Essar Group is a conglomerate of 63 companies in the Steel, Oil & Gas, Power, Communications, Shipping Ports & Logistics, Projects and Minerals sectors with operations in more than 20 countries across five continents and annual revenue of $15 billion.

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

Singh estimates that Essar Group has realized a 40% return on its Laserfiche investment already, but foresees ongoing and expanding operational improvements.

“As our ongoing success has shown, Laserfiche is agile enough as an enterprise solution to manage document-based workflows and accelerate turnaround time. Laserfiche has been a tremendous tool for developing new, more comprehensive business processes that have given Essar Group fresh perspective and improved our overall investment perspective as a company,” said Singh.

Other 2010 Run Smarter winners include: Central District Health Department of Boise, ID; City of Maple Grove, MN; Dallas Associated Dermatologists; Durham County, NC; ECOM Atlantic; Hamilton-Wentworth School Board; London Borough of Tower Hamlets; Long Beach Police Department; Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians; NE Metro Intermediate Schools; Pulte Mortgage; South Essex Partnership NHS Trust; Spire Investment Partners, LLC; Texas A&M University Kingsville; Virginia Port Authority; and Wythe County Community Hospital.

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.

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.

“I’ve been in HIM since 1986,” explains Patty Hall, privacy officer and director of HIM at Wythe County Community Hospital, a 100-bed facility located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, “and I have to tell you that having an electronic solution makes things so much easier.”

A transplant from a hospital in Illinois, where she had worked with electronic health records for years, Hall was determined to decrease Wythe’s dependence on paper and improve the ease with which clinical, clerical and billing staff could access the patient information they need.

“I had a very specific idea of what I wanted in a content management solution,” she says, “and I worked very closely with the team at EMI Imaging [a Laserfiche reseller] to make sure that they could accommodate my requirements.”

Convincing Corporate

Hall was quickly sold on Laserfiche due to its rich functionality and affordable cost, but convincing Wythe’s parent company of the system’s merits was a tougher nut to crack. “LifePoint Hospitals uses a different content management solution, and they were fairly adamant at first that we should go with the system they had in place,” she says.

According to Hall, EMI made the difference by designing a very detailed, highly customized demo for the representatives from LifePoint. “After the demo, the lady from corporate headquarters told me that she’d come out to Virginia with the intention of nixing the Laserfiche proposal, but after the demo, she just didn’t see a way to say no; it was such a perfect fit for our needs.”

Wythe purchased its Laserfiche system in August 2009. In less than a year, the hospital’s repository has grown to manage more than 2,152,886 pages of records. “Working with EMI, we were able to deploy Laserfiche very quickly,” explains Hall. “Today, nearly 100 of our 415 employees use Laserfiche to some extent.”

Leaving the Paper World Behind

In 2009, Wythe had a total of 7,200 inpatients and 37,300 outpatients, performing 3,300 same-day surgeries and treating 15,000 people in the ER. With so many patients coming through the doors, digitizing medical records has been a huge time saver. “Many of our ER patients, in particular, come back more than once,” says Hall. “When you’re living in a paper world, it takes time to track down their records. Laserfiche makes it instantaneous.”

Although some technology solutions require intensive staff training, the HIM director notes that Laserfiche is pretty much the exact opposite. “Laserfiche is very user friendly. If you know how to use Microsoft Windows, you can use this system. For some of the less tech-savvy staff, we conducted 15-minute training sessions. That’s really all anybody needed to get up and running.”

Laserfiche delivers a number of benefits on the clinical side, including:

