Outagamie County, WI, has a tradition of innovation. Appleton, its county seat, is home to Hearthstone, the very first home in the United States to be powered solely by Thomas Edison’s hydroelectric technology and light bulbs, way back in 1882. Now, almost 130 years later, that innovative spirit can be seen in the county’s deployment of Laserfiche agile enterprise content management (ECM) to expand and enhance information services in several departments.
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In a year marked with more bank failures than we’ve seen since the height of the savings-and-loan crisis, D.L. Evans Bank, a family-owned institution with 22 branches, 320 employees and $875 million in managed assets, has cause to celebrate. Its ten-year use of Laserfiche has netted the 105-year-old, Idaho-based bank a wealth of dividends, including:

• Faster audits.
• Streamlined lending.
• Improved business continuity planning.
• More efficient processes for opening new accounts.
• A 33% reduction in hard copy document production and an 85% reduction in paper storage.

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There’s little in life that’s more elemental than water. And yet, in most developed countries, it’s easy to take access to safe water and sanitation for granted.

Prior to the creation of the Central Contra Costa Sanitary District (CCCSD) in 1946, however, Contra Costa County—located east of San Francisco, CA—was in crisis. A post-war building boom had brought an influx of new residents, most of them relying on septic systems that didn’t take well to the area’s heavy adobe clay soil. With septic tanks overflowing and waterborne diseases such as typhoid becoming a potential threat, health authorities considered the polluted conditions in the county to be among the worst in California.

As a result, the CCCSD was formed as a special district, a sewer system and treatment plants were put in place, and the public received much-needed access to safe water and sanitation.
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The Clay County Utility Authority is an independent special district, created by special legislation in Chapter 94-491 of the Florida statutes, that services the water, wastewater, and reclaimed water needs of its service area in Clay County, Florida. “Being a governmental entity, CCUA obtains its revenues from its ratepayers, not from taxpayers,” explains Dave Howell, Records Management Administrator. And when people don’t use as much water – say, in the case of the recent economic slowdown and the resulting lull in home building and new service requests – CCUA acts like any other business: It watches spending and looks for ways to cut costs. Howell says Laserfiche has given him the administrative control to be flexible enough to not only manage CCUA’s exponential paperwork growth, but to monitor productivity, ensure compliance and implement a disaster recovery plan. As a result of this streamlining, efficiency and oversight, CCUA has been able to not only solve its document management issues, Howell says, but has also been able to cross-train existing staff to run more efficiently.
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The Daviess County, IN, prosecutor’s office, located in the basement of the county courthouse, isn’t the biggest office to start with. But with files stacked from the floor to the ceiling, it was clear that the office, home to three prosecuting attorneys, desperately needed more room.

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.”
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Minnesota. It’s not called the land of ten thousand lakes for nothing. This aqueous state needs a total of 45 watershed districts to manage water quality and to regulate any land development projects near bodies of water.

In Minnesota, watershed districts are local, special-purpose units of government that work to solve and prevent water-related problems. The boundaries of each district follow those of a natural watershed and consist of land in which all water flows to one outlet, and districts are usually named after that watershed. They range in size from the Carnelian-Marine District with 43 square miles, to the Red Lake Watershed District with 5990 square miles.
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IT Systems Analyst Gary Agira

If Gary Agira’s story were a movie, the story would include the Ugandan IT Systems Analyst navigating government bureaucracy, stubborn workers, and perhaps most dramatically, a national registry and warehouse overflowing with 34 million government documents—to bring them all into the digital world. It’d be a charmingly idiosyncratic story, but still a universal one: document management as a metaphor for progress, with Agira’s unwavering belief in the power of technology as he moves a nation and a workforce into the digital age.

But this isn’t a movie, and the real Gary Agira is the IT Systems Analyst for Uganda’s Privatization & Utility Sector Reform Project (PUSRP). The PUSRP is the department of the Ministry of Finance and Planning charged with the epic task of overhauling the way the African nation archives, stores and perhaps most profoundly of all, actually works with records to support the divestiture and reform of 42 public enterprises. It’s all part of an initiative to move Uganda’s economy forward.
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Charlottesville, VA is consistently voted one of America’s best cities to live, marked as it is by its deep history (birthplace of three U.S. presidents) and its college-town charm (home to the University of Virginia). But when it came to records management, Charlottesville’s paper history held little charm for the city staff left dealing with its outdated and overgrown filing system.

“Life before Laserfiche was full of frustration,” remembers Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue and Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.
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Since its incorporation in 1921, the city of Lynwood, CA, has endeavored to build a safe, self-reliant and pride-filled community that welcomes citizens and businesses alike. But while this goal hasn’t changed much in the past 80-plus years, the demands of residents and city staff have. With a Laserfiche document management system at the heart of its technology strategy, however, Lynwood is positioned to meet the needs of its more than 73,000 residents, and to continue on its path of forward progress. Full story »

Located at the southern shores of Chautauqua Lake, Jamestown, NY, is the largest city in picturesque Chautauqua County. The Jamestown Public Schools serve approximately 5,000 students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade at six neighborhood elementary schools, three middle schools and one comprehensive high school.

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

For financial advisors at Bond and Devick Financial Network, over twenty years of industry experience had given them a heightened awareness of the problems of a paper-based filing system. File cabinets took up almost 50 square feet of office space, and staff wasted time and money making multiple copies of the same document so advisors could have simultaneous access to information.

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

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When designing a disaster recovery strategy, business owners usually plan for blackouts, natural disasters, server failure and theft. But there are some catastrophes—such as an arsonist attempting to burn down the office building—that probably don’t immediately spring to mind. MultiMed, an industry-leading emergency medical services billing company located in Baldwinsville, NY, was faced with such a threat in August 2007 when a three-alarm fire nearly engulfed their office complex. Fortunately, MultiMed had taken the right disaster preparedness measures, building a Laserfiche-powered recovery plan to ensure business continuity, come what may.

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Cedar Rapids, Iowa – June 25, 2008 – When severe flooding affected businesses and families in the center of Cedar Rapids this month, the law firm of Arenson & Zimmermann, P.L.C., held strong. The firm had a plan in place that would help them resume operations shortly after the flood waters began to recede. Full story »

Thinking of a traditional courthouse records room might conjure up images of file cabinets overflowing with folders, but that’s not how it works in York County, PA, where staff have used technology to streamline the thousands of cases that pass through the court system each year. Full story »

A lot of people associate an electronic document management system (EDMS) with the goal of realizing the “paperless office.” But as the St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, Sheriff’s Office shows, it’s possible to realize all the benefits of an EDMS—including greater staff efficiency, smarter work processes and lower overhead costs—without entirely doing away with paper copies of important documents and records. Full story »