“Many providers adopted EHRs thinking that these systems would make their practices paper-free,” said Laserfiche Vice President Tom Wayman. “In reality, there’s still a lot of unstructured content that needs to be managed in a HIPAA-compliant fashion, including consent forms, EKGs, EOBs, physician licenses and more. ECM is the key to completing your transition to a secure, efficient and paper-free practice.”

Laserfiche solves business problems across the practice, facilitating everything from patient records management to HR onboarding and disaster recovery planning. “Laserfiche is committed to providing stress-free ECM solutions that are easy to implement, easy to administer and easy to use,” said Wayman. “As such, we’re offering free massages for MGMA attendees to reflect our commitment to making life easier for practice managers and physicians alike.”

Laserfiche will be on hand at booth #1245 throughout the event to demonstrate its software solutions, provide free massages and distribute copies of customer success stories featuring Fertility Centers of Illinois, Dallas Associated Dermatologists and Arkansas’ CareLink.

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. Since 1987, medical groups have used Laserfiche to manage both patient and practice files in a HIPAA-compliant environment, easily increasing information access, speeding billing processes and saving time and money.

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

The confidential information contained in a special education student’s file is vital to CSISD’s special education teachers. “It’s important that those working with students in Special Services understand what modifications need to be in place and what each student needs to succeed in class. That information resides in our students’ files, so maintaining them properly is a top priority for us.”

With an overflowing amount of paperwork, stored offsite as well as taking up space onsite, keeping these confidential records organized, secure and easily accessible was a massive problem. “I used to get paper cuts and a strained neck from sorting through boxes for hours to satisfy a request for information,” says Boller.

Costly Paper Trails

“We’re required to keep our students’ files for seven years after they leave our district,” Boller explains. As a result, the department housed thousands of inactive files in offsite storage—costing several thousand dollars a year.

“Annual placement review meeting reports alone can be anywhere from 10-30 pages long. Some students are in the district from age three until age 22, so they get reviewed 18 or 19 times,” Boller explains. “The bulk of content we have to manage, just in our inactive files, is incredible.”

In addition to yearly placement meeting reports, each student’s file includes federally protected information such as:

• Special Education testing (required every three years).
• Medical records.
• Disciplinary information.

To satisfy requests for information, Special Services staff used to go to the warehouse and search through boxes, or, in some cases, warehouse staff would bring 10-15 boxes from the offsite storage room to the department so that staff could sort through them to find the requested information. Once located, the department made copies of the entire file (sometimes hundreds of pages) and paid to mail it to the requesting school district. “At $5 or $6 a package, the cost adds up,” Boller says.

Transition to Technology

After learning about Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) software from an employee in the purchasing warehouse, the Special Services Department acquired bids from two other content management providers and then evaluated the software during demos and presentations. “We needed a solution that would not only keep our records safe and accessible, but would also be easy to use for a variety of staff. Laserfiche was the best fit for our needs,” Boller says.

“At first I was a little skeptical,” she admits, explaining that some of the long-time employees were especially hesitant to switch to digitized content. “But we received lots of help from SMARTfiles, our Laserfiche reseller. Scanning in all the files was faster and easier than I expected, and the end results of using Laserfiche make it well worth the investment of both time and money.”

Secure Access Saves Time

One of the biggest benefits of deploying Laserfiche for CSISD’s Special Services Department is that content is both more secure and easier to share with authorized personnel. “When a dyslexia specialist or a special education teacher needs to access an active record that was previously stored in one of 40 boxes, she’s now able to access that information online, right from her classroom,” Boller explains.

Because only authorized personnel can access the files stored in Laserfiche, confidential information is secure and protected. Plus, Boller says, “With student information in electronic format, it’s so much easier to provide it to new schools and districts if the student moves. The transfer of information is prompt, so students’ services aren’t interrupted.” She notes that smooth, continued service is particularly key to accommodating student needs.

CSISD uses the Texas Education Agency’s state-wide record request system, Texas Records Exchange (TREx), to send and receive student information across the state’s educational system. “We’re now able to export files from Laserfiche to PDFs, then upload them to the TREx system for delivery. We no longer have to scan in pages one by one. It’s so much faster and easier—and it doesn’t tie up the Xerox machines all day!”

In addition, CSISD uses Laserfiche Audit Trail to ease the burden of complying with federal record retention regulations and mandates. “The government can come in and audit us at any time,” says Boller. “Electronic records are much easier to locate thanks to the organized file structure, granular search capability and secure access we get through Laserfiche.”

Prepared for the Unexpected

While Laserfiche is able to reduce CSISD’s paper clutter and provide instant, secure access to student records, Boller brings up another interesting benefit of implementation. “In our region, we have to keep in mind that natural disasters occur. For instance, some schools lost all their paper records when Hurricane Ike came though.”

In order to create new or replacement files for special education students, the students must be retested. Retesting can take anywhere from four to 12 hours—not including the time it takes to do the paperwork. To get a child into the Special Services system, Boller says it can take as long as 60 days.

“Digital files aren’t as fragile as paper,” Boller says. “With Laserfiche, we don’t have to worry that our students will lose ground after a natural disaster.”

Future Plans

Although CSISD’s Special Services Department currently uses Laserfiche mostly for inactive records management, Boller says the department is moving toward managing all active files in Laserfiche. “After seeing what Laserfiche can do, we can’t wait to take it to the next level. Laserfiche has made our jobs more efficient, which in turn helps students—and that’s our main priority.

“Laserfiche allows us to better manage the sheer volume of paperwork we have, but our added needs for confidentiality and easy access make the system essential for Special Services,” she concludes.

A former change management analyst at Bank of America, Slack had seen technological innovation drive efficiency, from automating input and reconciliation processes using MS Excel to capitalizing on the use of e-mail and the internet in BofA business processes.

When Slack came to Keane, he began to analyze where automation could have the biggest impact. “I looked at it like this: we’re a small shop, so we don’t have entire divisions or departments. We have people—seven people. So we need to leverage technology as best we can,” he says.

Slack initially focused on the need for a common repository for staff to share thoughts and ideas from their research—and the various media it came from, including:

• Handwritten notes
• E-mails
• Reports from the Web
• Bloomberg charts
• 10-k filings
• And more.

So he launched the search for a content management solution.

On the Hunt

“Our technology support services partner gave us a couple of ideas. I talked to our prime broker, and I talked to compliance experts in the industry about what firms like ours were using,” he recalls. “Laserfiche was one of the five or six referrals we got, so I Googled it.”

Slack was then referred to John Caso of reseller One Source Document Solutions, Inc., which already had a strong presence in North Carolina’s financial services industry. Caso showed Keane staff how Laserfiche could automate the firm’s process for storing and sharing research, as well as its client records.

“Our discussion wasn’t about things like compliance and client service at first. We just wanted a better way to share research other than e-mails in Outlook,” Slack admits. “But when John started asking about our large collection of filing cabinets, he hit upon the biggest need in our office.”

The biggest need was to free up space in Keane’s modest offices. Six file cabinets worth of information—almost one cabinet for each employee—certainly weren’t helping achieve that goal.

“Those six cabinets contained the first eight years of our business. We knew as we kept growing, there would be more and more paperwork,” recalls Slack.

He adds, “Those filing cabinets contained the only copies of our information, so if a fire had ripped through our offices, it would have been quite difficult to replace all the documents, especially for a firm our size. That’s when the discussion turned to business continuity.”

Moving Forward with Laserfiche

The firm purchased an 11-user Laserfiche Avante system in July 2008. The hardest part of implementation, Slack admits, was getting the firm’s small but diverse staff to agree on a standardized naming and filing convention for the research-sharing process. Once the research folders were set up, Slack says, automating the active client folders was the easy part.

“We already had an efficient process and detailed file folders that we were able to mimic in Laserfiche,” he offers. “It may have taken a bit to get the investment folks to retrain their working habits and thought processes, but once they did, learning the Laserfiche product itself was very easy.”

Backlog conversion of a decade’s worth of client information was likewise relatively easy, requiring only a few months of part-time student help. “Now,” Slack says, “we can scan in every document received, file it away in client-specific folders in Laserfiche, and our entire network drive is backed up remotely by our tech support firm. We still file the originals in cabinets, but there are backup copies available.”

Enhancing Client Service

As Keane’s staff began using Laserfiche, it became clear the system’s value was not limited to disaster recovery. “The primary advantage is having all client-specific information available in a heartbeat, accessible from each desktop in our office,” Slack says.

“When clients call with questions, we can pull up those files immediately and provide the answer in that same conversation. Not only that, but we can pull a copy of the document they’re asking about, and e-mail it to the client within seconds—usually while we’re still on the phone with them,” he says. “It’s imperative to have a complete picture in terms of client history, and using Laserfiche, we have that right at our fingertips.”

Slack credits Laserfiche for soothing skittish clients’ fears in the wake of recent market fluctuations. “Our clients aren’t institutions, they’re individuals. They’re not just interested in numbers and charts, they value the kind of relationship we have with them. If we don’t provide good client service, there’s no performance in the world that will keep those clients invested with us,” he says.

“During this last market blip in 2008, it would have been easy for them to get scared and take their money out. Being able to pull up a caller’s information and click and drag it into an e-mail speaks volumes about how much we care for our clients’ wants and needs. It really helped take our client service to the next level.”

Responding to Regulatory Changes

Now, with recent regulatory changes all but guaranteeing more oversight by the SEC and other regulatory agencies, Slack sees Laserfiche playing a more significant role in audit preparation and maintaining compliance logs.

“Dodd-Frank gives oversight authority to the SEC, but it still leaves a lot of gray areas as to some of the specifics that will be required of us. But, we know we’ll be required to register with the SEC by July 2011 and we know that the SEC will come audit us on a regular basis. Laserfiche will help us to be organized and prepared for that inevitability,” Slack says.

“We made the choice to keep all working documents on the network drive, but all other documents in Laserfiche. So, it provides peace of mind knowing that all my documents are easily accessible, effectively filed and efficiently searchable. All the required books and records are there, and can easily be transferred to a CD or zip drive for the SEC’s reference.”

Onward and Upward

Slack sees continuing value in using Laserfiche to adapt not only to new challenges, but new success as well.

“At Keane Capital, we describe ourselves as ‘value investors,’ which also carries over to the way we run our business. The Laserfiche Avante system was a very affordable option for us, but I look at its value as more than cost savings,” Slack explains.

“Laserfiche allows us to grow the business. It scales from one to 1,000 clients in a way that allows us to handle the work using the same efficient processes.”

A Need to Improve Data Governance—and a Need for a Plan

In 2006, county departments secured budget approval for a three-year automation planning initiative to replace the county’s AS400 imaging system, which was slow and offered limited search capability. Melissa Buman, records management/administrative services supervisor for the Outagamie County MIS Department, recognized the need to manage electronic documents as intuitively as paper ones.

