Although the doctors’ attention is devoted to delivering excellent patient care, they recognize that if the medical group’s finances aren’t in order, their ability to continue serving patients is compromised. Therefore, they’ve charged their business office with employing the best people, processes and technology to optimize the revenue cycle and ensure the profitability of the practice.

Recession Brings Reimbursement Challenges

“The tough economy and changing California regulations have made it more and more difficult to collect payment in a timely manner,” explains Sue Kruger, Office Manager at Tri City. “Medicare and Medi-Cal pay only a fraction of the fee for emergency services, people who’ve lost their jobs and their health insurance oftentimes can’t pay for their care and private payers sometimes drag their heels.”

She notes that the group’s physicians treat an average of 6,000-7,000 patients a month. In terms of Tri City’s revenue:

• 27% comes from Medicare patients.
• 17-18% comes from Medi-Cal.
• A little over half comes from private insurers and self-pay accounts.

“Our employees have to work much harder to collect the same percentage of payment they did three or four years ago,” says Kruger. “If we didn’t have a paperless system, we’d absolutely have had to hire more staff.”

Integrating Content Management with Practice Management

After transitioning to a new practice management system—CPU’s MED/FM—in 2003, Tri City began thinking about how to get even more value out of that system. When CPU introduced an integration with Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM), Tri City jumped on board.

“Handling paper was a big expense that slowed our staff down,” says Kruger. “Our doctors recognized that purchasing Laserfiche would pay off in terms of staff productivity.”

J.R. Juiliano, Tri City’s IT Manager, explains, “We scan everything that’s related to patient encounters into Laserfiche. This includes demographic information, dictations, EOBs and correspondence from insurance companies.”

He notes that the hospital sends information to the medical group via an FTP site. “In the past, we just printed everything onsite.”

This, of course, was problematic on many levels:

• It was expensive.
• It was difficult to store.
• It was tough to retrieve in a timely manner.

“We have to keep patient information for seven years,” says Juiliano. “We used to rent four storage units at a facility that’s ten miles away. We kept a year’s worth of records onsite in a big filing room, but somebody had to go over to the storage units at least once a week.”

Kruger adds, “Efficient medical billing depends on keeping people in their seats so they can be productive. Manual tasks like retrieving paper records just aren’t the best use of employees’ time.”

Today, Tri City automates the document capture, indexing and filing processes with the following tools:

• Laserfiche Snapshot converts the electronic documents from the hospital’s FTP site into TIFF images and processes them using Laserfiche Quick Fields, a high-volume document capture and processing tool that automatically extracts metadata from the documents and files them in the Laserfiche repository—no printing or scanning required.
• Laserfiche Quick Fields also scans and processes paper EOBs and correspondence from insurance companies. Using optical character recognition (OCR), Quick Fields converts the scanned images into editable and searchable text, extracts metadata and files the documents in the repository.
• Laserfiche Import Agent captures and processes electronic faxes.

Verifiers, coders and payment entry staff work with dual screens, so they’re able to view a document on one screen while performing data entry into MED/FM on the other. With the MED/FM integration, documents are automatically attached to the appropriate patient records in the practice management system. When employees type a number into a specific field in MED/FM, Laserfiche opens the corresponding document. This ensures that employees don’t have to launch Laserfiche or toggle between screens to retrieve the documents they require.

Kruger explains that the integration keeps her staff in their seats. “Laserfiche makes our staff so efficient that we haven’t had to hire more people. In fact, we haven’t even replaced everyone who’s left.”

Visibility = Productivity

Documents—whether scanned or electronically imported—are time-stamped when they enter the Laserfiche repository so that the management team can measure staff productivity. Kruger explains, “If something comes in at eleven but doesn’t get finished until 4:30 pm, I can go to the person and ask, ‘What were you doing for those five and a half hours?’”

Juiliano appreciates how easy it is to run and store reports in Laserfiche. With Laserfiche Audit Trail, a monitoring and reporting tool, Tri City can create summaries of all actions taken on a particular document or record, making it much easier to prove compliance with HIPAA. “We can see who changed what when, where and why,” he explains.

In terms of other types of reports, Juliano says, “We run a lot of reports—collections reports, month-end reports, weekly reports. Even if we don’t run the report in Laserfiche, we store it there, which makes it easy to access and compare historical data with present trends.”

