As the second largest deathcare provider in the United States, Stewart Enterprises safeguards contracts pertaining to every aspect of funeral or cemetery services, from memorialization and property purchases to inscription details. In the past, when people passed away, contracts from funeral homes and cemeteries were permanently added to the millions of pages of records in each of the company’s regional storage centers.

Although Stewart Enterprises initially considered implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) solution in 2005, it failed to anticipate that its documents might incur damage. Unfortunately, when Hurricane Katrina struck later that year, the company’s New Orleans Records Management Center was hit and tens of thousands of documents were submerged for over a week.

“The hypothetical doomsday scenario became a reality for our organization,” says Pellegrin. “Unfortunately, we were not as forward-thinking at that time as we are now. Rather than accepting an initial ECM proposal for $175,000, we spent $1.5 million recovering and restoring our documents.”

Setting a Document Standard

Despite the loss, the disaster gave the organization the forward velocity it needed to go digital with Laserfiche ECM. “When implementing a new functional area, as soon as I put the Katrina pictures up, everyone is on board,” says Pellegrin. “When you talk about buy-in, it isn’t a hard sell.”

As a direct result of Hurricane Katrina, the company first digitized the records in its New Orleans Records Management Center. Before implementing ECM enterprise-wide, Pellegrin started discovery by physically walking through various company facilities and taking stock of employee processes, paper piles and organization structure—a preliminary step he recommends for anyone beginning a Laserfiche project.

“The sheer volume of documents involved in digitizing a record center astonished me,” he says. “Walk through a variety of departments and ask yourself, would it would be beneficial to management to see the documents and to have real-time tracking for every step in this process?”

These discoveries allowed Pellegrin to seize the opportunity to standardize records management across the company by upgrading to Laserfiche Rio. He rolled out digital archiving to the company’s other records centers in Miami, Dallas and Orlando, as well as individual facilities and corporate offices in 25 states and Puerto Rico.

Configuring Laserfiche Rio across multiple departments and integrating Laserfiche Quick Fields with the company’s contract number system and reporting systems transformed Stewart Enterprises’ Laserfiche ECM system from a simple disaster recovery plan to a flexible, yet central, point of control.

“We’re not looking at an individual person or process, we’re thinking enterprise-wide,” he says of the company’s IT strategy. “What we have noticed as a result of implementing Laserfiche is not only a more efficient process, but a structured workflow that can be implemented nationwide.”

Centralizing Contracts

Because Stewart Enterprises juggles different regulations on its contracts and facilities for every state in which it operates, Pellegrin sought a standard workflow that could track and store documents in compliance with these regulations while still offering fluid access to documentation when adjusting a client’s file.

Laserfiche Rio allowed the company to greatly restructure the contracts workflow. Using the Laserfiche SDK, Pellegrin configured Laserfiche Quick Fields to draw information between the company’s .NET point-of-sale applications and Laserfiche. This integration, along with standardized scanning methods and better quality control, led to much faster processing:

• 750 field employees now image documentation as .TIFF files onto a national network drive using Canon scanners.
• Laserfiche Import Agent then transfers those documents from the drive into the Laserfiche repository automatically, day and night.
• Laserfiche Quick Fields runs a real-time SQL search against the company’s account receivable contract system based on individual contract number.
• Laserfiche Quick Fields then indexes each document by geographic location, sorts and routes it to separate workflows depending on values identified in the SQL lookup.
• Users across the regional centers and corporate headquarters can route, process and update contracts using Laserfiche Workflow and Laserfiche Snapshot.

Prior to Laserfiche, these records centers contained vaults full of filing cabinets and shelves of manila folders that a contract research team mined during contract retrieval requests. With this system in place across all facilities, the company has already scanned more than 30 million pages from its document centers into Laserfiche’s digital repositories, repurposing filing cabinets into valuable real estate and saving thousands in paper costs. Now the company can scan, monitor and check the quality of its financial transactions, such as deposits, to better ensure compliance with each state’s regulations.

