On this new Support Site forum, your organization can solicit best practices for configuring your system directly from other Laserfiche SLG users from around the country. IT departments will particularly benefit from the group’s technical discussions and tips. Whether you’ve used Laserfiche for years or are configuring your first system, the User Group welcomes users of all levels.

Don’t wait—check out the group today, get involved and learn how others have optimized their Laserfiche systems!

Note: You must have access to the Laserfiche Support Site to participate in this group. For questions, please contact Lisa Miyake, County Government Strategist.

“The staff was really good in sitting down and critically looking at how they do business with their documents,” Filippi says. “Because of that, they were able to come up with the identifying fields that process 95% of their documents.”

In a series of narrated screen shots, Filippi provides an overview of the process, along with some best-practice advice:

1. Avoid inputting information from the same document at the same time.
2. Use best practices and practical needs to manage metadata.
3. How the Property Transfers Division configured their template.
4. 67 database fields shared across 26 document templates.
5. “People love stamps here.”
6. Processing ‘Claims for Reassessment Exclusion’ forms.
7. Extracting data from the form.
8. Create templates first to help determine fields.
9. How tokens use fields to name documents.
10. Include the document type in its name for future associated use.
11. Can’t find something? Check the folder path.
12. Use Zone OCR to extract data from a specific area of a document.

*****

1. Avoid inputting information from the same document at the same time.

“When you first open Laserfiche Quick Fields, it tells you the recent sessions you already opened based on your log-in ID. If someone is using that session, you can’t open it—which is good because you’re avoiding the cross-scanning, as I call it,” says Filippi. “You might have people trying to input information from the same document at the same time. Some users don’t like it because they say, ‘Well, it cuts down on productivity,’ but you have to think of the bigger picture here: We want to make sure we have accurate document data in our repository. That overrides everything else, so I’m glad Laserfiche considered that in the software’s design too.”

2. Use best practices and practical needs to manage metadata.

“Metadata management is a good source of one-stop shopping for us to identify what we’re using, what we have as far as templates and fields, and where we can cross reference data and information in our document repository,” says Filippi. The Assessor Recorder’s 26 templates below were developed in-house working with department staff to determine their respective best practices and practical needs. “Everything you see is what we’ve created internally going through the processes, testing and then streamlining.”

3. How the Property Transfers Division configured its template.

“Property Transfers has decided to do ‘one-stop shopping,’ so this is their template,” explains Filippi. “All the field names on the left are common to every single document type they use. What’s really important is on the right under ‘required.’ When staff scans these documents through Quick Fields, the only field that needs to be inputted at the time of capture is the document number. Good or bad, that’s how they’ve maximized their efficiency. They’re identifying their best business processes to help them sort and go to these documents.”

4. 67 database fields shared across 26 document templates.

The Assessor Recorder’s Office uses 67 different types of fields to process and index documents—social security numbers, permit numbers, names, notice dates and so on. “Laserfiche has hundreds and hundreds of field capabilities you use to name your documents or manage your repository with,” Filippi says. “Pretty much everything in our repository that is searchable has a field and is listed here.”

5. “People love stamps here.”

In addition to fields and tags, departments use stamps electronically affixed to a document that employees have customized to their needs and preferences. “As you can see, there’s quite a few of these. I’d like to see less,” Filippi laughs, “but people love stamps here.”

6. Processing ‘Claims for Reassessment Exclusion’ forms.

‘Claim for Reassessment Exclusion’ forms are required by Proposition 58, which exempts a property from tax reassessment when it passes between parents and children. On the left, the ‘Page Processing’ list displays the ‘menu’ of adjustments and refinements that will be made to the document. This session, for instance:

• Runs optical character recognition (OCR – see slide 12 below) to capture the assessor’s parcel number.
• Rotates the document upright.
• Removes blank pages.

“You only have to do this once—when Quick Fields identifies this document type, it will process it according to that configuration,” Filippi says. “Laserfiche has given us a lot of options on how to process documents at the time of capture.”

7. Extracting data from the form.

Says Filippi of the ‘Fields’ highlighted on the right, “When the users created this document, they identified that these pieces of information—the year, the document number, the APN and so on—are all critical to identifying, processing and efficiently moving this document through their business processes.”

8. Create templates first to help determine fields.

Before determining fields, Filippi recommends, “The first step is to create a template for a particular document type,” or a ‘blueprint,’ as he calls it. “Then, from those templates, you get an idea of your fields,” he says. “The important thing is to understand the document types first, which are identified by your templates. And then, what fields you need in each of those documents to make them do what you need them to do.”

9. How tokens use fields to name documents.

The specific metadata fields in the ‘Property Transfers’ template will be used to name the document via a token, seen here in the ‘Default document name’ window ‘Fields.’ “When you see the ‘%’ sign, this is an actual script format that Laserfiche recommends to capture what you’re seeing right now. For ‘document number,’ the syntax is ‘%, bracket, field, doc number.’ Every time we run a session, we tell it, ‘capture this information in the document so our people don’t have to key it.’”

10. Include the document type in its name for future associated use.

“When you look up the document, you’ll see that it’s named according to the document number, the year and ‘Proposition 58.’ Now, the reason we do this—and this is just our business process—is to get to a point that whenever you type in a document APN, that eight-digit number will get every associated document that comes up with it, including a Prop 58. Some people say, ‘Why are you putting the name in again?’ Well, that’s why we do it,” says Filippi, adding, “Whatever fields you have, you can include up here. But this Division, in this document type-case, has decided only to put document number, year and the name.”

11. Can’t find something? Check the folder path.

When a file can’t be found, Filippi says check the ‘Properties’ column, a “one-stop shop for diagnosing problems,” as he calls it. “If you can’t find your document when you scan or capture, this ‘Properties’ tab on the right is the first place you should look. Most of the time, the folder path is wrong.”

12. Use Zone OCR to extract data from a specific area of a document.

Zone OCR is what allows ASR to pull data from a specific area of a document type, in this case the assessor’s parcel number (APN). Filippi says there was “some trial and error involved initially” with how big an area to OCR, eventually reducing the zone from the entire document to just the APN. The Department has since reduced its error rate from 20% to about 3%. “So if you know that your critical data is always going to be in one area of a given document, then I would suggest you maximize that ability,” he says. “Our clerical staff doesn’t have to key this information.”

Filippi points to this as another example of how Quick Fields is “really well thought out from a user perspective—you can tell it which pages to OCR. Again, it all depends on how you want it to work to suit your processes in-house. The critical components of the software have been really well thought out. But, you’ve got enough options to really make it your own. And that’s why it’s really been so huge for us here!”

