Kowal Investment Group, LLC is a fee-based financial advisor from Waukesha, WI, that has specialized in financial planning and investment advising for over 35 years. The firm manages nearly $200 million in assets and also hosts a weekly financial advice radio show called “The Retirement Clinic.” But just as baby boomers looking into retirement look to Kowal for advice, Kowal itself began looking to retire its old way of filing paper. “We knew we wanted to move toward the paperless office,” explains Michelle Rossi-Weida, Operations and Compliance Manager for Kowal. “Just in terms of better organization and also the cost savings paying for file space, as well as making people’s jobs easier and more productive.” Full story »

We’ve all seen them: the young man suffering from his first bout of bipolar mania—paranoid, delusional and unable to sleep; the 40-year-old veteran, injured in Iraq, addicted to painkillers and living on the streets; the single mother with schizophrenia—abused, uneducated and unconvinced that antipsychotic drugs will ease her pain.

For the people who struggle with these issues in southeast Texas, Spindletop Mental Health Mental Retardation (MHMR) Services has the resources to support their recovery and relieve their distress. But with over 8,000 patients every year and upwards of 400 employees, Spindletop’s ability to respond promptly to records requests—and, by extension, to patients—was being compromised.
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When we last heard from Joseph Salpietro, President and CEO of Xpyria Investment Advisors, he was looking forward to implementing Workflow to streamline his Firm’s repetitive work processes. As one of the first Avante customers in the financial services industry, one of the reasons Salpietro chose Avante was because of its built-in business process management (BPM) functionality.

“A lot of people think if you have an office in a metropolitan city that the highest cost to a business is rent, it’s not. It’s the people we employ. So I’d rather have them doing mission-critical, profitable work.”
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The City of Sun Prairie, WI, is the fastest growing city in Wisconsin with 26,000 residents and counting. But serving this rapidly expanding community has meant its municipal offices are spread out between its City Hall and satellite facilities that house various departments, its wastewater treatment and even a public access cable station. The main fire and EMS stations are housed in yet a third location.

So when City Clerk Diane Hermann-Brown says staying on top of Sun Prairie’s mounting paperwork was a city-wide problem, she literally means city-wide. “With all of our various departments that are off-site, it wasn’t just an issue of the time involved to retrieve the documents, but the time and resources involved in sending a clear, clean copy to the requesting party,” she says. “From the start our vision was to have a records management system where people could search, retrieve and print their own copies without every ever leaving their work station.”
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“We have a fiduciary responsibility to get value from tax dollars,” says Captain Blakely of the Riverside, California Police Department. For the past decade, Riverside has increasingly turned to information management technology, emerging as a model of public efficiency, especially these days.

As Roz Vinson, Police Records and Information Manager puts it, “I’m short 10 bodies - that’s where we are right now. Where can I work smarter? If we only have to touch something once, that’s progress.” Full story »

Since implementing Laserfiche in 2007, Collin County, TX, home to the Dallas/Fort Worth area’s fastest-growing northeast suburbs, has enjoyed enterprise-wide success automating and integrating its business processes. But as Records Manager Margaret Anderson points out, it’s been as a direct result of equally enterprise-wide pre-planning working with the county’s myriad departments.

The County saw its population increase nearly 50%—from nearly 500,000 in 2000 to 725,000 by 2007—straining the county’s infrastructure. As Anderson puts it, “The exponential growth rate of our county is reflected in the increased demand for essential county services.” The governing body of the county, the Commissioners Court, then issued a strategic direction to improve efficiency and customer service. “This caused us to look at an enterprise solution to managing our records with emphasis on migrating to electronic records,” she explains. “We had to reduce our paper and microfilm records volume.”
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The Challenge

The strict oversight of the Isle of Man Government’s Financial Supervision Commission (FSC) means that independent financial advisers require a secure, enterprise-wide platform for tracking and managing both paper and electronic records. Proliferating work process documents, extensive audits and strict records-retention rules leave many financial services firms struggling to maintain productivity in a highly-competitive industry.

For Jon McGowan, managing director of MAC Financial, these challenges multiplied with his business’s increasing success. With three major acquisitions in three years, McGowan and his staff were dealing with more customers, more work and significantly more paper. They needed a solution that would not only organize their records, but would also assist them in following compliance directives. Whatever solution they chose had to have enterprise capabilities, be able to manage a large volume of documents and integrate with their customer relationship management (CRM) system to enable fast, efficient and flexible client service.