Lisa Newland, Tri City’s Assistant Manager, notes that the group’s RAC audits have gone smoothly thanks to Laserfiche’s instant search-and-retrieval capabilities. “Being able to instantly pull the information the RAC auditors want to see makes life so much easier than digging through filing cabinets or storage boxes.”

All in all, says Kruger, “Laserfiche is a great product. I don’t know how we ever got along without it.”

Implementing ahead of inclement weather

Meyer says the move toward ECM was a proactive one. “For us, it was the general idea that we could increase efficiency by saving time and money while continuing to improve client service that first got us interested in an ECM. Also, the disaster recovery aspect really attracted us.”

As both an advisor and the firm’s IT Manager, Meyer brought a unique perspective to the search for an ECM. “Naturally, being in the financial services industry, auditing, security and compliance were simply ‘must haves.’ After that, flexibility and scalability were important to us in an ECM—we wanted a system that could grow with us over time as our business evolved,” he says.

The firm looked at several ECM solutions, including cloud-based options, before deciding on Laserfiche. “Laserfiche was the most feature-rich of the solutions we looked at in terms of the comprehensive functionality it offered,” he recalls. “Quick Fields, Bar Code Plug-In, Zone OCR, Audit Trail, Workflow—these were all appealing because they either directly or indirectly addressed our ‘must haves,’” he says. At the same time, Meyer continues, Laserfiche would improve day-to-day operations. “We wanted to reduce costs, and we found from talking to other firms using Laserfiche and reading about the software that, first, Laserfiche saves time—employees spend less time searching for documents. Second, it saves on paper and printing costs; and third, it saves on storage costs of client files and other documents.”

Last, but not least, Meyer adds, Laserfiche is a name synonymous with ECM in the financial services industry. “Having a tried-and-true, trusted name in document management was important to us as well,” he says. “The system was already approved by our broker dealer, Commonwealth Financial Network, which was also a plus.”

Laserfiche’s impact was felt not long after implementation. “The savings in time and paper realized after just one quarter was significant,” Meyer recalls. “We used to scan a copy of each quarterly report to a PDF using a multi-function copy machine (MFP). Someone would have to manually rename and file each report. At that time, we also kept a duplicate copy on file. Using Quick Fields and the Bar Code Plug-In, we were able to scan all of our reports and have them renamed and filed instantly. We also eliminated the need to keep a physical copy.”

Soon, hundreds of client files dating back to 1985 were scanned into Laserfiche, eliminating the need for several bookshelves and filing cabinets. While Meyer admits it was “a paradigm shift” for some employees to move from a paper-based system to a paperless one, after they experienced how they could literally file things automatically and then find them instantly, they embraced the concept completely. The transition brought peace of mind—and cost savings.

“There’s a reassurance in knowing that all of our important documents are stored electronically and backed up off-site, ensuring access to the data even if something were to happen to our office,” Meyer says, adding, “employees now have the option of accessing documents remotely [over Fure’s secured network], so they can work from anywhere.”

A key component to true enterprise consolidation of the firm’s information was working with reseller Cities Digital to integrate Laserfiche with CRM solution Junxure. “Before Laserfiche, we used to have some digital files in the CRM, some paper documents in a large client file and some documents in different filing cabinets; it was very disjointed,” he recalls. “Now, with the two systems integrated, we have one centralized location for statements, account paperwork, estate plans, correspondence and all relevant material related to a client.”

Automating compliance with Workflow

In addition, Laserfiche Workflow automates several business processes—chief among them logging client letters for compliance review. “We no longer need to make copies, depend on a person to manually log each letter, compile all letters into a binder for review and signatures or fax the letters every week,” Meyer says of the familiar process. “We used to create three copies of every single client letter we sent out. Now, we simply scan one copy right at our MFP, which Laserfiche Import Agent OCRs and applies metadata to before moving it into Laserfiche.”

Then, Workflow renames the document and applies the correct metadata by referencing Fure’s Junxure SQL database. The document is then routed to the correct folders automatically, which a Fure senior advisor is then able to review and sign—all electronically. “Once the workflow is completed, it even e-mails the signed document to Commonwealth’s compliance department,” Meyer adds. “Import Agent and Workflow, with some custom scripts built by Cities Digital and an electronic signature pad, have taken that process completely paperless with one touch of the button on our MFP.”