“The lack of an electronic records management strategy, including e-mail retention, resulted in poor data governance, with a lot of confusion and a lack of consistency throughout the departments,” she says. Add to this the increasing costs of storage and managing paper files in various departments, and it was time for a change.

With the support of County Executive Robert “Toby” Paltzer, the county chose Laserfiche ECM. County MIS staff, who support approximately 40 departments, soon realized that while Laserfiche gave them the right tools, they didn’t yet have a clear vision for how to manage such a large project on top of their existing workload.

Creating Repeatable Processes to Balance Departmental and IT Resources

In 2008, Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital helped the county develop an implementation strategy that would balance departmental and MIS staff resources to ensure success. Led by MIS Project Manager Steve Flater, staff reviewed existing procedures and worked out a multi-year implementation timeline before deploying Laserfiche in the Corporation Counsel, Health and Human Services, Brewster Village, Planning and Finance departments.

“Our strategy was to create a foundation with the first few departments, so the MIS team had repeatable processes to set up individual departments, while still maintaining a manageable IT workload as more departments came on board,” explains Cities Digital Executive Vice President Jessica Welsch.

The paperless (or “less paper”) strategy had an immediate impact county-wide:

• Aging Planning Department files, for instance, could be archived, reducing storage needs and costs.
• Staff at Brewster Village, the county-owned nursing home, used Laserfiche to keep track of internal paperwork as well as managing client case files.
• The Corporation Counsel’s office adopted a paperless incoming mail process, reducing bottlenecks, aiding in e-discovery and improving staff efficiency and productivity.
• The Purchasing Department immediately began distributing requested documents more quickly, and cut down on the amount of time it takes to perform audits. According to Buyer Nicole Schoultz, Laserfiche helped cut the audit time of the county’s procurement cards in one department from 11 hours to less than four.
• Risk Management has likewise benefitted from not just reduced storage demands, but from improved information governance. “Security and retention are big concerns because we’re dealing with a lot of workers compensation and liability claims that involve confidential medical records and legal documents,” explains Risk Administrator Brian Margan.
• “Continuity of Operations—which is our disaster recovery plan—is also something we look to Laserfiche to help with, so if anything happens, we can get back to business as soon as possible,” Murgan adds.

Laserfiche Agile ECM Improves Case Management in Health & Human Services

In the Outagamie Health & Human Services department, with 360 employees serving seven different divisions, Laserfiche has helped staff consolidate and secure patient files, which can grow to ten volumes over a lifetime of care. MIS has set up security settings that improve data governance by limiting access to confidential documents as well as those falling under the HIPAA umbrella, redacting personal information such as Social Security Numbers. “A worker in Mental Health can’t see the records of a WIC client,” explains Kathy Watters, system support supervisor, adding that staff adoption of Laserfiche has been unanimous. “The folder structure wasn’t hard to learn because it’s what they’re used to already,” she adds.

A major procedural improvement has come from integrating Laserfiche with the department’s case management system. “It used to be that when a contracted psychiatrist came in for the day, we had to have support staff wheel all the medical records on a big cart so they could see a patient’s lab results and other medical records,” Watters says. “Now, contracted staff members just click a button in the case management application to see the rest of the files, which are stored in Laserfiche.” Not only does this save staff time, it lessens the load for users and MIS staff who don’t have to train and support hundreds of users.

Making an Impact in the MIS Department

The biggest impact has been in the MIS department itself, which now uses Laserfiche to scan and manage internal billing system records, IT service requests, inventory paperwork, financial and budgeting department forms, meeting minutes, and, of course, documentation regarding the management of Laserfiche for the rest of the county. Users are able to retrieve information such as diagrams, manuals, spreadsheets, presentations or even audio recordings wherever they are. Content is never lost, and multiple staff can access and share information easily.

With the first round of deployments complete, MIS is ready to expand Laserfiche to the Airport, Highway and Coroner departments in the coming year. Plans are also underway to complete a final migration from the AS400 to Laserfiche. As MIS Director Tom Pynaker explains, “Our Website is integrated with the old imaging system and those links will need to be re-established.”

The Value of Automating Repeatable Processes

Outagamie County’s success thus far illustrates the importance of setting realistic expectations and manageable goals. “We looked at this product much like we do Microsoft Exchange/Outlook—that it’s IT-initiated and supported county-wide,” says Pynaker.

“We learned we had to promote a team of users and IT staff to create a complete plan for the use and support of Laserfiche. We also had to look at the complete life cycle of the document to have the proper procedures implemented at the user level,” he adds. “As we continue to cycle through our departments, the same basic processes will be repeated time and time again. Thankfully, Laserfiche is flexible enough to be fine-tuned based on departmental needs.”

The MIS team is now looking at how Workflow can further maximize its resources. “Some of our future projects in MIS include paperless work request processes and using Workflow for additional services such as mail services, print shop orders, records center transfers, microfilm retrievals, and online forms with automatic routing for internal time off requests,” says Buman.

After taking classes at the Empower 2010 Laserfiche Institute Conference earlier this month, Buman is confident but realistic. “We’ve come a long way, but there are still many enhancements that can be made to further automate our daily processes,” she says.

• 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.

Original Pain Points: Data Storage and Accessibility

When Tato Munoz joined D.L. Evans as IT director in 1998, one of the first challenges he set out to tackle was the bank’s approach to data storage. “With the incredible amount of information we had, keeping everything accessible and knowing where it was all located at any given time was difficult,” he says.

At first, the bank considered simply finding a more efficient way to manage its paper-based documents. However, as Munoz explains, “That wasn’t really an option because we were filling up our secure storage facilities pretty fast.” At the time, the bank’s storage space included a 20×13 room, a 12×12 vault and an off-site warehouse. According to Munoz, “Keeping track of what was due for disposition, finding it in that crowded warehouse and then shredding it all was a nightmare.”

In addition to the headache associated with storing paper records, Munoz knew that paper was a frighteningly fragile medium, and he wanted to ensure that records would be accessible even in the face of tragedy or natural disaster. “If we gave documents to an auditor and he got into a car crash and the documents were destroyed, we had no back-ups,” he says. “It would have been extremely detrimental to our business.”

To break the bank’s reliance on paper records without breaking the IT budget, Munoz began investigating enterprise content management solutions.

Pioneering Laserfiche within a Banking Environment

It was September 15, 1904, when a group of enthusiastic and dedicated pioneer businessmen led by D. L. Evans met to organize and open the first bank in Cassia County, Idaho. But it was nearly a hundred years later that Tato Munoz brought that same pioneering spirit to the bank’s approach to content management.

“Back when we were evaluating content management systems, there were no other banks using Laserfiche,” says Munoz. “I saw what government, education and healthcare customers were doing with it, though, and I knew that we could realize the same benefits.”

According to Munoz, the deciding factors in selecting Laserfiche were reliability, security and ease of use. Chief among these, however, was ease of use. “It was clear that Laserfiche was very easy to implement and use,” says Munoz. “And now we have 10 years of experience to back that up!”

Streamlining Lending

When it came time to deploy the new Laserfiche content management system, D.L. Evans started with its consumer loan department, where loan packets routinely numbered 500 pages and frequently had to be photocopied as many as 20 times.

Originally, the bank planned to focus on converting loan applications and supporting documents into an electronic format on a day-forward basis, only back scanning about a year’s worth of files. It wasn’t long, however, before D.L. Evans decided to scan and store all existing loan records in Laserfiche. “Once we started processing our paperwork, everything was so quick and easy that we decided to go all the way back,” says Munoz. “We also extended our deployment into the commercial loan department pretty fast.”

Today, lending documents are generated electronically at the branch locations and captured into Laserfiche using Snapshot, which creates TIFF images of electronic documents for long-term archival—and eliminates the need to print paper documents in order to scan them into the system. Missing information, along with supporting paper documents, is later scanned into the system at the head office.

The bank has one centralized Laserfiche repository, which is critical for ensuring that staff from different branches can access and review lending materials at any time.

According to Munoz, “What used to be an extremely time-consuming, cumbersome process is now fast and easy, especially on the document retention side.” He adds, “We used to store one year’s worth of lending documents in a 12×12 vault. With Laserfiche, electronic document retention is unlimited, and our vault has been freed up to hold seven years’ worth of titles, which must be stored in a physical format per the FDIC.”

Expanding Laserfiche throughout the Organization

Building on the success of Laserfiche within the consumer and commercial lending departments, D.L. Evans soon rolled the system out to departments enterprise-wide, including:

• New Accounts, where staff streamlines document capture for 258 different types of documents, including signature cards, CD applications and ATM requests, using Quick Fields.
• Tellers, who automatically access client documentation from the Laserfiche repository through an integration with EZTeller, the bank’s branch automation software.
• Human Resources, where staff uses Laserfiche to securely manage confidential employee information.
• A/R and A/P, whose staff tracks and stores incoming and outgoing invoices.

When asked whether there have been any issues with user adoption, Munoz laughs and replies, “Yeah, we’ve got a little problem with adoption: Once people see Laserfiche and how easy it is to access information that’s in the system, they want to use it for more and more things. Our problem is that people like it too much!”

In fact, over the past year, the bank implemented Quick Fields in response to the new account desk’s requests to streamline its processes by automating data capture and eliminating the need to populate template fields manually. With 258 different types of forms brought into the system via both Snapshot and manual scanning, “the new account desk uses Quick Fields extensively,” says Munoz. “They run approximately 450 Quick Fields sessions every night on all kinds of documents, including signature cards, CD applications, ATM requests and so on.”

For tellers, Laserfiche has become a significant part of their daily business processes due to an integration with EZTeller, the bank’s branch automation software. EZTeller links ups with Laserfiche, automatically pulling up relevant documents stored in the repository so that customer service is faster and more efficient. HR staff, meanwhile, particularly appreciates the ability to easily and automatically redact confidential employee information using Laserfiche’s secure black-out and white-out redactions. Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable digitize all of their invoices, making them simultaneously accessible to multiple people and easier to keep track of.

Laserfiche has also shored up D.L. Evans’ data retention and compliance policies. And it’s cut down the time it takes to perform external FDIC audits and internal audits by approximately 50%. “We give our auditors encrypted USB drives with all of the electronic documentation they need to review, so they can complete most of their work off-site,” explains Munoz.

“Audits used to take three to four weeks,” he continues. “Now they take two weeks at the most.”

In terms of security and disaster recovery, Munoz says that all of the bank’s information “is encrypted and backed up to disk. Laserfiche is mirrored on an external drive that we pull out once a week and store offsite as an encrypted drive. The system’s images and SQL database are also mirrored and continually sent out to another location via the network. I never worry about security, and I never worry about business continuity anymore, either.”

