s accounting and quality assurance departments for review. It then went to the file room. When a customer called with an order-related question, staff had to leave their desks and visit each of these locations in turn to search for the relevant document, while the customer waited on the phone. If the document was sitting on someone’s desk or had been misfiled, staff would have to undertake a more exhaustive search and return the customer’s call once they’d found the necessary information.

Recognizing that staff needed instant access to order-related documentation from their desktops, Brown’s CIO, Justin Lasley, began researching digital document management. Although Lasley and his colleagues quickly saw the benefits of scanning order-related paperwork, they had doubts about the manual data entry processes most systems relied on. “Our biggest concern was how to accurately associate metadata—such an invoice number and purchase order number—with each scanned image,” Lasley explains. “Most document management systems require manual entry of those values. This increases costs and does not necessarily guarantee a high level of accuracy.”

Laserfiche® quickly put these doubts to rest. When staff scan order-related paperwork into the Laserfiche repository, the Quick Fields™ module reads a bar code printed on each document. Quick Fields then uses this information to automatically populate the document’s template fields with the relevant metadata, which is retrieved from the company’s orders database. Thanks to this process, customer service staff can now quickly locate a document using any piece of information they have, including customer name, invoice number, sales order number, purchase order number, part number or ship date—without leaving their desks. “Now, our orders are easy to locate and retrieve, and important information can be relayed to customers more quickly,” Lasley says. “We’ve built our business on our ability to quickly respond to customer inquiries. Laserfiche helps us maintain that edge over our competitors.”

The ability to quickly locate orders also helps production personnel. “When we receive a repeat order, we refer to previous orders to review the processing instructions,” Lasley explains. “Because our production team can quickly find the original order in Laserfiche, they can provide instructions to the machine operators and shipping personnel without first having to look through a file cabinet. This helps us process orders quickly and accurately, and allows us to furnish a consistent product to customers.”

Laserfiche benefits staff and customers in other ways as well. For example, staff can quickly e-mail bills of lading, invoices and other documents to customers directly from the Laserfiche repository. Optical media publishing enables staff to easily transfer both individual documents and entire directories to disc, which greatly improves document portability and enhances business continuity planning. And, whereas the file room could only hold five years’ worth of orders, the Laserfiche repository has an unlimited storage capacity, meaning that Brown Metals can now build a comprehensive digital archive of all order-related documentation and correspondence.

Although Lasley originally intended to use Laserfiche only for order-related documents, he soon realized that the system would help him solve other information management challenges as well. He started with customer specifications. “We have a number of customers who are ISO 9001-registered, and who have their own manufacturing specifications they ask us to adhere to,” he explains. “We receive these specifications in a variety of formats, including Microsoft® Word® documents, PDF files, faxes and e-mails. Our own ISO 9001 procedures require us to retain these documents, have them available for reference and distinguish between current and older versions. The manual system we were using to manage this information was not very convenient for our sales staff. Looking up customer requirements became daunting.”

Now, Brown stores all customer specification information in Laserfiche. When staff need to reference a specification, they simply log in to the repository and navigate to the customer’s folder. As customers submit updated specifications, staff use a custom template field to flag existing specifications as obsolete. Thanks to this flag, Brown can easily retain obsolete specifications for historical purposes, without causing confusion as to which set of specifications is current.

Lasley currently has plans to use Laserfiche to manage accounts payable documents, as well as the Word, Excel®, and Visio® files associated with the company’s own ISO 9001 registration. He’d also like to install the Laserfiche Workflow™ module to automate the document routing process. He feels Workflow will prove particularly useful in replacing the manual process that the shop traveler currently follows to collect information about an order—including weights, coil sizes and box dimensions—as it moves through the production process.

No matter how much he expands the system’s use, Lasley knows there’s one thing he won’t have to worry about: staff buy-in. “When we started our initial implementation, several users were not convinced that Laserfiche would bring value to our business,” he says. “We’d been using a manual filing system for years, and new systems can cause feelings of uncertainty.

“After they started using the software, however, these users saw its value,” he continues. “Customer service staff can quickly locate tracking numbers and other information for customers. Production personnel can easily retrieve order-processing instructions, which speeds the order fulfillment process and promotes greater accuracy. And everyone spends less time worrying about lost documents.”

Lasley recommends Laserfiche to other organizations that want to streamline business processes and build stronger long-term relationships with customers. “Laserfiche has definitely helped us increase employee productivity, provide better customer service and distinguish ourselves from the competition,” he says.

“Within our storage area,” recalls Dubon, “you frequently had to move a lot of boxes out of the way to get the one you wanted. If they were overhead, you had to call someone to help you. With boxes that heavy, it would be really easy for someone to get hurt. It was a worker’s comp claim waiting to happen, which would not only mean injury for an employee, but also an unnecessary expense for the department.”