Audit preparation has likewise benefitted from the centralization and automation—utilizing functionality as simple as a robust search and as comprehensive as Audit Trail. “Laserfiche allows us to pull the necessary documents together for an auditor extremely quickly instead of going through file cabinets,” Meyer says. “The security and auditing of documents is also important as we are able to prove the integrity of our documents; any activity or change with a document is right there.”

The Laserfiche advantage: weather-proofed is ‘future-proofed’

For a family-oriented firm like Fure, the little improvements add up as well. “We can train new hires much more quickly—the system is that intuitive. We’re not having to give tours of file drawers or a bank of cabinets anymore.”

Meyer says he can recommend Laserfiche on two levels: “From an IT standpoint, the program is very easy to administer, and the flexibility of Laserfiche and the highly customizable security options allowed me to tailor the program to fit our needs as far as setting up template fields, adding users and ensuring compliance,” he says. “From a user standpoint, Laserfiche allows our financial planning team to access client documents and pinpoint what we need, when we need it, which translates into more time spent with clients and generating revenue and less time on tracking things down. That’s the real benefit—the reclaimed time and effort.”

Still, for all the operational benefits he can identify, Meyer credits the long-term value of Laserfiche to fitting so well with the firm’s holistic business philosophy. “Having a powerful ECM system like Laserfiche allows our business to adjust to the changing environment that many small businesses in any industry face,” he says.

“The more agile and flexible your technology system can be, the more ‘future-proofed’ you can become,” Meyer adds. “While it’s very hard to predict exactly where compliance, government regulations, clients’ needs and technology will be in the future, Laserfiche allows us to prepare as much as possible. Staying on course, no matter which way the wind blows, means having to adapt as conditions change without compromising on the final destination.”

• Full Laserfiche 8 Support: Make use of Laserfiche 8 features such as multi-value fields and new tokens.
• Profile Disabling Option: Disable specific profiles instead of stopping the entire Import Agent service.
• Tag Comments: Specify a comment for assigned tags.
• Create Multiple Text Pages: Configure Import Agent to create a new text page after a specific number of lines.

This release supports English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Vietnamese.

What is Import Agent?

Import Agent is a tool that retrieves files from a Windows folder and imports them into your Laserfiche repository. It can retrieve virtually any type of file from any location on your WAN (wide area network) or LAN (local area network) and can run automatically according to a predefined schedule. During the import process, Import Agent can OCR the files, index them, add metadata (e.g., a template, fields, tags) to the document it creates and much more.

What’s New in Version 8.1?

In addition to the new features below, Import Agent 8.1 retains the same functionality present in version 7.

• Increased performance and reliability, especially in terms of retrieving files over a WAN.
• Full compatibility with the Laserfiche 8.x Server.
• Ability to interact with concepts that are new with the Laserfiche 8.x Server, such as the ability to assign fields independent of templates and multiple-value fields.
• Access to new tokens, such as Parent Name, Page Count, Parent ID and Parent Field.
• Option to import documents into a parent folder’s default volume.
• Ability to add comments to tags.
• A new file monitoring system. You no longer need to tell Import Agent how long it should wait to check for new or recently updated files. The software communicates with your operating system’s file system to determine when files are available for import. (Note: You can still configure an Import Agent profile to only retrieve files at a certain day and time.)

When will Import Agent 8.1 be released?

The software is in the final testing stages and is on schedule to be released by 2010.

The Investment Dealers Association of Canada (IDA) requires securities firms to verify client signatures when existing clients change their account information. While Credential was complying with this regulatory demand, they were simply running out of space to house all the paper client files required to verify signatures.

“Our staff needed instant access to client information, but we didn’t have space to store all our client files onsite,” remembers Vice President of Operations Ernie Nichiporik.

Mr. Nichiporik and his team began researching digital document management solutions, focusing their efforts on finding a secure, scalable Web-based solution that was still easy to use. “We really wanted a Web-based solution, so external parties could access the system even if they weren’t connected to our network,” he says. “And security features were key—we had to guarantee that our client files were safe and tamper-proof.”

After attending a presentation by IKON Office Solutions, Mr. Nichiporik and his colleagues chose a Laserfiche® digital document management system. “It had everything we needed. It was secure, easy-to-use, cost-effective and didn’t require a lot of time to implement.”

Within seven months, employees were fully benefiting from the new system. “Installation didn’t take long,” Nichiporik says, “and we started realizing benefits quickly. The seven month time frame to full productivity was due to the fact that we imaged all of our existing files, as well as new files coming in.”