With ten years of savings and streamlined processes in multiple departments under its belt, the bank is now considering adding Laserfiche Workflow to its arsenal for improving institutional efficiency.

From a Supporting Application to a Critical One

Overall, using Laserfiche has “changed the way we do business,” Munoz explains. “It’s changed our mindset and streamlined all of our processes. In the past, people used to think, ‘If I don’t have it on paper, it’s no good.’ That way of thinking has totally shifted, and now it’s more like: ‘If it’s not electronic, it’s not as accessible, it’s not as affordable, it’s not as secure.”

A happy early adopter of Laserfiche content management in the banking space, Munoz concludes, “Laserfiche went from being a supporting application in a couple of departments to being a critical one enterprise-wide. It’s a great product and we’ve been extremely satisfied.”

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.

By 2002, CCCSD had expanded to meet the needs of 450,000 people by maintaining 1,500 miles of sewer lines and treating an average of 45 million gallons of wastewater per day. But with 56 years of service came 56 years of records—including permits, construction plans and Board documents. Storage space was at a premium, gaining access to information was difficult and time-consuming, and the district wanted to strengthen its disaster recovery plans.

“Over the years, CCCSD has created a reliable and efficient infrastructure to handle the wastewater needs of thousands of Central Contra Costa residents,” says John Phillips, IT systems analyst for CCCSD. “Laserfiche is helping to add similar efficiency and reliability to our IT infrastructure, allowing us to provide our staff with faster access to the content they need to do their jobs.”

Implementing ECM

The special district enlisted Laserfiche reseller ECS Imaging to build out its information management infrastructure with Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM).

The first department to implement Laserfiche was the Secretary of the District, which converted critical Board documents from CCCSD’s inception in 1946 through the present into an easily accessible, digital form. The Permits operation was next, with a much larger and more complicated filing backlog of permits and record drawings. This conversion process is still underway today.

“It was important for us to select a system that could handle many different forms of content,” says Phillips. “Documents are simple. Maps and drawings are where things get more complex.”

Today, permit job files (including maps and drawings) are scanned into Laserfiche offsite by ECS Imaging. This practice centralizes content management, reduces the need for physical storage space, minimizes wear and tear on the originals and enables convenient access to them by CCCSD employees.

Since 2002, many other departments have begun using Laserfiche to manage a wide variety of content, including:

• Maps and drawings (Engineering Support)
• Right of Way agreement files (Right of Way)
• Employee and retiree files (Human Resources)
• Standard operating procedures (Lab)
• Discharge permit documentation (Plant Operations)

Expanding ECM by Integrating GIS

To further improve information access, the special district expanded its use of Laserfiche by integrating it with CCCSD’s GIS system, AutoDesk MapGuide. The in-house integration grants engineers, permit counter staff and field maintenance crews instantaneous access to scanned permits and record drawings. This is particularly important for CCCSD’s field crews, which operate out of a separate facility without convenient access to paper records.

“Prior to the integration of Laserfiche and the GIS system, field crews were unable to access any of these records directly,” explains Carl Von Stetten, information systems analyst, Engineering Support, CCCSD. “They had to take the time to retrieve copies from a variety of filing rooms.”

To access scanned permits and record drawings, users simply double-click on a parcel or pipeline within a map, and then follow the links in the subsequent reports to content stored in the Laserfiche repository. According to Von Stetten, “This has eliminated time spent looking up hard copy permits and drawings and enabled our crews to be more productive in the field.”

Business Benefits

“Our deployment has focused on achieving specific business goals rather than on technical bells and whistles,” explains Phillips, “which is why we’ve had so much success.”

The key benefits CCCSD has realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche include:

• Increased efficiency. Today, all employees have easy online access to current and historical records, which are centralized in the Laserfiche repository. Access to additional content such as permits, HR files and operating procedures is granted to authorized users based on Laserfiche security protocol. Laserfiche search tools enable staff to locate information quickly, so time is no longer wasted on finding, copying and distributing content. The system has also reduced CCCSD’s need for storage space.
• Easy integration with GIS. By linking Laserfiche to its GIS system, CCCSD engineers, permit counter staff, and field maintenance crews can instantly access scanned permits and record drawings. This is a particular timesaver for CCCSD’s field crews, which operate out of a separate facility without convenient access to paper records.
• Improved disaster recovery. In the past, disaster protection focused on preserving and protecting vulnerable paper copies. The installation of Laserfiche, with redundant off-site storage, has greatly improved the district’s ability to protect historical and vital records. “We hope we never face an emergency that will demonstrate the benefits of having Laserfiche,” says Phillips, “but we have to be prepared.”

“My best advice for companies that want to extend their information management infrastructure with ECM is to talk to other users who’ve done what you’re trying to do,” concludes Phillips. “Leverage their experience to ease your implementation and achieve your goals.”

Shortly after deployment in early 2004, staff began scanning job files and the benefit was as obvious as it was immediate. “Retrieval. No question at all. My number one benefit is retrieval,” Howell says. “We had an employee at this end of the building, that whenever they needed an invoice, had to go to the other end, go into a banker’s box, then make a copy, then put everything back up. To find an invoice start to finish, took 20 minutes. Now, it takes five minutes, tops.”

In the process of deploying Laserfiche, Howell says, CCUA has developed “folders within folders” to sort and group the myriad financial documents and as-built drawings for each file, assigning a team of two people to scan and review, with a third staffer assigned spot-checking newly-created files for quality control. While the Engineering Department has been scanning job files since the beginning, both the Finance and Billing Departments now also employ scanning personnel. Says Howell, “Not only are they scanning customer payment information, but also ‘turn-on/turn-off’ requests, change of addresses – we scan all those requests. It just makes for better, more complete customer service having a record like that.”

These days 139 office and outside personnel access documents in Laserfiche, while 25-30 staff use it on a daily basis to either scan in CCUA documents or use Laserfiche for efficient retrieval of documents without leaving their workspaces. Ongoing backlog conversion efforts are continuing each day– thanks in no small part to a growing need for a disaster recovery plan in CCUA’s hurricane-prone part of the country, as well as Florida’s “Sunshine” Law, which mandates public access to records.

“Beginning in 2008, CCUA made it a priority to go back to [files from] 2005,” Howell says, adding that staff have made files from 2006-on their priority for this year. “We’re in Florida, so we’re looking at crisis management and disaster recovery if there’s a natural disaster. CCUA’s main concern is that we want current project files protected – that’s what keeps us operational,” he adds. “It’s not the files from 10-15 years ago, but the ones from the past two years that are very important.” Another benefit, Howell says, is that financial audits that used to mean hours and sometimes days of digging out records can now be done in an afternoon. “Instead of staff going to the filing cabinets to retrieve files, our auditors’ can go directly into Laserfiche to access and retrieve the required documents – they love it.”

Howell has long been a fan of using Laserfiche administrative tools to monitor productivity and manage long-term projects. Since implementing Audit Trail in 2006, Howell says he’s been able to maximize productivity. “I can make Excel spreadsheets and graphs from Laserfiche reports and see how we’re progressing on any of CCUA’s scanning projects.” This kind of oversight and responsiveness has made CCUA agile in a way not usually associated with a governmental entity. For instance, even in the midst of the recent economic slowdown, CCUA has not had to lay off any of its 139 staff members. Rather, using powerful reporting tools – Laserfiche among them – administrators have been able to minimize bottlenecks and re-assign staff where needed to ensure sustainable productivity evenly throughout the organization. As CCUA knows well, business is best when staff and information can flow as efficiently as the water service it provides.

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.”

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.

The Rice Creek Watershed District has been managing the water in the lower Southeast corner of the state since 1972. Rice Creek, a tributary of the Mississippi River is approximately 28 miles long and drains a watershed of 201 square miles of Anoka, Hennepin, Ramsey and Washington counties. Portions of the district can be found in 28 municipalities.

State regulations mandate that government agencies maintain an historic record of files, so the District’s records room was drowning in paper files dating back to the District’s founding in 1972. Their almost half-century of records filled 20 filing cabinets and 45 additional bankers’ boxes, and files were growing at an alarming rate. And because the District had no disaster recovery backup plan, a fire or flood could wipe out nearly 40 years of records in an instant.

Rice Creek in Fridley, MN

Besides the massive backlog of unprotected files, the District’s paper-based building permit process created costly logistical deadlines. “When a new permit request came in, it was given a permit number and a file number and then sent to an outside engineering consulting firm 25 miles away,” says District Administrator Doug Thomas. “We would need to have it sent by courier or mail, or someone from their office would come pick it up – all which took up a lot of time. Since we have a permit deadline each month, time was a big issue.”

Rice Creek was among the first watershed districts to look into Laserfiche after hearing rave reviews from City of Shoreview‘s IS Manager, Dick Crumb. Crumb contacted Laserfiche reseller Larry Phelps from Solbrekk and suggested Phelps introduce Rice Creek’s staff to Laserfiche. (Check out a video of Crumb demonstrating Laserfiche to over 40 employees from 18 Minnesota cities here).

When Phelps showed Thomas and his staff how easily their paper could be scanned, indexed, managed and searched with Laserfiche, they were quick to implement. Ned Phillips, the person responsible for IT at the District, decided to purchase Laserfiche and a Canon 3080 scanner. He also added Import Agent so that staff could scan and import documents into Laserfiche right from their digital scanner and copier.

Rice Creek in Shoreview, MN

Today, Rice Creek scans all their current documents and are reaping the benefits of having documents close at hand. The permit application process in particular has been greatly streamlined.

“Each permit application is scanned immediately,” says Thomas. “Laserfiche creates a place where everyone can go electronically and work with that file without having to find the paper file, make a copy, and deal with paper boxes and spend hours making copies.”

And now engineers no longer have to wait for files to arrive by mail, which completely eliminates the rush to meet deadlines. “We gave the engineers their own licenses, so they can view a file immediately after it’s been scanned into Laserfiche. This definitely helped us to meet permit deadlines,” Thomas adds.

Disaster recovery is also no longer an issue. “Rather than having boxes and boxes in fireproof and waterproof hard storage—which can get pretty costly—our files are backed up in electronic form in Laserfiche,” says Thomas. “It is a far better information management system than paper.”

Adds Phillips, “We now have the peace of mind that our documents are now secure.”

Thomas offers the following advice to other administrators who might hesitate to make the investment needed to get their own Laserfiche system off the ground. “Most people worry about the initial investment and the labor involved with scanning,” he says. He suggests hiring an outside agency to handle all backlog conversion scanning, and to start scanning everyday business processes immediately. “Once it’s done, your day-to-day business processes become much more streamlined,” he says.

Now staff can’t imagine life without Laserfiche. “Just today, I had a call about a project in 1990,” says Thomas. “I was able to go into Laserfiche and find the engineer’s report for that project and use Laserfiche to e-mail the file directly to that person in 5 minutes.

