“In this volatile economy, Laserfiche is committed to providing stress-free ECM solutions that are easy to implement, easy to administer and easy to use,” said Brian LaPointe, Vice President of Strategic Solutions at Laserfiche. “As such, we’re offering free massages for EDUCAUSE attendees to reflect our commitment to making life easier for IT and administrative decision makers at colleges and universities.”

Laserfiche solves business problems across campus, facilitating everything from student records management to facilities management, HR onboarding and disaster recovery planning. “Laserfiche takes a synchronized approach to content management, easing the burden on IT staff while eliminating departmental information silos,” said LaPointe.

Laserfiche will be on hand at booth #1619 throughout the event to demonstrate its software solutions for higher education, provide free massages and distribute copies of customer success stories featuring USC and Texas A&M. Laserfiche will also host a reception on Wednesday, October 19, from 6:00 – 8:00 pm ET at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown.

During the reception, Laserfiche will present John Hermes, CTO and Vice President of IT at Oklahoma Christian University, with a Visionary Award for using Laserfiche to streamline processes across campus. Hermes kicked off the Laserfiche project by enabling students to complete and submit financial aid documents through a student portal; next, he’ll implement the system in Admissions and the Business Office. In 2012, he plans to bring the Registrar’s Office and the Office of Student Life onboard.

“From a leadership perspective, implementing a product like Laserfiche and having an entire office up and running proficiently on the system within just a few days speaks volumes,” said Hermes. “IT staff was very impressed with the ease of administration and how smoothly the implementation has gone.”

About Laserfiche

Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. Since 1987, more than 30,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and institutions of higher education—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

Laserfiche provides colleges and universities with an ECM solution that can be centrally regulated by the IT department and easily configured for each department’s unique business processes. Schools such as Texas A&M, the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of Utah use Laserfiche to increase collaboration and information sharing between departments, automate core business processes and minimize ongoing maintenance demands for IT personnel.

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

“By standardizing on an agile ECM system from Laserfiche, colleges and universities increase information accessibility and security, eliminate data silos and enable key stakeholders to make better-informed decisions,” said Brian LaPointe, vice president of strategic solutions at Laserfiche. “Agile ECM also gives academic institutions a flexible and secure way to automate business processes in every department.”

With hundreds of higher education customers around the world, Laserfiche has emerged as the leading ECM solution for enhancing efficiency and cutting costs across campus. For example:

• Texas A&M’s Department of Entomology expected to receive an initial ROI of $54,000, but actually achieved an ROI of $272,000 within one year of implementing Laserfiche.
• The University of Southern California has improved faculty records management. The Provost’s Office says, “Something that used to take ten minutes now takes a matter of seconds.”
• The University of Utah has dramatically accelerated the disbursement of financial aid. According to the university, “In the past, it took us at least six weeks to process a student’s paperwork. Now we process those documents in two weeks.”

LaPointe notes that the benefits of Laserfiche extend across the institution because agile ECM tools can be configured locally yet controlled centrally. “Agile ECM gives individual departments the ability to configure local solutions while helping them to avoid using consultants, programmers and in-house IT staff for all but the most strategic ECM tasks.”

Laserfiche will demo its agile ECM solutions and hand out copies of a new report titled “ECM Agility for Higher Education” throughout the conference at booth #1876.

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

The Laserfiche ECM system gives colleges and universities the ability to improve disaster recovery planning, centrally and securely manage records, and deliver shared services such as contract management, grant management and HR onboarding. It eliminates data silos and integrates easily with other applications, accelerating business processes and making staff more efficient.

The Laserfiche product suite is built upon Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

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

But with state facilities in College Station, TX, a major USDA entomology research laboratory, and members of the department’s graduate faculty stationed in nine major agricultural areas in the state, sharing information efficiently had become problematic for department staff.

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 (ECM) 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 Department of Entomology was introduced to ECM by Business Administrator Roberta Priesmeyer, who had read an article on document imaging during a business trip. She thought that an ECM system could help the department with administrative functions, and after learning about Laserfiche, she says that she couldn’t conceivably consider any other competitor due to the enormous difference in cost.

Laserfiche’s ease of use was a major selling point for the department; Priesmeyer reports that its user interface is simple to master, which increases staff adoption.

Once the system was installed, staff created a digital filing structure which replicated the department’s paper-based system. Before Laserfiche, department staff had difficulty finding documents if employees were unavailable, on vacation or had left. With Laserfiche, filing is standardized, so information retrieval is simple. Kathy Seaton, a staff member in the accounting department, previously had to return a vendor’s call after manually searching cabinets and folders. What previously took 30-45 minutes and several phone calls now takes 30 seconds and a single phone call.

IT Director Dr. Mark Wright believes that Laserfiche hasn’t just made life easier on the department head, but also for staff. “Staff really are happier as a result of their ability to increase productivity without expending more effort,” he says.

In addition, Laserfiche enables the department to adhere to their records retention schedule much more easily, something that was nearly impossible with paper. “It really helps us keep the auditors happy,” adds Wright.