• Electronic EKGs. Physicians log directly into Laserfiche, where they can view labs, radiology reports, EKGs and ER reports for outpatients and ER visitors. (Inpatient charts are not yet being managed by Laserfiche.) “Having the EKGs in Laserfiche is a big benefit for our doctors,” Hall explains. “While our Meditech system makes labs and radiology reports available electronically, the EKGs don’t have a place in any other software application. To have them accessible through Laserfiche, in a crisp image, is fantastic.”
• Centralized Charts. Hall also acknowledges that having a centralized digital chart available through one interface (Laserfiche) makes it easier and faster to access all of the information relevant to any given patient. Labs, EKGs and radiology reports are batch scanned and captured electronically using Laserfiche Quick Fields, a high-volume capture tool that automatically sorts, stores and creates folder paths for these documents in Wythe’s Laserfiche repository. Charts are tabbed and separated into sections that make it fast and easy for doctors to locate the type of information they need.
• Quick Digital Searches. Kim Newman, the HIM department’s lead operations technician, notes that the optical character recognition (OCR) process available through Laserfiche translates printed words into alphanumeric characters that the system indexes for full-text search, giving Wythe the opportunity to search for specific documents using a keyword or phrase. This capability has come in particularly handy when radiology reports were misfiled. “Searching by the patient’s medical record number enabled me to quickly find the missing report and save it to the correct chart. If this had happened before we implemented Laserfiche, we may have had to spend hours and hours searching through every chart processed on a particular day of service, and even then we may never have found the misfiled report. Laserfiche OCR is a real timesaving tool!”
• Easy-to-Access Advance Directives. In addition to the patient charts, the hospital’s HIM department has created a folder for Advance Directives, organized by patient name. Having these important documents in Laserfiche is particularly useful in the case of emergencies. In the past, paper copies may not have been discovered quickly enough to make an emergency patient’s wishes known to medical staff. With Laserfiche, a simple search rapidly reveals whether or not a patient has an Advance Directive on file; if such a document exists, the patient’s preferences are immediately identified and honored.

Back-Office Benefits

But it’s not just the clinical staff that benefits from Laserfiche; the patient access (registration) department, the business (finance) office and the lab director (who is in charge of compliance), all use Laserfiche, too.

“Before Laserfiche, Patient Access made four copies of each patient’s records; now they make none,” says Hall. She also notes that the hospital now sends its ER billing information to its outside billing company electronically, adding to the cost savings Wythe realizes on printing, storing and mailing paper documents.

Facilitating Compliance

As the hospital’s privacy officer, Hall is responsible for investigating HIPAA complaints. Laserfiche Audit Trail, which tracks repository activity and provides a Web-based interface for running detailed reports on the tracked information, allows her to monitor all system activity—who looked at various records, what time records were viewed, whether any changes were made, etc.

However, Hall notes that the security controls in Laserfiche make it virtually impossible for unauthorized people to view information they are not allowed to access. “We limit access to the content in our repository based on folders,” she says. “For example, the patient access department doesn’t see the same things our physicians do.”

Corporate audits conducted by LifePoint are also much simpler now that Laserfiche is in place. With Laserfiche, the hospital is able to grant auditors secure access to a folder containing all of the documentation that needs to be reviewed. “Laserfiche allows us to prepare for audits on very short notice,” explains Hall. “It’s a lot easier than finding and copying paper documents and putting them in the mail.”

What’s Next

Wythe is currently in the process of implementing Laserfiche in the physical therapy department, and it hopes to tackle inpatient records before too long. Hall is also interested in adding electronic signature functionality to Laserfiche. Although her department doesn’t currently have the budget for it, she’s hoping to get money approved for it next year.

Overall, though, Hall sees Laserfiche as “a much larger solution for the hospital. This isn’t just something that the HIM department can benefit from; it would be a great thing for departments like HR and credentialing, and for the hospital as a whole.”

Relying on paper was an inefficient use of TAMU’s monetary and staff resources. In addition, board requirements frequently limit the amount of office space to conserve space for classroom and labs, so space used for paper storage was at a premium. What little space was available could have been better used for professors’ offices.

Beginning in 2004, different programs and departments within TAMU began investigating document management solutions, in order to more efficiently and cost-effectively share information—not to mention save space. Ultimately, they chose a Laserfiche enterprise content management solution to securely store paper, implement business process management and eliminate file cabinets.

Currently, nearly 1,200 staff in 10 departments and divisions within TAMU use Laserfiche. The Health Sciences Center (HSC) reaches across Texas to educate health professionals and researchers through its seven components: the Baylor College of Dentistry in Dallas; the College of Medicine in College Station, Round Rock and Houston; the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; the Institute of Biosciences and Technology in Houston; the School of Rural Public Health in College Station and McAllen; the Irma Lerma Rangel College of Pharmacy in Kingsville; and the College of Nursing in College Station.

When the HSC 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.

Nace, the director for fiscal services, was formerly in the HSC accounts payable division. While working in that department, she scanned documents into a basic system that used a centralized network drive. In 2007, the HSC formed a committee to find an alternative system and a vendor to provide it.

