We’re excited to hear about the creative ways users have implemented Laserfiche to reduce storage, simplify business processes and save time and money across their organizations. Don’t be shy—take a moment to fill out the nomination form and tell us what “Run Smarter” means to you!

Nominations are due August 26. Please e-mail Melissa Henley at melissa.henley@laserfiche.com if you have any questions.

Since becoming a VAR this past January, Shaffer has expanded Laserfiche use in six school districts while
landing deals with two new accounts last month: the Allegheny Valley and Franklin Area school districts.

According to John Shaffer, president of Shaffer Technologies, the school districts purchased or expanded Laserfiche to add records management functionality to their electronic student management systems (SMS). Shaffer says that, prior to implementing Laserfiche RME, districts printed and stored records every semester to comply with state-mandated 99-year retention requirements. “Our customers welcomed the user-friendly records management functionality Laserfiche offers,” he says. In short, “They loved Snapshot.”

Key to his success, Shaffer explains, was positioning Laserfiche as a natural extension of districts’ SMS. To that end, the company is working with SMS providers CSIU and ProSoft to develop seamless integrations with Laserfiche. “Using Snapshot, the experience with the SMS remains the same,” Shaffer says.

Shaffer sees this initial success is part of a larger, phased sales strategy. “Managing student records is our foundation application,” he explains. “In phase two, Laserfiche will be extended to accounting departments. In phase three, Laserfiche will automate the processes and forms in HR departments.” Shaffer adds that he will work with PDP partner LincWare to develop e-form solutions.

Shaffer sees these initial sales as “the cornerstone of multi-year rollouts to make Laserfiche the number-one ECM choice for school districts because they address a variety of information and business process management needs in a manner that is comprehensive and user-friendly.”

To that end, he says, Shaffer Technologies will host its first state-wide Laserfiche workshop for school district information managers on Wednesday, August 18.

Dennis Raulie, Manager of Administrative Computing Technology Services, recognized that the university had outgrown its existing document management system. He realized that what staff really needed was an enterprise content management solution that would comply with the university’s records management retention schedules, better secure documents and decrease the cost of handling paper.

Raulie saw a demo by Laserfiche reseller SMARTfiles and was impressed. “Other document management systems didn’t fulfill our needs very well, while others just seemed rudimentary,” he recalls.

Raulie also listened to what his users had to say about Laserfiche. “They liked the simplicity and speed. They also liked the ease of use and how powerful it was in being able to find information. Laserfiche was also much more intuitive than what they were used to,” he remembers.

With his users’ approval and confidence in Laserfiche’s robust functionality, TAMU-CC chose Laserfiche. Says Raulie, “With Laserfiche’s direct, accomplished and ingenious approach, we knew we’d be able to provide state-of-the-art service to our client base.”

After reviewing the areas that could be most improved in the shortest amount of time, Raulie focused first on development of a system to streamline the University’s BPP/FAMIS report distribution – a process that generates a lot of information, and, in some cases, a lot of unnecessary paper. “The BPP/FAMIS feeds are mainframe listings that consist of several small ‘reportlets’ that are bundled into one file,” explains Programmer III Michael Williamson. These reportlets, Raulie adds, contain information that must be stored in Laserfiche as well as several pages of less useful information, such as security listings that are in some cases blank. “Some of these reports need to be seen, but don’t need to be kept,” he adds. “However, to the printer, it’s all the same. All the reports would be printed when they came in – sometimes as many as 60 data forms a day.”

Often these reports were thousands of pages long, requiring a ream or two of paper a day to print. This system, Raulie says, didn’t just consume time, it also consumed money. “The paper-driven report distribution system is very expensive when you add up the costs of printers, fax machines, paper, toner, storage for these supplies and storage for printed archived reports,” he says. “These paper reports often are copied and saved by individuals along the paper trail, which duplicates the expenses, too. So we knew if we could move duplicating the existing paper-driven report system into a digital form that would reap huge benefits.”

