These days, however, an officer responding to the same call can pull up reports right in their patrol car, accessing information vital to the safety of the EDP – and the public – using just a name, incident number or other simple keyword.

It’s this kind of progressive approach to information and process management that’s transformed the Hamilton Police Service from a command-and-control police model to a community-based-and-problem-solving service over the last decade. As HPS Records Supervisor Gary Holden puts it, “Laserfiche has allowed us to spend more time in the community and less time travelling back and forth to the station.”

But this progressive approach had to begin somewhere, and it started in 2000 when IT Manager Ross Memmlo began investigating document management to alleviate storage costs and repurpose valuable office space. Franz Gangl of Laserfiche reseller IKON Office Solutions demonstrated Laserfiche’s information management capabilities for Memmolo, IT Administrator Diana Scime, Shari Moore and Holden.

Holden says they chose Laserfiche based on four criteria:

• Business Functionality: “It needed to be really user-friendly, no matter how comfortable staff were with computers. Our reseller showed us an example of an agency about our size using a system similar in size and capacity to our proposal.”
• System Architecture: “The flexibility and expandability to allow for future development and integration was important.”
• Organization/Support Training: “We knew whenever we had a question, all we had to do was make that call to the 1-800 number.”
• Project Schedule: “According to our funding cycler, the system needed to be up and running by year’s end.”

Working with IKON, Memmlo planned a phased implementation that would begin with current reports, advance to backlog conversion, and finally establish Web access for officers and staff. Phase I began in fall 2002, scanning current incident reports and Motor Vehicle Collision (MVC) reports.

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In early 2002, the implementation team developed “banner pages” to enable Quick Fields to index various reports, which helped with a massive backlog conversion project that would eventually add 860,000 images to the system. “We were able to scan anything and everything – photographs, willsays, handwritten notes – into folders,” says Holden. By 2004, the Laserfiche repository held over 300,000 active and historical incident reports, DNA records, MVC reports, pardon files and sudden death reports.

“One challenge we faced was reworking our existing paper processes,” explains Holden. “Many of our serious offences needed to be disseminated to many different officers and divisions. The new process had to ensure the report was coded according to Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, then scanned, entered on the Canadian Police Information Center (CPIC) system and reassigned for further investigation. The process changed how our Records Business Centre handled the reports.” To remedy the situation, Holden created a color-coded folder system staff use to process reports prior to scanning.

Quick Fields’ automated indexing also helped Holden to standardize the record keeping process, which, along with Laserfiche’s fuzzy search capabilities, has almost completely eradicated misfiling. “If a report is improperly indexed, we simply run a search to locate it within the database,” explains Holden.

This search capability has become especially empowering to police officers. “Optical Character Recognition (OCR) allows the front-line officer to glean valuable information from reports that wasn’t possible in the past,” Holden says.

“If an officer wants to know more about a rash of Breaking & Enterings where all he knows is a red pick-up that has a unique decal on the side door was involved, he can use Laserfiche search to look up other reports,” he adds. “We can’t possibly index every piece of information within a police report, but OCR and fuzzy search addresses that problem, making it a valuable investigative tool.”

It has become even more valuable since Hamilton deployed Laserfiche WebLink in 2004. Police Chief Brian Mullan, responding to a need for heightened police presence, realized he didn’t necessarily need to hire more officers if officers spent less time looking for paperwork. Holden explains. “With Internet access to the Laserfiche repository, officers can view police reports on their MDT [mobile data terminal],” he says. “It’s effectively made our cruisers an extension of our Records Management System (RMS). They can search five historical reports right away without linking.”

Adds Holden, “The ability to view active missing person photos or photographs of lost or stolen property is critical when locating a missing youth on the street or locating previously stolen property.”

For 2009-2010, the HPS Laserfiche team plans to expand Laserfiche to Hamilton’s Human Resources and Legal departments, but not before answering concerns about employee confidentiality and security rights.

