“The Art of Enabling the Government Enterprise with ECM” on November 16 and December 8 at 10:00 A.M. PT demonstrates how state and local governments (SLG) can streamline transactional content management and improve citizen services across their enterprises with expanded Laserfiche ECM systems.

Attend to learn how your organization can:

• Build an ECM foundation that moves beyond siloed applications and enables shared services.
• Cost-effectively meet SLG-specific governance, risk and compliance requirements.
• Automate cross-functional departmental applications, like case management and AP Processing, from the comfort of native applications.
• Trade in legacy document management systems for credit towards upgrades.

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With approximately 150,000 residents, Franklin County comprises 52 different departments, including the Commissioners’ Office, Human Resources, Human Services and Risk Management, to name just a few. Yonker notes that these departments “operate like 52 separate businesses under the same umbrella.”

In this kind of environment, it’s especially important to establish enterprise-wide IT standards to promote consistency and cross-departmental collaboration, Yonker says. However, it’s often difficult to find technology that’s agile enough to meet the needs of many different departments and flexible enough to adapt quickly and cost-effectively to changing conditions.

“It’s hard to convince all the different departments that they can all use the same system,” says Yonker. “Because of that, we didn’t start out thinking Laserfiche was going to be enterprise technology. But after the enterprise content management seed was planted in one department, suddenly all our departments wanted to know more.”

The Beginning

Franklin County first purchased Laserfiche back in 2001. “We had some younger Commissioners come in, and they were more familiar with technology and the benefits it could have for Franklin County than previous Commissions had been,” explains Jean Byers, deputy chief clerk in the Commissioners’ Office. “They selected Laserfiche for its instant search capabilities, as well as the fact that we could install it directly on the computers already in use.”

She continues, “We immediately realized tremendous benefits from Laserfiche. Documents that used to take days to find became available with the click of a button. It used to take hours to find specific text within meeting minutes that were hundreds of pages long, but with Laserfiche it only took seconds.”

The new technology also made it easy to share documents with colleagues, and due to a similar look and feel as Windows, Laserfiche quickly became popular with both management and staff.

The Evolution of an Enterprise Standard

As Laserfiche took root in the Commissioners’ Office, other departments began to take notice. With their focus on compliance and prudent financial management, both the Fiscal Office and the Controller’s Office deployed Laserfiche in 2004.

“Laserfiche is great for accounts payable (A/P) functions and auditing,” says Yonker. “For A/P, instant document retrieval speeds and simplifies the review and approval of invoices. And with electronically stored documents, employees can quickly and easily pull the files needed to satisfy an auditor’s request, with no need to spend hours digging through file cabinets. That’s a pretty impressive efficiency boost right there.”

Yonker notes that rolling Laserfiche out to additional departments was an easier sell than other system expansions because there was buy-in from the top right from the start.

“Whenever County purchases exceed a certain amount, they need to be approved by the Commissioners,” he explains. “Because the Commissioners were already very familiar with the value of using Laserfiche, they never hesitated to give the go-ahead when other departments wanted to get on board.”

The next departments to raise their hands and ask for Laserfiche were Human Services, which was particularly excited about Laserfiche from a disaster recovery standpoint, and Human Resources. Both departments implemented the software in 2006.

Human Resources

The first thing the HR department did after implementing Laserfiche was to start scanning personnel files into the system. It took some time to develop an appropriate folder structure that separated employees’ employment records from their confidential medical records and discipline files, and then it took about a year to get everything scanned in.

“We probably spent between 4-6 months in the planning phase, but getting those personnel files into Laserfiche properly has had an enormous payback for us,” says John Aguirre, Director of HR at Franklin County.

A few of the benefits include:

• Reduced paper consumption. “We used to photocopy 100,000s of pages of job applications a year for review by our elected officials,” says Aguirre. “We almost never make hard copies of documents anymore since our officials have access to everything they need in Laserfiche.”
• Instant search and retrieval. “The ability to locate documents quickly is great for me,” explains Aguirre. “Not a day goes by that I don’t get a request from one of our directors for material from an employee’s personnel file for various purposes. Laserfiche makes it easy for me to satisfy their requests and quickly e-mail them exactly what they need to see.”
• Higher staff productivity. “With Laserfiche, we can do more with less and accomplish more functions with the remaining staff, which is important in this economy. When one of our part-time HR reps left the County, we didn’t need to find a replacement because Laserfiche makes everybody more efficient. Retrieving documents is as easy as opening a Web page.”
• Reduced need for document storage. “Prior to implementing Laserfiche, we had a large ‘Electreiver’ file cabinet in the office that stored approximately 1,500 files and rotated them on chains. It was always breaking down and causing us headaches. Once we started digitizing our documents, we were able to get rid of that monster, along with five standing file cabinets. We now use that space for our receptionist’s desk and our Laserfiche scanner, so our office is much less cramped,” says Aguirre.
• Easier audits. “Auditors love Laserfiche because it’s so fast and easy to use. It’s also clear to them that we’re meeting compliance mandates with regards to our folder structure and the security surrounding confidential medical records, etc. In addition, my department no longer has to stop working in order to organize for the audits.”

Aguirre notes that in addition to managing personnel files in Laserfiche, his department has also added recruitment documentation and union and arbitration files to the system, which has led to quicker resolution of some grievances. In addition, HR is currently most of the way through scanning employees’ benefits files and leave of absence documents into the repository, and it has recently started on payroll documentation.

“Laserfiche is so secure in terms of access rights and privileges that we’re comfortable using it for everything we’ve got,” Aguirre says. “For example, I’m the only person in the HR Department who can view the union files, and I’m also the only one with deletion rights. I know that unauthorized staff can’t see confidential information, and I know that no one’s going to tamper with our files. The role-based security provides real peace of mind.”

Laserfiche Rolls across the Enterprise

With some technologies, organizations hit a tipping point for enterprise adoption. For Franklin County, that tipping point for Laserfiche was the implementation in HR.

“After HR deployed Laserfiche, everybody started to ask for it,” Yonker recounts. “People saw how successful the HR implementation was, and they began to talk about what the benefits for their departments could be.”

As Laserfiche was adopted by more and more departments, the types of content stored in the system grew more and more diverse:

• Emergency Services uses Laserfiche to manage notes from its 911 calls and cases.
• Franklin County Jail stores inmate records and requests in the Laserfiche repository.
• Planning, which is tasked with fostering the proper growth of communities within Franklin County, manages new development records with Laserfiche.
• Open Records, with its goal of making government transparent to County citizens, makes plans, drafts and studies stored in Laserfiche available to the public.
• Real Estate manages audit reports and past voting results using the ECM system. It is also able to respond to 13,000 queries a week in a fast and efficient manner thanks to Laserfiche’s ability to e-mail digital documents.

With 26 departments already using Laserfiche, Franklin County recently upgraded to Laserfiche Rio to bring 24 additional departments onto the system. According to Yonker, “Court Administration will be the last big department to make the transition, and we’re going to integrate Laserfiche with the state’s case management system for them.”