Because of Laserfiche’s successful implementation in the Texas A&M AgriLife program, it was considered for the HSC, and was ultimately chosen due to ease of use. Nace says that Laserfiche’s interface is simple and self-explanatory, and the system’s ability to import and export Microsoft Office documents was critical to its ultimate selection.

As in other departments, the HSC’s implementation committee chose to implement Laserfiche in stages. The implementation began in the Finance Department, which includes accounts payable, payroll, human resources and the contracts and grants division and has 180 users. The Finance Department was chosen for the initial implementation because it is the number one paper consumer in the entire HSC.

The HSC’s Laserfiche ECM system was implemented on February 1, 2008, and was completed by May 31, 2008. During the implementation, staff were trained and the department established scanning requirements for their component offices. Nace was surprised at how easily the staff embraced Laserfiche, and how easily the implementation went. “Adoption was extremely easy,” she says. “When it comes to Laserfiche, I don’t have to make anyone do anything.”

In fact, potential users approach Nace nearly every day and ask when they will get to use Laserfiche. Nace is also impressed by how her colleagues are constantly approaching her with new ways they can use Laserfiche to streamline their workflow. In fact, there is even competition between component offices over scanners, because everyone wants one.

The HSC implementation took place without IT support; in fact, IT staff only perform standard server maintenance. “Besides file structure and security, we’re really using Laserfiche straight out of the box,” Nace comments.

Since implementing Laserfiche, the finance office has quit accepting paper documents, and instead requires all internal documents, such as invoices, payroll documents and contracts, to be submitted electronically. They have been able to eliminate most of their 69 file cabinets, which cost $2,100 annually to maintain. And they have been able to adhere to their records retention schedule much more easily.

Even better, the department has eliminated nearly all their overnight shipments from regional locations. Previously, regional offices would overnight documents to the finance department on a daily basis. Because 95% of these overnight shipments were internal, they are now handled electronically through Laserfiche—eliminating nearly $55,000 spent in shipping costs.

“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,” Nace explains. “Utilizing Laserfiche security, we’ve moved to only having one copy of the document and are allowing our departments access to many of those folders – which they love because they no longer have to keep their own copy, which of course means fewer files in their offices.”

Nace says an intangible benefit of Laserfiche is its ability to eliminate clutter from offices. She believes that employees are happier now because their offices are free from file cabinets and paper.

In the future, HSC plans to expand Laserfiche into Student Business Services (SBS). After the SBS implementation, stage three will be to implement Laserfiche in the medical records department (MR). MR stores performance review files for doctors practicing medicine in the state of Texas, which are reviewed by other doctors to determine if they have the potential to become a malpractice case. Nace plans to use Laserfiche to redact sensitive information, and also plans to segregate them on a separate Laserfiche repository, to maintain security. She would then be able to give non-departmental users, such as doctors from across the State, access to only the specific documents they need to review cases.

Also, HSC has just received a land grant from the neighboring city of Bryan, and the state has approved construction for two buildings. One of the stipulations is that these buildings be used mainly for classrooms and research, so offices located on the new campus will have to be extremely small. In an effort to maximize available office space, the department head has already made Laserfiche mandatory for document storage.

In addition, the board has also approved the establishment of a campus in Round Rock. Like the Bryan campus, storage and office space will be limited, so a Laserfiche implementation is planned for this campus as well.

Nace has recently created a position to manage the expansion of Laserfiche into new HSC departments. Eventually, every department in the HSC will be using Laserfiche.

“Our largest unexpected benefit came in realizing how popular Laserfiche has become within our organization,” she says. “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 into Laserfiche,” she adds. “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.”

For example, it was nearly impossible for employees to append pages to scanned documents that were stored in Alchemy; typically, in order to add pages, the whole document needed to be rescanned and resaved.

Jacquez-Nares urged the city to find a more sophisticated, user-friendly solution. It was at this point that a collaborative, inter-departmental team was formed with Jacquez-Nares as the project manager.

All of the City’s departments—City Clerk, City Manager, Community Development, Community Services, Finance, Human Resources, IT, Police and Public Works—came together to define their requirements for the RFP. The selection came down to two choices: Laserfiche and LibertyNET. In the end, the balance tipped in favor of Laserfiche for two reasons:

• Its comprehensive search functionality and easy-to-use Web interface made Laserfiche the most user-friendly choice.
• A formal needs assessment showed that implementing Laserfiche would ultimately save the city $273,200 by freeing up enough office space to create a total of 13 workstations for essential city services such as traffic management.