This year, the survey emphasized program integration and practical implementation in its judging approach. Competition in the survey is stiffening as counties incorporate ever more government operations into increasingly sophisticated computer systems, making it ever more important for consolidation and integration, according to Kimberly Samuelson of Laserfiche, a content management software design firm which had 22 customers among the 54 Top Tens.

“It’s the silver lining in this government economic cloud,” Samuelson said. “Sales of our most multi-functional software systems have jumped sharply since the onset of the recession. Communities are being forced to make dramatic cutbacks and finding the only way to survive is by consolidating operations, removing overlap between government agencies and letting the software do the rest.”

Among the many content management software products Laserfiche offers, Avante and Rio are specifically designed to connect all offices within one government into the same document and information management system. These enterprise content management (ECM) systems are in place in the 22 Laserfiche communities named to this year’s Top Ten lists, including Pueblo County, CO, and Nevada County, CA, which ranked No. 1 in two of the four population categories.

Thanks to several counties receiving the same score on the survey’s measures of technology use, the number named to the Top Ten lists in the four categories used was 54, more than any other year. The survey found that letting information and communications technology take over more and more government functions is a top priority for counties surveyed in 2011. It also found that collaboration between county agencies on building these systems and expanding the ICT workforce were a higher priority in 2011 than 2010.

“Across the United States, county governments are using enterprise content management solutions to capture critical savings while increasing service quality,” Samuelson said. “We are very proud that nearly half of this year’s top digital counties use Laserfiche to help them achieve their goals.”

For a full list of winners, visit http://www.digitalcommunities.com/survey/counties/.

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 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 while still offering business units the flexibility to react quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built on top of Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports the Microsoft SQL platform and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

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

Serving four counties and more than 425,000 residents, CDHD implemented Laserfiche to streamline the cumbersome sewage permitting process and give realtors, septic installers and other external clients self-service access to permits over the Web.

“Locating permit information for clients sometimes took hours to accomplish,” said Mike Reno, Supervisor of Land Based Programs at CDHD. “Now, with Laserfiche WebLink, the installers and other external clients can view permits online and print their own copies. Reducing the need to copy and fax permits has saved our staff hundreds of hours.”

Thanks to Laserfiche’s secure and easy public access to permits and more efficient staff response time, IT Manager Margaret Ross reported that CDHD “can concentrate on customer service, not paperwork.”

Other 2010 Run Smarter winners include: 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; 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.

Of his probationers, Eyrick says, “They’re just people who make some bad decisions. I try to focus on their issues and their individual dynamics, while at the same time testing them and making sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

In recognition of his commitment and personal dedication to the job, Eyrick received the 2009 “Order of Augustus,” an annual statewide probation officer award named for John Augustus, the father of probation in America.

But Eyrick’s responsibility extends beyond offering assistance to individual offenders: He’s also tasked with developing and coordinating the direction of the probation department as a whole.

For Eyrick, technology plays an important role in shaping departmental strategy. Under his direction, the department recently rolled out a video conferencing system, which has improved security by keeping inmates in jail during their arraignments. The department has also benefitted from the chief probation officer’s decision to implement Laserfiche content management more than seven years ago.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche,” Eyrick says, “we were storing piles of files that had accumulated over the course of more than twenty years. Organizing everything was a problem, as was finding enough storage room. Laserfiche changed all of that.”

Specific benefits the probation department has realized since implementing Laserfiche include:

• Increased efficiency. Without leaving their desks, employees are now able to instantly locate probationary records within the superbly-organized Laserfiche content repository. Staff members are more productive because they no longer have to waste time searching for client files in cluttered filing rooms.
• Easy integration. Laserfiche provider BOLT Document Management created a useful integration with the probation department’s case management system that allows probation officers instant access to clients’ files while viewing case information in the database.
• Storage savings. Scanning old records into Laserfiche allowed the department to destroy thousands of hardcopy documents and reclaim a large storage room that had been in utter disarray. The Court Clerk, who shares the space, benefits from how neat and organized the room is today.

Eyrick’s success with Laserfiche soon attracted attention outside of his department, and it wasn’t long before Darlene Hale, IT director for the entire county, came calling.

The Tipping Point: From One Department to Many

Charged with delivering the most effective and affordable technology to all LaPorte County offices including the auditor, treasurer, probationer, surveyor, juvenile detention and more, Hale had noticed a few problems with the way content management had been rolled out county-wide. Chief among them was that, in the years before she’d taken the helm, individual departments such as Eyrick’s had been allowed to choose and deploy their own preferred IT systems. As a result, interoperability was lacking, sharing information was difficult and costs were high.

It was time to standardize.

In the course of Hale’s research, she determined that if one of the content management systems already in use could be expanded, the cost of conversion wouldn’t be quite so high. Two systems rose to the top: Laserfiche and Docuware. Ultimately, after talking to Eyrick and his department, comparing features and functionality and considering ROI, Laserfiche won out.

According to Hale, “The biggest thing that sets Laserfiche apart from other content management solutions is the sheer ease of use. The layout is simple and intuitive, so it’s easy for users to pick up, but just as important for IT professionals like me is that it’s also easy to administer. Setting up templates and user licenses, integrating it with other products and external applications: everything is just so easy.”

BOLT helped LaPorte County migrate the content stored in Docuware into Laserfiche by completing the following five steps:

• Examining the document and information structure of the old Docuware repositories.
• Obtaining samples of documents and data from every unique document set.
• Using the samples to determine the logic and structure incorporated in the repositories.
• Creating a unique conversion program for each document set.
• Importing and testing samples from each set in Laserfiche.

Once the testing was successfully completed, the conversion process began—one department at a time.

Each phase of the migration project was carefully defined and scheduled, since departments needed continuous access to stored content even while the process was underway. Employees could look up existing information in Docuware, but to prevent “orphaned” records, staff was not allowed to make any additions or changes. After the process was complete, the converted information was mounted as new volumes to the county’s Laserfiche server. BOLT then installed and configured the Laserfiche client software on department computers and trained each department’s personnel.

Users Love Laserfiche

Although LaPorte County now has centralized control over all of its content (ensuring that information from all departments can easily be shared), Laserfiche grants each department the flexibility to adapt the system to the way they work and manage their files. “Our users love Laserfiche,” Hale explains. “It just has so many more uses and capabilities than what they were using before.”