To filter the important information from the non-essential information, Raulie, Williamson, and Systems Support Specialist I Bobby Martinez took inspiration from Rube Goldberg’s legacy of creating seemingly complex machines to achieve simple tasks. They created their own “Report Upload Bifurcation Engine” (R.U.B.E.), which processes continuous BFF/FAMIS report files, and splits them into individual reportlets as it does so. R.U.B.E. then distributes the resulting reports and data into a virtual staging area where Quick Fields reads the data, Zone OCRs the documents and distributes the information into the proper folders within Laserfiche.

This is significant, notes Raulie, because R.U.B.E filters out the information that only needs to be seen but not stored. R.U.B.E. recognizes what data needs to be kept according to records retention demands and sends them to Laserfiche, then sends the rest to Windows Share. The information is still available for viewing, but the reports do not need to be printed, thus saving more paper.

After R.U.B.E.’s initial success, Williamson turned to converting TAMU-CC’s legacy imaging data from its legacy document management database into Laserfiche through the “Legacy Image Translation Engine” – the L.I.T.E. R.U.B.E., naturally. Williamson wrote a custom process that accessed the University’s outdated document management system and pulled the stored data and metadata, processing it through Import Agent and sending it into the corresponding folders in Laserfiche. “The old system was flat, with lots of template fields,” Williamson explains. “It was not always useful and many end users did not know why these fields were being used.” The actual process of converting all the old information into Laserfiche allowed Raulie and his team to collaborate with end users to reevaluate what fields were needed, determine which fields were most useful, and eventually add those to Laserfiche templates. In fact, Raulie says, this conversion process occasioned the same kind of useful re-evaluation and determination of template fields with each of the University’s business units and their respective document types.

Change, of course, can be hard, no matter what kind of progress it promises. Raulie offers this advice deploying Laserfiche: aim for small victories at first to win internal champions to inspire organic adoption – not just demand it. Raulie targeted TAMU-CC’s Accounting Department, where hundreds of data forms a day were printed, scanned and manually indexed by student workers, as a process ripe for improvement. Before Laserfiche, Raulie notes, it was considered acceptable to be a month behind in the filing because there was so much that needed to be done. Since implementing Laserfiche and R.U.B.E., Raulie says, reportlets can be separated, converted, uploaded and placed into Laserfiche within minutes. Not surprisingly, Accounting is no longer a month behind in their filing – instead, they’re now working in real time. Even better, the department is now one of Laserfiche’s biggest champions. “Get people like that comfortably productive and enthusiastic,” advises Raulie. “They talk about the success and the word spreads.”

Adds Williamson, “When they see the light at the end of the tunnel, and they see their associates’ success and what they can do, that speaks volumes.”

Raulie also advises creating a test environment where users learning Laserfiche can experience the software at their own pace. “Build a ‘sandbox’ repository for users to play in and let them learn the controls,” he says. “You can’t learn to ride a bike unless you get on it, right?” Raulie also suggests obtaining administrative buy-in with regular progress updates. Soliciting department and unit managers for their input is also invaluable, he says, to increase group ownership of the project. “These are the team members who ‘know the flow.’ Their input is crucial.” Updating administrators with reports of the success and progress of the implementation is also a key component. “It’s not bragging if it’s true,” says Raulie. “After a while, it begins to take on a life of its own, and individuals talk about the ease of use and time savings.” Lastly, Raulie advises developing a strong working relationship with your reseller like the university did with SMARTfiles. “SMARTfiles offers training videos and other training materials that we make available to our users,” says Raulie. “Offer continuous training opportunities for your clients. If you think the price of training is too high, consider the price of ignorance.”

For other IT Developers interested in creating their own R.U.B.E. using the Laserfiche Software Developer’s Kit (SDK), Raulie says that with prior knowledge of Visual Basic, developers shouldn’t have any problems at all. “In the hands of someone who knows VB, it should be a snap,” he says. Williamson adds that it is easy to write code that formats legacy imaging data into the components required to drive Import Agent, so it can then distribute converted data into the appropriate folder.

