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

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

Leading Up to the Upgrade

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

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

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

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

The integration works as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since the Upgrade

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

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

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

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

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

Additional Integrations

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

This functionality will be useful for multiple departments, including:

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

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

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

Avante = Affordability

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

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

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

The Westminster Fire Department began using digital data in 1985. Since most fire departments predate electronic data by decades if not centuries, the 1980s brought a wave of digitizing data to fire departments across the country. Fire departments generally use records management systems designed specifically for the firefighting field, although according to Chief Macaloney, there’s no particular consistency when it comes to vendors and most departments keep paper records as well.

“Ultimately, you end up with this mishmash of electronic data and paper data,” he says.

This combination of paper and electronic data proved fortunate for Westminster. “We had a catastrophic failure of our records management system software,” Macaloney remembers, “which caused us not to have any electronic data from the mid-eighties all the way through the year 2000.”

Since Westminster had always kept paper copies of their records, the department could retrieve the paper copies. But resuming digital data storage was a challenge. After the software failure, Westminster was ready to switch vendors and converting data from one system to another was complicated, even with two systems designed for fire departments. Changing over to another fire-response software system for records management would have required rewriting massive amounts of code, which would have been very expensive.

“Transitioning systems wasn’t an issue for me,” he recalls, “because I decided to go out and secure Laserfiche to be my system for records storage and retrieval.”

Chief Macaloney, who had only a massive number of paper records to work with, knew he needed a common way to look at and retrieve data. “Before installing Laserfiche, I had no consistent way to retrieve information regarding any incident without someone telling me specifically the date and time that it happened,” he says. “When we lost our electronic data, we had no ability to look up public records and fulfill a public records request. Laserfiche provided a mechanism to scan the data, retain it, retrieve it, sort it and search it—and not just the records from 1985 forward, but everything. Now I can log into Laserfiche and pull up an incident in seconds.”

So far, the department has scanned in documents from 2002 to the present and is going back in time with the goal of scanning in all their paper records. To that end, Westminster has developed an innovative program that benefits the fire department and senior citizens alike. “In Massachusetts,” Macaloney says, “any city or town that chooses to adopt the provisions of the state law may reduce the tax levy on property for senior citizens who fall within certain income limits. We’ve utilized senior workers in the fire department in the past, but lately we’ve had them scanning in documents, under the direction of my administrative secretary. We record their work hours and send them to town hall and the town abates their taxes. The good news goes beyond our happiness with Laserfiche itself. We’ve been able to use this program to everyone’s benefit.”

Laserfiche also helps the fire department save money in an unexpected way—on envelopes and stamps. “Some of the documents we scan in are for ambulance transports. That information has to be sent to a billing company. We worked out an agreement with our billing company that when we scan in those documents, we FTP the data over to their site, so we no longer have to mail them the paper documents. So in addition to the good things you have about document management and retrieval, there are the secondary things that we didn’t anticipate, such as sending the electronic file for the billing company to process. We save time and the money we’d spend on envelopes and stamps. That’s a big gain right there.”

The fire department initiated the establishment of a network for the city, and built it, running the fiber-optic cable across the parking lot to city hall. Now firefighters in the field can call up documents on their laptops and read information pertinent to the fire sites. “That will become even more important in the future,” says Macaloney, “when we scan in documents such as permits that have never been electronic documents. The network is seamless. It ties alarm receiving to dispatch to records. And it sends an email to my cell phone notifying me of the alarm. Everything is retrievable through the network from the building or anywhere with access.”

It’s clear that Westminster’s technical innovations have far-ranging benefits for everyone from firefighters in the field to senior citizens working to abate their taxes. The technical savvy shown by this town of 8,000 proves that innovation isn’t the sole province of large municipalities. With the police department and town hall in line to integrate with the system, Laserfiche has been and will continue to be an integral part of the town’s success.