“I can’t imagine how many hours would have gone into trying to find that same record if it were stored in files and boxes somewhere,” he adds.

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.

On paper, the PUSRP’s mission was simple: to provide an information management infrastructure to support improved commercial and utility services through divesting and restructuring public enterprises like telecom, energy, water and transport by increasing private sector participation.

But the paper itself that needed to be archived and managed, well, that’s what Agira refers to as “the horror of the heaps.” The national registry overflowed with 10 million documents, which, owing to an inconsistent filing system, led to information silos and misplaced documents. Then there was the massive national warehouse, located 20 minutes away. “That’s 20 minutes on our roads,” Agira laughs. “These aren’t four-lane highways.” There, another 24 million documents were precariously housed, subject to water from burst pipes, exposure, and perhaps most memorably, “vermin damage.” Yes, rats were eating the paper.

Besides protecting critical information from damage, Agira faced other challenges. Documents were often leaked to the press, which brought up security concerns. And with divestiture would come the need to strengthen the regulatory framework of newly privatized enterprises, as well as financial oversight of public enterprise.

In short, there was a need for transparent records management, even if no one knew that’s what it was called yet. “There was a lack of know-how of modern document management techniques,” Agira sighs. Librarians held a monopoly on information. Representatives from the national government viewed document management as a librarian’s task and not a part of business processes. “There was a lack of collective ownership,” he says.

And many workers were intimidated by technology, fearing it would render their jobs obsolete—a concern in a nation where many workers serve as their families’ sole support. Agira recalls one records custodian specifically. “He put his hands up and pleaded with me, ‘This is all I know how to do!’”

Agira lobbied his administrators with pictures of workers searching for records in the national warehouse, protected by makeshift hazmat suits. Finally, after a few false starts, he secured funding for the much-needed system and, by 2005, the search was on. Agira carefully assembled a team, including government sceptics, as he puts it, “to experience document management as a group.

“I realized we had to have executive buy-in from the start,” he adds. “People at the top had to own this as much as we did.”

Agira and his team looked at half a dozen options and agreed on Laserfiche. “It was easier, it was faster and we got more functionality for our money,” he explains.

Agira set up a scanning room and a server, and soon newly trained clerks began scanning in the 10 million documents in the national registry. “It was in a word, revolutionary,” he recalls. “OCR technology was something we’d never seen before.”

The benefits were as obvious as they were various. Master files were created to eliminate duplication, lost documents and information silos, security could be tracked and managed using Audit Trail, and, in a country with molasses-slow internet capabilities, Web Access made remote retrieval available, which was in itself revolutionary. “FTP isn’t available to us,” Agira explains. “When we hit send, we can go do something else and come back later and it’ll still be transmitting.”

There were unexpected benefits as well: because Laserfiche stores scanned documents as single page TIFFs, document storage only used a third of the tetrabytes Agira had allotted, and Laserfiche has proved utterly reliable and stable. “In our three years, we’ve had zero breakdowns,” he says, with a mix of pride and amazement.

But it’s been the intangibles—the shift in workers’ attitudes, morale and confidence—that he’s most impressed by. Agira credits that enthusiasm to what he jokingly calls Laserfiche’s “idiot-proof” interface. “In just two hours of training, people are comfortable using the system,” he says. “They have a sense of ownership in the whole process of document management. It’s something we all share in now and take pride in. I’ve got young guys who are like our in-house experts teaching other people. Now they can be at an internet café in Singapore and look up something [via Web Access] and say ‘I did this.’” Similarly, desk officers and contractors who used to have to make day trips to the registry for building plans, blueprints or transaction files can take the documents with them on their laptops, or even just access archives via the Internet.

“I think the nicest thing has been the sense of co-ownership of the whole project from our end,” he says. “Even me, as an IT person, didn’t know exactly how accounting or procurement worked. Now, I understand why they would need copies of everything.”

With this important phase of implementation complete, Agira foresees Laserfiche branching out to other offices and departments. “We’re starting to develop how we’re going to use Workflow, but we’re still in the infant stage,” he says. “I’ve talked to the minister of ICT, Officers at the Bureau of Statistics, and, based on what we’ve achieved, they’re starting to see how Laserfiche could benefit them.”

By demystifying document management, Agira and the PUSRP have modernized more than just Uganda’s information infrastructure. “People have changed the way they work. We’re even ready to introduce the idea of ‘flex-time,’” he laughs.

“Sometimes, to change things, you really have to move mountains,” Agira adds. “Laserfiche is really a magical solution, because it made moving those mountains easy.”

“Life before Laserfiche was full of frustration,” remembers Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue and Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.

Collins was often as confused as the seasonal staff she’d hire to help keep up with the mounting file load. In the city’s personal property area, for instance, a two-index paper filing system meant records older than four years had to be hauled down to the basement. If active incoming documents related to a past tax year, they had to be stored with older records. Business licenses were shuffled between active files and archives when they closed, only to be moved back if the business re-opened—always with more and more paperwork. “You could have 15 years of license applications and papers,” Collins says. “Name order wasn’t that great so there was always confusion about indexing business names: by the last name of the proprietor or the trading name or the first name of the legal name?”

Rosalind Collins is the Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.

Retrieving information was even worse. “Trying to find things was the biggest frustration,” she says. “My desk was nearest to the filing cabinet room. I can’t tell you how many slammed drawers and expletives I heard on a daily basis!”

And the inefficiency of the city’s information management system bordered on the tragic. “It took all year to file our documents, so most of what you needed was in a big pile of ‘stuff to file.’ Some years, we had a full-time employee, bless her heart, she was over 90 years old and a sweet petite woman. I’ll never forget the image of her folded up on the floor between cabinets filing in the bottom drawers.”

The last straw was when the city was reminded the hard way it had no disaster back-up plan when a plumbing accident damaged the basement records room. “I knew there had to be a better way out there somewhere,” says Collins.

There was—Collins just had to find a way to fund it.

“They say ‘pick your battles’ and I chose this one,” she recalls. “It took me three years of lobbying every way and everyone I knew and becoming a general pain in the rear, but we finally were able to set up an intra-departmental team to choose a system and, even better, we had funding to implement it.”

A view of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate, from its gardens

Her team reviewed almost 15 bids. “Some of the biggest names with the biggest price tags weren’t even meeting our minimum requirements, but Laserfiche met them all and then some.” Collins had done her homework; what she envisioned the new system doing read like a list of signature Laserfiche features: “OCR, scalability, public web access, configurable indexing, ‘print to scan,’ the ability to use any scanner hardware and to integrate with other systems, the ability to automate workflow and add routing capabilities,” she says, leaving one to ponder what else she could possibly ask for.

But the question wasn’t “what?” but rather “how easily?” Again, the answer was Laserfiche. “We were especially interested in ease of use and its fast learning curve,” she says. “We wanted something that stored our images and data in non-proprietary formats—especially since we’d been burned with an imaging project before that put thousands of HR files into a system we could no longer get into!” Collins also liked Laserfiche’s other qualities, including its price. “We were impressed with the security, multiple indexing ability, configurability and ease of maintenance and to top it off, it was the lowest bid.”

A pilot implementation in the city included five departments. The Commissioner of the Revenue’s office started day-forward scanning within months. The City Council Clerk archived city council minutes as well as current documents. These days, Human Resources and City Attorney offices are using Laserfiche, with more departments asking how they can be brought on board every year.

The Rotunda at the University of Virginia was designed by Thomas Jefferson

Progress has been gradual. “People have a hard time letting go of the tangible,” Collins says. “Then they see how much easier it is to get what you need with a few keystrokes. The person who was digging in the boxes of scanned documents the first year because they didn’t trust the digital system is now one of the most vocal advocates of this system.”

Managing index data quality and workflow took a little finessing as well. “Just as with misfiled paper documents, if an index key is entered incorrectly, the document may as well not exist since no one will find it,” she says. Collins automated indexing using Ascent Capture by Kofax and then Quick Fields (see sidebar) to improve accuracy and speed. “We centralized scanning and indexing to a few people with additional training,” she explains.

These days, Charlottesville’s new-found efficiency has taken many forms. “Time to find a document went from hours or sometimes days to seconds,” Collins beams. Using Laserfiche also inspired a paradigm shift in how the city considers what’s worth keeping around. “You start to see the value in that information, but also what isn’t valuable,” she says. “We eliminated the filing requirement for vehicles, which saved us not just money, but also from having to index and store over 20,000 documents a year. Today we stay current within a week in the personal property scanning area—in many cases, a document is stored with its metadata the same day it comes in!”

And there’s the cash savings. “We used to hire a full-time person for six months a year, just to open and file mail. We were usually just catching up for the year when the December bills went out. Now, we’ve saved half the cost of a FTE and only have one person scanning personal property files part-time just one day a week. We were able to eliminate another half of a position and reinvest the time into audit programs designed to increase City revenue,” she says. “That’s real dollars.”

Still, Collins realizes getting other municipalities to see the Laserfiche light means thinking of ROI in broader terms. “Getting funds is a challenge because the costs of doing things the old way aren’t staring people in the face. You’ll save a lot of time for your staff, but no one wants to eliminate staff or positions. Real estate isn’t a factor for a government that doesn’t pay rent or taxes. Nobody factors in the cost of lost documents or a disaster destroying all your files,” she says.

“You have to look at it as part of process improvements and think about what you could do with the time you save and the value of bringing data and paper together. Another wise user told me that to gain support for expanding the system to other documents, departments and processes, show them how it would work, because the truth is that it’s much simpler than people imagine it will be,” Collins adds. “We recently had a ‘what we like about our office’ meeting and so many people responded ‘Laserfiche!’ That’s why I recommend it. It’s easy to use, easy to learn, easy to configure, adapt or improve in particular—because of its incredible focus on the user.”

According to Administrative Analyst III Daniel Baker, Lynwood was looking for the technological answer to a variety of challenges. “The city environment was changing in a technological sense,” he recalls. “Community members wanted information quicker.”

Citizens weren’t the only ones with demands. Lynwood faced many of the classic challenges of working with paper documents: mounting shipping and handling costs, proliferating documents and dwindling storage space. City staff were growing tired of inefficient paper-based business processes, especially when it came to producing discovery for an influx of litigation. “We were spending a lot of our funding digging through loads of paper documents in response to discovery,” Baker remembers. “The City Attorney would assign short deadlines for finding documents for ongoing litigation, and if staff couldn’t find documents in time, the City could be penalized. That required staff to work a lot of overtime.”

These issues were overwhelming on their own, but were made even worse by Lynwood’s lack of an official records policy. “We needed to develop and maintain guidelines for an efficient records program,” According to City Manager Roger L. Haley. “Furthermore, we had no backup plan in case of fire, flood, earthquake or other disaster.”