TAMU-CC’s future plans include automating and streamlining business process management using Workflow, with Bobby Martinez acting as project manager. It will bring its challenges and its success, but perhaps most importantly, it will continue to make their end users happy users – like Payroll Manager Melissa Wright. When asked to sum up her success using Laserfiche, Wright simply replied, “Laserfiche is easy to use. I LOVE LASERFICHE!”

Created in 1965, Head Start is the most successful national school readiness program in the United States. It provides comprehensive education, health, nutrition and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families. All told, nearly 25 million preschool-aged children have benefited from the program nationwide.

The Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) operates the largest Head Start-State Preschool program in the country, contracting with 26 agencies that employ a staff of more than 3,000 people and serve more than 25,000 children—and their families—in the greater L.A. area each year alone. Of course, with that many clients comes all kinds of records: attendance tracking, child abuse and accident reporting, growth charts, fiscal reports and more. Organizing and ensuring fast access to them all was becoming a major problem.

Dealing with Data Silos

“Head Start has three units that monitor the services we provide and the agencies we contract with,” says Shirley Lee, an administrative analyst with LACOE. “In order to get a full picture of the agency, you need to be able to review content from all three units at once. Prior to implementing Laserfiche, each unit was its own data silo. It took a lot of time and effort to track down all of the information necessary to gain a 360 degree view of our operations.”

Head Start’s three monitoring units are:

• Program Review and Support (PRS). Manages program-related information from children and their families, health and social services, and personnel.
• Internal and External Affairs (IEA). Manages information related to enrollment and attendance, funding and program goals and objectives.
• Fiscal Operations and Support (FOS). Manages financial information and ensures that costs are necessary, allowable, reasonable and allocable.

According to Lee, centralizing the agency’s approach to data governance was a key driver for implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) solution. Other drivers included:

• Inadequate storage space. LACOE used massive quantities of paper to print out hardcopy records relating to the Head Start program. The file room was constantly overflowing, and employees were always on the lookout for additional storage space.
• Missing files. Inconsistent labeling, the lack of a file index, ineffective check-in/check-out procedures and uncontrolled access to the filing room led to a large number of lost and misplaced files, as well as concerns over information security.
• Decreased productivity. Staff members spent many hours storing, retrieving and searching for documents. Because records could not leave the file room, employees needed to photocopy any document they wished to review at their desks, consuming even more time and paper.

“We were all tired of running around to the various monitoring units looking for documents that were stored all over the place,” explains Lee. “Our old way of doing things made it difficult to get a comprehensive view of the program, ensure compliance with county requirements and guarantee document security.”

Giving Head Start a Leg Up

Laserfiche has helped LACOE’s Head Start-State Preschool program improve efficiency by digitizing student documentation. Using Laserfiche, the Head Start program now scans all paper documents and stores them, along with electronic content, in a central, secure Laserfiche repository.

According to Lee, the specific benefits Head Start has realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche content management include:

1. Centralized, secure records management. Today, all records and content from the agency’s three monitoring units are stored electronically in the Laserfiche repository. With a single click, authorized employees can easily access all of the information they need from PRS, IEA and FOS to gain a complete, 360 degree view of the agency’s operations.
2. Storage savings. Without the need to save thousands of paper records, LACOE has decreased the size of its filing room so that it has more room for what really matters: better serving its students and their families. The old filing room now serves as a large conference room that can comfortably accommodate a greater number of attendees.
3. Fewer missing files. Laserfiche has eliminated many of the causes that led to lost or missing files, including inconsistent file naming, ineffective check-in/check-out procedures and uncontrolled access to the filing room. Drop-down lists ensure standardized file names, Audit Trail functionality enables LACOE employees to ensure that files have been scanned into the system and tracks who has worked with particular documents, and Laserfiche security limits access to authorized users.
4. More efficient employees. With the help of ECS Imaging, the agency’s Laserfiche reseller, LACOE employees use copiers to scan batch jobs into the system, where Quick Fields automatically indexes and files them into the appropriate Laserfiche folders. This has enabled easy scanning and instant search and retrieval from the comfort of each employee’s desk, saving time and effort.

“We thought we were just getting a repository to hold our electronic files, but Laserfiche is so much more,” says Lee. “Laserfiche content management is helping our whole agency become more organized and efficient. You will be amazed at what it can do for you!”

