According to Margaret Anderson, Certified Records Manager for Collin County, the county’s location just north of Dallas, reasonable housing costs, great schools, and a family-friendly environment have contributed to the county’s growth. Records show the population is quickly approaching 1,000,000 – almost double its size since 2000. Anderson said county officials saw an increase in demand for services and found that access to information through a conventional paper-based filing system was no longer an option — due to the sheer volume of documents.

“We needed an enterprise solution that had retention schedule capabilities, met DoD 5015.2 requirements, offered disaster recovery capabilities, reduced storage needs, and allowed shared access to documents across several building locations,” said Anderson. “We are growing so much that it’s just not cost efficient to keep silos of unmanaged information.” Anderson explained that storage and workflow needed to be addressed.

When a committee of ten did their research and made their decision, Anderson said they chose Laserfiche because they liked the integration already in place with HTE, which is their primary application in Accounting and Budget. Laserfiche also provides the back-end they need to archive their growing volume of cases. Further, they did their due diligence and found that cities and counties of similar size that were using Laserfiche gave positive feedback.

For the justice system alone, Collin County currently handles more than 322,100 documents per year and the number is growing:

The county will begin with those departments related to the criminal justice system including the District Clerk, District Attorney, and the County-Court at Law Clerks. The county’s Laserfiche document and records management system will provide an archival and records management backbone for their case management system. It will later be expanded to other county departments such as Human Resources and Public Works. The county plans to archive over 10 million images that date back to the early 1800s, when the county was founded.

Following a competitive selection process, MCCi, a long-time reseller for Laserfiche with extensive expertise and a client base of over 400 government agencies, was selected to implement Laserfiche’s document and records management solution.“We designed the implementation plan with an innovative and consultative approach that would allow Collin County to phase the solution in successfully,” said Russell Haddock, lead account executive for MCCi. “Once the contract was awarded, our lead project manager molded the plan with input from the Collin County team to allow for a seamless implementation, which Laserfiche is known for.”

Laserfiche Vice President, Government Solutions, Hedy Aref, said, “2007 has been a notable year for local government. Many entities have managed to roll out solutions that improve internal work processes, resulting in better public service delivery. We are pleased to have played a major role in this initiative and continue fully supporting this goal. Local governments look favorably at digital document management for multiple departments, if not the entire enterprise,” she said.

About Collin County
Collin County was created by the state of Texas in 1846. McKinney became a county seat in 1848 and was named after one of its first settler statesmen, Collin McKinney. This bustling part of North Texas has become an attractive home to two professional sports teams and an ever-growing list of corporate headquarters. The county is home to an estimated 730,000 people who live and work from Plano to Blue Ridge, Celina to Royse City, and everywhere in between.

About MCCi
MCCi (www.mccinnovations.com), a subsidiary of Municipal Code Corporation (MCC), the nations leading codifier for local government, has been providing Electronic Records Management Solutions to its clients since 1998. In 1998, MCCi created a document imaging division, which subsequently evolved into MCCi in the summer of 2003. MCCi has formed several strategic partnerships with leading technology companies such as Laserfiche. MCCi has its headquarters in Tallahassee, Florida with satellite offices in Atlanta, Georgia, Ft. Worth, Texas, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Lansing, Michigan.

About Laserfiche
Founded in 1987 and based in Long Beach, CA, Laserfiche (www.Laserfiche.com) develops scalable electronic document management solutions that enable a wide range of organizations to operate more effectively. Supported by a network of more than 1,000 certified Value Added Resellers, Laserfiche solutions can be found in more than 25,000 business and government offices worldwide. Laserfiche products are known for being both broadly applicable and easy to use and maintain.

With space a premium commodity, a storage room full of paper was a luxury the City of Denton, Texas couldn’t afford. But that’s what city staff was facing in late 1999. The city’s human resources department had 15 lateral 5-drawer file cabinets, filled to overflowing, crammed into 300 square feet of space. Even worse than sacrificing the storage space was trying to comb the files for information.

“We entered our Laserfiche installation in the ‘Best of Texas’ competition and won the

award for the most innovative use of technology.”

—Mary Collins
Technology Services Manager

Staff was losing valuable time searching for documents, making copies, routing information and returning it to the original files, not to mention trying to locate documents that were misfiled or yet-to-be filed.

“One of the major issues was finding documents. So many times a file had been pulled and we couldn’t find it,” says Technology Services Manager Mary Collins. That just wasn’t good enough for this county seat that includes leadership, innovation and outstanding service in its mission statement. To solve the problem, Denton staff began searching for a digital document management system.