The county, too, has reaped the benefits of standardizing on Laserfiche. Overhead costs for content management have diminished, and information management throughout county offices has dramatically improved. In addition, all of the advantages that Steve Eyrick’s probation department realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche—increased staff productivity, storage savings and easy integration with mission-critical applications—have now materialized for all of the departments under Hale’s purview.

“Better system, more functionality, lower overhead costs, excellent ROI,” Hale concludes thoughtfully. “What’s not to love?”

Of his probationers, Eyrick says, “They’re just people who make some bad decisions. I try to focus on their issues and their individual dynamics, while at the same time testing them and making sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

In recognition of his commitment and personal dedication to the job, Eyrick received the 2009 “Order of Augustus,” an annual statewide probation officer award named for John Augustus, the father of probation in America.

But Eyrick’s responsibility extends beyond offering assistance to individual offenders: He’s also tasked with developing and coordinating the direction of the probation department as a whole.

For Eyrick, technology plays an important role in shaping departmental strategy. Under his direction, the department recently rolled out a video conferencing system, which has improved security by keeping inmates in jail during their arraignments. The department has also benefited from the chief probation officer’s decision to implement Laserfiche content management more than seven years ago.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche,” Eyrick says, “we were storing piles of files that had accumulated over the course of more than twenty years. Organizing everything was a problem, as was finding enough storage room. Laserfiche changed all of that.”

Specific benefits the probation department has realized since implementing Laserfiche include:

• Increased efficiency. Without leaving their desks, employees are now able to instantly locate probationary records within the superbly-organized Laserfiche content repository. Staff members are more productive because they no longer have to waste time searching for client files in cluttered filing rooms.
• Easy integration. Laserfiche provider BOLT Document Management created a useful integration with the probation department’s case management system that allows probation officers instant access to clients’ files while viewing case information in the database.
• Storage savings. Scanning old records into Laserfiche allowed the department to destroy thousands of hardcopy documents and reclaim a large storage room that had been in utter disarray. The Court Clerk, who shares the space, benefits from how neat and organized the room is today.

Eyrick’s success with Laserfiche soon attracted attention outside of his department, and it wasn’t long before Darlene Hale, IT director for the entire county, came calling.

The Tipping Point: From One Department to Many

Charged with delivering the most effective and affordable technology to all LaPorte County offices including the auditor, treasurer, probationer, surveyor, juvenile detention and more, Hale had noticed a few problems with the way content management had been rolled out county-wide. Chief among them was that, in the years before she’d taken the helm, individual departments such as Eyrick’s had been allowed to choose and deploy their own preferred IT systems. As a result, interoperability was lacking, sharing information was difficult and costs were high.

It was time to standardize.

In the course of Hale’s research, she determined that if one of the content management systems already in use could be expanded, the cost of conversion wouldn’t be quite so high. Two systems rose to the top: Laserfiche and Docuware. Ultimately, after talking to Eyrick and his department, comparing features and functionality and considering ROI, Laserfiche won out.

According to Hale, “The biggest thing that sets Laserfiche apart from other content management solutions is the sheer ease of use. The layout is simple and intuitive, so it’s easy for users to pick up, but just as important for IT professionals like me is that it’s also easy to administer. Setting up templates and user licenses, integrating it with other products and external applications: everything is just so easy.”

BOLT helped LaPorte County migrate the content stored in Docuware into Laserfiche by completing the following five steps:

• Examining the document and information structure of the old Docuware repositories.
• Obtaining samples of documents and data from every unique document set.
• Using the samples to determine the logic and structure incorporated in the repositories.
• Creating a unique conversion program for each document set.
• Importing and testing samples from each set in Laserfiche.

Once the testing was successfully completed, the conversion process began—one department at a time.

Each phase of the migration project was carefully defined and scheduled, since departments needed continuous access to stored content even while the process was underway. Employees were allowed to look up existing information in Docuware, but to prevent “orphaned” records, staff was not allowed to make any additions or changes. After the process was complete, the converted information was mounted as new volumes to the county’s Laserfiche server. BOLT then installed and configured the Laserfiche client software on department computers and trained each department’s personnel.

Users Love Laserfiche

Although LaPorte County now has centralized control over all of its content (ensuring that information from all departments can easily be shared), Laserfiche grants each department the flexibility to adapt the system to the way they work and manage their files. “Our users love Laserfiche,” Hale explains. “It just has so many more uses and capabilities than what they were using before.”

The county, too, has reaped the benefits of standardizing on Laserfiche. Overhead costs for content management have diminished, and information management throughout county offices has dramatically improved. In addition, all of the advantages that Steve Eyrick’s probation department realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche—increased staff productivity, storage savings and easy integration with mission-critical applications—have now materialized for all of the departments under Hale’s purview.

“Better system, more functionality, lower overhead costs, excellent ROI,” Hale concludes thoughtfully. “What’s not to love?”

Behind this success has been the foresight and follow-through of Laserfiche Luminary Dr. Robert J. Sobie, the county’s Information Systems Director. For almost 15 years, Sobie has patiently championed the efficiency of the paperless workplace, department by department, process by process, all the way to the Prosecuting Attorney’s office and beyond.

“Laserfiche came into the county in 1995 as a single-user application to support my IT department,” Sobie recalls. Other departments were hesitant to see the value of scanning, but by 1997 Sobie was able to implement document imaging in the Construction Code Department to establish a digital archive of scanned building permits. By 2000, Sobie found what he needed: an internal Laserfiche champion in Prosecuting Attorney Jeffrey Sauter.

Sauter had a history of advocating increased communications between his office and the courts, and Sobie saw where Laserfiche could do just that. Sobie had already stepped up his own use of Laserfiche by having his administrative assistant scan all incoming mail for him to view online. The viability of this approach to working with documents led to a conversation with Sauter about going digital. “I saw it as more than a way to archive closed case files,” Sobie says. “I thought we could use it for active case files and sharing documents both inter- and intra-agency.”

Establishing a Laserfiche Expert

Sauter was interested – so much so that he wanted to get several scanners, presumably for several employees. But where Sauter had a use for Laserfiche, Sobie had a vision: “I advocated against multiple scanners on the grounds that we could develop an ‘expert’ within his office who would fully learn and understand how Laserfiche could benefit the office, today, and into the future.” Additionally, Sobie recognized that over time, less paper would be produced or submitted to Sauter’s office, thus reducing the need for scanning equipment. Sobie diplomatically met with concerned staffers to assure them this would be the most effective – and sustainable – route to go. “Eventually, Jeff agreed and we implemented a single scanner and began developing the expertise of an administrative staff member, Kimberly Gleason, who presently works in the PA’s office.”