Expanding Laserfiche proved to be more than an answer to any specific challenge; in fact, it empowered Lynwood to maximize the value of citizens’ tax dollars.

“The city has a responsibility to provide excellent customer service,” Haley continues, “including quick access to city records and improve service with today’s technology.”

Laserfiche’s tried-and-true document search, retrieval and distribution capabilities proved fit for the task—and for keeping costs down.

“Laserfiche has decreased our printing of paper documents by making it so easy to send files digitally,” Baker says. “The majority of agreements, letters, resolutions and other correspondence are now being e-mailed to vendors instead of mailing a printed copy, which reduces our dependence on the postal system and lowers costs.”

Baker also reports faster response times for records requests, such as resolutions and agendas, while finance department staff can confirm if bills were paid by looking up scanned checks. Staff members looking for copies of resolutions, agendas and agreements no longer trek to the City Clerk’s office, meaning staff productivity and efficiency have increased. “Documents are now at our fingertips instead of in a box in the basement,” Baker says.

Of course, even the most powerful software is only as useful as it is intuitive. That’s why ease of use played a major role in Lynwood’s purchasing decision—and why Laserfiche was the clear choice. “Laserfiche’s functionality is not only rich but easy to learn,” Baker says. “It gives people who aren’t very computer-savvy the confidence to use computer programs in the workplace.”

It’s no surprise that Lynwood would want to extend easy information access to the community. But while city staff quickly came to understand and appreciate Laserfiche, many citizens were hesitant to retrieve documents via Laserfiche rather than making pilgrimages to City Hall. “Many residents refused to change the way they were retrieving information, because they couldn’t understand how valuable a tool Laserfiche is,” Baker recounts.

Lynwood’s electronic document management team adroitly addressed customer concerns, taking Laserfiche’s user-friendliness to new heights with a custom WebLink interface.

“Most public document search engines come off as intimidating to the public, and as a result, few people use them,” Baker explains. “We wanted our approach to be user-friendly, with a likable theme to encourage use.”

Baker teamed with IT Technician Mike Ochoa and Graphic Technician Jamel Goodloe to create a public records portal with an emphasis on accessibility. “We wanted to people of all ages and experience levels to be able to search for documents,” Baker says. The resulting site, called My Doc Spot, features a public records mascot, Spot, who “fetches” agendas, minutes, resolutions, budgets, RFPs and agreements for Lynwood citizens.

Response to the records portal has been overwhelmingly positive, from both citizens and the city staff who formerly had to manually respond to records requests. In fact, My Doc Spot helped Lynwood fetch a coveted 2008 Laserfiche Run Smarter Award. Of course, it also helps that the city now has a codified records policy in place.

“Laserfiche has provided us with a system to cope with our records challenges while meeting ISO standards,” says Baker. “We can now easily classify, store and search for all our records, which satisfies the California Public Records Act,” he adds.

Laserfiche has also helped Lynwood overcome its increased litigation challenge, dramatically reducing the time it takes to respond to discovery requests. “With Laserfiche,” Baker notes, “we can look up what we need to find by a simple keyword search, with no added expense. And instead of giving attorneys binders of documents, we can give them their requested documents on CD.”

The most important benefit of the Laserfiche system, according to Baker, has been establishing and maintaining a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, Laserfiche centralizes all of Lynwood’s vital documents—including agendas, resolutions, printed checks and invoices, agreements, minutes, budgets, city maps, and public requests—for storage and regularly scheduled backup. “Our Laserfiche system makes it very easy to copy images to a DVD-R or tape and send them to a protected location,” Baker says.

Laserfiche went five-for-five in meeting all of the city’s information management challenges. But it’s the unexpected benefits—like increased staff morale and a decreased carbon footprint—that have been especially satisfying for Lynwood staff. “Our staff have definitely taken a liking to the Laserfiche system,” Baker reports. “Most use it to store all their vital and general correspondence, with the confidence that their files will never be lost. By using Laserfiche so much, we’re also promoting a paperless work environment, which in the long run will save resources and promote cleaner air.”

Baker doesn’t hesitate to recommend Laserfiche to his peers. “My advice to those looking to implement document management is this,” he says. “Laserfiche is a ground-breaking solution that gives you the ability to be more efficient, confident and reliable as an organization. Once we installed Laserfiche, our information management challenges soon became yesterday’s news.”

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.

HIPAA requirements mandated that employee medical records must be segregated so only the HIPAA officer and benefits manager could access them, which required keeping these documents in separate file cabinets. And worst of all, there was no disaster plan in place, so if documents were destroyed, they would be impossible to replace.

But in 2004, the district received funding from the New York State Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund to hire a records management expert to examine the feasibility of implementing document management in the HR department. By 2005, a selection committee of the district’s HR director, IS director and records management coordinator were interviewing document management vendors.

“Although another vendor’s ‘unlimited user licenses’ offer was attractive from a fiscal standpoint, our selection committee was concerned that if the product wasn’t user friendly, unlimited licenses would not make the HR staff, or any other department’s employees, more willing to use it,” says Director of Human Resources and Records Management Officer Karen Briner-Peterson. “After a lot of research and deliberation, we decided Laserfiche would best suit our needs.”

J.M. Fletcher Elementary School

Once Laserfiche was installed, staff began with a pilot project to scan all personnel files into Laserfiche, with plans to eventually expand the project to other administrative areas and school buildings as resources and time allowed. The need for multiple file cabinets was immediately eliminated: staff designed their file structure to include five sub-folders (personnel, payroll, training, insurance and medical) set up so they could place security tags on confidential files. “Because all this information is confidential, we had to restrict access to everyone except the district superintendent and two of our assistant superintendents, who can access these documents through WebLink,” Briner-Peterson says.

And just as important is the peace of mind Briner-Peterson and her staff enjoy knowing Jamestown’s records are finally safe—come what may. “9/11 and Hurricane Katrina just proved the need to be able to continue running a business or government office immediately after a crisis,” she says. “Our largest concern was that we had no disaster plan in place. If water pipes broke or a fire started, we had no ability to recreate documents that could not be easily replaced.”

All of the district’s documents are retrievable through WebLink so that, in case of disaster, district maintenance employees, administrators and local police, fire and emergency personnel can immediately access information. In fact, Briner-Peterson is so confident in Laserfiche that she’s begun moving original hardcopy personnel offsite to the district’s new records storage facility. “Laserfiche is the foundation of our district disaster recovery plan,” she says. “Combined with our HR and payroll software, Laserfiche hasn’t just saved us time and money, but has also enabled us to be up and running at an offsite location within a matter of hours after a disaster.”

Beyond disaster recovery, some of the most noticeable benefits of using Laserfiche have come from staff expanding their use of the system into other areas, including managing e-discovery, tracking the history of provisions in collective bargaining agreements and handling FOIA requests.

Laserfiche has also been used to store and display large amounts of data in litigation. “We were able to import documents into Laserfiche, bringing more than 500 pages of documents to court for dramatic effect,” says Briner-Peterson. “During testimony, the information being testified to can be projected on a screen in the hearing room for the entire court to see. Due to discovery requirements, we are able to provide the judge and opposing counsel with all documents admitted into evidence stored on one CD instead of storage boxes.”

James Prendergast Library

Laserfiche has proven even more helpful in managing collective bargaining agreements between the district and its seven employee unions. At times, Briner-Peterson explains, a union may bring a grievance alleging violation of a contract provision or the parties must go to arbitration to define a word or phrase in a collective bargaining agreement. “Last year, I was asked by our Assistant Superintendent to determine a history on a particular contract provision,” she says. “By doing a word search in Laserfiche, within twenty minutes I’d printed out the appropriate pages of the contract provision as the language evolved from 1973 to the present. Before Laserfiche, this would have taken several hours, perhaps even longer.”

It’s equally easy for staff to quickly respond to the numerous FOIA requests they receive each year. “Sometimes documents must be disclosed under FOIA, but contain information that is confidential and can’t be disclosed,” Briner-Peterson explains. As the district’s Records Access Officer, she used to have to manually redact each document. First, she’d copy the document and use a marker to black out any confidential information. “But because print below these marks can still be seen, I’d have to make an additional photocopy to ensure that no redacted information could be read,” she sighs.

But now, Briner-Peterson simply uses Laserfiche’s redaction tool to securely—and clandestinely—remove any confidential information. “I really like the ability to use a white instead of a black redactor, because it’s impossible for the reader to see how many words in a sentence were removed,” she says. “Although it may seem trivial to anyone who doesn’t handle FOIA requests, using Laserfiche to store and redact our documents helps us prove that we used our best efforts to comply with the law.”

Jamestown is home to the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center.

Briner-Peterson and her staff have been so inspired by the utility of their document management system they’ve come up with even more ways to use Laserfiche throughout the district. “Our confidence in Laserfiche enables us to reach out to other departments—so we continue to find new and innovative ways to use it,” she says. In fact, in recognition of their innovative and creative use of their Laserfiche system, the Jamestown Public Schools HR team was recently awarded with the Laserfiche community’s prestigious Run Smarter Award.

Briner-Peterson believes that any Laserfiche user can enjoy the same success—as long as they invest the time up-front in proper planning. “We’d tell anyone to start in one department and deal with a workable amount of documents. We started with a small number of users and basic functionality, but we’ve added users and more advanced functionality as time goes by and our system becomes even more critical to our operations,” she says.

“Once you’ve had successes in one department and can prove to others that the system is user-friendly, functional and dependable, you’ll have departments knocking on your door,” she offers. “In our estimation, the best—and most unexpected—benefit of Laserfiche has been that we’ve been able to use it for so many things that no one on our selection committee ever could have envisioned.”

“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.”

Devick had read about document management in an industry magazine, and had heard about it from colleagues who had implemented their own paperless offices. When she saw Laserfiche at the FPA Symposium in Minneapolis, however, it was clear that Bond and Devick had found their perfect solution.

“We knew we needed a cost-effective system that was easy to use,” Devick says. “Some of the other systems that met our specific criteria were cost-prohibitive, and they required changing our operating procedures. Laserfiche didn’t require us to change how we do business, and we could choose exactly the functionality we needed—no more, no less.”

Once Bond and Devick decided on Laserfiche, installation was “very quick,” according to Devick. Within eight months, the firm had fully transitioned from paper to digital files.

The Bond and Devick Minneapolis Team – RJ Devick, Andy Feterl, Rachel Halvorson, Kristine Bisanz and Sherry Duggan

“It helped that our reseller, Cities Digital, Inc., sent two staff to the office to train everyone the day our system was installed,” Devick says. “It only took a couple of hours for us to feel comfortable with Laserfiche. It’s extremely easy to use, so training—even for new users—takes very little effort.”

Devick also believes support from Cities Digital was crucial to their success. “Once we started using the system, they were always available to answer any questions,” she says. “Their customer service is truly second to none.”