Although the IT Department had not initially planned to implement Laserfiche as the county-wide standard for ECM, it’s now grateful to have that consistency in place. “We got rid of a couple departments’ antiquated imaging systems in order to move them onto Laserfiche, which makes my staff more efficient because it only has to administer the one ECM system. It’s also easier from a user training perspective, since everybody’s using the same thing,” Yonker says.

According to Rochelle Waldoch, Compliance and Records Manager at Ramsey County, the need for more efficient paper-based business processes drove the county to investigate enterprise content management (ECM). “The Human Services Department had always been a paper-heavy department, but as caseloads grew, we started having difficulty with sharing paper files. In addition, client information was siloed, so employees had to collect the same data over and over again. It wasn’t an efficient process, and it needed to change.”

She notes, however, that the county wasn’t interested in deploying a departmental ECM solution. “If the Information Services Department was going to invest the time and resources in implementing ECM, the solution we chose needed to provide a standard systems architecture and methodology for managing all types of documents across the county—not just in one department.”

Needs Analysis and Selection Process

To that end, Waldoch and Toyia Arvin, EDMS Business Analyst, worked with county staff to analyze business processes and document needs in every department. This analysis included:

• Interviews with more than 500 county employees.
• Document inventories completed by each department.
• A review of each department’s network shared folder directory structures.
• An inventory of software applications used by each department.

Armed with the results of the needs analysis, Waldoch and Arvin authored the county’s RFP. “Prior to implementing Laserfiche, we were using the DocuWare system to store a variety of document types, but it didn’t have the advanced workflow or capture functionality necessary to streamline business processes enterprise-wide,” explains Waldoch.

In terms of the selection process, Arvin says, “Laserfiche was beyond impressive when we were doing our RFP. Laserfiche Rio offered a familiar, Windows-like interface for our users; included all of the components we needed to achieve ECM success across the county, including Workflow, Records Management and unlimited servers; and received excellent recommendations when we did our reference checks.”

Central Control, Departmental Flexibility

Ramsey County implemented a 2,000-user Laserfiche Rio system in the summer of 2010. It is supported centrally by a four-person team within the IS Department. To date, the team has transferred more than eight million documents stored in the old DocuWare system to Laserfiche and brought a variety of departments onboard, including:

• Administrative
  o Boards and Committees. Documents such as agendas, ordinances and proclamations are OCRed and stored in Laserfiche, streamlining search.
  o Budgeting and Accounting. Using DataNOW Affinity, Laserfiche is integrated with ASPEN (PeopleSoft) accounting software. Users can locate transactions in ASPEN and then automatically index, store and/or retrieve associated documents.
  o Human Resources. Personnel files are managed in Laserfiche. Laserfiche security restricts file access to authorized users.
• Elections. Laserfiche allows the department to save staff time and money on tasks such as making copies, redacting private information and responding to public data requests.
• Human Services. Laserfiche streamlines case management for divisions such as Child Care, Financial Assistance Services and Workforce Solutions.

Waldoch and Arvin note that the Elections and Administrative implementations have gone smoothly. “Because there was an election recount coming up, Elections employees did their homework before their initial meeting with us. They brought a lot of document samples and mapped out what kind of folder structure they wanted, which documents would need to be barcoded, what information would need to be redacted and so on,” says Arvin.

“Because of that, we were able to get them up and running in a week,” she adds. “Working with Crabtree, we’d do a build, show it to them that day, and then tweak it based on their feedback. They’d been thorough upfront with their planning, so there weren’t a lot of changes that needed to be made.”

Efficient Case Management Commences

Implementation in Human Services, which started out with a 75-user pilot project (including 28 case managers), has taken a little more time. “Elections is a small department with a limited number of document types,” explains Waldoch. “Human Services, on the other hand, is a huge department with hundreds of users and hundreds of forms—and a heavy need for Workflow.”

To determine how to configure the Client repository that Human Services uses, Arvin sat down with key Human Services employees to better understand their processes. “Subject matter experts in each of the three areas of the pilot analyzed their current folder structure by reviewing case files. Together, we analyzed the tabs contained in the paper files and came up with a nine-sided file structure that could meet the needs of all the various Human Services divisions,” she says.

“The goal of implementing Laserfiche within Human Services is to allow case workers to collect information from clients once and share it electronically throughout all program areas,” explains Waldoch. “Electronic client files decrease delays in processing benefits since case workers have, via Workflow, near-immediate knowledge of document receipt.

“In addition, supervisors have greater visibility into the workload and productivity of their employees. With Laserfiche, they’re able to run queries showing them what’s being processed and what’s still waiting in the queue.”

Also adding to the department’s increased efficiency is an integration using LincWare’s LincDoc to create a Case Creation Form for the Client repository. “LincDoc makes two calls—one to a State system (SMI) and one to a County system (CAFÉ) —to pull the information needed to create a new case in Laserfiche,” Arvin says. “Automating this process saves staff time.”

After a case is created, it goes through the following steps:

• The case receives “Appointment Pending” status in Laserfiche. When the client arrives for the appointment, CAFÉ alerts the worker to the arrival. An intake worker assigns the case to him- or herself by changing a template field, and Workflow routes the file to that person’s New Cases Queue.
• The intake worker meets with the client to collect additional information. Once the information has been captured into Laserfiche, Workflow routes the case to Case Assignment, where a clerk assigns the case to the ongoing case worker.
• Workflow sends a New Case Notification to the ongoing worker, who “acknowledges” the case by changing a template field. The case is then visible in the worker’s Active Cases queue. The worker then manages the case for ongoing benefits.
• Once a case is closed, its status is changed from “Active” to “Closed,” and the case is routed to the Records Department for long-term retention.

Arvin notes that creating workflows for Human Services wasn’t as simple as she’d first imagined. “The biggest lesson I learned is that you shouldn’t try to replicate paper processes in an electronic workflow. We built a workflow this way only to find out that a chunk of it was unnecessary, so we had to ask the Laserfiche engineers to go back and build it again.”

In terms of additional functionality, the IS team is currently in the process of enabling electronic signatures, electronic forms and barcoding, all of which will simplify working with Human Services clients.

In terms of additional Human Services divisions, the team is working to:

• Transition 340 Financial Assistance Services employees from read-only to full-client users, allowing them to expand their use of the system beyond search and retrieval.
• Integrate Laserfiche (via DataNOW Affinity) with MAXIS, the state-based case management system.
• Integrate Laserfiche with vxVista, the Mental Health Center’s electronic health system, so that users can automatically retrieve information from Laserfiche while looking at patient cases in vxVista.

“Although we have a long way to go before we’d consider Human Services a mature Laserfiche implementation, we’re definitely on the right track,” Waldoch says.

Change Management Methodology

“A lot of counties have to force content management into their departments, but we don’t have that problem here, due in large part to our extensive training program,” Arvin explains.

For the Human Services Department, the Laserfiche team involved all pilot participants in the project from early on. “The more involved people are in designing their own solutions, the more bought-in they’ll be when it comes time to use it,” she says. “We also had some strong advocates who’d previously worked in other counties that use ECM, so that was certainly a stroke in our favor.”