Currently, over 60 users, located in four offices over 3,000 miles apart, use the Laserfiche system. Credential has three different business lines, and they store all their client files—including scanned paper documents, faxes and e-mails—in their Laserfiche repository. Documents are easily accessible thanks to templates that store the account number, document type and the department that last worked on the document. Credential also created a folder structure for the six different administration departments that house working documents, so that all company staff can locate documents that haven’t yet been archived in the client’s folder.

To further optimize business processes, Credential implemented several tools to automate document import and storage. Import Agent™ monitors the company’s network folder for new faxes, imports them into the Laserfiche repository and dynamically creates new folders to store them. Quick Fields™ document capture tools automate document scanning and storage, creating the file structure with different templates for each of Credential’s three business lines. The Quick Fields Real Time Lookup module accesses three different SQL databases to retrieve client information from the appropriate business line and automatically fill each scanned document’s template fields with client demographic information.

Staff who only need to view documents retrieve them through WebLink™, a read-only document viewer accessible through their Web browser. Users who have to add additional information to client files use Web Access™, a Web-based thin client that simplifies deployment and support. “Web Access really makes upgrades to the system easier, because we only have to install them on our Web server, instead of on each computer,” Nichiporik says.

“We also have a few ‘power users,’ who use the Windows®-based Laserfiche Client™ to scan and index documents,” he continues. “Using all three modules really fits our needs—and demonstrates the system’s flexibility. Instead of being locked into one option, we chose a combination of options to meet our exact requirements.”

Nichiporik believes that clients really appreciate the changes Laserfiche has brought to the company—“They really like that when they phone us with an issue, we have all their documentation in front of us,” he says—which is due to the secure digital storage of their files. Their previous paper-based storage system left staff dealing with lost faxes and misplaced documents, which made it difficult to respond to client requests in a timely manner. Thanks to Laserfiche, lost faxes have dropped by over 50%. “Now, only three people in the entire company have the authority to delete documents, whereas with paper files, anyone could misplace or lose a document in a file,” he says.

Credential also implemented the Audit Trail™ module to further guarantee security. Audit Trail tracks user actions within the Laserfiche system, simplifying compliance with regulatory requirements. “With Audit Trail, I can easily show IDA regulators that employees are looking up client signatures while updating client information, and I can also show them that we have a highly secure process to manage our client documents,” Nichiporik says.

Because of the company’s initial success with Laserfiche, Credential is actively planning to expand the solution. “Eventually, we’d like to integrate Laserfiche with our trading system, so that our sales force can easily access client documents during the trading process,” Nichiporik says. “Not to mention that many departments within the firm have seen how well the system works, and now want imaging for themselves.

“Because of Laserfiche, we now expect immediate access to documents,” he continues. “Laserfiche solves problems for us every day. It’s easy to use, easy to implement and works well in many different environments. Laserfiche is really a superior solution.”

The city had installed Laserfiche in its Finance Department in 1998 as a virtual file cabinet. “Between 1999-2003 we were only scanning a few thousand documents a month and it was limited to just the Finance department,” admits Network Administrator and Laserfiche Luminary Allen Pilgrim. By 2004, Laserfiche storage totaled just ten volumes of 4.6GB each. A significant number, but apparently not significant enough for one new city administrator.

“That same year, we got a new Finance Director. We’ll call her Brenda (not her real name),” Pilgrim explains. “We were having our second weekly meeting with her and she blurted out ‘We’re getting rid of Laserfiche.’ We were all shocked.”

Pilgrim took it upon himself to prove the system’s worth. He went into what he calls “stealth mode,” personally approaching other departments about stepping up their use of Laserfiche, tactfully earning their trust and answering their concerns along the way. Simply put, Laserfiche had its internal champion, but the software ultimately sold itself, user by user, process by process, department by department.

Albany, OR, Network Administrator Allen Pilgrim

“Most people were fearful of losing their precious paper. I sat down in meetings with people and just one on one made it clear that I was committed to ensuring the safety of their data,” Pilgrim explains. “As we progressed, people saw the evidence that I was serious.”

The Building division in Community Development was interested, for instance, but thought Laserfiche was limited to just the Finance Department. Pilgrim pointed out the annual maintenance had been moved to the IT budget, leaving Laserfiche open for intra-office adoption.