In subsequent meetings with Sauter’s staff, the idea came up to view documents live in the courtrooms, which brought with it a need for wireless network access and laptops.

Sobie extended Laserfiche in the PA’s Office and brought it on-line with five laptops with wireless connections for about $24,000 – but has gotten quite an ROI in return.

“The $24,000 we spent to bring the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office on-line represents the costs to expand the system into the office. Earlier costs were not spread between any offices – just assigned to my IT department. However, the ROI with or without spreading these other costs has been significant,” Sobie says.

• Nine lateral filing cabinets of paper were reduced to one, which holds archived evidence on CDs.
• Office supply costs were cut by 34% - an annual savings of over $35,000.
• The office eliminated a part-time legal assistant position, saving $10,000 annually.
• The office also eliminated a budget request for an additional legal secretary, a savings of $50,000 annually.

The total savings? Over $95,000 annually in staffing and supply costs.

Archiving cases was one thing; relying on laptops for both preparation and court appearances was another. “Jeff experienced some resistance but he methodically promoted this new approach. On occasion, Sobie recalls, Sauter used the phrase, “There will be no old dogs here,” meaning, “Change your attitude and practices or move on.”

“Not everyone learns the same or at the same pace,” Sobie says. “This continues to be a challenge, but it’s unrelated to the easy-to-use Laserfiche interface.”

Working with the Lansing-based Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan (PAAM), Sobie helped Sauter create a system to link cases with PAAM’s online case-tracking systems. Attorney’s progress notes would be saved in the case-tracking system; legal assistants would scan and save any new documents in Laserfiche while linked to the case-tracking record and easily accessed through a keystroke.

After years of success, the more complicated a case becomes, the more Laserfiche makes sense to find, review and distribute documents. One of the early problems encountered after building out the wireless network was a weak connection causing attorneys to temporarily disconnect from the network while working in the court’s law library. The cause, ironically enough: the density of the paper-based books and documents stored in the room.

Sauter has seen many benefits since transforming how case files are established and maintained in his office. One noteworthy benefit is that discovery is now sent so swiftly, using Laserfiche and e-mail, defense attorneys often receive it before they get the actual notice of appointment from the court. In fact, Sauter has seen so many benefits from Laserfiche that he spends time speaking at industry conferences about paperless file management – and even hosts site visits from other prosecutors interested in eliminating their paper case files.

Next, Sobie plans to implement Laserfiche Records Management Edition, and possibly Workflow, to automate, manage and move documents through the County while establishing document retention policies. He’s also working to establish Laserfiche redundancy. “I believe mirroring the Laserfiche environment will significantly improve the process of recovering a document (or folder) that was inadvertently deleted,” he says. “Of course, the new Recycle Bin feature [of Laserfiche 8] helps to mitigate this problem but I also want maximum availability of documents stored in Laserfiche.”

Sobie loves the efficiency Laserfiche brings Eaton County, but when asked his three favorite things about Laserfiche, he doesn’t hesitate in answering.

“First, document and information sharing in a campus-style environment,” he says. “Second, the stability of the core Laserfiche application. And finally, the continuous product development.”

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

The dry-witted comedian Steven Wright once joked, “I’m so far ahead of my time, nobody’s there yet.” Mohave County Records Manager Chuck Chlarson can relate. He saw his two predecessors try without much success to implement an enterprise-wide records management system—despite a state mandate to do so—because of a lack of technical support and user buy-in. But as Chlarson has found, in Mohave County, being the third Records Manager is the ticket to success.

In 1998, the State of Arizona had the forward-thinking idea to get all its counties on the same page with digital records management by creating the position of Records Manager. The first holder of this title in Mohave County was Steve Beller from the County Recorder’s office, who began the search for scanning software to contend with the mountain of paper the county had generated throughout the years.

Chuck Chlarson has served as Mohave County Records Manager since January 2005.

Beller chose Laserfiche for its flexibility and expandability, instead of the standard system the state had mandated for use in all the state’s courts. “Steve saw in Laserfiche all that he thought we needed or could grow into,” Chlarson recalls. “It was a case of ‘buy what you need now and expand when the need arises.’”

But though Beller had succeeded in finding Laserfiche, he hadn’t yet found a reseller that could offer the technical guidance to help the county follow through on its potential. It wasn’t until Beller’s successor Gordon Buchanan became Records Manager that Mohave County began its vital relationship with Laserfiche reseller DocUnited. Under the mentorship of “the girls from DocUnited,” as Chlarson affectionately terms co-owners Marta Hortel and Susan Mosby, the software was installed and plans for county-wide implementation were laid out.

Buchanan visited all the departments of the County to inform them of the install and of the need to begin scanning their permanent documents into the Laserfiche system. But the rest of the county wasn’t as ready to shift their paper filing paradigm to the scanner just yet, and Buchanan ran into resistance in virtually every department. “Gordon approached the departments with a new concept,” Chlarson says. “And at that point, it was just too new.”

By the time Buchanan retired in 2005 and Chlarson became Records Manager, Mohave County had just four scanning stations and seven viewing licenses.

Building from this small but vital start, Chlarson eventually succeeded in bringing Laserfiche to all the county’s departments (except its courts, which were still bound by state law to use its legacy system). “As the third person in the position, I had the value of learning from previous experiences—both good and bad,” he says. “It was a good jumping off point for me to get started dealing with the departments of the County. I was able to demonstrate scanning and how easy retrieval was with Laserfiche’s search functionality. Also, my boss, the Recorder, agreed to fund additional scanning stations and licenses, so we could start expanding our system.

“One of the advantages we found early in our relationship with Laserfiche and DocUnited was the ability to expand our system as needed,” Chlarson continues. “When new departments came on board, it was so simple to add additional scanning stations and more user licenses.”

Again, Chlarson points out how effective the support of “the girls from DocUnited” has been to the county’s success. “Marta and Susan were instrumental in the training and education program that we implemented after we added more users to our system. Their unwavering dedication and desire to drive the 200-plus miles up to Kingman [from Phoenix] was great. Frankly, we probably wouldn’t have gotten as far as we have without them. They are everything a reseller is supposed to be!”

He also found that getting departments to actually buy in to the software itself by getting them fiscally invested in its upkeep ended up encouraging user buy in. “Two years ago, I required each Department pick up their fair share of the maintenance fees, which brought them more into the Laserfiche family,” Chlarson says. “Typically, the county’s budget process is well in advance of the fiscal year, and budgeting new items needs to be addressed very early in that process. Initially, we weren’t knowledgeable enough about this. Our boss, the Recorder, had been paying all the bills for Laserfiche, even as we added new scanners and users. In 2006, I finally got each department to pay their fair share of the bill, and now each is billed separately.”