Once the Laserfiche pilot had been implemented, non-pilot employees started receiving information from Laserfiche on disk so that they’d become familiar with the way information was organized and presented. The team also created a lot of training documentation (available online), including videos of how to perform tasks in Laserfiche featuring the cast of The Flintstones. “Just because something is technical doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it,” Waldoch says. “If people are laughing, they’re paying attention.”

In-person training classes are conducted by unit, so that employees see the information and steps that are relevant to them. When needed, the Laserfiche team conducts individual training sessions as well. The Laserfiche team also plans to create a county-wide Laserfiche User Group to facilitate knowledge sharing between departments in the future.

Future Plans

Although Laserfiche is currently being used by several departments to enhance internal productivity, in the future, Ramsey County wants to use Laserfiche to directly help its citizens as well. It plans to do this by making information available to its constituents via a public portal, increasing transparency, and also by giving constituents the ability to complete and submit forms online. “We’re here to serve the public,” Waldoch explains. “We want them to get as much benefit from Laserfiche as our staff does.”

In conclusion, Waldoch says, “Laserfiche is a powerful enterprise system that’s already having a great impact in a number of departments.”

“ECM is a necessity to win larger deals, but finding the right partner can be an arduous task,” said Tom Wayman, Vice President of Product Strategy at Laserfiche. “The Laserfiche Systems Integrator Program provides a stress-free experience for system integrators looking to close larger opportunities.”

The Laserfiche Systems Integrator Program provides members with access to the Laserfiche ECM suite, which is built on Microsoft technologies to leverage existing Microsoft skillsets. Members:

• Quickly implement vertical-specific solutions built on the Microsoft stack, including ready-made templates for government, financial services, education and healthcare.
• Receive bid support including technical inquiries, sales team briefings and proposal assistance.
• Benefit from a dedicated team of engineers who assist with system design and training.

“Charter members of the Systems Integrator Program have won deals as large as $50 million in industries including federal government, education and financial services,” added Wayman. “We look forward to welcoming more members into this prestigious group.”

Systems integrators interested in program membership can apply at booth #719 in the Solutions Innovation Center (SIC) throughout the event, where Laserfiche will be offering stress-reducing massages and demonstrations of its agile ECM solutions.

More information on the Laserfiche Systems Integrator Program is available at www.laserfiche.com/si.

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 30,000 organizations worldwide use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

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

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

BMB and Laserfiche present Solidere with the 2011 Laserfiche Visionary Award. L-R: BMB's Nizar Ghannam, Zahi Naamani, Afif Soubra and Laserfiche's Sean Tang.

“Despite tough economic times, travel restrictions and security issues, we saw remarkable international VAR and end-user participation,” says Maya Abou Jawdeh, ECM Channel Development Manager at conference co-host, BMB sal. Jawdeh credits the dedication of the BMB and Laserfiche team for creating an organized, lively event. “Everyone was eager to participate and expressed enthusiasm for attending future Laserfiche/BMB events—it was a very collaborative atmosphere.”

Attendees were able to choose from more than 40 different class sessions over three days, including interactive lab sessions, roundtables and customer success stories. Taught by BMB and Laserfiche staff, and featuring Laserfiche users and resellers as guest presenters, the conference sessions offered something for everyone interested in bolstering their content management knowledge.

Conference attendees networking before classes.

Day one kicked off with a keynote from Ms. Phyllis Chen, Managing Director of Laserfiche International, followed by the welcoming speech from Mr. Nizar Ghannam, BMB’s Chief Operating Officer. Classes geared toward end users and businesses as well as intermediate and advanced technical training were offered, in addition to customer success story presentations that described real-world implementations of Laserfiche ECM.

Afif Soubra from Beirut-based real estate company Solidere discussed their use of a Laserfiche Rio system to manage reconstruction and development projects in Beirut’s City Center in the presentation, “Rio is the Way to Go for Solidere.” “Solidere is very satisfied with its choice to adopt Laserfiche ECM. Users are interested in the friendly interface and administrators appreciate the way the system is managed. After implementing Laserfiche in two major divisions within our company, we look forward to expanding to the remaining divisions in the coming months.”

Ghannam (L) and Tang (R) present a Partner Excellence Award to Muath Khatatbeh from Itqan Technologies.

Muath Khatatbeh and Mustafa Siddiqui from Laserfiche reseller Itqan Technologies presented on behalf of client Aspire Zone Foundation on how Laserfiche Rio is allowing them to move to a totally paperless environment, while Khurram Jamal from reseller Pixel Digital spoke about how the Dubai Police utilize Laserfiche to archive forensic photographs and other evidence to help catch criminals in the session “Laserfiche Helps in Archiving Forensic Evidence.”

Solidere was also one of six customers honored with Visionary Awards for their dedication to excellence, leadership and innovation in implementing Laserfiche solutions. Other organizations included Service Informatique de l’Armee (Algeria), Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudi Arabia), Ministry of Petroleum (Saudi Arabia), Al Watany Bank of Egypt (Egypt) and BankMed (Lebanon).

For Mr. Abed-el-Kader Amine of BankMed, this was his third year attending the Laserfiche International Conference. “Each year we find something new and helpful at the conference,” Amine says. “Now, we’re utilizing open database connectivity (ODBC) and Laserfiche database schema to successfully create and run our own custom reports.”

Itqan Holding from Qatar and Integrated Solutions for Business (ISB) from Saudi Arabia were also honored with Partner Excellence Awards in recognition of their outstanding service and technical innovation for their customer communities.

A special exhibitor area highlighted event sponsors, including:

• Diamond sponsor ForeFront Technologies (Fujitsu and Kodak) from the UAE.
• Gold sponsor Nashua Limited from South Africa.
• Platinum sponsor Image Systems-Canon from Lebanon.
  

  Attendees gather for lunch on the first day of the International Conference.

For the 4th consecutive year, BMB and Laserfiche have made a strong commitment to educating the MENA market and transferring knowledge to the region’s large customer base and resellers. “It’s our priority to respond efficiently to market competitiveness,” says Nizar Ghannam, COO of BMB. “We strive to optimize our efforts as we see specific needs emerge in the MENA region, and both users and partners are clearly pleased with Laserfiche products as indicated by the strong attendance of this year’s conference. It’s this dedication that ensures a successful conference—people are proud to be part of the Laserfiche community year after year.”

“Rodney recognized that although SharePoint could do many great things for our organization, DoD 5015.2-certified records management wasn’t one of them,” says Ellis, who today is a senior web analyst for the Port Authority.

“SharePoint,” she explains, “with all of its many features is so much more robust than a network drive. In particular, the Port Authority uses document workspaces heavily, because they make it easy to collaborate on works in progress such as contracts. However, once you go beyond about 10,000 documents, you’ve got a real mess on your hands.”

According to Ellis, the Port Authority didn’t want to lose the collaboration features inherent in SharePoint, nor did it want to take a familiar interface away from the staff, so it needed to make sure that the ECM solution it selected had a seamless SharePoint integration. “I was the lead on the team that built our RFP,” Ellis says. “In the end, we had more than 400 requirements and 24 vendors vying for our business. The SharePoint integration was our top concern.”