“What happened next was nothing short of amazing,” Pilgrim says. “The Building division latched onto Laserfiche as if it was the greatest thing they had ever seen.” Building’s Allison Liesse began scanning all day, every day, eventually working with Pilgrim to purchase a wide-format scanner. IT Staff even came up with interface integration with the city’s Accela PermPlus permitting software so that building inspectors could retrieve Laserfiche documents through the application. Within a year, storage jumped from 10 to 42 4.6GB volumes. Now, inspired both by Building’s success and Pilgrim’s handling of the implementation, Albany’s Planning division has come on board just this year.

Around the same time, Paul Jacobson in the Public Works Engineering division was interested in Laserfiche. Pilgrim was able to, as he puts it, “give him an area in Laserfiche to play with.” Jacobson’s experience inspired his whole department to convert to using Laserfiche. “There was no longer any talk of getting rid of Laserfiche because it had become too valuable to the City and more people were using it all the time.”

By 2006, Pilgrim convinced Albany’s IT Director to add Laserfiche as a standard install on every computer in the city. Pilgrim notes that by then, IT was independent from the Finance Department – and that “Brenda” had since moved on.

In 2008, the police department requested a demo. “They fell in love with the product,” Pilgrim says – and he was soon requesting two high-end scanners and training several PD employees. Concurrently, Pilgrim implemented Quick Fields. Police reports are now completely automated with Quick Fields. “They just drop them into the scanner and they’re done,” explains Pilgrim. Planning has since come on board; by now Public Works was now doing all of their projects in Laserfiche. Ambulance Billing has become, as Pilgrim puts it “another Quick Fields success story.” Operations also started doing more with Laserfiche.

Quick Fields, Quicker ROI

Pilgrim worked with Albany’s new (post-“Brenda”) Finance Director to approve the purchase and implementation of Quick Fields following a demo last year by reseller Michael Dane of VPCI. “We determined it would be perfect for four departments and the benefits have been spectacular,” Pilgrim says.

1. Allison Liesse in Building says it has saved her literally hundreds of hours of work – it saves her four hours a month processing timesheets alone.
2. Ambulance Billing reports are automatically processed by Quick Fields, which saves “dozens upon dozens” of hours.
3. For the Police Department, automatically processing thousands and thousands of police reports has been the biggest benefit of the city’s Quick Fields implementation. The failure rate is less than 1%. “Changing the slashes in the dates to dashes made all the difference,” Pilgrim notes. “Basically they just drop a stack of reports in the scanner and their job is done.”

The Future

Already in 2009, Pilgrim has done demos for staff of the Municipal Court, which has since started using the system, as well as to Albany’s Fire Department. The City Manager’s office and the HR Department are the latest additions, while the Parks & Recreation Department is slowly but surely adopting their own system. And all of Purchasing’s paperwork is stored in Laserfiche. “Most recently our GIS division had me set it up so they could move all of their As-Builts into Laserfiche,” adds Pilgrim.

Besides efficient (and satisfied) city employees in virtually every department, 2009 marks another Laserfiche milestone: the City of Albany will be only the third city in Oregon to launch “Digital Image as Original” (DIO). This will allow the city to maintain digital copies for many of our records,” explains Pilgrim. “This will allow us to lead the way on being more green, because it’s fun being green.” And as Albany has proved, Brendas of the world be darned, it’s fun being efficient, too.

Register for the “Laserfiche for Local Government = ECM + BPM” Webinar and learn more.

In Minnesota, watershed districts are local, special-purpose units of government that work to solve and prevent water-related problems. The boundaries of each district follow those of a natural watershed and consist of land in which all water flows to one outlet, and districts are usually named after that watershed. They range in size from the Carnelian-Marine District with 43 square miles, to the Red Lake Watershed District with 5990 square miles.

The Rice Creek Watershed District has been managing the water in the lower Southeast corner of the state since 1972. Rice Creek, a tributary of the Mississippi River is approximately 28 miles long and drains a watershed of 201 square miles of Anoka, Hennepin, Ramsey and Washington counties. Portions of the district can be found in 28 municipalities.

State regulations mandate that government agencies maintain an historic record of files, so the District’s records room was drowning in paper files dating back to the District’s founding in 1972. Their almost half-century of records filled 20 filing cabinets and 45 additional bankers’ boxes, and files were growing at an alarming rate. And because the District had no disaster recovery backup plan, a fire or flood could wipe out nearly 40 years of records in an instant.