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

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

City Government: City of Lynwood, CA

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full story here.

County Government: Thurston County, WA

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

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

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

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

Read the full story here.

International Government: City of Okotoks, AB, Canada

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full story here.

Healthcare: BC Biomedical – Surrey, BC, Canada

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

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

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

Read the full story here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full story here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

K-12 Education: Jamestown, NY, Public Schools

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

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

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

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

Read the full story here.

Commercial: The Star Tribune – Minneapolis, MN

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

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

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

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

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.”

“I lived in the Kootenay-Columbia area from grade six until high school,” says Fraser, now Enterprise Solutions Manager at IKON. “I attended five schools in the area. The teachers and the school system were great. My most influential teacher was my grade seven teacher, Mr. Truant. I owe him a lot. I wish I could see him again and thank him for helping me immensely through a difficult year where I attended three different schools.”

This devotion to supporting educators led IKON to help school districts throughout British Columbia digitize their paper records and speed their workflows. School District No. 20 (SD20), located in the interior of British Columbia, Canada, serves a number of communities throughout the province. Thanks to IKON, it’s also discovered the benefits of Laserfiche.

When SD20 began looking for a digital document management solution, it was to maximize their extremely limited storage space. “Our biggest concern was too much paper,” says Greg Luterbach, Director of HR and IT for SD20. “The volume of paper was consuming more space than we had. It was very time-consuming to track things down, which made it difficult to respond to requests in a timely manner because we couldn’t access information quickly.”

The school district had identified three departments where the Laserfiche solution would provide nearly immediate benefits: the accounts payable department, the human resources department and Board operations. In the accounts payable department, lack of physical storage space was a concern, as was access to previous invoices for issues like warranty coverage. The storage and access to personnel files for both active and inactive employees was cumbersome. Payroll clerks needed to retrieve files from off-site storage on a regular basis, but due to the time and effort required to actually locate the file, this task became low-priority. In addition, there was an identified need to be able to search through Board agendas and minutes for previous data and decisions.

Laserfiche serves as a centralized repository for both hard copy and electronic documents, enabling space savings, a faster retrieval time and the ability to share files electronically among district employees. Christine Barrett, Solutions Consultant at IKON, believes that preparation and planning were key to the implementation’s success. “By doing the work up front, the implementation plan was fairly straightforward and we were able to meet the project’s objectives and timeframe,” she says. “Most people don’t realize that the time you spend planning and preparing in the beginning is the key to a smooth and stress-free implementation.”

Luterbach agrees with Barrett’s assessment. “The implementation went very well,” he remembers. “IKON did the backfile scanning for our HR records, while we just scanned day-forward records in the payroll and Board operations. Staff had some initial concerns regarding the time it took to digitize and profile documents in the system, but it didn’t take long for people to realize the benefits of accessing information from their desks.

“There was a nearly instant payback,” he continues. “I’d say it only took weeks for us to see a difference.”

In the human resources department, SD20 leveraged key Laserfiche features to minimize manual indexing of active employee files. With a simple data extract, the IKON implementation team pulled a list of key index fields like employee names and identification numbers from the school district software, which were used to create cover sheets with all the index fields SD20 required for employee file retrieval. The implementation team scanned the files with the matching cover sheets, which electronically pulled the files into the Laserfiche repository. Quick Fields™ and Zone OCR automatically indexed and stored the files, minimizing the time and effort required for digital archival.

Now, instead of having to get files from off-site storage or attempt to answer queries from memory, staff simply open a digital copy of the paperwork they need right on their desktop computers. “The best thing is that we’re much more confident in our answers to questions,” Luterbach says. “We can answer most questions while people are waiting, saving the time it would have taken to locate the information and then call them back. Now, we base our answers on facts. We just open up Laserfiche, click Search, find the document and answer the question. Our efficiency is up, and our confidence is, too.”

Staff has embraced the new system. “We really feel like we’re more efficient, more effective and more confident,” Luterbach says. “We have reliable access to information right from our desks, and that’s what we needed.”