Other important selection criteria included:

• Robust records management functionality.
• The ability to electronically store a wide range of file types, including AutoCAD drawings.
• Open architecture allowing integration with line-of-business applications such as CRM.
• Availability of workflow functionality for process improvements—and a reduced paper flow.

“Before we implemented Laserfiche, our records management plan was very inefficient,” Ellis explains. “We’d print out documents, process them by hand and then file them in cabinets. We had a whole warehouse dedicated to file storage, containing all kinds of old documents in Bankers Boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling that we didn’t have time to properly manage.”

Laserfiche + SharePoint = Transparency

By integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint, the Port Authority now has the ability to collaborate on documents, retain them electronically, and efficiently manage and dispose of digital records—all while giving users access to content through the SharePoint interface.

“Laserfiche has dramatically reduced the flow of paper throughout the organization,” says Ellis. “It’s opened up space for new offices and enabled us to tear down an entire warehouse for profitable use!”

But the cost and space savings aren’t the most significant benefits the Port Authority has realized as a result of its Laserfiche implementation. By acting as integrative middleware, Laserfiche allows users at the organization to access information in the environment with which they’re already familiar: SharePoint.

“The Port Authority’s had SharePoint for close to ten years, so people are pretty familiar with it,” says Ellis. “Most of our users won’t even know they’re using Laserfiche. With the integration, our content is searchable on an enterprise level, and the results are returned to users transparently through SharePoint. It enables us to access all our information from one central location without having to train our users on a new system.”

Laserfiche + SharePoint = Operational Efficiency

With Laserfiche in place, the Port Authority has started using it to streamline business processes. First on the list? The RFP and vendor selection process.

The Port Authority was established in 1952 as a political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Virginia for the purpose of stimulating commerce in the ports of the Commonwealth, promoting the shipment of goods and cargoes through the ports, improving the navigable tidal waters within the Commonwealth, and in general to perform any act or function which may be useful in developing, improving or increasing the commerce of the ports of the Commonwealth. As such, it contracts with dozens of vendors each year.

In the past, the RFP and vendor selection process was manual and paper-based:

• Proposals were submitted in hard copy and photocopies for each member of the selection committee.
• After a contract had been finalized, paper copies were made for the Contracts and Finance Departments, and also distributed to the contract administrators.
• Because copies of the contracts documents weren’t centralized, it was difficult to locate the most current version of any given contract or amendment.

With the help of Unity ECM, the Port Authority’s Laserfiche reseller, the organization has transformed the entire process as follows:

• Proposals are submitted electronically and automatically routed into SharePoint.
• Proposals are posted to a workspace in SharePoint for contract evaluation, scoring, changes and selection.
• Once the collaboration phase is finished and the contract is finalized, it is automatically pulled into Laserfiche, where it is retained according to contract retention schedules.
• From SharePoint, users can access the contract by clicking on a URL that takes them directly to the document stored in Laserfiche. The URL placeholder in SharePoint ensures that the data is synchronized between the two systems, simplifying version control.
• When searching for a contract, users run a search in SharePoint that seamlessly provides results from both the Laserfiche and SharePoint repositories.

“Even employees who aren’t technologically inclined appreciate the efficiency of our new process,” says Ellis. “In general, having real-time information available in a central location has been one of the most important process improvements our organization has received as a benefit of this project.”

Overcoming Implementation Hurdles

One implementation hurdle that Ellis hopes to help other people avoid when integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint has to do with Kerberos, a network authentication protocol that, according to Ellis, is “widely used but poorly documented.”

The Laserfiche/SharePoint integration tools are optimally designed for a single-server deployment, but according to Ellis, the Port Authority “has Laserfiche and SharePoint set up on a multi-server farm that consists of five different servers: the Laserfiche Application Server, Laserfiche SQL Server, SharePoint (MOSS) Server, SharePoint SQL Server and a server for Laserfiche Web Access. Prior to implementing Laserfiche, we didn’t realize that—because we have multiple servers—the integration wouldn’t work without a great deal of manual configuration and without using Kerberos. We had a few frustrating days before we figured that out.

“In the end,” she adds, “we had to enlist a senior network administrator to assist us by adding the SPNs on the domain controllers, since adding them to the Laserfiche or SharePoint servers doesn’t solve the issue.

“My two big pieces of advice for other organizations that want to deploy the Laserfiche/SharePoint integration are to get to know your Active Directory and SharePoint experts really well (if you’re not either one) and use the Laserfiche Support Site. Read those Knowledge Base articles!”

Even the hassle surrounding the Kerberos issue, however, didn’t dampen Ellis’ enthusiasm for Laserfiche. “If I had to do it all over again the same way, I’d do it all over again, hands-down,” she says. “Both our users and our executives are impressed with the efficiency and effectiveness the Laserfiche/SharePoint integration affords the organization. Putting a secure, centralized and powerful Laserfiche repository behind SharePoint has given everybody much better access to the information they need to do their jobs well.”

According to IDC, “Laserfiche clearly has momentum on its side, in terms of growth, product development, and community acceptance. The company has been able to demonstrate a compelling value proposition to partners and customers, propelling it through a difficult economic climate.”

Other key takeaways include:

• “Laserfiche continues to focus on meeting the requirements of IT for centralized control of implementations and administration while enabling line-of-business users to define solutions to meet their particular needs.”
• “The company possesses competencies in capture and workflow as well as enterprise content management (ECM), enabling seamless integration between those capabilities, further facilitating business process optimization.”
• “Laserfiche is clearly good at nurturing its customer, partner, and advisor community. . . The number of Laserfiche Luminaries —customers that Laserfiche deems most innovative and passionate — increased by 25% in 2010. Customers and partners are supported by an extensive Web site and knowledge base, Webinars, workshops, and certification courses.”

The report concludes, “Laserfiche provides a complete offering without being overly complicated, enabling organizations to address the majority of their document and records management issues within a shorter time frame than other large ECM offerings. As the company further positions its offering as an ‘agile framework’ that can serve as a universal repository, integrative middleware that links into legacy systems, and an enabler of shared services, it will continue to attract the attention of IT professionals seeking a robust enterprise solution.”

Read the full IDC report now.

She ticks off a few of the benefits that give Laserfiche a leg up on the competition: “First, Laserfiche is easy to use, because it looks and functions like Windows and Google. Second, it’s stable and easy for the IT Department to maintain. Third, it has an open API that makes it easy to integrate with our other applications.”

These benefits, Duckett notes, are vital to Shakopee, which has a two-person IT Department supporting approximately 125 city staff in nine different departments. In fact, if Laserfiche wasn’t easy to use, maintain and integrate, the city wouldn’t have considered shaking up its approach to enterprise content management (ECM) by upgrading from four concurrent users to a 50-user Avante system.