The inter-departmental ownership encouraged broader use, and, of course, with more use comes more efficiency. Chlarson points to successful automations like the county HR department’s newly-termed records as well as the Medical Examiner’s shift to electronic recordkeeping. It wasn’t until last month’s elections, however, that the benefits of using Laserfiche became apparent. “Our real success was to scan and index all the 5”x8” paper voter registration forms so the Voter Registration Division could verify signatures from their desks rather than going to a storage room and pawing through years of forms hoping to get lucky. And with this last election period, it saved a tremendous amount of time for them.” He hesitates to limit discussion of the benefits realized to the bottom line on a balance sheet. “How do you put a dollar value on convenience? The time the Voter Registration folks saved in not having to finger through thousands of paper cards to just doing a name search on Laserfiche was immeasurable.”

Fueled by Mohave County’s steady but palpable success, Chlarson has become active in the Laserfiche Luminaries program, singing the praises of enterprise-wide electronic records management whenever he can, including at this year’s ARMA conference in Las Vegas.

“I’ve had the opportunity to testify to other counties and organizations about our experience with Laserfiche, and just how completely satisfied we were with the products,” he says. “As I talk with folks interested in scanning, the one thing most people see is the initial expense. I explain to them that all software has a pretty good price tag, but to look at what follow-up can they expect, and upgrades as they are fielded. I also stress the annual maintenance fees and what they include, at least for us.”

In the near future, Mohave County is planning an upgrade to Laserfiche 8.1. “Obviously, Records Management Edition (RME) will allow me to fix retention metadata directly to documents as they are scanned, and have schedules implanted to aid in the destruction of old material,” he offers. “We should be in great shape.”

But Chlarson is definitely looking forward to sharing his county’s success story in a presentation at the Laserfiche Institute Conference, taking place January 12-14 in Los Angeles, CA. “As you can tell, we are certainly pleased with Laserfiche, and not shy about telling people,” he laughs.

Please join us as we congratulate this year’s winners: the City of Lynwood, CA; Thurston County, WA; the City of Okotoks, AB; BC Biomedical; Berger Financial Group; Texas A&M University; Jamestown, NY, Public Schools; and the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

We’d like to thank everyone who submitted nominations for this year’s award—and we’d like to invite you to join us at the Conference January 12-14 in Los Angeles to congratulate this year’s winners.

City Government: City of Lynwood, CA

Lynwood was a city in transition: the community, attorneys and staff wanted things quicker, yet storage space was maxed out. Legal expenses rose, customer service dipped, productivity slowed and documents were misplaced as storage overflowed.

Laserfiche increased internal productivity, while shortening request times by the public for resolutions and agendas. The finance office knows if old bills have been paid by looking up scanned checks, while staff no longer have to make trips to the clerk’s office for copies of resolutions, agendas or agreements.

Staff has decreased actual paper printing: instead of mailing documents to vendors, they just e-mail them, saving on postage. Litigation is now smoother—and less costly—because overtime hours aren’t being spent digging through files during discovery, and the city isn’t paying fines for taking too long to find submit them. Instead of delivering bulging binders for court cases, now they get all the documentation they need on a single CD.

But perhaps the biggest accomplishment of adopting Laserfiche was Lynwood’s ability to win over its not-so-tech-savvy public.

City IT staff used Laserfiche to create a custom interface for the public to access documents called MYDOCSPOT which uses a virtual mascot, Spot, to fetch agendas, resolutions and other documents as a dog might fetch a stick. He’s not the only one wagging his tail; morale’s up amongst city employees and last but not least, the city is intuitively working towards a greener, paperless environment.

Read the full story here.

County Government: Thurston County, WA

The sheriff’s office used to have to transport 14 heavy-duty filing cabinets up and down the elevator to jail to access the civil orders and warrants issued by district and superior court judges to make sure a warrant was still active—a process both cumbersome and dangerous. The elevator broke down frequently and workers would get injured hauling the cabinets.

Prosecuting attorneys and assigned counsel trying cases couldn’t share client folders, while the payroll department would need days, sometimes weeks, to verify length of employment for retirees.

Now civil orders and warrants are scanned into Laserfiche for remote access, so there’s no more hauling file cabinets up and down the elevator and a lot fewer worker’s compensation claims. Attorneys on both sides can pull up their client cases remotely, even in court. And the payroll department can verify retirees’ work history faster, while storage costs are way down and employee morale is way up.

“At first I wasn’t sure if everyone in the county was prepared to use this tool—and boy was I wrong! Now everyone wants it and they want it yesterday,” says IT Consultant Bonnie Hilyard.

Read the full story here.

International Government: City of Okotoks, AB, Canada

Okotoks was a mid-sized but quickly-growing municipality preparing to consolidate staff from three buildings into one new administration building with considerably less storage space. In preparation for this move, and in consideration of a corporate goal to reduce paper, Safety Codes—the town’s building inspection services—embarked on a scanning project at the beginning of 2007.

The challenge of scanning new building and development permit applications that could contain anywhere from two to 297 pages each into Laserfiche became even more challenging once prime building season came around in April. Right away it was obvious that finding permits was a lot easier, and with approximately 3,026 images scanned, Safety Codes saw they were saving on paper supplies with reduced environmental impact.

But the real impact was on time spent looking for documents, as Laserfiche made the documents readily accessible to Safety Code Officers in the field and provided real-time information, enabling the staff to make more accurate decisions.

Now the benefits are rippling out to builders, contractors and residents. Safety Codes staff are now able to e-mail approved documentation back to an applicant as well as receive the initial applications over the Web. The level of automation saves builders time and money because they don’t have to visit the town’s office to drop off or collect documentation, plus they receive an immediate response. Likewise, homeowners can now have instant copies of their permitting and inspection process documentation.

As Laserfiche is a new product to Western Canada, this success has drawn attention from other departments within the Town and also from other Canadian municipalities. Perhaps most enduringly, it’s empowered staff to meet the town’s sustainability and environmental guidelines, as well as streamline its work processes.

Read the full story here.

Healthcare: BC Biomedical – Surrey, BC, Canada

BC Biomedical Laboratories Ltd. is the largest physician-owned and operated lab in British Columbia, with more than 1.8 million patients visiting one of its 43 patient service centers. For 50 years, its medical diagnostic services have been an integral part of the province’s healthcare system.