Enterprise-Sized Gains

Unlocking critical contract information from paper forms brought an unprecedented level of enterprise visibility to the company, which Pellegrin lauds as Laserfiche’s main asset. When Laserfiche Workflow creates a permanent record for storage, it also makes the contracts available for real-time access to over 1,000 employees nationwide via a Laserfiche WebLink Web portal.

Now, users ranging from executive vice presidents to customer service representatives can research the contracts and their indexes and status information with the click of the Laserfiche icon on their desktop.

“Giving real-time, simultaneous access to a variety of functional areas and hierarchies brought immediate value and efficiency to our organization,” explains Pellegrin.

For example, read-only access to contracts for the company’s audit department has eliminated travel costs during audits. The audit group may perform a facility audit without the facility knowing about it, right from their own computers.

“Laserfiche has allowed us to not only standardize our processes, but to easily monitor them as well. We now have access to empirical data about employees indicating efficiency, accuracy and completeness on a real-time basis,” notes Pellegrin.

Stewart Enterprises truly leverages the full scale of Laserfiche Rio, using it for everything from conversion and storage of microfilm records to streamlining and enhancing internal audit processes across the entire company.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche, I was virtually in the dark with respect to ECM. I didn’t have the slightest idea of the impact this one system could have throughout the organization. We’re changing the culture of our company in a span of three to six months at each record facility.”

With 500 contracts to manage between 12 businesses spread out over 55 miles, the Corporate Commission of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians upgraded to Laserfiche 8 to automate contract management with Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management (BPM) tool.

According to Lance Dutcher, Systems Engineer for the Corporate Commission, “We did all the training in-house without a consultant, so we were able to implement our contract management system without any outside services or additional costs.”

Lance Dutcher, systems engineer for the Corporate Commission, accepts the Laserfiche Run Smarter Award from Melissa Henley, Laserfiche Marketing Communications Manager.

One of the greatest benefits of using Laserfiche for contract management has been time saved. “Most of our documents are now routed within three days or less,” said Dutcher. “Documents are e-mailed to a single contract administrator, who uses Snapshot to add them into Laserfiche, and the contract is automatically routed for approval.”

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; NE Metro Intermediate Schools; Pulte Mortgage; South Essex Partnership NHS Trust; Spire Investment Partners, LLC; 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.

When two of the 10 departments in ECOM’s Dallas office came to Zandi with what she recognized as a need for an electronic document management system (EDMS) in August of 2009, she saw an opportunity to introduce full-scale ECM/BPM functionality into the company, one familiar process at a time.

“I’d been preaching the importance of using workflow and document imaging, but I didn’t have any business groups with that burning need,” she says. “Then a year ago our tax and real estate departments each came to us with some ideas about streamlining and automation, and we told them, ‘If all your documents were electronic, you could.’”

Hitting the Ground Running—with the Vision to Go the Distance

ECOM had a relationship with Jeff Flory of Dallas-area reseller Datamax Technology Group, who suggested Zandi look into Laserfiche as an ECM solution agile enough to answer ECOM’s pressing needs while also possessing the potential to expand in size and scope. “Laserfiche was easily the most user-friendly solution we looked at, but it was also scalable to meet more and bigger needs as we evolved the system,” Zandi recalls.

ECOM purchased a 25-user pilot system with Audit Trail and the Laserfiche SDK with an eye toward future integrations, expanded deployment and automated business processes —once the immediate document management fires had been put out.

“We had the vision for BPM and automation upfront,” she says. “The important part for me was the Workflow and the scalability. We started with the two departments that were on fire, and we’re capturing that momentum to implement Laserfiche in other departments. The system lends itself to that flexibility.”

First up were HR and Accounting. Zandi explains, “HR saw that it could use Laserfiche for archiving and historical information, while Accounting could jump in with day-forward scanning of active records.”

Operational improvements followed these departmental implementations. For example, “Our Treasury Department has a variety of companies depositing checks and money. Those checks are now automatically scanned, so that when the bank receives checks it no longer copies them—and a notification that the bank has the check is automatically printed in Laserfiche as well,” says Zandi.