Leading Up to the Upgrade

“We first implemented Laserfiche in 2005, using it to manage building permits through an integration with our PIMS building permit software,” Duckett explains, outlining how the process works:

- “We print barcoded permits that our records clerk scans into Laserfiche Quick Fields, which is an automated data capture solution.
- “Within Quick Fields we have an ODBC connection that connects to the PIMS database.
- “Quick Fields pattern matches the permit address, permit type and permit ID and automatically archives the document in the Laserfiche repository.”

She also notes that the city has long used Laserfiche to manage council agenda packets and other miscellaneous items, some of which are made available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink, a Web browser-based thin client that provides read-only access to public information.

The desire to upgrade the system came last year, when the Police Department hopped on the Laserfiche bandwagon. “In October 2010,” Duckett says, “the Police Department started using Laserfiche for evidence photos, and we integrated Laserfiche with New World, the PD’s case management system, to enable officers to automatically open photos that pertain to specific cases.”

The integration works as follows:

- Officers access an incident report in New World.
- By right-clicking on the New World screen, a box with a “Search Laserfiche” button pops up.
- Clicking the button launches Laserfiche and automatically takes the user directly to the right case folder, where he can view the evidence photos.

Jennifer Boudreau, Shakopee’s Police Records Technician, explains that one way the PD leverages the integration is to track graffiti, making it easier for officers to identify all instances of a tagger’s work so the city can recoup clean-up costs.

She also notes that Laserfiche allows officers to access photos in the field from their squad cars, which is something they couldn’t do in the past. “It’s an officer safety issue,” she says. “For example, if the officers come across a tagger with a known gang affiliation, they can treat that individual with more caution.”

Boudreau notes that in the past, search options were limited. With Laserfiche, officers can search photos by case number, but they can also search based on the metadata associated with each photo. This makes it easier to discern patterns that might not have otherwise been apparent.

Now that Shakopee has upgraded to Laserfiche Avante, the Police Department is looking forward to scanning all case files into the system. “Right now, case documents are contained in a paper file, which eliminates collaboration and the ability to work on the case at the same time as someone else,” says Boudreau. “As a result, we end up doing a lot of photocopying, which wastes paper. It can also get confusing to have so many copies of the same document floating around, because you never know which is the most current, complete version.”

Further, she explains that Laserfiche will be able to store more than copies of paper documents; where applicable, electronic case files will also contain audio files, squad car video and so on.

Since the Upgrade

Less than a month after implementing its 50-user Avante system, Shakopee has already brought the Finance Department onboard. It now uses Laserfiche Quick Fields to scan barcoded accounts payable documents into the repository, where they’re instantly searchable from the desktop.

“With the upgrade to Avante, which for us included the ‘Barcode and Validation’ and ‘Real Time Lookup and Validation’ packages, we can now use the pattern matching feature in Quick Fields, which automatically creates the folder structure in Laserfiche,” explains Duckett. “This creates a more efficient and seamless process for the users who scan documents into the system.”

She adds that once the Police Department starts using Laserfiche for its case files, it will use Quick Fields for its scanning, as well.

The next department to start using Laserfiche will likely be HR, which wants to use the system to digitize employee records and automate the hiring process using Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management tool that automatically performs specified actions (such as document routing) based on organizations’ unique business rules.

According to Duckett, this is just the beginning. “We hope to have every department using Laserfiche by this time next year.”

Additional Integrations

With the New World integration well underway, and the integration with the city’s PIMS building permit software already in place, Shakopee has big plans for linking Laserfiche to additional city applications. “Next, we plan to integrate Laserfiche with GeoLink, our GIS/mapping application,” says Duckett. “When you click on a land parcel, you’ll be able to launch Laserfiche and pull up all the documents associated with that particular piece of land.”

This functionality will be useful for multiple departments, including:

• The Police Department, which will use it for crime mapping.
• The Fire Department, which will be able to quickly retrieve building plans during emergencies.
• The Public Works Department, which will gain easy access to sewer information.

She goes on to explain that the city is also looking to integrate Laserfiche with JDE, Shakopee’s finance, payroll and HR software. “By integrating these two systems—and taking advantage of Laserfiche Workflow—we’ll be able to simplify the payment cycle with electronic invoices and purchase orders that can be automatically routed through the approval process. Once we digitize our HR records, we’ll be able to automate the hiring process as well.”

From Duckett’s perspective as an IT professional, the best thing about the planned integrations is how easy they’ll be to set up. “Because Laserfiche is used across so many cities and government entities, there are a lot of proven, pre-built integrations available to us at no additional cost.”

Avante = Affordability

In terms of cost-effectiveness, Duckett also appreciates how affordable it was to upgrade to Avante. “If we’d stayed with a concurrent user system and simply purchased the additional functionality and users we needed, it would have cost us $40,000 more than the upgrade to Avante,” she explains. “Plus, our named users now have 24/7 access to information, which is important from a productivity standpoint.”

She concludes, “Although it’s early in the implementation process, we’re starting to see financial and efficiency savings in the Finance, Building and Police Departments. Once we extend Laserfiche to all city departments and start creating workflows, we expect to save a lot more on paper and printing costs, and we also expect to greatly enhance employee efficiency.

“It’s our goal to have Laserfiche installed on every desktop in the city. We envision that it’ll be used as often as our e-mail client, providing instant access to records, streamlining business processes and allowing us to move data across multiple platforms.”

“We saw Laserfiche as a way to bring visibility, time-bound execution and accountability to our accounting business processes,” says Mandeep Singh, Head of Finance Shared Services at Essar.

Working with Laserfiche reseller Sigma-Tech India Pvt. Ltd, Essar Group initially purchased a 100-user Rio solution. What started as simply a way to centralize all finance-related information evolved into a full-scale ECM/BPM implementation.

According to Singh, “We started using Laserfiche primarily as a scanning and document management solution, but after experiencing the way Workflow and its integration capabilities could be used for our scanning operations, we scaled up use dramatically.”

Chandresh Sharma, Vice President at Sigma-Tech, worked with Essar business analysts to map out the end-to-end processes for finance and accounting functions. These processes were mapped in Laserfiche Workflow to validate vendor, customer, company and invoice information from the SAP masters, and ultimately route and approve invoices and contracts processed between Essar’s global business units and the Shared Service Center at its Mumbai headquarters.

Balancing Centralized and Decentralized Processes

“Laserfiche operates as part of a ‘hub and spoke’ model with the Shared Service Center as the hub and business geographies as the spokes, which connect to the central hub for document processing,” Singh explains.

A major operational benefit has been the ability to seamlessly balance centralized and decentralized processes using Laserfiche as both the hub and the spoke. “Financial Shared Services uses both models to fulfil transactions,” explains Singh.

• The centralized process approach is enabled by a central hub that accesses Laserfiche to process documents. Work allocation is assigned using Workflow, which detects exceptions to mapped data validation rules during the scanning process and provides notifications to responsible parties to resolve discrepancies. “This ensures that clean data is passed into the downstream operations of the financial services,” Singh says. A mail room solution is also in place to track and deliver transactions to Laserfiche, further accelerating the process and increasing productivity.
• The decentralized process approach uses Laserfiche deployed locally to establish remote common collection hubs at various offices across India (and eventually globally) through which vendors working with ESSAR can submit hard copies of transactions. “Laserfiche is run in a dedicated center and further downstream processes like scanning, indexing and quality assurance are carried out before being published to the SAP-DMS,” he adds.