Luterbach believes school districts of all sizes can benefit from a Laserfiche solution. “We’ve found our document management system to be highly effective,” he says. “We’ve been very happy as far as technology goes—the system has been rock-solid, and we’ve had good support from both IKON and Laserfiche in regards to any of our minor issues. The most important thing for school districts is instant access to information—and everyone benefits from that.”

When it comes to information access, Luterbach believes SD20’s Laserfiche system has been an overwhelmingly positive addition to the district office. “Laserfiche empowers people with click-convenient access to the information they need,” he says. “We’re really happy with it.”

King Saud University and the Ministry of Education have implemented solutions from Laserfiche that work for their specific needs. Abudulaziz Al Sania, President, Integrated Solutions for Business (ISB) in Saudi, Laserfiche’s document management experts in the Middle East, indicated that “as educational institutions are under increasing financial and competitive pressure, using Laserfiche as a “productivity tool” has paid for itself with the ability to mee the challenges of delivering archived information instantly.”

Superintendent Frank Auderer says Laserfiche has become “an integral and indispensable part” of how the St. Bernard Parish K-12 School District, headquartered in Chalmette, LA, does business. He credits the thorough follow-up of Laserfiche reseller Allen Gilbert of Image Tek of Louisiana for the speedy implementation of Laserfiche district-wide.

“Public education today is burdened with more paperwork than ever before,” Auderer says. “Laserfiche has helped our staff minimize paper-shuffling and searching for documents while keeping us in compliance with local, state and federal requirements.”

The St. Bernard Parish School District was honored with Laserfiche’s Leadership Award, presented in New Orleans during the international Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA) conference. Auderer and staff administrative assistant Sharon Campagna accepted the award, which recognized their quick application of digital archiving throughout the school district.

Major strengths of Laserfiche for IT managers are its ease of installation and maintenance, according to George H. Cancienne, Jr., the district’s computer systems manager. He says school administrators and office staff began using Laserfiche after brief training sessions, adding that the product’s intuitive interface has eliminated the need for additional training.

Cancienne has established scanning stations throughout school facilities to bring paper documents into Laserfiche. He has remotely installed Laserfiche on over ninety desktops, eliminating the need to go desk to desk. Reseller Allen Gilbert’s step-by-step assistance made this go smoothly, Cancienne adds.

Schools nationwide are under increasing financial and competitive pressure, Superintendent Auderer explains. He calls Laserfiche a “productivity tool” that has paid for itself with the ability to meet the challenges of delivering archived information instantly.

St. Bernard Parish School District includes fifteen elementary, middle and high schools. In addition to employing the latest technology, the district has undertaken a major facilities rehabilitation program to better serve its 5,000 students.

Thanks to the instantaneous electronic transfer of their educational files, made possible by Laserfiche WebLink, these juveniles now are keeping up with schoolwork and counseling opportunities. This increases the likelihood of their eventual rehabilitation.

“Laserfiche provided a timely solution to help counselors, psychologists and teachers plan coursework for students in court and provide report cards that can be e-mailed to their new schools,” says Robert Sciortino, program administrator of school records. “It enables us to comply with state Special Education requirements by making Individual Education Plans available within 24 hours to any site a juvenile may be transferred.”

Sciortino says the use of Laserfiche at the Los Angeles County Office of Education has made a fundamental change in operations. Personnel time previously used to search for paper files, copy them, refile them and fax or mail them is dramatically reduced. Lost files are no longer a problem, because all records are saved electronically and instantly retrieved with Laserfiche’s full-text search feature.

The software is mission-critical to the Alternative Education division now, but Sciortino envisions the day that it will be used to manage the records of all two million students enrolled in Los Angeles County schools. The county’s highly-mobile population would be served much more efficiently if records were maintained electronically, with no lag time when families move during the school year, Sciortino says.

As the nation’s largest regional education agency, the LACOE coordinates the programs of 81 separate school districts and over 1,700 schools. Established in 1852, the office assists in teacher placement, curriculum development and records management for the districts.