With Laserfiche, researchers can easily access reprints that previously required them to spend up to half a day sifting through files to retrieve a single document. Laserfiche’s optical character recognition (OCR) capability and unified metadata model have allowed the department to virtually eliminate this necessary but inefficient use of time. Since 2007, peer review articles have increased by 11.7%, with total faculty publications increasing by 22.4%. In fact, Department of Entomology tenured and tenure track faculty rank #1 in term of peer-review publication output in the US (from data published by the Chronicles of Higher Education).

To further conserve space, the department plans to eventually add accounts for faculty members who each use 4-5 file cabinets to store their publications, to make researching even easier.

Due to the University’s Vision 2020 plan, the department has been hiring more professors, and Laserfiche is indirectly helping them reach this goal by freeing up office space formerly used for storage. Since implementing Laserfiche, the department has removed almost 40 file cabinets, creating enough space for a new office and laboratory.

The department expected to receive an initial ROI of $54,000, but actually achieved an ROI of $272,000. ROI is tracked in areas as varied as staff costs, the cost of lost files, consumables, storage, current and proposed purchases, and lease tax savings.

ROI mainly derives from savings on accounting staff ($7,385), professional staff ($4,865) and management positions ($10,597). The department also reclaimed nearly $1,000 in storage space and nearly $1,000 in monthly printing and distribution costs, for a total monthly savings of over $22,000.

In five years, the department estimates they will save nearly $1.4 million from their Laserfiche implementation.

“I love Laserfiche,” Priesmeyer says. “I’d fight anyone who tried to take it away from me. Choosing it is literally the best decision I’ve ever made.”

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!”

Not that she wants to reinvent the wheel. “The Medical School has been collecting student and resident records for many years,” she says, “and has developed a workable filing method. Rather than change something that works well for them, I created the Laserfiche system to follow their method.”

The structure mirrors the filing hierarchy and classification codes that were already in place, so that staff can easily find information.

“At first employees were resistant to change,” says Baccardax, “and could not see the value of having scanned documents. But when they realized the Laserfiche serves as a backup should documents be destroyed, they no longer worried about losing paper documents. Once employees saw how easy Laserfiche was to use and that it could be tailored to reflect their workable filing system, the word spread to other employees. Now new departments are taking interest in getting their documents scanned.”

Baccardax has paid attention to developing best practices as well, right down to scanning methods. She experimented with different colored paper and ink to clearly demonstrate the difference in clarity to users and help them develop good scanning techniques. She also determined what would be sacrificed in speed and storage space when scanning in color. The school found that black-and-white scanning was clearer and faster and, because the school pays for nightly backup and color files take up more disk space, much more cost-effective.

Laserfiche gives staff speedy access to records, which comes in handy when, for example, an MD applies for a job in a hospital setting and the school needs to verify her records. “Before we used Laserfiche it could take a lot of time to fill verification requests,” Baccardax recalls. We would have to find the material in the file folder or retrieve it from off-site storage. With Laserfiche, the employee can quickly find the student or resident records to fill the hospital’s request. We scan the verification information so it can be used again for future requests.”

Using Laserfiche has helped the school clarify just which information is vital and who is responsible for it. “As a result,” notes Baccardax, “the departments were able to clear a great number of paper documents, which made their filing much more manageable and freed up a lot of storage space.

“For new employees,” she continues, “it clarified the role each employee had with respect to information gathering. It also opened the communication lines among departments sharing information by addressing the grey areas concerning who is responsible for what information. It elucidates where the information stopped and started between departments. And employees became more aware of the amount of information that an organization actually obtains during the course of the day.”

The school also takes inventory of its records to see which ones are crucial. Baccardax notes, “After careful review with record inventory, we realized that a small percentage of information is actually vital. While record inventory may seem like a time consuming task, it is actually a time saver because it reduces the need to scan redundant information.”

Laserfiche was particularly useful for the school when the provisions of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection of Privacy Act. (FOIPOP) was extended to universities in Nova Scotia. Says Baccardax, “Certain types of information could not be shared unless approved by an authorized person. Laserfiche enables you to set the access rights so that information is available only to authorized staff. In addition, the Laserfiche redaction option serves as a useful tool to black out any information that cannot be shared with unauthorized personnel.”

Baccardax notes the ease with which she compiles the information she needs. She has set up a search function, for example, to help her record the number of pages the school has scanned in for the month. She can import it into an Excel spreadsheet and run reports to calculate the numbers.

Future plans include moving to a Web-based system, to get each department scanning in its own records and easing the workload on current scanning staff. “First, we must have the policies and procedures in place for each department. Upon departmental approval, the plan is to select and train an employee who can act as custodian of the departmental information. Once training is completed, our next phase will be to have each department to scan its own documents. Our scanner will then have more time to complete archival records and rush jobs.”