International offices use an FTP route offline. “Here the SPOCs [single point of contact] submit their invoices to the FTP folder. From there it’s scheduled for automatic entry into the Laserfiche server using Laserfiche Import Agent. This enables further processing,” explains Singh.

In addition to streamlining accounting processes, Laserfiche has standardized work allocation enterprise-wide. “Operationally, work allocation is now defined based on certain parameters mapped in Laserfiche. For example, ‘Process Type,’ ‘Document Type,’ ‘Location Code,’ ‘Country Code,’ ‘Business Vertical,’ ‘Priority’ and others,” says Singh.

Shared Services, Enterprise Benefits

The benefits of using Laserfiche as part of the Shared Service Center have been both immediate and long-term:

1. Better throughput in terms of number of transactions per process associate.
2. Accelerated invoice turnaround times of less than an hour for urgent invoices across geographies and less than a day for normal invoices.
3. Increased visibility of daily transactions across 63 group companies. Laserfiche publishes a daily report to the business intelligence layer for companywide unified reporting.
4. Increased visibility of pending transactions in a categorized manner. Laserfiche Workflow notifies business process owners of necessary actions by way of mail alerts. “Moreover, we also unify these numbers with the Business intelligence Platform to provide better visibility,” says Singh.
5. Enhanced control environment through automatic system-end integrated validations with SAP-DMS using Vendor, Customer and Company Code checks for duplications or mismatches at the source stage itself. Laserfiche also does a validation for the key fields entered and runs a duplicate check across its database for any potential duplicates—which are then provided as reporting numbers and integrated with the BI platform.

The most ostensible benefit is obviously reducing invoice processing times from, on average, a matter of weeks into days and sometimes hours. But combined with increased transparency of business processes, Laserfiche has brought a new level of accountability to staff. With Laserfiche Audit Trail giving a step-by-step history of each action and user in the process, there are significant quality control and productivity benefits. Says Singh, “People think twice before performing a transaction.”

Though formal impact analysis will not be conducted until 2012, Singh estimates that Essar Group has realized a 40% return on its Laserfiche investment already, but foresees ongoing and expanding operational improvements. “Major ROI will come by de-skilling profiles deployed across companies for financial processes,” he explains.

Following the success of integration with SAP-DMS, Essar is now working with Sigma-Tech India to integrate Laserfiche (and SAP) with ARIBA financial software, as well as related procurement and e-invoicing modules to develop straight-through processing for accounts receivable, fixed assets, business expense reimbursements and income tax declaration. “We’re also now contemplating using [PDP partner] LincDoc for form-based workflow requirements,” Singh concludes.

Serving Ada County, Boise County, Elmore County and Valley County, CDHD manages the Board of Health and the Community Health, Communicable Disease, Immunization, Reproductive Health and WIC Departments in addition to the Environmental Health Department. The planning and zoning authority of each county requires the Environmental Health Department to review every subdivision’s application for sewage permits, which can include:

• Test hole inspections for sewage installation.
• Plot plans.
• Building permits.
• Zoning certificates.

“Paper copies of the records were located in each county’s office, which made them difficult for us to access without a lot of copying and faxing,” Ross explains. Efficient storage, organization and access to the documents crucial to the permit process was compromised until CDHD decided to implement Laserfiche ECM.

Powering Permitting

After the previous director of CDHD saw Laserfiche featured at an environmental health conference in 2004 and was impressed with its agility, the department decided to implement the software later that same year. The initial objective was to find a program that could scan in past and present septic permits and applications, while providing central access to the records across all the offices in the health district.

Today, CDHD uses Laserfiche not just to scan and store permit documents, but also to enable external clients to access the information themselves using Laserfiche WebLink, which provides read-only access to records stored in the Laserfiche repository. Clients include:

• Realtors selling homes that need permit information for potential buyers and appraisers.
• Septic pumpers looking to access permit information to find the location of septic tanks for pumping.
• Septic installers who are on-site and legally in need of a copy of the permit before proceeding with the installation.

Although clients applying for permits are supposed to provide a copy of their permits to septic installers (permits are required on the job site at all times), this frequently doesn’t happen. In the past, installers would have to come into the department and wait for a copy of the appropriate paperwork to be located and copied, or sometimes faxed over from the appropriate county. “Locating permit information for clients sometimes took hours to accomplish,” says Mike Reno, Supervisor of Land Based Programs for CDHD. “It slowed things down for both us and them.”

He continues, “With Laserfiche, the installers and other external clients can view the permit online and print their own copy if needed. This saves our clerical and field staff a lot of time making copies of permits and faxing them over.”

Ross notes that CDHD saw a significant reduction in information requests from external clients and that they continue to decline—especially from realtors—as clients realize most of their questions can be answered by accessing Laserfiche WebLink through the department’s Webpage.

“The ability to access data that resides in other offices is extremely helpful. It’s my favorite feature,” Reno says. If for some reason clients are unable to access the internet and attain records themselves, Reno can pull up the permit information on his desktop and provide the information within minutes.

With secure and easy public access and more efficient staff response time, Ross is pleased to report that CDHD “can concentrate on customer service, not paperwork.”

Empowering the Enterprise

After the initial deployment of Laserfiche, several other offices within CDHD got on board with goals of streamlining their specific work processes. Because Laserfiche integrates so easily with CDHD’s custom applications—written in-house with Microsoft Visual FoxPro—it’s especially easy to use across multiple departments. Employees are able to access Laserfiche features in a familiar way, which means CDHD can keep training to a minimum while maximizing staff efficiency.

“We used the Laserfiche SDK to write code in our Visual FoxPro applications. The custom code allows users to click on ‘search’ or ‘scan’ buttons from within our custom applications to invoke Laserfiche, which then searches for related images or fills in the template fields for new scans,” Ross explains. “This eliminates the user’s need to manually open Laserfiche, manually search for related images or manually fill in any templates. In turn, it reduces the possibility of data entry errors and mismatched key fields.”

Ross explains that a number of CDHD departments rely on Laserfiche in the following ways:

• Land Development and Subdivisions scans and stores permit information.
• Child Care Inspections manages, approves and files inspections.
• Immunizations scans all client records to improve access and searchability.
• Accounting scans contracts and other documents for improved access and storage.

CDHD plans to make Food Inspections, Pool Inspections and Tuberculosis records available through Laserfiche next, while records for the Daycare and Food Establishment Inspections Departments will soon be available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink.

The transition to Laserfiche has been embraced across CDHD and has already yielded an incredible ROI in terms of staff time saved. Prior to Laserfiche, one to four staff members were required to spend 15 to 30 minutes researching each document request from both internal and external customers. Now, due to interdepartmental and public access to records via WebLink, requests for information are either handled by clients themselves, or quickly managed by the department through fax, e-mail or the Web.