“We save money and time with Laserfiche, but most importantly we can better serve students and their families,” Sciortino says. “The name of the game is making sure students get the best educational opportunities, no matter where they are. With Laserfiche, students records are always available to any facility the students are assigned.”

IT staffer Jeramy Berry describes the tedious process the department used to follow. When documents were received, staff sorted them by type and handed the separate piles to data entry personnel. These staff members then separated the documents into two further piles: those that were missing information and those that were complete. Documents with missing information were carried to a “pending” basket in another part of the department. Completed documents were sorted into still smaller piles, based on each student’s ID number. Staff then processed these documents and placed them in the file cabinet drawers assigned to the department’s financial aid counselors, who retrieved them throughout the day. When the counselors had finished with the documents, they sent them to the file room, where clerks would sort the documents yet again and, finally, add them to the appropriate students’ folders.

“Because documents could be at any point in this process, they were difficult to find, which often gave the impression they’d been lost,” Berry explains. “We’d ask students to stop by our office to fill out incomplete paperwork, but when they’d come in, they’d have to wait while staff went to look for the documents we’d contacted them about.” He adds that storing all of this paper required a significant amount of space, given that the university must retain documents for seven years following the student’s graduation. “Because we’d filled up our own file room, we had to store older files in another department—and we had stacks of paper all over our office,” he says.

The department’s IT staff began researching digital document management systems with the goal of eliminating this massive paper archive and of finding a more efficient way of routing documents among staff members. In Laserfiche, they found all the functionality they were looking for. Laserfiche enables the department to store all of its documentation electronically, while the system’s comprehensive search tools help staff quickly find what they need. Perhaps most importantly, the Laserfiche Workflow™ module has fully automated document routing processes, eliminating the need to carry documents from one part of the department to another.

Now, when the department receives a document, staff scan it into the Laserfiche repository, where it’s stored as an archival-quality TIFF file. They then apply a digital template to the document and enter key metadata, including the student’s name, ID number and social security number. Finally, they use the template’s Status field to instantly route the document to data entry personnel.

Once data entry staff have processed the document, they update the Status field. The Workflow module then routes the document to the correct financial aid counselor—automatically. “We’ve always assigned cases to financial aid counselors based on the last two digits of the student’s ID number,” Berry explains. “For example, IDs ending in 00-07 go to Counselor A, IDs ending in 08-22 go to Counselor B, etc. In the past, staff had to manually sort documents into separate piles for each counselor—a process that was both tedious and prone to error. Now, Workflow ‘reads’ the student ID number entered in the template field and automatically routes the document to the right counselor.”

When the counselor has finished with the document, he or she sets its Status field to “Complete.” The document is then stored in the Laserfiche repository, where staff can locate it using the student’s name, ID number, social security number or other search criteria. Even though the department has over a million documents in its repository, searches take only seconds.

Berry estimates that Laserfiche has helped the department reduce processing time by two-thirds, meaning that students receive aid and scholarship money much sooner than they used to. “In the past, it would take us at least six weeks to process a student’s paperwork. Now, thanks to Workflow, we can process the documents in two weeks,” he says. Laserfiche has also made it easier to respond to information requests from other university departments. Instead of having to search for, photocopy and then hand-deliver the requested document, staff can now quickly e-mail it from within Laserfiche.

In addition to making information more accessible, Laserfiche has also made it more secure. “Every day, we receive documents that contain sensitive information, including students’ social security numbers,” Berry says. “In the past, these documents were ‘floating’ all over the office—stacked on people’s desks, piled on top of file cabinets or sitting in people’s inboxes. Now, all of these documents are stored in Laserfiche, and only authorized staff members can access them.”

Increasingly, students submit documents to the department in electronic format, and Berry says that Laserfiche helps staff manage these documents as well. Laserfiche offers multiple methods of importing electronic files—from Microsoft® Word® documents to PDF and JPG files—into the repository, where they’re stored in their native format. Alternatively, staff can use the Laserfiche Snapshot™ utility to quickly create TIFF images of the electronic documents, which they can then process in the same way they handle scanned documents.