But its system left room for improvement. Patient requisitions for test results needed to be photocopied and sent out, while phone calls to the Patient Services Center for requisitions were a constant if necessary interruption.

Now with Laserfiche, all requests are scanned in to a central database and requisitions can be made available online. Paper storage costs have been eliminated, the 28 hours of staff time it took each day to either file, re-file, fax or mail documents has been eliminated, and the phone isn’t ringing off the hook anymore with requisitions requests.

Read the full story here.

Financial Services: Berger Financial Group, Inc. – Medicine Lake (Plymouth), MN

As Berger Financial Group, Inc., (BFG) evolved over 30 years from a CPA firm into a full-scale financial services firm, so did the complexity of its files.

Since implementing Laserfiche in 2003, BFG has transformed its daily work processes, fueling the firm’s rapid growth. Instead of digging through file cabinets, its 14-member staff retrieves client information, spreadsheets, e-mails, even phone messages from their computers, while the front desk clerk scans printed mail as it’s received.

Quick Fields automatically processes 8,000 pages of incoming monthly electronic statements into individual well-organized client folders, saving staff hours of sorting. “It’s not just a benefit for us,” says Principal Mark Berger. “Our clients don’t have to fill their basements with old statements, reports and tax documents, because we store all those for them.”

Audits are easier; instant access means staff no longer have to search through file cabinets or off-site storage.

“Increased overall office efficiency and auto-sorting of statements are something all firms can benefit from. Not to mention that Laserfiche has enabled us to grow our practice at a much greater rate than our staff,” says Berger. “We’ve been able to provide a greater number of services for our clients that just wouldn’t have been possible before.”

Read the full story here.

Higher Education: Texas A&M University AgriLife Department and Health Sciences Center

Moving documents scattered throughout a state as big as Texas was cumbersome. And costly, especially if disbursements relied on other documents that had to be sent overnight, or if payments were held up because of a need for additional paperwork. Redundancies in the state-wide filing system abounded and countless workers’ hours were spent matching and filing documents.

Laserfiche allowed for Work-in-Progress folders to be set up in a central repository for the 300 or so units of Texas A&M AgriLife spread out over 86 locations. Disbursements could obtain invoices and other paperwork for quicker processing and payment. How much quicker? What used to take eight days now took just one. The system-wide automation has reduced and in some cases eliminated work hours spent matching documents into single case folders, and all but eliminated the need to print paper records. With the new file sharing comes the peace of mind of enhanced security with assigned users and assigned user groups. If someone leaves a user group, they leave their access rights as well.

When the Texas A&M Health Sciences Center was planning to build its 200-acre new central campus, it wasn’t planning on using space that could house students and labs to house file cabinets. Add to that a system that spanned the state and often required costly overnight delivery of paperwork to its central office, then a need to duplicate and store copies of that paperwork, and Laserfiche was just the cure Project Manager Kristin Nace was looking for.

“We’ve already seen a cost savings by reducing our overnight delivery charges for sending documents, which also translates into a smoother more efficient business process,” she explains. “But our largest unexpected benefit came in realizing how popular Laserfiche has become within our organization.”

Explains Nace, “I’m regularly getting requests from our departments to set up additional folders, processes, or even repositories. I knew people would love the product, I just didn’t expect they would love it this much. In the planning stages I remember wondering what I was going to do if our departments didn’t buy-in to Laserfiche. How was I going to get them to use it? I’m so pleased to say they bought in after the first training class. As a matter of fact, I’ve not had to convince anyone to use it, if anything I cannot keep up with all of their requests to bring more documents into the system. We are excited it has taken off as quickly and easily as it has.”

K-12 Education: Jamestown, NY, Public Schools

The Jamestown City School District’s Human Resources Department began looking at document imaging in 2003 as a way to solve what had become an increasingly varied set of paper management problems for their personnel records, employment applications, Freedom of Information requests, and reports regarding civil rights, unemployment and worker’s compensation.

Employees on different floors had trouble accessing files; multiple users sometimes needed to access a single file, and then would make copies of confidential files, which then were re-filed with the originals creating potentially confidentially problems and extra paperwork taking up extra space.

Once Laserfiche was chosen, personnel records were organized into separate folders with different sub-headings depending on who needed access to them and how confidential they needed to stay, which added a level of security without adding need for more file cabinets. In fact, the city’s HR Director is now so confident in Laserfiche’s abilities, hard copy records are being permanently moved off-site and a new HR and payroll package has been implemented, saving both time and money but also ensuring continuity, effectively disaster-proofing the district’s vital data and its ability to work no matter what.

Then Jamestown really started to discover what Laserfiche could do. The district saved money by not having to hire a third party to scan to scale architectural drawings, schematics and building maintenance manuals. Board of Education meetings became paperless, doing away with the need to produce and distribute hundreds of pages of documents for each board member. Contract negotiations with the seven unions the district deals with are smoother now that Laserfiche can trace the evolution of contract provisions from every contract they’ve worked from in the past 25 years. And Laserfiche’s powerful redaction tool allows Freedom of Information requests to be fulfilled without compromising confidential information directly or indirectly in compliance with the New York State Committee on Open Government.

Read the full story here.

Commercial: The Star Tribune – Minneapolis, MN

The newspaper needed to replace their legacy document imaging system—one with no support or upgrade path—with one that could migrate massive databases from shared servers.

During the migration process more than 25,000 missing files were found. Now, database fields in Oracle and SQL associate a PeopleSoft record with a Laserfiche document. By integrating PeopleSoft, RightFax, Oracle and Laserfiche, the Star Tribune was able to automate workflow.

For example, an expense report entered in PeopleSoft has a bar code, which RightFax sends to a network folder where Laserfiche Quick Agent recognizes the bar code, files the receipt in Laserfiche and then notifies PeopleSoft that the expense can be reimbursed.

What started as an Accounts Payable solution is now being used by Circulation, HR, Asset Management and Interactive Media, with Laserfiche Records Management Edition on deck to manage contracts for the entire company.

That’s the lesson from 2008 Run Smarter Award winner Thurston County, WA. Until implementing Laserfiche in 2007, the rustic county, peppered as it is with forests and Puget Sound waters, was beset with what could best be described as information management logjams.

But in less than two years, Thurston County has evolved its use of Laserfiche from a pilot project handling backlog conversion to the backbone of a department-by-department phenomenon. In short, Thurston County has realized the very essence of what it means to Run Smarter.