Thanks to this training and support, Devick says, users were instantly more productive. “We immediately started scanning and importing client information, including e-mail correspondence, trade reports, contracts, holding reports, retirement analysis and basically anything else we could think of,” she says. “We also store our company information, such as our compliance reports, employee files, 401(k) plan documents and meeting minutes.

“The interesting thing is that filing our information in Laserfiche actually takes a little longer than filing a paper document, because we have to take a few seconds to enter template information and put it in the correct location,” she continues. “But the ability to access information once it is filed is just so much easier and quicker. We don’t have to dig through file folders and try and find just the piece of paper we need. And, because it’s stored digitally, it can be viewed by more than one person at a time.”

With locations in Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN, sharing information was a priority. “Because we handle sensitive and private information, we needed a secure system, but we also needed to become more efficient,” Devick says. “To create that efficiency, multiple people needed to be able to access the same document simultaneously, and we needed to access it through our client management software.”

To truly enhance efficiency, however, the firm worked with Cities Digital to integrate Laserfiche with their client relationship management (CRM) application, ACT!® “From an efficiency standpoint, it was an obvious need for us,” Devick says. “The ability to integrate Laserfiche with ACT! was a question we asked about immediately.

When an advisor or staff member is viewing a client contact in ACT!, they simply click a link button to pull up all the folders for that particular contact. “Integration between a CRM system and Laserfiche is essential for firms who want to maximize the value of their digitally stored information,” says Cities Digital CEO Patrick Welsch. “With this type of integration, staff don’t have to do anything differently than they’re already doing. They just pull up information stored in Laserfiche directly from the CRM application. It’s a tremendous time-saver, and helps staff respond to client questions much more quickly.”

“The pleasant surprise with Laserfiche is how simple it is to use. Once things are scanned in, anyone can find the information they’re looking for.”

Devick agrees. “From the users’ perspective, this is truly the most useful feature in Laserfiche,” she says.

“The integration has really helped our financial advisors provide better client service. When speaking with clients on the phone, our advisors can immediately view documents to answer questions. When they’re doing account review, they can instantly pull up reports that are generated and scanned into the system.”

And when a client calls and needs tax forms or statements sent to their accountant or lawyer, Laserfiche enables the firm’s staff to turn those requests around “almost immediately,” says Devick. Staff simply find the document in the Laserfiche repository and e-mail it with a simple right click.

“This is really the biggest benefit for our clients,” she says. “Of course they benefit from our increased security, but that’s more behind the scenes. What they really notice is that, with Laserfiche, we can simply e-mail the document right from the system. It doesn’t matter whether the external party uses Laserfiche, because the document is sent in either TIFF or PDF format, which they can open from their own computer.”

And at the office, it’s not just advisors and back office staff that appreciate the firm’s Laserfiche system. “Even our greeter, who works on client accounts, benefits from it,” Devick says. “She doesn’t have to leave the front desk to grab client files because she’s able to view them right from her computer. So we always have someone sitting at the front desk—which is much better from a customer service perspective.”

Storing documents in Laserfiche also helps Bond and Devick comply with regulatory requirements for disaster recovery and information security. “Storing all our documents electronically enables us to back up the data and keep it offsite,” Devick says. “And our system is encrypted and password-protected, which makes unauthorized access nearly impossible.”

Laserfiche has also enabled Bond and Devick to more easily comply with legal and broker-dealer retention requirements. “Since we are required to maintain much of our client data for seven years, we’ve eliminated more paper than we could have imagined when we started this process two years ago,” Devick says.

“It’s also simplified our audit process,” she adds. “It’s cut the time of our compliance audits down considerably, since the auditor can quickly and easily pull up any information they need.”

When an auditor is onsite, they can sit down at a computer and pull up any information they’re looking for on their own. “Auditors have never had a problem using the system,” she says.

Ultimately, Bond and Devick knew that optimizing business processes was the key to their ultimate success. “We didn’t really look at our Laserfiche system from a financial perspective, but as a necessity,” Devick says. “Being able to access our information is quickly is key, and so is the fact that we can easily share information both in and outside the office.

“I would highly recommend Laserfiche,” she continues. “The pleasant surprise with Laserfiche is how simple it is to use—it’s much easier than locating a hardcopy client file. Once things are scanned in, anyone can find the information they’re looking for.”

Bill Long, MultiMed’s CEO, recalls his first thoughts upon hearing the news: “Of course, my first concern was my staff’s safety. But after I learned everyone was out of the building, I started thinking about what we’d need to do to get back up and running. I wasn’t in panic mode at all, thanks to of our disaster recovery plan. “

The foundation of MultiMed’s disaster recovery plan is their Laserfiche digital document management system. MultiMed staff immediately scans all incoming paperwork into the Laserfiche repository, where it’s automatically indexed and securely archived. Routinely scheduled in-house and off-site backups preserve documents’ integrity and ensure their future accessibility. “There’s nothing more important to us than making sure our clients feel safe with their information in our hands,” Long says.

That information includes pre-hospital care reports, checks and explanation of benefits (EOB) forms, so MultiMed must focus on protecting patient privacy, in addition to providing their clients with peace of mind. “It’s not just for compliance purposes,” Long explains. “From a moral standpoint, it’s the right thing to do.”

While Laserfiche has ably addressed the company’s disaster recovery concerns, MultiMed staff had realized the benefits of Laserfiche long before the fire. The company’s efficiency gains have been especially dramatic: Long estimates that since implementing Laserfiche, MultiMed has increased efficiency by 20% while controlling labor costs and dramatically reducing other overhead costs.

Says Long, “For any business, the benefits of going paperless are easy to see. There’s no more getting up, walking to a file cabinet, looking for a file and bringing it back to the desk when a client calls. We can bring up all our information instantaneously.”

Many medical billing companies have accelerated collections with Laserfiche, and MultiMed is no exception. Whenever a supporting document enters the Laserfiche repository, Laserfiche Quick Fields™ automatically files it to the appropriate folder, either by reading a bar code or by recognizing particular text printed on the document. The result? All documentation relating to each claim resides in the same folder, so staff can access whatever information they need in order to process a claim, whenever they need it.

Laserfiche’s integration with MultiMed’s primary billing software makes accessing information even easier. Staff employ a dual-screen setup—one monitor displays their primary software, the other shows the Laserfiche repository. Bringing up a pre-hospital care report in the primary software instantly retrieves all supporting documents from Laserfiche, then displays them side-by-side with the billing application. In addition, Laserfiche automatically assigns metadata to all future associated documents originating from the billing application, enabling staff to locate documents in a number of different ways.

Still, all of these enhancements would be for naught if MultiMed was caught without a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.

“We did an event synopsis after the fire,” Long explains. “We saw that even if the building had been completely leveled, all of our information would have been backed up, right to the minute of the event. We could have been back up and running within a day, two at the most.”

When asked to speculate on how long it might take to recover if the worst happened and MultiMed was without its Laserfiche system, Long answers flatly, “I don’t know if we would ever be back in business.”

Crisis averted, Long is beginning to think about additional ways Laserfiche could help with disaster recovery—specifically, if such a disaster were to occur at one of his employees’ homes.

“I’d like to offer all employees their own personal folder in the company Laserfiche repository,” he says. “That way, they could preserve all their own vital documents if something should ever happen in their personal lives. It would be a great added perk.”

Future plans aside, Long appreciates the peace of mind that Laserfiche offers every day. “We’re in the medical field, but every business has shared concerns, and similar documents to protect—invoices, HR files. It’s important to be prepared for anything. Laserfiche’s disaster recovery features have been like insurance—you hope you never need to use it, but if anything does happen, boy, are you glad you’ve got it.”

Because power at the Arenson & Zimmermann offices will be out for at least four weeks, staff spent the weekend setting up remote computer connections for all attorneys and support staff so they could work from off-site locations. “Using Laserfiche to pull electronic files has been a critical element in keeping our operations going, especially when paper files were impossible to get to,” said Lauri L. Chappell, Arenson & Zimmermann’s legal assistant.

“We were able to retrieve electronic copies of our insurance policies and tenant leases to determine issues as soon as possible regarding flood damage,” continued Chappell. “We have also been able to scan new documents into Laserfiche and transmit them to staff, opposing counsel and clients with little disruption to business.”

Laserfiche also allows the firm to print documents in order to recreate files for court, and to retrieve histories of cases without needing access to paper files at all. Chappell explained that without Laserfiche, staff members would have had to carry large boxes of files down nine flights of stairs while holding flashlights. “Although the stair climbing would have put us all in much better physical shape, Laserfiche has allowed us to spend our time producing billable work,” concluded Chappell. “Laserfiche definitely helped keep us going during this difficult time.”

Arenson & Zimmerman’s Laserfiche reseller, Paper Free Technology, is based in Des Moines, Iowa.

About Laserfiche

Laserfiche creates simple and elegant document management solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, Laserfiche has helped more than 25,000 organizations—including state and local governments, financial services firms and healthcare providers—optimize business processes and reduce operating costs.

Laserfiche captures and indexes all your organization’s business content—from documents and faxes to e-mails and multimedia files—in a secure, central repository. A unified metadata model helps users classify information, while full-text search tools enable them to quickly find what they need. Laserfiche’s open architecture and flexible API promote rapid integration with other Web- and Windows-based applications, allowing users to capture, manage and distribute information in diverse working environments.

Laserfiche software is distributed by a worldwide network of value-added resellers, who have extensive experience creating solutions that meet clients’ specific business needs. In recognition of the outstanding training and support we provide our resellers, the Laserfiche VAR program has received a five-star rating from VARBusiness magazine.

About Arenson & Zimmerman

Established in 1995, Arenson & Zimmerman is a multi-service law firm focusing its practice in the areas of business law, corporate law, dealer franchise law, litigation, real estate, criminal law, family law and personal injury. Arenson & Zimmerman takes advantage of the latest developments in accounting and computer science, including document management software.

The York County Clerk of Courts Office uses a Laserfiche® digital document management system to manage criminal court records for the York County Court of Common Pleas, whose records are used by 25 other county departments. With over 8,000 cases processed annually and more than $9 million collected in costs, fines and restitution, managing the related documents is a big job.

Senior Project Administrator Mary Jane McCluskey.

Before implementing Laserfiche, York County faced what Information Services Department Senior Project Administrator Mary Jane McCluskey calls a “‘sneakernet’ nightmare,” with paper copies as the only reliable means of circulating information. Searching for documents which could be located on any one of sixteen clerks’ desks was becoming increasingly costly. Not to mention that older documents resided five miles offsite and communicating with the county prison—also located five miles away—relied on easily-misplaced faxes.