When asked what tips she’d give to other universities, Baccardax replies, “Educate, educate, educate. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of educating the employee about how to make the best use of paper and electronic documents, so they can achieve good quality images in a timely matter. Removal of staples, paper clips, tapes, consciousness of types of color pens and markers being used, color or photo copy papers—all play a role in the quality and speed of scanning.

“Get approval and commitment from higher level before proceeding with records management,” she adds. “Upon approval, create a Records Management Committee to include one person from each of the appointed departments, an archivist, and a lawyer. Each will offer insights that will enhance the Laserfiche system.”

Important documentation was often, as Desiree Brown, Faculty Services Coordinator, puts it, “floating out there.” Factor in the potential for breach of confidentiality for sensitive and confidential faculty personnel files, and it was clear that a new solution was in order.

The need for greater speed and efficiency became more pronounced when Provost Marty Levine starting making increasingly specialized queries of faculty records that emphasized the need for more data-driven accessibility. “He’d want to see, say for instance, what female faculty members had been promoted in the last five years,” Haugland explains.

Laserfiche was chosen both for its ease-of-use, but also its ease of customization, which was essential to an office working with 17 different schools campus-wide. Initially, adoption was sluggish until a former Dean of the Engineering School became the high-level administrator, which underscored the need to have buy-in from the top down. “We were very fortunate in terms of having management on the project that was very IT-friendly,” says Haugland.

Brown notes that the Provost’s Office was a perfect pilot office for Laserfiche implementation owing to the fact that her office had already been scanning all incoming mail for a year before installing Laserfiche. “We had a cultural acceptance in our office—no one was afraid of going electronic,” she says.

For her part, Brown kept initial implementation manageable and recognizable, beginning with just one school’s set of records, and “looking at them like they were in a file cabinet only on my desk.”

Owing to the volume of files their office was required to keep as the university’s custodian of faculty records, Brown already had a working knowledge of what document management could do—and pretty soon she’d found out how much better Laserfiche could do it. “In the hard files we had a cheat sheet already that kind of summarized what information we’d usually need to see right away. But some of these files could be 300 pages, so if we needed to find something specific it was still a lot of work,” she says. “We had been using something in-house to scan in records, but you could only retrieve them in three categories. Laserfiche just gave us so many more options, especially when you want to search for one particular thing in a hundred page document.”

But trying to come up with a system that was as centrally controllable as it was locally accessible—the classic ECM paradox—presented its own challenges. On an IT level and user level, this active document management technology had to reconcile the Provost’s needs to centralize and standardize records while simultaneously accommodating the individual schools’ unique filing systems and primary applications. Payroll, for instance, was centralized, but not personnel records, which were left to individual departments.

Ease of use was a major factor, Haugland says, for two reasons: First, the system would be needed for multiple and continuous access. Secondly, staff members using the system ranged from Ph.D’s to administrative assistants, and even within those parameters, computer savvy varied wildly from gadget-philes to technophobes. “Believe it or not, we have people at USC who don’t even read e-mail,” laughs Haugland.

Key to resolving both issues was establishing what Brown refers to as “the gold files”—a master set of faculty records that would serve as the gold standard for all schools, eliminating the inefficiencies and redundancies of duplication.

“I call them ‘the gold files’ because it’s such gold to me,” Brown explains with a laugh. What gives them their shine is their standardized field template, which Brown helped design based on the naming conventions and filing habits of each of the respective schools and colleges. “That’s the beauty of Laserfiche, you can customize it,” she says. This helped allow a thorough application of Quick Fields to index and file incoming paperwork. “We were able to do all our own scanning in-house,” she adds. The custom template, for instance, allows Brown to update faculty status say, from on sabbatical to active, instantly.

It didn’t take long for Brown to all but eliminate paper from her desk. “Anything that comes in, I scan it, then pass it along as an e-mail,” she says. “The great thing is that I have a record on my desktop.”

The benefits, say Haugland and Brown, range from the simple (cutting down on inter-office mail, reducing storage and processing costs) to the profound (disaster recovery, transparency and compliance).

When she’s asked about ROI, Brown hesitates to limit her response to just a number because so many of the benefits are as qualitative as they are quantitative. “I like this question because I want to laugh—in a good way,” she says. “Something that used to take me ten minutes to find, now it’s a matter of seconds. The time saving is substantial. A lot of the benefits are subjective, but turnaround times, compliance – we know we’re better than we were.”

So do the other schools and offices, who’ve had positive experience interacting with the gold files. “Our office is the custodian for all faculty records. We have to ‘mirror’ all the files, so we have all 17 schools’ personnel records in our office,” Haugland explains. “Now they’re checking their files against our ‘gold files.’”

Many now use Laserfiche themselves, including Marshall School of Business, Keck School of Medicine, Career and Protective Services, and Facility Management.

“People that were afraid of the scanner saw that we were green and more secure and we weren’t losing anything,” Brown offers.

“Disaster recovery has really been the catalyst for enterprise-wide adoption of Laserfiche,” Haugland says. “All institutions of higher education – especially when it comes to stimulus funding – are facing higher compliance issues. We’re able to report accurately and quickly, and that affects everybody.”