Looking forward, Berry would like to install the Laserfiche Quick Fields™ module, which eliminates manual data entry by automatically capturing information from a document and copying it to the relevant template field. Given everything the department has already accomplished, Berry doesn’t doubt the success of this initiative.

“Thanks to Laserfiche, we no longer have to search through stacks of paper to find documents. We no longer have to manually sort documents and carry them to someone’s inbox. We no longer have to search for lost documents and misplaced files,” he says. “Most importantly, we’ve greatly reduced the amount of time we needed to process documents—meaning we can disburse money to students a lot more quickly than in the past.”

Less revenue, but plenty of paper records, in dusty file cabinets and boxes. However, there’s an electronic solution, as the Texans have discovered: Laserfiche document management.

State education law requires that the records of every special education student-most of them physically or mentally handicapped-must be retained for seven years after the student has left the system. Most administrators like to hold on to the records even longer. The reason was demonstrated recently, after an administrator reluctantly destroyed some records, legally and properly, in full compliance with the requirements of public notice.

Two weeks later, she received a telephone call from a lawyer in Ohio. He’d been assigned to represent one of her former special-ed students, a mentally-challenged youth charged with murder. He needed those records to support a defense of mental incompetence.

“This is far from an uncommon experience,” says Dr. Van Walker, director of the Robertson County Special Services Cooperative. “Special education records are uniquely important for many participants in those programs because, as a result of their disability, many need public assistance throughout their lives, from Medicaid, SSI, or other programs. The special-ed records establish their eligibility.”

In Robertson County, there were 15 file cabinets filled with “inactive” special-ed records-records of youngsters no longer there-and floor space was running out. Laserfiche provided the solution, which involved feeding over a million sheets of paper through a high-speed scanner; converting their contents into electronic images, and processing them with optical character recognition (OCR) technology to permit full-text searching. Once those steps were taken, a few keystrokes would display any document on a PC monitor. This represents a giant step towards the paperless office.

How were such small school districts able to afford such cutting-edge technology? Walker credits both Laserfiche’s low price-point and the fact that the school districts worked together. “Instead of each school district having its own special-ed department, they share special-ed services,” Walker explains. “And my pitch, to the five superintendents who are my bosses, was: ‘We can use Laserfiche to manage the special-ed records, but, more than that, the system can be used in the future to store all student transcripts.’” Texas law requires that those transcripts be accessible forever.

Walker consulted Charles E. Beard, president of DynaSource, a state-authorized, qualified vendor of information systems—and a Laserfiche reseller. Beard designed a system that not only stores records-it has an additional benefit of creating a “work station,” allowing summer jobs and computer training for some of the special-ed youngsters participating in the state Job Training Partnership Act program.

PCs with Laserfiche software have been installed in the cooperative’s office, and this summer, four students-two special-ed and two regular-ed-will begin scanning the data in those 15 filing cabinets of inactive files into the Laserfiche system.

As the program continues, Walker says, more of the students with special needs will be employed in it. “Giving these young people good work habits, and some basic skills in modern office procedures, is an important part of this program,” he says. “It’s all about inclusion-moving them into the mainstream and helping them to become useful, productive members of society.”

“Large school districts sometimes look down on small school districts, because they assume fewer resources mean fewer services,” says DynaSource’s Beard. “What the Robertson County Special Services Co-op is proving is that a cooperative effort, in a relatively rural district of Texas, can perform superior services and be the envy of school districts everywhere.”

And of those students, 35,000, give or take X, are eligible for free or low-cost lunches under a state-and- federally-subsidized nutrition program for low-income youth.

(Suppose also, that nobody can be sure whether X represents an insignificant few kids or an army.)

You’d be up against something like what Dr. Nadine Mann faced, as assistant director of the Child Nutrition Program in the East Baton Rouge Parish School System in Louisiana. Hers is a head-counting job worthy of SuperMom—or Laserfiche.

Thanks to federal and Louisiana state subsidies, lunch is free to some children from low-income Baton Rouge families and offered at a reduced price to others from slightly more comfortable homes. Federal and state auditors drop in several times a year, to make sure that all participants are really eligible and nobody’s being overlooked. But there were worse problems than being double-teamed by auditors.