“With the prison, people were often quicker than the process,” McCluskey says. “New inmates would be turned away because their paperwork hadn’t arrived and the prison didn’t expect them. Or the family would arrive to pick up a released inmate, and the prison wouldn’t know the case disposition, so they wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

After a successful pilot project to digitize minutes from board meetings, York County began digitizing court files in 2005. The first step was to identify major categories or topics of filings, such as “motion-petition-order” or “disposition-sentencing,” which streamlined file organization in Laserfiche. “My staff put their institutional knowledge to work and developed 17 criteria, or file chapters, from the myriad filings we receive daily,” says Clerk of Courts Don O’Shell. “Wendy Bossard, our judicial services manager, and Kathy Groff, our records unit manager, deserve tremendous credit for developing the basic building blocks of our electronic file structure in Laserfiche.”

In 2006, the office began scanning all incoming filings, with the goal of imaging all filings within four hours, or by the next business day for documents received after 3:00 P.M. Staff established a rush process, whereby documents requiring more rapid processing are rushed directly to imaging, docketed and forwarded to a judge, serviced to the sheriff or district attorney, or sent along to defense counsel.

On the recommendation of their reseller, DocuScan USA, the county also set up a system to simplify scanning and filing. They implemented Quick Fields™ with Pattern Matching and Real Time Lookup™, which pulls the case number from the state database and creates a folder structure. Quick Fields also automatically sorts and files case documents, which minimizes staff training. “All we have to do is create batch header sheets with bar codes, and Quick Fields does the rest,” says Front Counter Supervisor Garth Bambling. “It takes seconds for front counter clerks to create batch header sheets, which are attached to the documents and then sent back for scanning.”

The Gates and Plough Complex reflects private and public life in Colonial York.

County-wide access to the Laserfiche repository means that other departments can view scanned documents as they need them, eliminating the need to copy documents multiple times and significantly reducing file requests—making the court and related departments much more efficient. This reduces the need for overtime and promotes better relations among departments, given that staff in other parts of county government can instantly access case files maintained in the clerk’s office. The prison records office also has access to case dispositions and court documents in a searchable format, which eliminates the problem of misplaced documents, as well as the need to physically fax or transport paper records.

The office’s Laserfiche repository stores everything from criminal and juvenile records to miscellaneous docket files, summary appeals and administration files. By early 2006, all files had been imaged from the front end, and, in summer 2006, staff began the back-scanning process. “We had four million documents from 2000 on alone,” McCluskey says, “and we needed to be able to give the judges, probation staff, district attorneys and public defenders access to those documents.”

But not everyone immediately saw value in digitizing case files. “Certain members of the court expressed their preference that imaging take a back seat to the docketing and servicing of court filings, and said that imaging should be accomplished on the back end, instead of on the front end,” O’Shell remembers. “Some even went as far as to cite potential contempt of court proceedings if imaging wasn’t relegated to solely an archival process.”

Yet once the 2006 and 2007 files were digitized, judges began asking for even more documents online. “They found that it made research easy,” McCluskey says, “and they liked being able to immediately respond to questions from attorneys, probation officers and the public.”

To help judges and staff further embrace the new system, McCluskey and her colleagues started a hands-on training program to train staff during the judges’ lunch hour. “This is an ongoing project,” McCluskey says. “We’re training other departments as well. When we first implemented the system, we gave users access to it before we’d trained them, and some users became slightly frustrated because they didn’t realize everything the system could do. We definitely learned from that.”

The Snyder’s of Hanover bakery tour is a favorite in the “Factory Tour Capital of the World.”

And that wasn’t the only thing McCluskey learned. “With a big project like this, it’s important to think in terms of years, not months,” she says. “Just realize that success builds upon success—just focus on getting one thing accomplished, then move on to the next thing. Work in small steps, and before you know it, you’re done.”

The York County program doesn’t just provide faster access to case files, it also helps to ensure business continuity. McCluskey chairs an initiative to develop a countywide continuity of operations plan, of which Laserfiche is a key component. “This is a three-year project that moves far beyond disaster recovery,” she says. “We focus not just on technology, but also people, process and location to identify vulnerability. With departments that only have paper files, like our public defender or our mental health department, what happens if they can’t get back into their building for months? What happens if the files are gone entirely?”

In fall 2007, York County implemented a pilot program to give attorneys access to case files over the Web, and hopes to extend the system even further. The county also plans to implement Laserfiche in both the central booking division of the sheriff’s department and in the children and youth services department, where cases are often open for more than 20 years. The benefits have been so great that the clerk’s office would like to receive superior and supreme court appeals electronically, and they’d like to install touch screens in the courtroom so clerks can enter information and send it to Laserfiche even more quickly.

The progress the county courts have made is impressive. “To us, the biggest change is that the judges who refused to give up paper—the same ones who were threatening us with contempt of court charges if we couldn’t give them immediate access to case files—are now the system’s biggest advocates,” O’Shell says. “We even had one judge tell us the system was ‘better than sliced bread.’ ”

The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, which connects St. Tammany Parish to New Orleans, is the longest bridge in the world.

Prior to installing Laserfiche®, staff in the office’s criminal records department spent most of their time managing paper. The department’s supervisor, Captain Margie Hennessey, remembers the floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets staff would have to search through when detectives requested a file. To save storage space, records older than five years were transferred to microfilm; finding information in those files required staff to locate the correct film cartridge, load it into a microfilm reader and scroll until they reached the page they were looking for.

“Although the indexing system we used was fairly efficient, searches could take us anywhere from a couple of minutes to an hour or more,” Hennessey recalls. “Occasionally, we’d start looking for a document and discover that it had been misfiled. At that point, chaos would often result, as everyone got involved in the search.”

The office’s IT staff began researching document management systems with the goal of eliminating these manual search processes and reclaiming physical storage space. After evaluating several systems, the office selected Laserfiche because of its ease of use and because of the local technical support they’d receive from their Laserfiche reseller, ImageTek of Louisiana. Staff were also impressed by the system’s security features. “It’s critical that we protect the information in our case files—most of which can’t be released without a court order,” Hennessey explains. “Scanning documents into Laserfiche makes them much more secure than the paper copies we used to store in filing cabinets.”

“During Hurricane Katrina, we experienced some very traumatic times. At one point, the records division was down to three staff members—and we usually have a staff of nine. If it wasn’t for Laserfiche, we wouldn’t have been able to keep up with our caseload.”

Captain Margie Hennessey
St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office

Now, when detectives create a case file, secretarial staff scan the documents into the Laserfiche repository, where they’re stored in electronic folders whose structure replicates the physical filing system the office used in the past. As part of the scanning process, Laserfiche’s OCR functionality indexes each document’s content, making it immediately available for full-text searching.

Although Hennessey and her staff do a lot of scanning themselves, they also perform quality control on documents scanned by the secretaries. “We make sure that each document is legible, is indexed correctly and can be retrieved by our detectives,” she says. The detectives particularly appreciate the Laserfiche Plus™ module, which enables staff to quickly burn documents to CD. Because each CD includes a built-in document viewer, detectives can use the same search tools on these documents that they use on their desktop computers to search the full Laserfiche repository. “Thanks to the CDs, our detectives can review case documents on their laptops from wherever they need to be—and even work on cases from home,” Hennessey says.

Despite the time and efficiency savings Laserfiche has brought to the sheriff’s office, detectives continue to create a paper file for each of their cases. “The district attorney likes to have physical copies of documents on hand, for use during discovery,” Hennessey says. “So, after we scan the case file into Laserfiche, we deliver the original documents to the district attorney’s office, and they store the paperwork in their records room.”

Even though staff in the district attorney’s office continue to work with paper documents, Hennessey explains that they, too, have benefited from Laserfiche. “We provided the district attorney’s office with view-only Laserfiche licenses. Whenever we send them original documents, we drop the scanned images into their Laserfiche folder,” she says. “Thanks to Laserfiche, staff in that office can now view documents right on their computer screens, and they can use the system’s search tools to quickly find the information they need, without having to look through the paper file.”

In addition to the criminal records department, other divisions within the sheriff’s office use Laserfiche to streamline processes and eliminate paperwork. For example, the human resources department uses Laserfiche to manage personnel files and job applications. The jail uses Laserfiche to manage booking sheets and inmate health reports. And the occupational licensing division uses Laserfiche to manage documentation on each of the 8,600 vendors registered to do business in the parish.

Along with its flexibility, one of the major strengths of the Laserfiche system lies in the way it helps government agencies continue operations when a disaster occurs—something that was put to the test when Hurricane Katrina struck St. Tammany Parish in 2005. Hennessey says that, as the hurricane approached, she and her colleagues were confident that the office’s criminal records were secure. “Our IS division regularly backs up all our servers. Once the hurricane passed, they brought the servers back online, and we went back to work,” she says.

Once the storm passed, however, the parish had to deal with the aftermath. “We experienced some very traumatic times; there was devastation and loss of life all around us,” Hennessey remembers. “We lost several employees due to relocation. At one point, the records division was down to three staff members—and we usually have a staff of nine. If it hadn’t been for Laserfiche, we wouldn’t have been able to keep up with our caseload.”

A good old-fashioned Louisiana crawfish boil.

That caseload has only increased in the years following the hurricane, as displaced residents from New Orleans and other neighboring areas have resettled in St. Tammany Parish. But Hennessey and her colleagues haven’t had any trouble keeping up with the demands that accompany all of this growth. “In the four years since we installed Laserfiche, the parish’s population has increased by more than one-third, and our office has put 35 more deputies and 20 more detectives on the street,” she says. “Yet we haven’t hired more staff in the records department.”

She adds that staff are both more productive and more accurate than they used to be, and that they spend far less time making photocopies and searching for documents. In fact, since the office installed Laserfiche, they’ve reduced their photocopying costs by two-thirds.

Hennessey doesn’t mince words when she’s asked whether she’d recommend Laserfiche to other law enforcement agencies. “Not only would I—I already have,” she says. “We’ve had staff from other agencies visit our office, and they’ve been impressed with what they’ve seen. Generally, they’re most concerned with budgetary questions, and I tell them that Laserfiche will pay for itself in a short period of time.

“Laserfiche has definitely helped us better serve the parish’s citizens,” she continues. “Laserfiche makes us more efficient, meaning we can organize case files and get them to the district attorney’s office more quickly, which helps the parish keep criminals off the street. Prosecuting the people who commit crimes is the bottom line—there’s nothing we do that’s more important than that.”

According to Margaret Anderson, Certified Records Manager for Collin County, the county’s location just north of Dallas, reasonable housing costs, great schools, and a family-friendly environment have contributed to the county’s growth. Records show the population is quickly approaching 1,000,000 – almost double its size since 2000. Anderson said county officials saw an increase in demand for services and found that access to information through a conventional paper-based filing system was no longer an option — due to the sheer volume of documents.