The department’s storage space filled up quickly, so Dubon was forced to rent off-site storage space, an added expense for the department. “Someone would have to carry boxes out and transport them off-site” says Dubon. “Even if I decided to spare an employee’s effort, I’d have to hire a courier, so that was another expense.”

With the goal of freeing up storage space and protecting her staff’s time and health, Dubon began looking at digital document management solutions. She relied on Systems Analyst Nelson Munguia to do some initial investigation. He looked at four products, with an eye toward reducing necessary storage space, minimizing data latency, providing easy retrieval of information and spending funds wisely. “We were looking for something that we could implement without increasing the staff workload and that would give us easy access to the data,” says Munguia.

“I really needed something that would be HIPAA compliant. That was my number-one priority,” adds Dubon, whose staff is required to protect confidential information contained in billing and Explanation of Benefits (EOB) forms.

With the help of reseller American MicroImaging, Inc. (AMI), Munguia narrowed the choices to two. After a Laserfiche® demonstration, Dubon was sold. “We could see how easy it was to use,” she says. “It’s a very user-friendly system.” Dubon made the decision to outsource the scanning of older documents to keep her staff free for day-forward scanning and locating documents using the new system.

Munguia recalls, “It took about two months to complete the installation of the server and scan six months worth of documents.”

Within a week or two of installation, the Laserfiche system was up and running, solving the problem of searching through boxes in the storage space. Instead of hefting bulky boxes to find documents, staff just calls them up on their desktops. “It took a huge headache away from me and my staff. It’s just easy—you can take something like an EOB and e-mail it to someone, or print it and mail it. We’ve eliminated the lag time for each collector.”

Laserfiche also eliminated misplaced files and batches of files. “Nothing is misfiled anymore,” says Dubon. “If we have an issue with something not being in a batch, which happened before we had everything fine-tuned, we resolve it right away. But now I don’t find that anything’s missing.”

Dubon even finds that Laserfiche can save patients some grief. “If a patient calls with a problem—for example, ‘My secondary insurance hasn’t paid’ or ‘I’ve been billed for charges that aren’t mine’—we don’t have to tell the patient that we’ll call them back the way we used to when it took so long to search for files. We can locate the file right from our computers and see the problem. That saves the patient a lot of worry.”

Locating EOBs quickly, whether there’s a mistake or not, saves Dubon from having to hire additional staff. “If I didn’t have Laserfiche, I would have had to hire someone full time to pull all those EOBs. I don’t have to move to pull files anymore. I just move my fingers to access the system and it takes seconds.”

Because the department uses Laserfiche, charges rarely get posted to the wrong account. “That would happen all the time in the past,” recalls Dubon, “and it was a big effort to correct. Now we’re doing more of an electronic interface for charges, moving more toward being paperless, so that’s happening a lot less—and it takes a lot less time to correct. Before installing Laserfiche, it could take up to two hours just to find the invoice. Now it takes seconds.”

Radiology needs to share patient data with other USC departments that also use Laserfiche, particularly demographic and insurance data, but they also need to protect sensitive information. That’s why HIPAA compliance was so important to Dubon. And Laserfiche security features enable her to control access to confidential data.

“AMI helped get everything up-to-date—I could set the access controls so that only authorized people have access to sensitive information,” says Dubon. While other departments use Laserfiche for many reasons—for example, USC also uses Laserfiche to manage clinical data—staff in those other departments may not have the proper clearance to view confidential information. “When we send out files to other departments,” she continues, “we frequently use redaction to block sensitive information, such as charges or the reason a patient came to see the doctor.”

Munguia appreciates the reduced turnaround time between service and payment, as well as the reliable backup that Laserfiche provides. He sees an added benefit as well, noting that timely document delivery no longer stresses out staff. “I notice it every time we get a subpoena for medical records. Localization of documents is no longer a chore. Staff is smiling and they don’t look menacingly at the process servers anymore.”

Munguia first installed Laserfiche in the billing department. Accounting was so impressed by what the software could do that they soon followed suit. That department is now looking into expanding its use beyond auditing to creating accounting reports. Munguia looks forward to adding the administrative staff to the growing list of Laserfiche users.

There’s no doubt that Laserfiche has smoothed operations at USC Radiology. Dubon notices that in addition to sparing the staff heavy lifting and making their jobs easier, it’s also helped the department respond more quickly to patient requests. The installation is so successful, in fact, that AMI uses it as a demonstration model for potential customers.

Says Dubon, “The system is never down, it doesn’t have glitches and whenever something is not scanned properly, we’re able to flag it right away. I am very, very happy with it. It’s probably the best thing that my boss ever allowed me to do.”