Unanimous User Adoption, Magnanimous Enterprise Expansion

Building on this initial success, ECOM is now upgrading from its pilot system to Laserfiche Rio with a goal of standardizing content and business process management worldwide. “Rio makes sense for us because it gives us the flexibility to add servers and licenses incrementally, in whatever way we need to,” Zandi explains.

Currently, the system is being rolled out to more departments in ECOM’s Dallas headquarters—with unanimous adoption. “The familiar interface, being able to save searches, being able to use sticky notes—these are things that helped people catch on right away,” she says.

Zandi is confident that Laserfiche’s ease-of-use is paving the way for bigger and better things for the enterprise by encouraging users to do bigger and better things with their information. “Laserfiche is flexible enough that departments can implement it in a way that mirrors their current system, but once they’re comfortable, they can say, ‘I don’t even need a folder, now I can start thinking about changing my business,’” she says.

That change, she says, will come from implementing business process management (BPM) initiatives using Laserfiche Workflow. To that end:

• ECOM is working with Datamax to integrate Laserfiche with its Navision accounting software to set up distributed approval A/P processing for 10+ departments. Invoices will be automatically updated, then filed according to payment type and date using Workflow.
• The Real Estate Department is planning to integrate Laserfiche with its Timberline accounting system to update contracts and payment histories and file them automatically.
• The HR Department plans to integrate Laserfiche with its ADP system to automatically create and update personnel folders.

The most extensive—and potentially impactful—use of Workflow, however, is in ECOM’s Traffic Department, which is developing 35 workflows with up to 250 different outcomes. “I can’t even get my head around it!” jokes Zandi. She credits the simplicity of the Workflow Designer for lending itself to such an extensive deployment. “Workflow is created graphically—the Designer is essentially drag and drop, so you don’t have to know Fortran to use it.”

With an operational model and foundation in place, Zandi says ECOM is well on its way to standardizing its approach to content management worldwide using Laserfiche Rio. “This is where the scalability of Rio is so, so important,” she explains.

“Once we have integrations with the ERP up and running in our office, we can roll it out to our offices around the world literally overnight,” Zandi says. “We’re developing what has the potential to be the global, centralized ECM/BPM standard for the company’s business processes. Even before we’ve done all our analysis or know where that infrastructure will go and how our repositories will break out, we know Laserfiche has the scalability to do it.”

From its Onamia, MN, headquarters, the Corporate Commission of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians operates Grand Casino Mille Lacs and Grand Casino Hinckley, which includes hotels, convention centers, entertainment venues, a golf course, food and beverage venues, gift shops, an RV park, and a marina. In addition, the Corporate Commission operates an RV and auto shop, gas stations, a movie theater, a Subway franchise, and a wastewater management facility. “We have 12 separate businesses in all, spread out over 55 miles,” says Lance Dutcher, Systems Engineer for the Corporate Commission.

The Problem

A more efficient way was needed to manage the 500 contracts a year that keep these businesses serviced, supplied and staffed, says Dutcher. Each contract requires multiple approvals, which created ample opportunities for bottlenecks—sometimes costly ones. Missing deadlines could result in 10-15% fee increases because a discounted quote would expire, or due to penalties. And there was the potential for service contracts to lapse. “We could have a major piece of equipment go down and find out we had no contract,” Dutcher notes.

By 2008, Grand Casinos identified a need for an automated contract management system with three major requirements:

• Routing documents from outlying properties to the Corporate Commission’s office in a time sensitive manner.
• Tracking documents to enforce deadlines and address bottlenecks.
• Generating a required monthly report summarizing the activity/expiration of contract-related documents.

The Solution

For almost eight years, the Corporate Commission had been using a Laserfiche system with Quick Fields advanced capture to scan HR documents. When Dutcher saw the document routing and tracking capabilities of Laserfiche Workflow at the 2008 Laserfiche Institute Conference in Los Angeles, he realized he already had the enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) tools to build a contract management system using Laserfiche. “I literally went to one Workflow session at the Conference, came back, and started designing workflows,” he says.