Westminster purchased the software from Laserfiche reseller ECS Imaging in June 2008. Because Laserfiche is easy to use and Jacquez-Nares already had a lot of experience with it, virtually no formal training was required. By August, the solution had been installed, the City had begun back scanning the Planning Department’s records and by November, all Alchemy files had been migrated into the new system.

Making City Content Accessible in Seconds

As a part of its Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) solution, Westminster deployed Laserfiche WebLink, a secure Web content portal, to make content immediately accessible to all 402 city employees.

“In the old days, people in our Community Development department had to visit our offsite storage facility three or four times a week in order to locate planning documents,” says Jacquez-Nares. “When you add up the 15-30 minutes it took to drive there, the time spent looking for relevant documents and then the time it took to drive back to City Hall, you’re talking about 4-5 hours a week. With Laserfiche, it only takes a few seconds to call up all necessary documentation.”

The impact of Laserfiche on the City Clerk’s Office has also been great. “As the lead office for Public Records Act Requests, we receive all records requests and hear directly from the public about their concerns,” says Jacquez-Nares. “With Laserfiche, citizens no longer have concerns about transparency or document integrity because digital records don’t get lost or damaged, and they’re available much faster than their paper-based counterparts.”

All the City’s departmental records are currently scanned into Laserfiche on a day-forward basis by Kelly Lore, the centralized scanning records clerk. Just a few of the different types of content stored in Westminster’s Laserfiche repository include:

• Agendas
• Agreements
• Bids
• Building permits and plans, including large format plans
• Deeds
• Planning Department records
• Staff reports

“All of our departments have access to Laserfiche, and people are always coming up with new ideas for how to use it,” says Jacquez-Nares. “It’s much more useful than Alchemy—and much easier to use!”

IT Support Is a Snap

For a city like Westminster, with an IT department of only five employees, software applications must not only be easy to use, but also easy to maintain and administer. In fact, Laserfiche is so easy to support that Jacquez-Nares serves as system administrator, working with users across the City’s departments to structure the City’s content repository, create index fields for various City forms, and set up Quick Fields sessions to automate information capture.

“IT staff members create a backup when they’re updating the server,” says Jacquez-Nares. “Other than that, they pretty much leave everything to do with Laserfiche up to me.”

Future-Forward

Westminster has exciting plans for Laserfiche moving forward. Incoming City Clerk Robin Roberts recognizes the efficiency that Laserfiche ECM brings to Westminster and seeks to build on the project’s success by promoting city-wide use of Laserfiche through added integrations and training sessions.

With the help of ECS, the team is currently in the process of integrating Laserfiche with the City’s GIS system so that all building plans associated with any given address are accessible from within Westminster’s GIS application, CityGIS. Similarly, the City is also working on integrating its electronic permitting application with both Laserfiche and CityGIS. These integrations will save staff from performing time-consuming research to locate information about various addresses or land parcels.

The City also has plans to upgrade to Laserfiche Avante, which will bring Workflow functionality into Westminster’s arsenal, enabling it to automate standard business processes such as approvals and document routing. According to Jacquez-Nares, Westminster is also contemplating integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint, which the City owns but has not yet rolled out. Using SharePoint as a collaborative portal would, for one, help the City Clerk’s Office generate agenda Council packets in a paperless manner. Combining Laserfiche with SharePoint would bring imaging capabilities to SharePoint and enhance the SharePoint repository.

Even without these system expansions, the City is extremely pleased with the Laserfiche implementation. “Many people had to work together to make this project a success, and it’s wonderful to see just how effective a collaborative management team can be,” concludes Jacquez-Nares. “People are using Laserfiche, and the positive results have been staggering so far.”

Technical innovation just sometimes needs to be preceded by a little budgetary innovation, and this kind of group effort to pool resources to share the cost of investment is not uncommon, according to Laserfiche reseller Clay Behr of Crabtree Companies. The Marshall, MN, school district and city hall, for instance, joined with Lyon County to share services in an ambitious project dubbed “Prairie Net.” In Anoka County, 11 police departments joined forces to purchase a county-wide Laserfiche system.