For support, Holden looked to the Laserfiche Police User Groups he’s been attending for three years. “I knew York Police Service used Laserfiche in its HR department, so I thought, ‘Why re-invent the wheel?’ I asked them about their implementation and training process and what worked.” Based on what he learned, Holden formulated his own strategy, highlighting the ability to assign multi-layer security to employee records in transit, the ability for assigned HR staff to view documents from their desktop, as well as reducing paper files and better controlling retention.

The three patrol divisions in the City of Hamilton.

“We have three separate divisions. Laserfiche will allow yearly performance reviews to be shipped electronically between offices,” he explains. “It’s easy to understand Laserfiche as a simple storage repository, but you can move things around so you’re actually managing active records. The security capabilities of Laserfiche were a huge benefit for me to ensure confidentiality during this process, because I could assign rights that allowed a user to browse a report but not open it. They’d be directed to see the proper authority to obtain a copy of the report where necessary, which facilitated our disclosure processes.”

The ability to redact sensitive information was also key to the Records Business Center’s ability to process disclosures to the Courts and outside agencies. “The redaction ability of Laserfiche is by far, one the greatest assets to address these needs,” Holden says. “We used to copy our reports—twice—then black out the information and then copy the vetted version again. Redacting in Laserfiche saved us a fortune in paper and time. We also use stamping and sticky note annotations to address disclosure/non-disclosure issues and verification/validation processes of ongoing police investigations.”

It wasn’t until Holden could show that Laserfiche Audit Trail would ensure the integrity of legal documents that the Crown [District] Attorney signed on. “I had meetings with the Crown Attorney to ensure them there were no legal issues producing these documents as evidence in court,” Holden remembers. “We discussed the quality of the images and how we’d be using Audit Trail to confirm when a document was scanned or modified. We were ultimately able to scan in every document—except for witness statements, which they requested to remain in their original paper form.”

Ultimately, the Hamilton Police Service has realized a significant amount of savings by using Laserfiche to refine its business processes:

• $200,000 saved annually, due to downsizing 4 civilian staff in the Records Business Centre, as officers are able to access vital information directly.
• Officers spend more time in the community because they no longer need to attend Central Station to view reports.
• Clerks save time, because they no longer need to locate reports and read them to officers over the phone.
• Valuable floor space has been reclaimed from paper storage.
• Redacting documents in Laserfiche saves “a fortune in paper and time,” as Holden puts it, helping staff more easily meet file requests from the Courts and outside agencies.

• Spring 2002: The Project Team chooses Laserfiche.
• Fall 2002: Phase I begins. Staff start scanning in current incident reports and Motor Vehicle Collision (MVC) reports.
• 2003: Indexing is automated with Quick Fields. Backlog conversion of historical occurrence reports (860,000 images) takes 30 weeks.
• 2004: Phase I is successfully finished, with over 300,000 records and reports scanned into the system. Phase II begins. When it is finished, every officer and designated civilian will have direct access to Laserfiche through the Internet.
• 2009: Web access expands Laserfiche access to 120 additional users, including officers in their patrol cars.
• 2010: The Police Laserfiche Team plans to expand use to Human Resources and Legal Services departments.

Thanks to Prosecuting Attorney G. Byron Overton, they’re getting it. Overton and his staff are working with Laserfiche reseller Nancy Mathes of Paper-Lite to scan and store files electronically in Laserfiche. “We’re not going paperless,” Overton says. “We’re going file-less.”

Daviess County’s move to paperless file management began when Overton attended the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA) annual conference, where he heard Laserfiche Luminary Jeff Sauter speak about his paperless prosecutor’s office in Eaton County, MI. Sauter, a well-known speaker at industry events, is known to host on-site visits from other prosecutors interested in his Laserfiche paperless file management system.

“I talk about Laserfiche whenever I can,” Sauter says. “When I present at continuing education events, I show screenshots of our Laserfiche repository and explain our various work processes. I also like to show photos of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ in our office. Instead of six file cabinets, we now only need a single drawer – and it doesn’t even hold paper! We use it to hold evidence CDs. The fact that we haven’t lost a single file in over three years is earth-shattering to other prosecutors.”