Working with solutions consultant Clay Baer of reseller Crabtree Company, Dutcher laid the groundwork for a Laserfiche contract management system by:

• Moving the Laserfiche 7.2 server to a single virtual server running Windows Server 2003 SP2 and SQL 2005.
• Installing Laserfiche Workflow, Web Access, Quick Fields, and Audit Trail on the virtual server.
• Upgrading to Laserfiche 8.0.

Dutcher then worked with a five-member project team drawn from Management, Legal, Training, Purchasing and IT to develop and refine contract workflows over a two-month period. The team worked out routing processes, deadline times and designated the approvers.

While designing that process, Dutcher’s team found it made sense to have a backup person for every approver in the routing process, to keep the process moving efficiently.

Turning Months into Days—Without Incurring Costs

Following a month of designing and programming workflows, Dutcher led three months of trial testing using the IT Department’s own contracts. After training users, the system went live with all 39 departments in 12 businesses.

“Within six months, we had 22 Workflows,” he says. “We did all the training in-house without a consultant, so we were able to implement our contract management system without any outside services or additional costs.” Dutcher notes this is in sharp contrast to stand-alone contract management systems he had researched prior to implementing Laserfiche Workflow. “I looked at half-a-dozen contract management systems and went through all their bullet points, and I couldn’t find anything we needed that we couldn’t build ourselves using Laserfiche.”

Security and viewing is configured using Microsoft Active Directory groups, so only department heads can see their own contracts. Dutcher notes this keeps system administration to a minimum. “There’s actually no administration in Laserfiche.”

As a result of using Laserfiche for contract management, Dutcher says, the Mille Lacs Band has been able to:

• Centralize and standardize management and storage of contracts.
• Provide remote access to location-specific information and documents using Web Access.
• Track all contracts.
• Share documents between businesses and departments.
• Eliminate printing costs and duplication.
• Automate reporting.

The greatest benefit is time. “Most of our documents are now routed within 3 days or less, instead of weeks and in some cases months. We used to have an administrator at each location distribute paper copies for signatures that were faxed—and sometimes re-faxed if they weren’t legible. Now the documents are emailed to a single contract administrator, who uses Snapshot to add them into Laserfiche, and the contract is automatically routed for approval,” Dutcher says. “Upper management can review contracts from anywhere using Web Access. We’ve been able to have 12 people at different properties sign a document in less than 90 minutes.”

User accountability and timeliness has come from being able to track documents using stamps and annotations. “Anyone that has the ability to view the document can track where the document is and how long someone has had it,” Dutcher says. “We don’t need a spreadsheet of where a contract is or to search from office to office because we have automatic reminders to make sure that documents continue to be routed.”

Finally, using an “expiration” metadata field added to all contracts, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services creates monthly reports of contract activity for the company while alerting appropriate department heads of relevant contracts in danger of expiring. “It used to take an administrative assistant a full day to make these reports,” Dutcher notes. “Now, they’re generated automatically.”

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

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

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

The Need: Uniting Content and Contract Management

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

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

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

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

System Integrations “Just a Click Away”

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

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

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

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

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

Creating a Standard for Imaging—and Image-Enablement

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

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

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

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

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

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

When it came time to upgrade to Laserfiche 8, Hummel saw that a consolidation to an enterprise solution made sense to streamline administration, and would allow him to better leverage his own staff to handle future integrations and deployments. Eugene’s long-time reseller VPCI, of course, had an app for that: Laserfiche Rio enterprise content management.

In April 2009, Hummel submitted a memorandum to Eugene’s Central Services Advisory Board outlining a plan to consolidate Eugene’s four Laserfiche systems by moving to Rio. Besides recapping the “high return on investment” Eugene had already enjoyed in the areas of sustainability, efficiency and “new capabilities”—GIS and SharePoint integration among them—as well as asset protection over the last ten years, he outlined the potential benefits of moving to Rio:

• Unlimited Servers and Repositories: With the unlimited servers included in the Rio system, Hummel’s team could easily establish environments for testing and pilot projects.
• Named User Licenses: Instead of limiting mission-critical users like judges and 911 operators with first-come, first-serve concurrent licensing, licenses assigned to individual users would provide constant access.
• Enterprise-Wide Features: Because Rio licenses come fully loaded with a complete suite of applications, features currently used by certain departments—including Workflow, Records Management and the Laserfiche SharePoint integration—would now be available city-wide.
• Unlimited Read-Only Public Connections: Rio’s Public Portal provides unlimited read-only connections through Laserfiche WebLink 8, which would enable the city to meet surges in public demand for information.