The City of Denton Technology Services Department began by evaluating a number of products. “We had a directive from our city manager to look at document imaging,” says Collins. “We looked at a number of products over a long period of time. And the technology changed during that period.”

After a small, failed pilot project with another product, the city chose Laserfiche®. In 2000, Denton tested Laserfiche with a pilot program in the city manager’s and city attorney’s offices. In addition to the success the city experienced in accomplishing necessary tasks in those offices, the support Denton got from its reseller, DocuNav, made Laserfiche the city’s choice.

With funding from a bond project, the city expanded the installation to other departments two years later. “We moved forward with some enhancements to the city manager’s office and expanded to HR and administration,” recalls Collins.

HR staff expected it to take five to seven years to get a document imaging system up and running. But in October 2002, HR began implementing Laserfiche to manage its documents. “I looked at that room full of paper and thought it would take 5 years to digitize. It ended up taking 6 months,” says HR Operations and Training Specialist Sally Cavness. “By spring 2003, we completed the Laserfiche conversion of all our personnel files.”

And it’s been a dramatic improvement over the previous, paper-based system. Staff finds needed information in a fraction of the time it used to take. Sarah Mabel, HR assistant for records management, notices a huge difference in handling open-records requests: “We used to have someone who had that as a full-time job. Now I’ve taken it over and I estimate that filling open records requests takes somewhere between eight and 13 percent of my time. If someone wants an entire personnel file, I can just burn it to a CD in five minutes instead of taking two days to print all of the information out.”

Cavness adds, “We also had a full-time file clerk that we don’t need anymore. We’ve reduced the time it takes for records management period, so that Sarah has more time to focus on other things.”

“Once you get used to it, you start thinking about ways to further integrate it into your system.”

—Jesse Perez
HR Technician for Selection and Placement

When it comes to selecting candidates for employment, Denton’s integration of Laserfiche with its JD Edwards^®(JDE) Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) software has proved crucial. With a volume of nearly 8000 applications a year, the paper used to really pile up. Some applicants apply multiple times a year for various positions and each application is considered unique. With the paper system, HR might store 10 paper copies of the exact same application in 10 different folders.

Some employees have been with the city for more than 30 years, and their files would be enormous. Copying them took up to two days and generated three times the paper of the original files. Security concerns dictate redacting portions of the files and the paper-based process was long, tedious and wasteful. Staff would copy the records, black out portions with a marker and make a second copy to completely black out the original text.

With the goal of a paperless employee records system, HR integrated Laserfiche with its online application process and its Internet and intranet applications. “The City of Denton has developed a user-friendly process that dramatically increased the human resources department’s effectiveness and efficiency. We now have an online job application process that includes the civil service exam registration,” notes Cavness.

DocuNav helped the city design a custom program to integrate Laserfiche with the department’s HRIS software. “HR doesn’t have to type in all the index information,” says Cavness. “It pulls it in from JDE. We assign the documents a specific number and the program uses this number as a guide to fill in the blanks by retrieving it from JDE. We now use it for workflow as part of our selection placement process.”

Downtown Denton's fine arts theate

Jesse Perez, HR technician for selection and placement, explains, “Whenever there’s a vacancy, we enter the employee requisition into the HRIS system. We set up an appropriate folder in Laserfiche and that’s where all the images and the application are scanned. We use our customized application to retrieve all the information in JDE and populate the fields for the name, ID number and position and then put them in the only folder that the supervisor has assigned rights to. Each supervisor is assigned a unique login and password for access to the intranet.” Applicants can update their information as needed over the Web and while each application is still unique, the system can pull candidate information from what’s already stored in the system.

The entire selection process is totally automated, from the initial application to the creation of a new-hire personnel file. HR receives applications electronically via the Web and the system populates the HRIS with pertinent applicant information and sends the applications to Laserfiche. Supervisors can then view applications over the city’s Intranet via WebLink™, from the comfort of their own offices. “By eliminating the need to shuffle paperwork back and forth between the supervisor and the HR department,” says Cavness, “we’ve eliminated the risk of losing applications.”

Laserfiche has accelerated searching not only for files, but for information within files. Sometimes staff only knows a bit of information about an employee and that made searching through paper files difficult and tedious. Because Laserfiche is integrated with the city’s payroll software, city employees can now search remotely by name or employee ID number. Redaction capabilities have eliminated the previous, cumbersome process of manually blacking out and copying portions of the files.

Laserfiche has saved city staff legwork as well as time. “As a city,” says Cavness, “we have buildings that are very, very widely spaced. Previously, supervisors might have to come all the way across town to look at paper applications. Being able to view applications from their desks is a tremendous time saver, not only for the supervisor, but for us, because it’s one less person who walks through the door and takes our attention from something else.