“We needed an enterprise solution that had retention schedule capabilities, met DoD 5015.2 requirements, offered disaster recovery capabilities, reduced storage needs, and allowed shared access to documents across several building locations,” said Anderson. “We are growing so much that it’s just not cost efficient to keep silos of unmanaged information.” Anderson explained that storage and workflow needed to be addressed.

When a committee of ten did their research and made their decision, Anderson said they chose Laserfiche because they liked the integration already in place with HTE, which is their primary application in Accounting and Budget. Laserfiche also provides the back-end they need to archive their growing volume of cases. Further, they did their due diligence and found that cities and counties of similar size that were using Laserfiche gave positive feedback.

For the justice system alone, Collin County currently handles more than 322,100 documents per year and the number is growing:

The county will begin with those departments related to the criminal justice system including the District Clerk, District Attorney, and the County-Court at Law Clerks. The county’s Laserfiche document and records management system will provide an archival and records management backbone for their case management system. It will later be expanded to other county departments such as Human Resources and Public Works. The county plans to archive over 10 million images that date back to the early 1800s, when the county was founded.

Following a competitive selection process, MCCi, a long-time reseller for Laserfiche with extensive expertise and a client base of over 400 government agencies, was selected to implement Laserfiche’s document and records management solution.“We designed the implementation plan with an innovative and consultative approach that would allow Collin County to phase the solution in successfully,” said Russell Haddock, lead account executive for MCCi. “Once the contract was awarded, our lead project manager molded the plan with input from the Collin County team to allow for a seamless implementation, which Laserfiche is known for.”

Laserfiche Vice President, Government Solutions, Hedy Aref, said, “2007 has been a notable year for local government. Many entities have managed to roll out solutions that improve internal work processes, resulting in better public service delivery. We are pleased to have played a major role in this initiative and continue fully supporting this goal. Local governments look favorably at digital document management for multiple departments, if not the entire enterprise,” she said.

About Collin County
Collin County was created by the state of Texas in 1846. McKinney became a county seat in 1848 and was named after one of its first settler statesmen, Collin McKinney. This bustling part of North Texas has become an attractive home to two professional sports teams and an ever-growing list of corporate headquarters. The county is home to an estimated 730,000 people who live and work from Plano to Blue Ridge, Celina to Royse City, and everywhere in between.

About MCCi
MCCi (www.mccinnovations.com), a subsidiary of Municipal Code Corporation (MCC), the nations leading codifier for local government, has been providing Electronic Records Management Solutions to its clients since 1998. In 1998, MCCi created a document imaging division, which subsequently evolved into MCCi in the summer of 2003. MCCi has formed several strategic partnerships with leading technology companies such as Laserfiche. MCCi has its headquarters in Tallahassee, Florida with satellite offices in Atlanta, Georgia, Ft. Worth, Texas, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Lansing, Michigan.

About Laserfiche
Founded in 1987 and based in Long Beach, CA, Laserfiche (www.Laserfiche.com) develops scalable electronic document management solutions that enable a wide range of organizations to operate more effectively. Supported by a network of more than 1,000 certified Value Added Resellers, Laserfiche solutions can be found in more than 25,000 business and government offices worldwide. Laserfiche products are known for being both broadly applicable and easy to use and maintain.

How has the “City of Parks” met the demands of high-volume recordkeeping and permitting processes, while maintaining great public service? The City’s IT and Planning and Development team answers that question—and reveals how the City won an award for its approach—in this issue.

The Planning and Development Department issues 100 building permits per week, generating anywhere from 60 to 100 records related to each property. At a minimum, 6,000 records flow into the department’s records management system on a weekly basis. Using a paper-based system, staff spend hours copying Plan Checkers’ notations from every building plan reviewed onto archival copies.

Beyond the records room, the real-world significance of those numbers comes into focus. The Fire Department depends on fast access to building plans to pre-plan for maximum firefighter safety. Building Inspectors, other agencies and the public frequently request building records that were previously stored on microfiche. Plans buried in cabinets of microforms frustrate front counter staff with long searches, not to mention finding information that’s hard to read due to decades of handling.

Any solution would have to address these issues, and also meet the criteria of the Information Technology Division. It would have to be easy to use to encourage fast staff acceptance. It would provide a low-maintenance, Web-based thin client, and it would have to serve as a foundation for integrating other applications and extending benefits citywide.

The solution began with a simple request for a large format scanner. Recognizing the regulatory ramifications of scanning records and depositing them on a network without a comprehensive records management plan, the City’s Manager of Administration and Special Projects seized the opportunity to lay the foundation for an enterprise information management solution. While the Planning and Development system would be deployed to deliver immediate benefits to that department, it would also serve as a pilot project for the eventual citywide solution.

After earning buy-in from the City’s senior management, the IT and Planning and Development project team forged ahead with their Laserfiche® archived digital records project, dubbed CARS (City’s Archival Records System). CARS has met or exceeded all of the team’s initial goals to provide a high degree of value to internal clients and taxpayers.

Reducing costs and improving upon paper-bound processes were chief among those goals. On those scores, CARS has achieved an award-winning level of success as demonstrated by the British Columbia Public Sector Technology Award the City recently received for the system. The department estimates reductions in search and retrieval costs alone at $30,000 to $50,000 annually.

Accurately capturing building plans submitted with permit applications is another key goal that contributes to the ongoing success of the system. The City determined that a mix of in-house and outsourced scanning best suited their needs. Laserfiche allows commercial building plans scanned by an outside service provider to be easily incorporated into their digital repository, while department staff capture residential plans with their in-house scanners.

Authorized users then can access digital building plans from their computers using a Web-browser interface to search for the civic address or words in the full-text record. It’s so easy to use that Building Inspectors, initially resistant, now “love it,” says CARS/Laserfiche Project Manager Tina Chahal, and it requires minimal support from IT. The system also has reduced potential liability by eliminating the error potential inherent in the old manual copying process.

Taxpayers and other departments also realize the benefits of the new system. In-house scanning saves customers the cost of submitting duplicate copies of building plans, and thanks to the 50% reduction in plan- review and notation-processing time, the public enjoys faster turnaround of permit applications. First responders in the Fire Department no longer have to wait for a digital tracing process to get current building plans into their CAD system.

IT Manager Geoff Samson says he’s optimistic about expanding throughout the city, given Laserfiche’s usability and ease of integration. Ms. Chahal agrees, attributing much of their success to thorough planning, with emphases on engaging end users early on and careful indexing to promote smooth implementation and scaling up. “We’re a lean, innovative IT department,” she says. “We push our applications to the nth degree.”

The flooding, on Oct. 17, caused one fatality, apparently from a heart attack, and inflicted major damage in and near the downtown section, where the unrelenting heavy rain sent flash floods roaring down two rivers and what’s usually a small creek. Homes and small industrial buildings were sluiced off their foundations; cars were swept away. Many people were housed in shelters and many months later were still homeless.

The Laserfiche system, purchased from DynaSource, LLC, of Beaumont,TX, had arrived a day or two earlier and had not yet been unwrapped. But within a week, DynaSource president Chuck Beard and his partner Pete Petry came up to install the new equipment and show Ms. Sarkozi’s team how to use it.

“The simplicity of it is what we’ve enjoyed the most,” Sarkozi said. In about three weeks, they were able to scan the minutes of all city council meetings going back to 1945¾ a four- or five-foot stack of oversized ledger books, 640 pages to the book¾ into a single pocket-sized CD. “Those books weigh 30 pounds apiece,” Sarkozi added.

“When somebody wanted a municipal record, we had to heft the book down, hope to find the right page in the index, photocopy it and hand it over. Now, it’s just a matter of tapping a few keys and walking over to the printer. We’re going to put those books in a safe place. We won’t need them any more.”

Now that they have compressed a half-century of city council minutes on to one compact disk, Sarkozi’s crew is looking for more worlds to conquer. “We’re going to do our resolutions, and all the city ordinances, deeds and easements,” she said. “Oh, we see so many uses for it. Just as soon as this city dries out a little bit.”

School counselor Roberta Thornton says it was the floods of 1990 and 1994 that convinced the school board it was time to investigate the potential benefits of the paperless office. “The 1990 flood wasn’t so bad,” she said, “Only a few neighborhoods were affected, and a few houses under water. After it was over, everybody said ‘Well, that’ll never happen again.’ ”

But it did, in October 1994, and it was far worse. The Baptist Hospital (now Liberty-Dayton Hospital) across the river from the school, was inundated, and its nursing home had to be evacuated. And Mrs. Thornton received a pre-dawn telephone call.

“It was four or five in the morning,” she said recently, “They told me that the levee had broken and we had to get right up there to save the records. Well, when I arrived, the water was rising but it wasn’t up to the school yet. We went inside, the principal, Don Lorenz; the superintendent, Dr. Joseph Crane; and I. We went into the records office, where the big four-drawer file cabinets are. We took out all the bottom drawers of all those cabinets, and put them on top to give us a foot or so of leeway, in case the water came up that high. I want to tell you, a standard file cabinet drawer filled with paper is no light little thing. It’s HEAVY!

“And those files were dry. Can you imagine what the job would have been like if the water had risen higher and we’d had to pull them out soaking wet?”

It was still dark, but the river had reached the two-story building’s porch when Mrs. Thornton went home. The school auditorium and part of the gym, below ground level, were flooded, but she was able to reach her car without getting her feet wet. Principal Lorenz wasn’t so lucky: he stayed longer, lifting a second tier of file drawers atop the cabinets, and by the time he left, he had to wade across the parking lot.

The water never entered that part of the building above ground level. The records remain dry to this day. But school was closed for a week because of high water throughout the town.

So Liberty High survived the 1994 flood. But, as if these humans needed any more convincing about the powers of Mother Nature, a tornado grazed the school just a few months later, lashing the tennis court. That was enough for Mr. Lorenz and the school board. They decided that the next natural challenge might not be survived quite as well. They consulted Charles Beard, President of DynaSource LLC, of nearby Beaumont, who since 1975 has made a specialty of counseling independent school districts on computer and archiving problems. He set up a small, self-contained Laserfiche Document Imaging system for the school, at a cost of less than $10,000 for the software plus the labor of converting nearly 80 years of paper records to storage on virtually-indestructible plastic disks.

This meant replacing 16 large file cabinets with a package small enough to fit on a desktop. To find any student’s record, all a clerk needs to do now is slip a five-inch disk into a PC disk drive, and type a few letters and numbers: the required data leaps to the computer’s monitor screen.

The next time the Trinity River acts up, one person can carry the Liberty High School student records to safety with one hand. And if that person oversleeps, or doesn’t hear the telephone, there’ll be a backup set of disks higher and dryer in the school district’s main administration building, a few miles away. And Mrs. Thornton has reclaimed valuable office space, which the looming file cabinets had taken away from her.

The new system also gives Principal Lorenz a new feeling of security. “We feel we will now be in compliance with guidelines and will be protected against future calamities,” he said.