Hummel points out that a 100% credit offered by Laserfiche, as well as pooling support costs, not only made the Rio upgrade affordable—only about 10% more of what the four contracts totaled—but it also allowed the city to centralize administration and IT staffing for further deployment and customization.

Leveraging a city-wide telecom tax set up to support three-year IT projects, Hummel was able to secure a funding boost to launch the project, while giving departments a temporary break from their own support costs until 2013. The Board agreed with the plan and the project was funded in summer 2009.

The Rio Reality

“We didn’t really start our Rio deployment until after the 2010 Laserfiche Institute Conference in Los Angeles,” Hummel explains. “We have a large enough IT staff to do a lot of work in-house, so we wanted to learn as much as we could before we got started.”

His strategy’s working; the Rio upgrade will be complete this month. “Rio not only solves our licensing problem, but it also lays the framework for Laserfiche as a common content management platform for everyone across the enterprise,” Hummel adds. “Beyond that, it has the potential to become a real information sharing and collaboration tool.”

The biggest improvement, Hummel says, is centralizing Laserfiche administration and service. “I think we’ve made a more professional IT environment for Laserfiche—which is part of laying the groundwork for future deployment,” he says. “We’re proactive in that we’re able to apply patches and fixes all at once. Where we had functions within departments before, we’re able to cultivate expertise in the right place as far as re-aligning departmental staff into central server administration.”

At the same time, he adds, the Rio centralization has afforded Eugene greater control and oversight of its information assets. “A big benefit is that the whole system is auditable. Because Laserfiche authorization is now controlled by a central administrator, in respect to security roles, we’re able to lock down repositories and folders according to different administrative needs,” Hummel says. “Now, we’re treating Laserfiche like one of our larger information systems such as ERP and database servers that also encompass risk management and compliance.”

And, he says, having a single, standardized ECM system allows staff to be more self-sufficient. “We have a lot of applications with embedded Laserfiche components, so we use the Laserfiche SDK a lot. We’re a .NET shop, so that’s the kind of flexibility that’s important to us,” Hummel says. “Laserfiche offers flexibility and programmability in terms of .NET integration that allows a full-featured IT shop like ours to use the tools we already have to fully customize it for our own applications.”

He points to a recent example. “We built an ASP.net web application for our Planning and Development department for building inspectors that has GIS maps, their routes, etc. All supporting documents are stored in Laserfiche, but the inspectors use the application in their car, and click on a button and the supporting documents come up in WebLink—without them knowing where it came from. All the searching and metadata is behind the scenes. We basically wrote our own client.”

Standardizing Enterprise-Wide

For Hummel, standardization is its own combination of reality and potential. “In government, everything seems to grow in silos, by workgroup and department,” Hummel says. “The ability to easily and seamlessly automate information across organizational boundaries—it’s kind of the holy grail of IT.

“Just having Laserfiche isn’t going to get us there, but our Rio-based architecture—and by that I mean both the placement of servers on our network as well as the way we positioned our repositories to simplify the creation of shared processes—gives us the technical framework that will allow departments to create business processes to cut through silos. That’s a good start,” he adds.

He also points to the promise of Workflow, which will enable his department to easily develop and implement standardized, repeatable processes. “For city-wide applications, we’ll write our own custom user interfaces. We want to use the workflow engine, but we’ll build in interactivity using the ToolKit API and .NET,” he says.