“And here in HR,” Cavness continues, “viewing the files from our desks means we don’t have to physically search for or return files. Previously, it could take up to two weeks for a new application to get filed. Now that process is normally completed within a day, with information almost instantaneously at our fingertips.”

Success with Laserfiche has not been limited to HR. The library uses it to track memorial donations and the fire department uses it for administration and inspections, as well as for the civil service files that they send back to HR. In addition, city staff has scanned map books and building footprints into Laserfiche and made them available on CD, so that firefighters can access them from their fire trucks.

The city secretary’s office has scanned in thousands of documents, including city council minutes, ordinances and resolutions going back to the 1900’s, and cemetery records and abstracts from the 1800’s. Using Laserfiche, the tax department saved thousands of records, dating back to the 1950s, from being lost to aging due to deteriorating paper.

University of North Texas Murchison Performing Arts Center

The City of Denton Engineering Department manages easements, ordinances, sewer and waterline camera videos, contracts, plats, as-builts, project files and a variety of other documents with Laserfiche. City workers access the documents over the Web. From the city’s intranet site, images are linked to other applications, such as their Geographic Information System (GIS), Cartegraph®. Field personnel onsite can use their laptops to view records or videos pertaining to a specific location onsite, enabling the engineering department to more easily share updated information with other city departments.

Engineering also uses the Web to make information available to appraisers, developers, engineers, investors and surveyors, who have given the city a lot of positive feedback about the benefits of quick access to documents.

The city uses Laserfiche in the municipal courts and utility departments, and looks forward to expanding Laserfiche use to the building inspection and police departments.

If the sentiments of HR staff are any indication, Laserfiche is bound to grow in use and popularity throughout the City of Denton. As Jesse Perez puts it, “Once you get used to it, you start thinking about ways to further integrate it into your system. I don’t want to deal with paper any more—I prefer digital images. They save everyone time—you can send documents out more quickly, email them to people and you can really cut down on the space you need for paper documents. You have lots more room on your desk, you don’t have to search through piles of paper and once a document is scanned, you know it’s going to be there.”

Mary Collins adds, “In 2003, we entered our Laserfiche installation in the ‘Best of Texas’ competition and won the award for the most innovative use of technology.”

Sarah Mabel sums up the feelings of her HR coworkers. “When Laserfiche first came to the department, as with any new program, we were a little scared of it—we had that kind of mentality. Now, not a single person in our department can live without it. I love it.”

Mary Lynne Strata

Bryan is extremely dedicated to preserving its history, rooted in the westward railroad expansion of the mid-nineteenth century -including city records dating back to 1889. A hundred years later, reflecting a century’s changes in local government, Bryan established a citywide records management system to retain, store and destroy records in compliance with state and federal law. But as the city grew, so did the piles of paper and storage space needed to maintain the system. When two records storage facilities reached maximum capacity, the city sought records management alternatives. In this issue, City Secretary Mary Lynne Stratta, Records Management Coordinator Jodi Chaney and Network Specialist Chris Martin share their experiences with a groundbreaking document management solution.

On the initiative of City Secretary Mary Lynne Stratta, Bryan began exploring digital solutions in 1999, forming a committee to consider various options. The goals were to reduce the costs of document storage and retrieval, transfer and store data from the city’s computer systems, provide online access to city documents and apply retention schedules to electronic records.

In July of 2000, the city issued an RFP. After reviewing four document management systems, the committee decided on Laserfiche because of its ease of use and rapid search and retrieval capabilities. The city soon found out for itself why Laserfiche had such a great reputation among other municipalities as a feature-rich, easy-to-use solution. In just a couple of years after implementation, Bryan would garner media praise with an innovative and award-winning approach to software integration.

Bryan had a detailed paper-records management system before it began using Laserfiche. However, the city wanted to boost efficiency and free up space by eliminating reliance on paper.

To follow city charter mandates, the city secretary needs to be the records management officer with a records management system that meets statewide criteria. Stratta took this responsibility very seriously. Preserving the history of the city , even in unforeseen circumstances, was one of her top concerns. “If a disaster struck,” says Stratta, “we needed to recreate our vital records to get our business going again. I thought that an imaging system was the way to go.”

Offering a way to access records online was equally important to Stratta. She saw the Web as a way to further democratize city government. “I wanted residents to be able to access ordinances, minutes and records that were clearly public that show the history of the city and the actions of their elected officials.”

The search committee looked at four different imaging systems and met with each company as well as officials from other Texas cities.”Laserfiche was the unanimous choice of the team,” says Stratta.