The County must have heard other departments’ pleas, because suddenly several departments’ annual IT portfolios had requests for imaging systems. The County’s IT Manager, Brian Ferris, stepped in with the authority from its Information Technology Committee (ITC) and Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), and the search for an enterprise content management (ECM) system was on.

Back in 2006, IT Consultant (and now Laserfiche Administrator) Bonnie Hilyard and appointed imaging committee members were given the task to look at bringing an enterprise content management system into the county for all the departments to use. There was additional urgency because the overflowing records building had already spilled over into a second storage building. “We were looking at possibly needing a third down the road, and we knew we had to stop the insanity,” she recalls.

The imaging committee’s vision for the County’s ECM system was more than simply a virtual storage building. “The system would have to do more than address both our short-term and long-range needs for document imaging. We definitely needed an application that had open architecture, regional support, Web capabilities, document and records management as well as a powerful workflow engine,” she says. “Plus, a huge requirement was the ability to integrate with all of our existing business applications.

The County’s initial goal was to meet current and anticipated business requirements for 10-15 years, promote efficiency of county operations, save the time and costs of filling public record requests, as well as to save storage space. Whatever system they chose would have to allow for decentralized use for all levels of staff through easy desktop access, as well as the ability to integrate primary business applications with the system—all while providing multi-level security features.

What Hilyard and the team were looking for was a solution as enterprise-wise as it was enterprise-wide. Where did she find one?

“The county identified requirements for an Enterprise Imaging system and then released a Request for Proposal based on those requirements. After an extensive review process which included matching the county’s requirements with each proposal and visits to other jurisdictions in Washington and Oregon that used the proposed systems , we determined that Laserfiche was the best choice” Hilyard says.

“One of the biggest moves for us was to be able to certify the system we purchased with the State of Washington State Archives Certification process,” she adds. “This certification would allow us to eventually destroy some of the paper documents that were scanned into the system—a big move for shrinking our storage costs.” This was such a big move, in fact, that Hilyard and her team made sure only records associated with the records retention schedule set by the Secretary of State were added to their system.

Initial implementation was rolled out in three pilot offices: the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (PAO), and Development Services Department (DevSvcs).

The BOCC had ordinances and resolutions dating back to the 1910s, as well as board meeting minutes that staff scanned into Laserfiche. Almost immediately, citizens and staff could search and print out documents themselves, which was a huge time saver for the board’s secretary. Says Hilyard, “Now she scans them in and they are automatically posted to the Web with WebLink. She can then send an e-mail notifying everyone that it’s posted, and she’s done.”

Next, Hilyard’s team is installing Laserfiche in the PAO, mostly due to the office’s sheer amount of paperwork. By law, cases must be kept for at least 20 years, but this retention period can stretch even longer when the appeals process is included. After an outside vendor scanned 3.7 million pages into TIFF files, Hilyard’s team used Quick Fields to automatically import them into file structures organized by year. As the documents were imported, Laserfiche’s OCR engine automatically extracted searchable text, simplifying retrieval. In 2009, Hilyard says, the PAO hopes to be scanning the documents as they come in, but she’s realistic about the process.

“We know that this transition will be hard on some staff, so we’re not going to completely eliminate the ‘safety folders’ at this time,” she says. “We’re hoping the attorneys will see they can use their laptops to locate all the up-to-date paperwork for the case in the court room or office.”

To help the effort, Hilyard’s team designed a folder structure where each case has its own file folder so all subsequent incoming information could be routed to these folders by staff using Snapshot or through Laserfiche Workflow.

“We decided to go this direction because as a case is closed, Workflow will move the active folder to the Records Management module to begin its records retention,” Hilyard says. The PAO has almost finished linking Laserfiche (through an application programmable interface (API) created by VPCI) with their Damion business application.

Next, Development Services Department technical staff and VPCI programmer are working together to create an API for their business application, Amanda, and Laserfiche using Web tools, a project, Hilyard notes, that is now 80% complete.

With pilot projects underway in the first three departments, Hilyard started looking across all departments to see who could benefit from the relatively new system. She admits, though, that for as inevitable and organic as the County’s enterprise-wide adoption of Laserfiche seems now, it wasn’t always easy.

“Implementing such a large scale roll out has been challenging for myself and our Records Manager. Keeping up with the demand for all the scanning requests has also been a big challenge,” notes Hilyard. “It’s amazing now that the cat is out of the bag how many people in the county are knowledgeable about this technology. I hear no negative comments about the implementation, just a lot of thanks.”

Up next is exploring the possibilities of Laserfiche 8, which TC implemented just this month. “I’m hoping that maybe somewhere along the way I can find the time to learn how to use the Toolkit myself so that I can develop API’s internally,” Hilyard muses.

Somehow, she always finds time to sing the praises of Laserfiche to local governments. “I recommend Laserfiche on an ongoing basis. I share all my stories, documents and knowledge whenever I’m asked,” she says.

“It’s nice to have a community in Washington and Oregon State where we all get together and share. You know you’re not alone and if it’s something that can be done, maybe it’s already done and I don’t have to re-invent it.”

“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.”

Working with R&S Integrated, a Laserfiche reseller based in Lakeland, Florida, JWB installed Laserfiche to manage and store accounting and personnel records, as well as documentation related to board meetings. The new system helps staff locate information far more quickly and easily than in the past, as well as reclaim office space previously used to store paper.

As with most Laserfiche installations, staff kept finding innovative ways to use the new system to improve their job performance. But when JWB decided to use Laserfiche to reinvent the way social services agencies apply for board-distributed funds, R&S realized that it wasn’t just dealing with paperwork anymore. Instead, it was helping these agencies evaluate—and improve—the services they provide to disabled people, single mothers and disadvantaged children.

“It’s a great public service for us to help JWB streamline the application process the agencies follow,” says Robert Porter of R&S. “We feel good about helping those agencies—which are dedicated to helping needy families—eliminate time-consuming paperwork.”

JWB feels good about the job Laserfiche is doing, too. File boxes filled with documents, spreadsheets, photos and hand-written notes have been converted into easily-searchable PDF files, which are linked to JWB’s Website via a customized, password-protected intranet connection developed by R&S. Using this technology, the agencies can instantly access and complete numerous checklists and forms online, and can easily attach supporting documentation when needed. Once complete, the forms are archived in Laserfiche.

JWB also uses Laserfiche to manage its library of documents related to each agency’s service mission. Using Web Access™, the agencies can retrieve these documents, as well as add new documents to the library.