One of these new business processes is city-wide contract management. “Right now, every department keeps its own copies of contracts and its own retention policies, even though everything’s in the City Recorder’s archives. They may not know what’s being kept centrally and if they do, they think it’s a big process to access them,” Hummel says. “One of the things that attracted us to Rio was the idea of transparent records management, so we could make the actual storage transparent and be able to assign access to certain folders according to who needs to get them. That way, we can really increase the transparency of information back to the organization, which will translate into efficiency.”

Hummel points to this efficiency in the evolution—and simplification—of how the Eugene Police Department (EPD) shares reports with the Eugene Municipal Court (MuniCourt). The EPD first used shortcuts to a special distribution folder in Laserfiche, then a custom integration that briefcased police reports to move it into the MuniCourt repository—which still created multiple copies. Now with Rio, EPD staff use a simple “yes/no” MuniCourt template field to give the court read-only access to designated reports in the EPD folder, which are searchable by case number. “We actually had a customization written for the prosecutor [to briefcase reports for MuniCourt]. But since going to Rio, now that they’re sharing common services, we’ve eliminated a ton of custom code and complexity,” Hummel says.

Reaching ROI

Hummel is confident this self-sufficiency will translate into enterprise efficiency, especially staffing-wise. “We’re not talking about using automation to eliminate positions, but we’re looking at using technology to cope with positions we have already lost during the economic downturn, as well as any future staff reductions,” Hummel says. “We want to make sure the level of service doesn’t denigrate. We want to cope with the reduced footprint using automation tools. Laserfiche is one way to do that.”

Besides efficiency, he says, Rio has allowed his staff the freedom and focus to excel as well. “The Information Services Department is 40-plus people, where all six city departments have two to three analysts to determine their application needs,” Hummel explains. “Every department is really its own business. One of the challenges is to serve very specialized departmental needs with a fairly modest staff. Each of member of my team is assigned directly to a department for application support, so professional collaboration among IT staff has always been a challenge.

“Laserfiche has been a unifier,” he adds. “We have a team of Laserfiche IT folks where we can make the most of where the expertise lies to serve all the different departments. It’s made the upgrade possible. We have this collaborative environment that’s made the lines between assignments more fuzzy so hopefully that will be a catalyst for other [IT-driven] endeavors.”

Hummel notes functionality his staff once had to develop themselves is now out-of-the-box. “The last version of WebLink, we basically re-wrote it to be our own version. But WebLink 8 is essentially like the Adobe reader interface, so now we’re ripping out custom code.” That, and the collaborative, catalyzing environment standardizing on the Rio ECM system inspires, is encouraging, he says, both for the success of the Laserfiche consolidation, but in terms of the reality and potential of his own department.

“If you look at companies like Microsoft or Apple, they owe a lot of their success to the way developers are able to build innovative solutions in it,” Hummel says. “It’s not locked down. Like Laserfiche, it’s a broader base of development that encourages more innovation, because users are not just customers, they’re partners.”

• 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.”

“Our approach to technology has always been to be proactive, not reactive,” says Town Clerk Lisa Garcia.

Adopting Records Management

A decade ago, however, the Clerk’s Office just needed a better way to respond to records requests. “It was a very political time and we had more public records requests than we were used to,” Garcia remembers. “Our office would sometimes spend weeks going through ten years of minutes and resolutions by hand, reading each page, just to fill a single public records request.”

Garcia researched document management solutions and selected Laserfiche for its ability to organize scanned documents into a secure, easily searchable repository. The Clerk’s Office was soon answering requests that used to take days—sometimes weeks—almost immediately. Laserfiche became the go-to application for backing up, storing and retrieving copies of the town’s hard records.

In 2007, Garcia noticed an Arizona newspaper was investigating the municipal e-mail accounts of several counties and cities, exposing security and compliance breaches along the way. “We started seeing cases across the state where old e-mails had become a liability,” Garcia explains. She had reason to be concerned: All ten of Florence’s departments kept their correspondence and records in Outlook as e-mails.