One was how to register for the program. Until this year, applications were submitted singly, one per child. If there were five children in a family, five separate applications had to be submitted, providing five opportunities to put the wrong name or ID number on the wrong line. This year, Dr. Mann instituted a multi-child application, one per family. She argued that if one child’s family circumstances entitle him/her to a free lunch, siblings probably deserve the same.

Then, of course, the lunch youngsters had to be registered as regular students, the same as their classmates. This student registration is handled manually on a two-part NCR form, at the school level, with school clerks sending one part to a main frame computer at district headquarters. The other half is bound and kept at the school.

The new multi-child meal application caused some confusion to parents. There were many mistakes, which had to be found at the school, manually corrected there, then corrected again on the headquarters computer, then re-re-corrected in the meal benefits office. Dr. Mann said, “There was a lot of fine tuning to be done. My staff needed a way to search for and look at the students’ meal benefits applications, and search the mainframe data to make sure that benefits were assigned to the right student. And that’s where Laserfiche came in.”

At a meeting of the Association of School Business Officials (ASBO) in San Antonio, Tex., Dr. Mann met Chuck Beard, president of DynaSource LLC, of Beaumont, Tex., document management consultants and resellers of data processing, software, and hardware. His team created a new interface for the Child Nutrition Program that integrated the scanned image of the meal benefits application, the text file created by the OCR program and the school system’s mainframe data file, allowing a search of a student’s records in 24 fields.

“The powerful search and retrieval feature in Laserfiche enabled a search in three systems to assist in reconciling duplications, contradictions and omissions,” said Dr. Mann. The system also compares the data extracted from the meal program applications with what’s in the school system’s mainframe computer and provides an always-ready archive which puts all the following data literally at an operator’s fingertips:

Number of youngsters in the lunch program at a given school, or all schools together; children’s names; grades, dates of birth, addresses, mother’s name and family income.

“Laserfiche,” Dr Mann said, “will be an integral part of a systems approach to handling a multi-child meal benefits application in a large school system. It will provide the archival and retrieval function to the current scanning process and meal benefits processing of multi-child applications in the EBRPS Child Nutrition Program.

“But I really foresee some very good things, It is going to help me tremendously when we’re audited or we have a review from our state education department. They’ll come in and say `We need to see all the applications for Riveroaks Elementary School. “I can just type in a request for all the applications for that school, and it will print those for me, and another copy for the auditor. The retrieval process will make my life very easy.”

“We just kept hard copies of all our data. Right now, we have three large rooms, former classrooms in what used to be a junior high building, filled with four-drawer filing cabinets – 150 to 200 to a room. I don’t think we have space for another one.”

Gonzalez was named to his present post two years ago, and, he said, record storage was one of his first challenges. “Would we put in more rooms to store more file cabinets? That didn’t seem to me like a really practical way to solve the problem. And I didn’t see microfiche as a future kind of tool either. There’s still a storage problem with that because you’re still storing film, you’re basically creating a smaller file, which you still have to go to and look for,” said Gonzalez. “So we opted for Laserfiche. One of the advantages that we saw with Laserfiche is that you’re doing two things – one, you’re indexing the information and two, you’re storing it in a portable, compact, secure kind of a vehicle.”

The compactness of the Laserfiche system also was important to Gonzalez. Once scanned into the system, data is stored on a CD-ROM. One disk, can hold as much data as a four-drawer file cabinet. “Once we’ve emptied all those file cabinets, I think we’ll renovate this building and open it as a school again,” said Gonzalez.

“We have looked at some other types of equipment, especially an optical disk which was much more expensive,” said Gonzalez. “But it didn’t seem to have the flexibility and compatibility with all computers that Laserfiche has. Laserfiche is expandable; it has the capability of faxing, e-mailing, and networking information. That was a real selling point for us.”

“The other selling point was that the software interface is user friendly. There is a very small learning curve. We could teach people who aren’t that familiar with computers very easily how to use it. It has a Windows interface so it’s very familiar to a lot of people. That was a real plus.”

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.