In fact, Reno estimates that hundreds of hours of staff time have been saved thanks to Laserfiche.

CDHD also found another enormous benefit of implementing Laserfiche: a dramatic reduction in the cost of Quality Assurance (QA). “Prior to Laserfiche, we had to send someone to each county to assure the quality of data on the permit applications coming in. Outlying offices were required to make copies of applications and permits and then fax that material to the person conducting quality control of the data in the particular county. Now, we have one person who does all QA from their desktop in Laserfiche,” says Reno.

With one person able to quickly locate and manage the data for permits in multiple counties, Reno notes, “The quality of our data has improved and we have saved significantly on travel costs.”

Ross, meanwhile, concludes, “The great thing about Laserfiche is that it grows with you. Even after you solve your initial problem it can do so much more than you imagined.”

“As the leading ECM provider in the RIA space, Laserfiche is 100% committed to supporting the CRM systems our customers rely on,” said Tom Wayman, Vice President of Product Strategy at Laserfiche. “Laserfiche’s open architecture allows advisors to instantly access critical client documentation from within their CRM applications, saving time and effort.”

Available as both a Web-based and a desktop solution, Laserfiche ECM includes:

• Document imaging capabilities that enable advisory firms to go paperless.
• Records management automation that lowers the cost of compliance.
• Powerful, DoD 5015.2-certified security features that protect confidential client information.
• Comprehensive auditing and reporting capabilities that monitor all system activity.
• Workflow functionality that enables advisors to automate standard business processes.
• Windows-like interface that minimizes user training and improves productivity right away.

“Managing multiple applications causes costly inefficiencies that detract from the time advisors spend on profitable activities,” said Wayman. “Advisory firms across the country have reaped the benefits of integrating Laserfiche with traditional CRM systems, and providing an easy-to-implement integration with Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM solution was the logical next step in meeting our clients’ needs.”

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 28,000 organizations worldwide use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system gives financial advisors the ability to simplify regulatory compliance, improve profitability and limit exposure to civil and criminal liability. It allows advisors to prepare for audits more easily and ensure compliance with multiple state, SEC and FINRA regulations—all while accelerating business processes and making staff more efficient.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

“Registration is 20% ahead of where it was at this time last year, which is a testament to this event’s successful track record and to the value repeat attendees gain each and every year,” said James Every, President of the Laserfiche Institute. “Many organizations are coming to the conference to do their due diligence for expanding their ECM infrastructure in 2011, and we’re committed to providing an outstanding educational experience for them.”

With 120 distinct classes offered over the course of three days, Laserfiche will this year introduce interactive panel discussions on hot enterprise content management (ECM) topics such as virtualization, metadata design/implementation, workflow optimization, risk management and more.

The conference will also showcase customers’ best practices for using Laserfiche to solve business problems. Featured organizations include North Carolina’s Gaston County, Pulte Mortgage, Texas A&M University, Xpyria Investment Advisors, the UK’s London Borough of Tower Hamlets, DL Evans Bank and more.

In addition to conference keynotes and classes, a special event at the Petersen Automotive Museum on January 10 will facilitate networking and give attendees the chance to dine among some of the world’s most impressive cars.

Learn more about the Laserfiche Institute Conference at http://www.laserfiche.com/conference.

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 28,000 organizations worldwide use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built upon Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

“To be an innovative leader at a technology company, you have to have your feet on the ground and your eyes on a vision that’s inspired by technology trends,” said Wacker. “Creating a company based on this vision is what has enabled Laserfiche to stay on the leading edge, gaining millions of users at 28,000 customer organizations around the world.”

Founded in 1987, Laserfiche is a leading provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software. The company has been praised by industry analyst firms such as IDC for helping organizations “address the majority of their document and records management issues effectively and within a shorter time frame than other large enterprise content management providers.”

Wacker added, “I’m deeply honored to receive this Smart Leaders Award, and I’d like to give credit to our staff, channel partners and customers for their dedication to Laserfiche’s vision of providing simple and elegant ECM solutions that enhance organizational efficiency.”

Robert LaGace, President of Chase Middle Market Banking, presents Nien-Ling Wacker with her 2010 Smart Leaders Award

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 28,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

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

Like Laserfiche, BAS software is created using the latest Microsoft Windows development tools (.NET, SQL Server) and is designed for ease of use and quick access to information or processes. “Laserfiche will facilitate direct access to essential building and code enforcement information, and improve workflow and productivity across building departments,” said Robert Vitti, vice president of BAS.

Together, Laserfiche and BAS provide a wide array of municipality solutions that automate and consolidate tax collection, utility billing, building permits, complaint tracking and clerk licensing.

“As the enterprise content management leader in the municipal market, we are always very pleased when companies like BAS, which have complementary software systems for cities, integrate with us,” said Alex Wilson, director of the Professional Developer Partnership (PDP) program at Laserfiche. “Our municipal user community benefits a great deal from the user-friendly, purpose-built interfaces BAS provides that streamline many of their day-to-day activities. Being able to store all the related documents in one place and take advantage of our workflow creates a system whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Established in 1987, BAS provides software and services to more than 700 clients (towns, cities, villages and counties) throughout New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and is recognized as a leader in the development of software solutions for municipal government.

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche® creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 28,000 organizations worldwide have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built upon Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

Laserfiche conducted a global survey in cooperation with the Economist  Intelligence Unit and found that during challenging economic times, it is easy for leadership to justify strict controls. However, leadership teams also need to understand where employees need flexibility to ensure good business decisions and productivity. If you are interested in seeing a copy of the completed survey and white paper, please go to http://www.laserfiche.com/landing/economist.html?from=lfhome.

According to McDonough, PPS’ IT Director became interested in Workflow after Duplitron created electronic lockboxes to batch claims documents using Quick Fields last year. “That brought us one step closer to automating the whole process,” he explains.

Actual Workflow implementation took place earlier this year as part of an upgrade to Laserfiche 8. “There were a lot of what I’d call ‘curveballs,’” says McDonough. “For instance, when we created the lockboxes, we split up the documents to be processed in Quick Fields based on their FSC coding, but that one lockbox had to remain intact—the documents could move but the folder couldn’t.”

Working with Laserfiche Presales Engineer Jonathon Kim as well as VAR Desk’s Lisa Durham and Jessica Smith, Duplitron configured Quick Fields and Workflow to fit the intricacies of PPS’s claims process—with significant results. “It use to take a day or two to process a claim; now it’s processed back in the batch folder within an hour,” McDonough says.

As a result, McDonough is confident Duplitron will be able to repeat this success with its other billing and coding clients. “We’ve already got four other clients using the electronic lockboxes to capture everything on the front end, so we can show them what PPS is doing and use that as a template.”

Meanwhile, PPS’s IT Director is impressed. “She’s worked in healthcare industry many years and never had a product that’s been able to do everything it says it can do.” Now, he adds, she’s asking how Workflow can be used as an accounting tool. “They want to use an exceptions report to reconcile claims, almost like a balance sheet,” McDonough says.