Garcia saw the value of adopting a formal records management policy for e-mail correspondence and spurred a town-wide “E-mail Project” to initiate the purchase of the Laserfiche Records Management module. Garcia and her team worked with Linda Russell and Susan Mosby from reseller Doc United to set up records management in the town’s existing Laserfiche system, as well as create retention schedules to fit the town’s needs.

Data Governance: Making Information Useful

With data governance, data stewards like Garcia ensure that important data assets are formally managed throughout the enterprise. It doesn’t just ensure that the enterprise can become more efficient, but relates to an entirely new way of thinking about information. Technology can help in the process, but isn’t the entirety of the process, as data governance consists of four components: people, process, technology and risk management. But what’s clear, says Garcia, is that “Laserfiche is the foundation of all of it.”

To get the process underway, Garcia and the Clerk’s Office team began by setting up an E-mail Project Records Committee of stakeholders, including departmental managers, to ensure that the town’s Laserfiche records management system met enterprise needs. “We knew that the information in Laserfiche had to be useful to everyone,” she says, “so we made sure that everyone was involved from the beginning. That way we could make sure everyone’s needs were met.”

Ironically, that meant that Garcia herself had to look at what would make everyone as comfortable using Laserfiche as she was. “It took a lot of trial and error to craft a records management plan that was flexible,” she admits. “As the Town Clerk, I knew the code pursuant to the state’s record series and schedule. But Laurie Capek, our administrative assistant, actually pointed out that when she would look things up, she would go beyond the code and find a keyword,” Garcia explains. Accordingly, the town came up with its own system—“PW” for Public Works, “FIN” for Finance, etc. —that everyone could recognize and use. In fact, notes Capek, “This system sets up a level of transparency, even amongst ourselves.”

Under the town’s new records management plan, e-mails would only be kept for 90 days. Town staff then makes a determination based on training by the Clerk’s Office and the State Records Retention Manual if the document is required to be saved. Then, it’s simply moved into Laserfiche, where state-mandated retention schedules are applied.

The integration between Laserfiche and Outlook, where e-mails can be sent directly to the Laserfiche repository from Outlook and metadata can be auto-populated for imported Outlook e-mails, has been instrumental to the system’s effectiveness as a data governance and risk management tool. “My favorite thing about Laserfiche is its integration with Microsoft Outlook,” says IT Technician David Blincoe. “The attributes are easy to setup on an enterprise basis and the e-mail template can be used to easily save the metadata from each e-mail.”

Garcia says users like that this personalization means that they don’t have to change the way they’re used to working in Outlook. “The best thing about this is that, even from within Laserfiche, the document opens as an Outlook document; people can even send e-mails and they’re automatically saved in Laserfiche,” Garcia says. “The e-mail is now filed and stored with all the accessibility, functionality and ease of use that Laserfiche provides.”

The system has also proven itself easy to use, for users and IT alike. When a user deletes a document, it goes to the Recycle Bin, where Blincoe and Garcia can review it before deleting it permanently. If there are any questions or missing documents, Blincoe uses Audit Trail to track them down.

Ultimately, Blincoe is impressed with how easy Laserfiche is to administer. “Lisa and her staff really haven’t needed too much technical assistance,” he says.

The Avante Advantage

This year, Florence is implementing a Laserfiche Avante ECM/BPM solution, which will eventually equip each user with their own Laserfiche account, just as they already have their own Outlook e-mail account.

Garcia says she is looking forward to deploying Workflow business process management—included in the town’s new Avante system—to further automate contract management. “We’re already using Laserfiche to run reports to tell us when a contract is up for renewal,” she explains. “Now we’ll be able to have automatic e-mail notification when a contract is available.”

But even now, the benefits of using Laserfiche are many: Town-wide adoption of Laserfiche for records management ensures both compliance and transparency while it saves the Clerk’s Office staff time and resources. Across departments, paperwork has been reduced while continuity of operations is ensured. But really, Garcia, says, the lasting impact of Laserfiche is that the town has found a new and better way to work. The Planning Department, for instance, has already moved its files to Laserfiche. This saves storage costs, but also gives staff the ability to do their own research. “It’s a big deal to be able to just click on a contract from your desktop to see it, as opposed to how it used to be – submitting an internal request to us and having a five-day turnaround time while you waited for the hard copy,” Garcia says.