From the end user perspective, Laserfiche was the overwhelming choice. Says Stratta, “It was by far the most user friendly. And the search and retrieval function was head and shoulders above the rest. I also wanted to make sure that whatever system we chose was from a company that was reputable and was going to be around for a long time. Again, Laserfiche beat out the competition-by far. We were making a long-term commitment, and we knew that Laserfiche would be around for a long time.”

City Secretary Stratta has come a long way from her early days on the job. For her entire first year, over 17 years ago, she actually had to bring in her own computer because the city didn’t have one. At that time, Bryan stored paper records in enormous boxes in the basement of the former city hall building, and the only disaster recovery plan was to store birth and death records on microfilm.

Chris Martin

We continually achieve great return on our investment with Laserfiche.”

—Chris Martin
Network Specialist

Having led the path from sorting through volumes of paper stored in the basement of another building to instant access of electronic records from a desktop, Stratta has a unique perspective on the evolution of records management. Under her stewardship, the city became the first anywhere to deploy an integration module that connected Laserfiche to HTE-the software Bryan uses in all city departments to handle accounting, risk management, HR, permits and other city functions.

Bryan installed Laserfiche in seven city departments beginning with a pilot program in 2001. From the start, Bryan made city ordinances, city council meeting minutes, resolutions and agendas available to the public. Gradually upgrading and expanding the system, so by the end of 2005, Bryan had the latest version of Laserfiche installed in fifteen city departments.

Stratta adds, “That was a huge accomplishment. Previously, in order to access records, people used to have to go downstairs, get a key, go across the parking lot, walk down into the basement, dig for the record, and come back. And when they were finished with the records, they had to go through the same process to put them back. Now we can go into Laserfiche, call up a record, and email it directly. It really saved us a lot of time as well as space.”

The results also dramatically reduced paper and freed up a lot of office space. “We were able to do away with a complete storage center-about 1500 square feet,” says Records Management Coordinator Jodi Chaney.

Management Coordinator Chaney also notes that Laserfiche greatly simplifies disaster preparedness. “When Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita were headed our way, we were able to copy all our ordinances, minutes, and other critical documents onto CDs and put them in a safe deposit box.”

Perhaps, the greatest impact of Laserfiche has been the streamlining of the city worker’s day-to-day workload and the increased access to records by Bryan’s citizens. Customizing the system to work with HTE, the city’s accounting and management software, has been essential to Bryan’s success.

In 2006, building on its already cutting-edge solution, Bryan pioneered an HTE integration module that eliminated scripting and automated the process of pulling information from HTE to Laserfiche. The first of its kind, the installation allows users to open either program to access the other. “It really freed up our IT department,” says Stratta. “And the users love it.”

The city installed the integration module over a weekend with no interruption of service to the users. “We then moved onto training and installation on the client side,” says Martin. “Now that we have a process in place, we bring departments aboard quickly and smoothly. We continually achieve great returns on our investment in both applications, HTE and Laserfiche.”

In other government offices, the integration has likewise increased efficiency and streamlined workflow. “Integration has made the work a lot easier for departments like finance and HR,” says Martin. “It blended well with what they already do. Rather than waiting to scan checks or invoices into Laserfiche, they can do it right when they’re entering them into HTE. They don’t have to wait for scripts to run. The uptime and availability of the system is much greater.”

Overall the Laserfiche solution saves work, time and builds more transparency into city government. Chaney remembers the days before Laserfiche:

“We recently had an open-records request that involved a lot of information. Before Laserfiche, it would have taken at least a month to actually research the minutes and find out all the names of the contracts, easements and documents associated with this project. With Laserfiche, we were able to get a print-out of all the documents the first day. Even taking time to pull the documents that had not been scanned into Laserfiche, we were able to gather all the documents within six business days.”

Martin adds, “Another example is our Finance department. This was the first year that they had Laserfiche, and it made a real difference when the auditors were here. Instead of having the auditors go to physical file cabinets, they saved a lot of time with index searches, going directly through HTE. They actually finished a few days early.”

Network Specialist Martin’s job involves training new users to use Laserfiche. “The training is straightforward and simple,” he says. “People have an easy time understanding the product and how to use it-it’s very intuitive. It looks like the Microsoft^® Windows File System they already know. I usually train ten people at a time, and each session lasts about an hour. ”

Perhaps the greatest measure of success has been the satisfaction of Bryan residents. “The positive feedback we’ve had from citizens has just been incredible. For example, the other day I talked to a real estate agent who had been digging at the courthouse for days to find a document from 1922. I called it up using Laserfiche and emailed it to him in minutes. He was very impressed.”

Stratta is committed to providing great service to Bryan’s citizens and city departments. She thinks back to the days of rooting through boxes to find records. “We’ve come along way to get here.”