At the event Overton attended, Sauter asked attendees to guess how much time prosecutors’ staff spent working with case files. According to Overton, he and other attendees guessed 25 to 30 percent of their workdays. Sauter replied if they actually asked staff, they’d find it was likely closer to 50 percent.

Once Overton thought about it, he realized Sauter was right. “When we need older files, our administrative assistants have to physically retrieve them,” Overton says. “Somebody has to trek down there, find the file, get the file out and bring it back down here. It takes a lot of time, and it happens weekly.”

After Sauter’s presentation, Overton chose a Laserfiche Avante system for the prosecutor’s office. Although he knew it would take time to get up and running, he had confidence the payoff would be worth it. “We’re just running out of room,” he says. “Laserfiche is going to save us time, and eventually, save us money.”

Staff agree. “There’s no more looking for files,” says Chief Deputy Prosecutor Dan Murrie. “Everyone can work on the same file at the same time.”

The prosecutor’s office has six administrative assistants, each of whom has a Fujitsu fi-6130 scanner at their desk and scan documents into Laserfiche as they arrive. Mathes also worked with staff to create an electronic work process in Laserfiche that mirrors what they were used to doing with paper case files. The child-support side of the prosecutor’s office, with one attorney and four administrative assistants, is following the same process as the criminal side, as is civil cases.

When a case file arrives, staff create a standard document in Microsoft Word that lists necessary information such as the defendant’s name, case number and any other pertinent information. Using Laserfiche’s “Send To” feature, the Word document is sent to Laserfiche and a case file in Laserfiche is dynamically created. The case number and defendant’s information is automatically filled in the file’s template fields, and the template is attached to the original Word document. Staff then open the folder in Laserfiche and scan and enter all case documentation by document type, where a drop down list of document types speeds data entry. And at the end of the day, all scanned documents are full-text indexed for instant search and retrieval.

This system is just as easy for attorneys to navigate as it is for support staff. Attorneys are able to open the Word document and update their notes, just like they used to write on the front of a file folder—except instead of searching around the office for a file folder, they access documents right from their desktop computers. When they’re done entering notes, they simply close the Word document and their changes are automatically added to the case file stored in Laserfiche.

To guarantee disaster recovery, files are backed up twice at the courthouse and a third time off-site. “Even in the highly unlikely event all three back-ups fail, our files are largely made up of other agencies’ files, so we could reconstruct them if we needed to,” Overton says. And the original documents needed for trial exhibits—such as blood alcohol test results, documents from other counties and states and other supporting evidence—fit in one filing cabinet.

“It’s definitely a work in progress, but it’s one of those things where you have to realize that the problem didn’t occur overnight, and the solution won’t either,” says Mathes. “Byron and his staff have been great, hanging in there and sticking with it, knowing that the end result will be worth the effort.

“You can’t pick a perfect time to get started, you just have to get started,” she adds. “There’s no perfect conditions. With this office, they were just out of room, and that’s why they had to get started. But they have confidence that it will ultimately be successful, and it will pay off in greater efficiency.”

While the prosecutor’s office is still in the midst of deploying their Laserfiche solution, they still haven’t neglected to plan for the future. Overton says the attorneys in his office will eventually get laptops with “access to all files all the time.” And once the office is ready to implement the integrated business process management functionality that is included with the Avante system, Mathes will write a workflow rule that enables attorneys to automatically send necessary filing instructions and/or case files to support staff for additional processing. “We designed the template to enable Workflow automation in the future,” she says. “We were able to sit down, plan our implementation and do what we needed up front to make things easier as we move ahead.”

Once the office finishes scanning this year’s files, they plan to start on older files in storage, a process that will likely be handled by interns. “It’s a never-ending process,” Overton says. “We need more room. The courthouse has limited space. Everybody needs more room.”

And while Overton knows his office’s Laserfiche deployment is still unfolding, he has faith in its eventual outcome. “The conversion phase is in process,” he says. “It’s a difficult process, but it will ultimately prove to be worthwhile.”