“Knowledge is power and we provide everyone with the same power. Better still, says Garcia, “We’re truly doing more with less. The Clerk’s Office has not had to hire more staff, and we’re providing tools so people can do their jobs better.”

Garcia says other smaller municipalities can learn from Florence’s example. “We would have loved to be the community that could go out and buy everything in one shot, but we started slow and showed the users what benefits they would receive through using Laserfiche and built on that foundation. Now both administration and elected officials feel confident investing in Laserfiche because our Clerk’s Office has such a proven track record,” she offers.

And Garcia and staff in Florence are always looking for new things to do with Laserfiche, even without a formal monitoring and evaluation plan. “We know what we’ve done so far, but we’re always looking at what else we can do, especially now that we have Workflow and we can begin automating more and more business processes,” Garcia says.

“Our motto is ‘Love Laserfiche.’ We want to make it so easy and convenient that people are so enthusiastic that they come to us with their ideas for how they can use it. That’s what our long term goal is—to have everyone as in love with Laserfiche as we are.”

But the rapid growth of its renewable energy division in the last few years led to challenges managing its documents and records. “With each new energy project, we were increasing the number of relationships with private land owners, commercial suppliers, and government agencies,” explains Sean Malowney, a Senior Business Systems Analyst at the company. “This translated into a growing volume of invoices and contracts.”

Malowney led the company’s search for a robust but equally secure document and records management solution, one that would fulfill—indeed, reconcile—the company’s need for central, secured control over its records and documents, but still allow staff and administrators the local flexibility to be able to manage, automate and use them in their processes. The system would have to scan and store information according to the specific retention schedules and regulatory requirements endemic to an energy company. But to be used efficiently, it would also have to align with existing with line-of-business applications to complement how staff were already working. Malowney made a list of system requirements: work seamlessly with terminal services, offer Web-based client access, allow for writing custom workflow activities, accommodate an extensible SQL database and integrate with Microsoft® Windows® Active Directory security.

Malowney and his team chose Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME) for its transparent, DoD 5015.2-certified records management platform, as well as Laserfiche Workflow for its .NET 3.0 framework, one that would enable seamless integration with the company’s existing line-of-business applications. “The DoD 5015.2 certification really underscored the records management credentials of the product,” says Malowney. “We felt confident that we would not encounter limitations in the software after implementation.” Plus, he adds, “Laserfiche not only satisfied our requirements, but was priced at a significant discount to the other solutions we looked at.”

Implementation capitalized on the automated capture capabilities of the Laserfiche Quick Fields module for scanning invoices. “Our deployment strategy has been to convert the most structured departments, like Accounts Payable, first, going for quick wins with extremely high ROI,” Malowney explains. Now, when new invoices enter the system, e-mail notifications are automatically sent to the responsible parties for review. These notifications contain a summary of the metadata and a link back to the document via the Laserfiche Web Access module for approval.

Likewise, automating the life cycle of contracts is now both more transparent and secure. “We’re not limited to filing legal documents just alphabetically anymore,” Malowney explains. “We can use dozens of metadata fields, which allows grouping by counterparty, contract type, effective date, status, and so on, depending on who and how the information needs to be retrieved and used.” Standard SQL server reporting generates a monthly “contracts calendar” highlighting agreements that are about to expire. Additionally, Laserfiche’s integration with Active Directory enables the company’s helpdesk to make consistent—and precise—security decisions using the same tools that manage the rest of the organization.

“We seem to come up with new and clever uses for the software all the time,” says Malowney. “Now we have five departments managing records in Laserfiche, and this has made information much more accessible within the organization.”

Now Malowney is in the process of automating Iberdrola Renewables’ records management using Laserfiche RME’s full capabilities, with plans to bring the company’s audited systems into Laserfiche for regulatory compliance by year’s end. As the company’s website puts it, “Structure yields flexibility,” and Laserfiche RME has given Iberdrola Renewables a powerful balance of both.