Rice Creek in Fridley, MN

Besides the massive backlog of unprotected files, the District’s paper-based building permit process created costly logistical deadlines. “When a new permit request came in, it was given a permit number and a file number and then sent to an outside engineering consulting firm 25 miles away,” says District Administrator Doug Thomas. “We would need to have it sent by courier or mail, or someone from their office would come pick it up – all which took up a lot of time. Since we have a permit deadline each month, time was a big issue.”

Rice Creek was among the first watershed districts to look into Laserfiche after hearing rave reviews from City of Shoreview‘s IS Manager, Dick Crumb. Crumb contacted Laserfiche reseller Larry Phelps from Solbrekk and suggested Phelps introduce Rice Creek’s staff to Laserfiche. (Check out a video of Crumb demonstrating Laserfiche to over 40 employees from 18 Minnesota cities here).

When Phelps showed Thomas and his staff how easily their paper could be scanned, indexed, managed and searched with Laserfiche, they were quick to implement. Ned Phillips, the person responsible for IT at the District, decided to purchase Laserfiche and a Canon 3080 scanner. He also added Import Agent so that staff could scan and import documents into Laserfiche right from their digital scanner and copier.

Rice Creek in Shoreview, MN

Today, Rice Creek scans all their current documents and are reaping the benefits of having documents close at hand. The permit application process in particular has been greatly streamlined.

“Each permit application is scanned immediately,” says Thomas. “Laserfiche creates a place where everyone can go electronically and work with that file without having to find the paper file, make a copy, and deal with paper boxes and spend hours making copies.”

And now engineers no longer have to wait for files to arrive by mail, which completely eliminates the rush to meet deadlines. “We gave the engineers their own licenses, so they can view a file immediately after it’s been scanned into Laserfiche. This definitely helped us to meet permit deadlines,” Thomas adds.

Disaster recovery is also no longer an issue. “Rather than having boxes and boxes in fireproof and waterproof hard storage—which can get pretty costly—our files are backed up in electronic form in Laserfiche,” says Thomas. “It is a far better information management system than paper.”

Adds Phillips, “We now have the peace of mind that our documents are now secure.”

Thomas offers the following advice to other administrators who might hesitate to make the investment needed to get their own Laserfiche system off the ground. “Most people worry about the initial investment and the labor involved with scanning,” he says. He suggests hiring an outside agency to handle all backlog conversion scanning, and to start scanning everyday business processes immediately. “Once it’s done, your day-to-day business processes become much more streamlined,” he says.

Now staff can’t imagine life without Laserfiche. “Just today, I had a call about a project in 1990,” says Thomas. “I was able to go into Laserfiche and find the engineer’s report for that project and use Laserfiche to e-mail the file directly to that person in 5 minutes.

“I can’t imagine how many hours would have gone into trying to find that same record if it were stored in files and boxes somewhere,” he adds.

Import Agent is a tool that retrieves files from a Windows folder and imports them into your Laserfiche repository. It can retrieve virtually any type of file from any location on your WAN or LAN network and can run automatically according to a predefined schedule. During the import process, Import Agent can OCR the files, index them, add metadata (e.g., a template, fields, tags) to the document it creates, and much more.

What’s New in Import Agent 8?

The following features are new in version 8. In addition to the items below, Import Agent 8 retains the same functionality present in version 7.

• Increased performance and reliability, especially in terms of retrieving files over a wide area network (WAN).
• Full compatibility with the Laserfiche 8 Server.
• Ability to interact with concepts that are new with the Laserfiche 8 Server, such as the ability to assign fields independent of templates and multiple-value fields.
• Access to new tokens, such as Parent Name, Page Count, Parent ID, and Parent Field.
• Option to import documents into a parent folder’s default volume.
• Ability to add comments to tags.
• A new file monitoring system. You no longer need to tell Import Agent how long it should wait to check for new or recently updated files. The software communicates with your operating system’s file system to determine when files are available for import.

Note: You can still configure an Import Agent profile to only retrieve files at a certain day and time.

When will Import Agent 8 be released?

The software is in the final testing stages and is on schedule to be released this month.

