The County saw its population increase nearly 50%—from nearly 500,000 in 2000 to 725,000 by 2007—straining the county’s infrastructure. As Anderson puts it, “The exponential growth rate of our county is reflected in the increased demand for essential county services.” The governing body of the county, the Commissioners Court, then issued a strategic direction to improve efficiency and customer service. “This caused us to look at an enterprise solution to managing our records with emphasis on migrating to electronic records,” she explains. “We had to reduce our paper and microfilm records volume.”

The county published its RFP in December 2006, and soon after a committee drawn from several county offices (District Clerk, County Clerk, Auditor, Sheriff, Tax Office, Juvenile Probation, Adult Probation, Purchasing, IT and Records) determined that Laserfiche (as bid by reseller MCCi) was the best fit for Collin County.

Anderson notes that she had had county-wide support from the start. “The success of the project is directly attributable to getting these larger user departments involved in both identifying the requirements for the RFP and making the selection,” she says.

Anderson had visited the Laserfiche booth at past ARMA conferences (an active ARMA member, she was a presenter at last year’s conference and is scheduled to present again at this year’s conference, October 15-18 in Orlando, FL). Anderson looked to Laserfiche for three things: its scalability and extensibility; the Laserfiche Toolkit, for integrating Laserfiche with existing and planned software applications; and the Records Management Edition (RME), in order to manage retention for electronic documents.

“RME provides a standard methodology for administering the state mandated retention requirements for all records as well as providing an audit trail for disposition,” Anderson says. “And all of this occurs in the background, so it’s transparent to the user.”

Collin County installed Laserfiche in mid-2007, followed by its first production implementation that November, starting with 100 user licenses and 500 WebLink retrieval licenses just to accommodate cross-departmental use.

The first offices to deploy were the District Clerk, County Clerk (which handles vital records, land recording, and county court at law records), District Attorney, Auditor and Records Department. Because the county was migrating from a legacy system dating from the ‘80s, a massive backlog conversion to Laserfiche was first priority. “Records was actually already scanning for the DA and Auditor, so we switched this to Laserfiche first,” Anderson says.

In the District Clerk’s office, a massive backlog conversion of documents from 1846-2000 into two million images added to the county’s Laserfiche system. “While we eliminated some paper files, we did keep the 1800s paper files for their historical value,” Anderson notes.

When it came to the auditor’s office, the County focused on integration to optimize business processes. “We added a property tax receipts interface with our RT Lawrence receipt processing system,” explains Anderson. Because the tax assessor/collector relied on paper documents, the 10 days it took to process mail resulted in over $1 million lost each day in interest. The county was able to get the assessor’s office up and running by the end of the year to coincide with the heaviest period of property tax receipts.

“Now we process payments much more quickly—up to 10 days faster,” Anderson says. “In fact, we eliminated almost 400 records storage boxes just with this one Laserfiche implementation.”

The County Clerk’s Office also uses RME as the back end for the court’s case management system, where it provides records retention for closed and inactive case files.

Finally, the Justice of the Peace, which manages traffic, truancy, small claims and evictions records, came onboard in June 2008.

With an implementation this extensive, there were understandably some hiccups along the way. “One of the mistakes we made was only purchasing one license each for Quick Fields, Zone OCR and Real-Time Lookup,” Anderson says. But with the approval of the FY2009 budget, the County will be adding Workflow, to be installed when the county upgrades to Laserfiche 8 by the end of the year, as well as additional licenses for ScanConnect, Quick Fields, Zone OCR, and Real-Time Lookup.

The biggest hurdle, however, hasn’t been what modules to use. “I’d say one of our biggest initial challenges was helping departments understand their business processes so we could develop a records series plan tied to record management and retention,” Anderson says. “It’s really an educational process.” Anderson and her team of what she calls “Customer Department Advocates“ employ business plan questionnaires, user guides and demos of successful intra-county implementations, and even help departments choose the right scanners.

These Advocates identify training needs, review business processes, records series structure and templates, and scan sample boxes of files into Laserfiche so departmental staff can see how their records series and template structures will work in the new environment.

As more departments successfully use Laserfiche, even more want to get on board. The Commissioners Court has a planned deployment through September 2009, which includes implementations in IT, the Auditor’s Department, Development Services (permitting and animal control), Human Resources, Sheriff’s Office records, Tax, Motor Vehicle and Purchasing.

“We based our 2009 deployment plan on several factors, including percentage of permanent records maintained for the department, volume of records, distributed accessibility requirements, and overall reduction in paper storage space in the new administration building for the departments moving their this year,” Anderson explains.

The County’s still quantifying ROI from using Laserfiche, but Anderson can point to a windfall of newfound efficiency.

“By using Laserfiche and changing the internal process to take advantage of the system’s new capabilities, the Auditor’s accounts payable office has already identified 300 hours of staff time saved, and reduction in volume of file folders and labels formerly used to place each paper copy of a check and the backup into a separate folder on their departmental shelving,” Anderson says. “The internal audit staff is able to review case files and receipts as part of their auditing process —freeing Auditor-, departmental-, and records staff from pulling paper files for auditors to review.”

Then there’s the peace of mind knowing that Collin County’s doing its part to provide better and more sustainable customer service now and in the future.

“We’re finally getting a handle on our electronic records, even though it’s going to take three to five years to fully implement,” Anderson says. “And we’ve definitely enjoyed faster response time when a customer or citizen requests a file. Even better, multiple users can access the same record from different locations simultaneously.”

Speaking of simultaneous, Anderson says that her biggest obstacle is handling the requests from remaining departments to implement Laserfiche. “The hardest thing I have to do is tell someone, ‘Not yet –can I work with you to make sure your needs are included in next year’s budget?’”

But as Collin County is proving department by department, the results are worth the wait—and the planning time.

Business Processes In this Case Study:

• Accounts payable
• Automated life cycle management
• Back-end records retention
• Backlog conversion
• Business continuity
• Case management
• Internal auditing
• Microfilm conversion
• Property tax processing
• Transparent records management
• Web retrieval