“This project has evolved has from a document management solution to a business process management solution—it’s true ECM from a claims perspective and BPM from a CFO/accounting point of view,” he concludes.

(From left) Boys & Girls Club members Pamela Lazcano and Destiny Rudolph, Laserfiche Public Relations Manager Francine Marlenee, Boys & Girls Club of Long Beach Branch Director Duncan Smith, and Boys & Girls Club members Kilani King and Gabriel Pope plant a tree in honor of Earth Day.

“Research has shown that the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year—the equivalent of roughly 1.25 trees,” said Chris Wacker, senior vice president at Laserfiche. “Multiply that by the number of office workers in the world, and the impact of paper production, consumption and disposal on our environment is staggering.”

For over twenty years, Laserfiche has helped organizations around the world reduce their use of paper by storing digital files that are instantly accessible without the need for copying or faxing. In addition, Laserfiche ECM decreases the cost of document storage and increases productivity by automating essential business processes.

“Laserfiche has a long tradition of helping organizations decrease their dependence on paper,” said Wacker. “By adding business process management functionality to our solutions—and enabling customers to manage all types of organizational content, including photographs, e-mails and audio and visual files—Laserfiche also enhances efficiency and facilitates smart decision-making.”

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche® creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 28,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built upon Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

“Laserfiche is the perfect complement to our ongoing workflow initiatives. It’s advisor-friendly, compliance-oriented and seamless in operation,” said First Allied President and CEO Adam Antoniades. “It will help our current and future advisors save money through reduced administrative expenses and seamless integration with many of our other systems.”

Laserfiche’s successful track record in the financial services industry was critical in First Allied’s selection process. According to First Allied Chief Technology Officer Steve Krameisen, “Laserfiche is a robust, secure, Web-based imaging and content management system. New features such as bar code recognition, an easy-to-use folder system and more advanced search capabilities—backed by the company’s proven track record—made it our top choice.”

Chris Wacker, senior vice president at Laserfiche, said, “While other financial advisors struggle to find the time, money and staff to comply with industry requirements, First Allied’s advisors will find themselves more efficient than ever before thanks to First Allied’s vision and commitment to providing the most agile content management solution on the market.”

About First Allied Securities
First Allied Securities (Member FINRA/SIPC) is the firm of choice for an increasing number of the industry’s leading financial advisors. First Allied’s exclusive business development platform has been expertly constructed to provide entrepreneurial advisors with one of the industry’s most comprehensive—and proven—platforms for growth. First Allied Securities, Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Advanced Equities Financial Corp., a diversified financial services company.

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 28,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built upon Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

“We are pleased to hear that the Port of Virginia has selected Laserfiche as its solution for managing its extensive business processes,” said Laserfiche Senior Vice President of Business Development Chris Wacker. “We are confident that Unity Business Systems will implement the project quickly, smoothly and professionally for this busy Port.”

In 2007, the Port of Virginia handled 2.1 million TEUs (twenty foot equivalent units). The Port Authority, which employees 140 people (85 police members and 55 administrative staff), was established in 1952 as a political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Virginia for the purpose of stimulating commerce in the ports of the Commonwealth, promoting the shipment of goods and cargoes through the ports, improving the navigable tidal waters within the Commonwealth, and in general to perform any act or function which may be useful in developing, improving, or increasing the commerce of the ports of the Commonwealth.

The Authority owns and is responsible for the operations and security of three marine terminals: Norfolk International Terminals (NIT), Portsmouth Marine Terminal (PMT), and Newport News Marine Terminal (NNMT), as well as an inland intermodal facility—the Virginia Inland Port (VIP) located in Front Royal, Virginia. These facilities primarily handle import and export containerized and break-bulk cargoes.

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche® creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 27,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built on top of Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

“Companies around the world recognize that ECM is a foundational component of data governance, ensuring that corporate information assets are consistent, reliable, available and secure,” said Sean Tang, International Business Director at Laserfiche. “We’re pleased to have the opportunity to demonstrate the specific benefits of Laserfiche ECM—including support of the Arabic language—to the international audience at GITEX.”

Together with its Middle East partners, Laserfiche will showcase the new Arabic version of Quick Fields 8, a document imaging and capture front-end for the Laserfiche ECM product suite that captures and indexes unstructured content from paper forms, faxes, databases and software applications.

Laserfiche will also spotlight the functionality of Agile ECM engineered with Laserfiche and SharePoint, a comprehensive ECM solution designed to support developers who need to improve data governance, extend collaboration and tailor specialized business processes to departmental needs, without interfering with centralized administration and control.

“Laserfiche is the preferred content management solution in the Middle East because of its ease-of-use and support for the Arabic language,” said Nizar Ghannam, regional manager at BMB Group, a business technology advisor and Laserfiche distributor based in Lebanon. “Our presence at GITEX will enable even more Middle Eastern companies to benefit from this best-in-class ECM solution.”

GITEX, which is held at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre, attracts more than 130,000 visitors from more than 60 countries. Laserfiche will be exhibiting in the IT Solutions section with ITQAN (Qatar), MAP (UAE), ISB (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), TAFEEL (KSA) and PIXEL (UAE). Other Laserfiche partners from Dubai who will be exhibiting include Solutions Middle East (UAE) and Global Technology Services (UAE).

About Laserfiche

Laserfiche® creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 27,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state, and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built on top of Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

“The subprime mortgage collapse has damaged many large financial institutions and created unique opportunities for well-run community banks,” said Laserfiche Senior Vice President Chris Wacker. “With its ability to accelerate loan processing, improve branch management, facilitate compliance and reduce costs, ECM provides a comprehensive competitive advantage for smart, tech-savvy community banks.”

At the Summit, Laserfiche will demonstrate how its agile ECM solutions automate, streamline and transform collaborative business processes at financial institutions such as FNB Durango and Farmers & Merchants Bank.

“At the First National Bank of Durango, we chose Laserfiche because it will enable us to increase efficiency, decrease costs, and automate processes such as account and loan opening—both of which have traditionally required a lot of paper and staff time,” said Jan Lewis, information technology manager at FNB Durango.

She concluded, “The flexibility and functionality of the solution are outstanding, the price is competitive, and our value-added reseller has contributed a great deal of knowledge and strength to our implementation thus far.”

About Laserfiche

Laserfiche® creates simple and elegant content management solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 27,000 organizations worldwide—including financial organizations, government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built on top of Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

Imaging-focused VARs are using distributed scanning to broaden the scope of their own document management solutions. According to statistics compiled by Moyes Technology Consulting, distributed scanning technologies used to account for less than 50% of the market’s hardware sales. This figure has grown to represent more than 80%. In fact, sales of distributed or workgroup scanners have grown from less than 50,000 units shipped in 2002, to over 400,000 in 2007, making it the most important segment in the scanning industry. Adjamian Affiliated, Inc. is a Laserfiche reseller that understands the value of distributed scanning as part of a complete document management solution. However, rather than remaining comfortable in strong, established vertical markets such as accounting, finance, or government, this VAR has taken distributed scanning beyond the confines of the ‘typical’ office and out to the job site trailers of some of the largest construction projects across southern California.