This kind of collaboration between bureaucracy-encumbered government agencies can often make for slow progress. But bonded by a common need, they did indeed make progress. Behr notes that, besides the year of business manager meetings Carr mentioned, “Really, what took the longest was getting everyone to agree how to set up the template and folder structure and how the volume security would work.”

School districts present particular document and records management issues owing to both state-mandated retention and privacy policies, as well as to the constantly growing documentation amassed over the course of a student’s K-12 career. But as NE Metro 916 shows, a school district can also present a unique staffing opportunity.

At around the same time Laserfiche was being deployed, Cindy Sapinski, work coordinator with Work Experience Life Skills-North (WELS-N), a program of NE Metro 916 providing work and transition services to students, read an article in Autism Advocate magazine about young people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) finding employment digitizing paper files. Coincidentally, Behr just happened to serve as a Technical Advisor to the Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities, a council dedicated to finding employment opportunities for people with ASD. Behr pointed Sapinski to examples of how document management processing and capture was being handled by people with disabilities by two of his existing clients.

Inspired, Sapinski approached Carr with the idea of an in-house digital imaging project staffed by her students. “We’ve had students prep documents before we used to outsource scanning, but when I saw what other people were doing, I asked if we could take the whole project over.”

Sapinski did just that, and before long, instead of outsourcing scanning to a vendor, a dozen or so students were handling the work spread out over four two-hour shifts a week. Right away, she saw Laserfiche was a perfect fit for its new staff. “It was so easy to learn that the transitional students were very accepting,” she says. “They were working on it within several days.” She found an internal Laserfiche champion in Aaron Erdman, a student with Asperger’s Syndrome, who became something of the ad-hoc Laserfiche administrator, overseeing QA and troubleshooting operational snags. “I was a little wary of handing over the manuals to him because I knew it wouldn’t take long for him to know the software better than me,” Behr laughs.

Erdman has since transitioned out of the program, as have another 15 or so students. They’ve made their way into the working world with their experience with Laserfiche technology on their resumes. As the program enters its third year, it has been an across-the-board success, helping graduates find jobs while the school districts have some 120,000 documents scanned a year—roughly 1,500 pages a shift.

The cost, Sapinski says, of using transitional students to staff the scanning service is roughly a third of what it would cost to outsource the work, owing in no small part to tax incentives for hiring the disabled. Behr and other Laserfiche resellers have helped organizations utilize the skills of people with unique abilities for scanning while creating opportunities for people where none existed.

But the benefits extend far beyond tax incentives. “This kind of work is perfect for people who like repetitive tasks and enjoy being meticulous in what they do,” adds Sapinski. “I think it really shows the potential for people to do more than sweep floors.” She notes that other schools have either contacted her directly or are interested in starting their own in-house imaging services, while area Day Training and Habilitation (DTH) Centers have also started offering imaging training. “I’ve even made phone calls about our program—I called a lady in Milwaukee who was having trouble placing students, and they had never even thought about imaging.”

Carr sees the success of the program as part of the larger success of Laserfiche for document and records management. “Reinvesting in our own students makes sense in a lot of ways because I know we’re not spending more to outsource it and we’re not having to lease space to store our HR files anymore,” says Carr. “That’s what’s unique about being a special school district—we offer programs and approaches to programs that really show an efficiency of scale.”

As for NE Metro 916’s own use of Laserfiche, conversion efforts have expanded into permanent contracts and expanded use by HR and the finance departments. “Every year we’ve gotten more people in more departments using the system because everybody’s realizing what great access they have to what they need.”

It may have taken a year’s worth of meetings to get Laserfiche, but now, Carr says, “It runs so smoothly we don’t have to have meetings to talk about it—that’s the beauty of the system.”

• 2007: Four public school districts including North Branch Area, Roseville Area, Stillwater Area and NE Metro 916 Intermediate partner to purchase a shared enterprise Laserfiche system, hardware and scanners.
• 2008: Reseller Crabtree implements system with “Crawl, walk, run” strategy, starting with search and retrieval. NE Metro 916 founds digital imaging program as part of its transitional training curriculum.
• 2009: Quick Fields added for barcoding applications from vendors for Accounts Payable; NE Metro 916’s Digital Imaging Program enters its third year.
• 2010: Planned upgrade to Laserfiche 8, Workflow and Records Management Edition (RME).