Around sixty social services agencies, from the YWCA to Big Brothers Big Sisters, depend on the JWB and its $52 million annual budget to fund their social services initiatives. However, with social services funds in short supply, JWB must ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent wisely, and that’s where one of JWB’s most important innovations comes into play.

JWB’s online Agency Self-Study Efficacy Tool (ASSET) is a collection of nineteen groups of questionnaires, application forms and documentation request forms agencies must complete every three years. “It’s more than an application process,” explains Pat Gehant, JWB’s director of IT. “It’s a process we use to strengthen an agency, in the sense that ASSET allows the agency to learn how effectively it’s doing its job.”

ASSET is a simple name for a complex series of forms agencies must complete to demonstrate the effectiveness of their service delivery. Now that most of the agencies complete this process online, however, it’s become significantly easier. Even for small agencies, the application process was previously quite lengthy and generated boxes of documentation, from spreadsheets and Microsoft^® Word^® files to photos and facsimiles. For larger agencies, such as the YWCA, completing the process took months and generated so much paperwork that hand trucks were necessary to transport it.

All of this paperwork was then hand-delivered to JWB reviewers, who examined files page-by-page to make sure they were complete. To verify the accuracy of the information the agencies provided, the reviewers had to transport the paper files back into the field to check them against the agency’s actual facilities. Because agencies were required to submit up to six copies of each document for different reviewers to examine, JWB provided each agency with $1500 to cover duplication costs.

“The agencies no longer have to make multiple copies of documents, which involved hours—or even days—of photocopying documents and organizing them in binders,” says Gehant. “Then, we’d have to go to the agency’s headquarters and perform a site assessment while carrying around all that paper. We’d literally get aches and pains from doing it. Now, we receive the documents electronically, and we can easily transfer them to CD and hand it to the reviewers. The reviewers take their laptops to the site and have instant access to the documents on their computer screens.”

Pinellas County’s Howard Park consists of 155 acres overlooking the Gulf of Mexico.

ASSET may sound relatively straightforward now that it’s up and running, but it took considerable ingenuity to develop. R&S first used one of its own software products, called OpusDoc^®, to convert scanned images of the ASSET forms into a single, compound document. R&S then applied SmartForms^® technology to the new file to make it easier for agencies to access it online.

The beauty of this system, as R&S’s Porter explains, lies in the fact that different types of documentation are accessible in a single PDF file: “Because Word documents, Excel^® spreadsheets and image files are in the same PDF, agencies no longer have to manage pages and pages of separate forms.”

Ambitious as the integration process may sound, the finished product is an elegant system that has eliminated the hours previously spent filling out forms by hand, copying information from one document to another, making photocopies and transporting documents from one location to another. The project has also provided R&S with a flexible middleware program that can be used again if another client wants to automate collaborative business processes in a similar way.

“Although the project was only half the size of some of the projects we’ve worked on, it was equally challenging, given the systems we had to bring together,” Porter says. “But now that we’ve built it, we can use it in other installations as well.” In fact, Porter believes that the JWB project represents the type of integration that’s becoming increasingly common as clients discover more innovative ways to use their Laserfiche systems.

Pinellas County offers an array of watersport activities.

There are other advantages to using ASSET and the custom programming that supports it, both Gehant and Porter agree. The agencies now have an online application portfolio that other government offices and funding sources can review. For example, the Pinellas County License Board can refer to ASSET when certifying childcare facilities funded by JWB. The agencies can also upload extensive information about their services to the JWB Website for increased exposure. “These charitable agencies can use the JWB Website as their own. It’s a helping hand JWB extends to the agencies, and more and more are taking advantage of it,” Porter notes.

It may seem surprising that agencies praise a system that’s ultimately used to evaluate their performance, yet many do. The YWCA of Tampa Bay, for example, derives a significant amount of its annual budget from JWB funding. Previously, when the YWCA had to complete the application process, staff had to assemble multiple boxes of documents. Thanks to ASSET, those boxes have been replaced by a single CD, making the process far quicker and easier.

“ASSET is a significant improvement over all that paperwork,” says Patti Bacha, the YWCA’s director of human resources and operations. “ASSET helps us make sure we deliver quality service to the people we are supposed to be serving. As a result, JWB is helping people more effectively.”

The Department opted for Laserfiche®-a document imaging software package designed by Compulink Management Center of Long Beach, California-and a high speed Ricoh scanner, all purchased from VP Consulting, Inc., of Eugene, Oregon. Almost immediately after the purchase order was approved, Mother Nature proved it was none too early: the worst rains in decades sent the Willamette River surging over its banks. Raw sewage threatened to back up into the County’s basement records room and the lowest two shelves were in danger of being inundated.

Eight volunteer deputies worked frantically to box up records and carry them upstairs. “Our offices were filled with boxes of paper,” Dane said. “It was hampering our work.”

Later, as the waters receded, the County donated the old jail records to a local museum and changed its rules on retention of all records. “We used to keep everything forever,” said Dane. “Now we follow the state requirements-2 years for misdemeanors, 7 years for felonies, and ‘forever’ only for homicides and unattended deaths.” (According to Dane, Oregon law defines “forever” as 100 years.) They also decided to broaden their implementation of Laserfiche to include current documents and active cases. Said Dane, “Initially, it was just to be for archiving, a replacement for filing cabinets. But as we saw the system demonstrated, we realized how much more we could do and our expectations changed. Imaging is not just a way to archive stuff, it’s also a way to share it!”

Dane reviewed two other systems before settling on Laserfiche. “The first was slick, but it cost $19,000 for each workstation, without any networking, and the proprietary hardware would just be a big paperweight when we weren’t using it. The Laserfiche system uses standard PC’s and our existing Novell network.” The second system was from the vendor of the County’s video booking system. “It was very clunky,” said Dane. “The interface just wasn’t intuitive.”

Finally Dane visited Oregon State University, which had picked Laserfiche in 1993 after a three-year search. “The librarian, Ramesh Krishnamurthy, told me that anybody can sell an imaging system, but Compulink was tops for a solid, stable network imaging system. Rather than conduct our own three-year search, we took his advice and bought Laserfiche.”

After scanning in the current records, the County plans to scan in all incident reports from 1994 and 1995, and then make the system available to the District Attorney, Juvenile Authority, and Roads Department via the County’s WAN (Wide-Area Network). Eventually all 15 County Departments will archive and share their records using Laserfiche. Continued Dane: “We’re even considering making the scanned documents available to the City of Corvallis because they share our network. With Laserfiche, we’ll be sharing files using faxing and our network instead of using photocopying and inter-office mail.”