It took less than half a day for MAC Financial to implement a Laserfiche solution, enabling instant document retrieval and freeing up an entire floor of office space. Now, MAC Financial runs more efficiently, saving time, money and staff resources while increasing revenue.
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“We were an early adopter of many technologies, but not document management,” admits Alan Levitz, President and CEO of GCG Financial, Inc. “It was hard for me to envision it working effectively, because I was concerned about flexibility and searchability.”

Levitz’s father, Robert, founded GCG Financial, then called the Greater Chicago Group, Inc. in 1975. Alan joined in 1983, and his brothers David and Rick soon followed. Alan’s now president and CEO; David and Rick are both executive vice presidents. But GCG is hardly a small family operation—the firm manages 83 producers who sell insurance, investment and benefits, most of them split between Bannockburn, and Oakbrook IL, and Denver, CO. “As our offices don’t share the same physical location, it was important to standardize the services we provide to both groups,” says Levitz.
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One of the things we get asked a lot is “How much money can I really save with Laserfiche?” We have two great white papers that show the possibilities - one for financial services and one for healthcare - but, as usual, our customers’ success stories speak for themselves.

We have so many customers out there who use Laserfiche in innovative and creative ways to make their budgets stretch as far as possible. Here are some examples.

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Many financial advisors consider technology an expense, no matter how necessary. Joseph Salpietro of Xpyria Investment Advisors felt the same way, until he came to a crucial realization.

“We always figured we’d have to hire more people to create the efficiency we needed,” he says. “We’d talked about needing two or three administrators over the next five or so years at a cost of, say, $30,000-40,000 each. And when we found out that we didn’t have to hire those people to help us with the paper chase—well, that’s a smart business decision.”

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In Bakersfield, CA, a town known for its agriculture, manufacturing and petroleum extraction and refining is now known for something different: its innovative technology.

As the fastest-growing city in the United States with a population of over 250,000, Bakersfield was experiencing an explosion of records. “We wanted a document management system to store public documents in a secure, easily searchable manner,” says IT Director Bob Trammell. “We chose Laserfiche because of its pricing and how easy it was to search for and retrieve documents.”

“I had already installed Laserfiche in a city where I was previously employed, so I was very familiar with it,” Trammell adds. “That was eleven years ago, and today all 19 departments in the city, as well as thousands of citizens, use Laserfiche.”
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As one of the fastest growing counties in the nation, Collin County, TX, faced the challenge of managing an increasingly-large number of records generated by a growing population.

According to Records Manager Margaret Anderson, staff in the county’s courts had difficulty finding information, due to disparate systems implemented by each department. “We also had over 15,000 reels of microfilm and 18,450 boxes of paper stored throughout the county,” she says. “Files were everywhere and we couldn’t keep up with the demand. We had to ensure that staff did not unintentionally destroy records that needed to be retained, and we wanted to implement a case management system (CMS). But we also had to manage all the paper.

“Our first step was to select and implement a new case management system for the county court system,” Anderson continues. “The records management system (RMS) we chose needed to interface with this system and provide records management control for closed and disposed case files, as well as support documents.”
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Toolkit 8 has been released and is now ready for download from the Support site.

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We have just added to our Laserfiche software Audit Trail-Advanced, Integrator’s Toolkit, Quick Fields and several of its components (such as Pattern Matching) for our sheriff’s office and a new repository for our County Counsel.

I am very excited about Audit Trail. It will not only allow us to track who is doing what in Laserfiche, but also to add the watermarks to the printed and e-mailed documents that we have been needing desperately. As a District Attorney’s office, having the correct information on the document (like when it was printed) can be very helpful when you’re going to produce documents for discovery.

I now have a new goal. That is to learn SQL 2005 Reports so I can actually write reports for the Audit Trail…Always something new to learn.

Suzanne Brean

Linn County District Attorney’s Office

Linn County, Oregon

SAN DIEGO, CA - June 25, 2008 – Peladon Software, a prominent developer of automated capture and document processing solutions, announced today that it has signed a Professional Developer Partnership (PDP) program agreement allowing the integration of its complete line of DocXP products with the Laserfiche 8 software suite. Full story »