Anaheim City

The City of Anaheim Public Utilities Department ensures that citizens have water and power on demand. But the department’s antiquated filing system had made accessing important information decidedly less reliable. With over 16,000 project files, each containing a jumble of blueprints, wiring schematics, job-site Polaroids and hand-written notes, finding a particular file was often a laborious, time-consuming and ultimately fruitless pursuit.

Supervisor of Records Management Ron Smith joined the City of Anaheim in 1999 and was tasked with bringing the department’s records into the digital age. Smith inherited a tangled web of misfiled information. His first day on the job, he walked into the department’s records room to find 600 12- by 18-inch boxes stuffed with project files dating back to the 1800s.

Smith recalls how the hodgepodge of boxes and manila folders usually made finding a file a shot in the dark. “It was the black hole syndrome,” he says. “I’d pull these boxes out for the engineers and we couldn’t always find stuff for them. Our level of service was suffering horribly.”

The engineers were equally frustrated, given that they’d often have to go rummaging through those boxes with the record keepers before they could get started on the day’s workload. “We had all kinds of different files,” says Mahendra Garg, the principal engineer with the Anaheim electric utility. “They were all over the place.”

The records were mostly archived by project number, Smith says. Over the years, staffers would sometimes assign an old number to a new project, resulting in multiple files with the same project number. Finding records was a time-consuming process that often led down blind alleys when the wrong project was found under the right project number.

Smith knew he had to implement digital document management to begin his mission of modernization. Laserfiche was already in use in other city departments, which certainly helped with getting approval. In addition to its familiarity, Laserfiche could handle the myriad media that comprise each public utilities project.

“We needed to partner with the perfect company and we did with Laserfiche,” Smith says. “They had people who would sit down and work with us. When we found this system, we knew we had made a good choice.”

After sorting all of the department’s documents—from memos and work orders to maps and photos—into distinct groups, staff began scanning the items into the Laserfiche repository, electronically labeling each file by street name, job number and type of utility. Now, the city’s utility workers and civil engineers can quickly locate records using whatever information they have on hand, and then access those records directly from their desktops. Each label provides another avenue to find—in just seconds—that one document out of thousands needed to get the work crews on the road.

The engineers definitely appreciate the newfound convenience. “From what I’ve seen so far, it’s great,” says David Butera, an engineer in the water utility’s capital projects division. “Now, if we need to find something, we can just look it up on our computers. Or, if we want to copy something, we can just send it to the closest printer—we don’t have to go walking across the building.”

Besides providing immediate information access, Laserfiche has brought a number of additional benefits. Every public utilities project generates a common sub-set of records, such as construction drawings and work orders, that are key to supporting everyday business processes. Currently, staff scan these documents into Laserfiche individually, then route them to their appropriate destinations. Soon, they’ll use Quick Fields™ to process these common documents in batches, saving even more time.

Smith also reports that Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME) greatly simplifies the management of retention cycles by automatically assigning the same retention period to all subfolders within a given parent folder. “This makes demonstrating compliance much easier, because we can show where all records are stored and maintained, and what their retention period is,” he says. “It ensures accountability to regulatory agencies, rate payers and, most importantly, to our staff members and city officials.”

RME has also become the centerpiece of an enterprise-wide records management platform, currently in the beta-testing stage. Using Workflow™ and Import Agent™, the system will automatically route completed construction drawings, providing staff with accurate, real-time updates to critical information. Smith envisions a not-too-distant future in which the details on every public utilities project, from the turn of a screw to a new baseball stadium, will be instantly and securely stored in Laserfiche.

The public utilities department has come a long way in the years since installing Laserfiche, and Smith plans to build on that success. In addition to the RME installation, he has plans to integrate Laserfiche with the city’s GIS system, which updates the city’s new Outage Management System. Smith says this will solve a major issue with routing finalized construction plans. “We need to import these documents into our GIS system in their native file format, and we can do that with Laserfiche,” he says. “The integration will significantly improve our business processes, as well as solve the long-standing problem of having real-time updates to our systems that depend on having electronic maps routed immediately upon completion.”

Given the department’s success with Laserfiche so far, it’s a good bet that this and other improvements will have a major positive impact on the quality of service Smith and his colleagues provide. In addition, Smith hopes that the spirit of innovation he’s helped instill will carry on to Anaheim’s future engineers and records managers. “We want to leave a legacy of improvement for future employees,” he says. “There are all kinds of theoreticals in working with records. But in the end, you have to be able to manage them.”