“Organizations have embraced business intelligence as a way to access, analyze and act on core business data, but traditional business intelligence works only with structured data in relational databases,” said Terry Kerans, general manager, worldwide Monarch sales, Datawatch.  “Our integration allows organizations to analyze all the rich data contained in Laserfiche—structured, semi-structured and loosely structured data alike.”

The integration will transform archived reports into live, interactive, Web-enabled data without the costly requirement for manual data entry. Datawatch and Laserfiche joint customers will leverage this integration to analyze reports, statements, invoices, log files, PDF/XPS files, ANSI/ASCII based text files, EDI reports, XML/HTML files, mainframe data and more.

Users will have multiple options for viewing the data, including HTML, Excel and PDF, among others. Web-based analytics views of report data will be generated by Monarch RMS based on user requests through a Laserfiche interface.

“According to IDC, data and analytics are a ‘must have’ competency for 2012,” said Alex Wilson, Director of the Laserfiche PDP program. “We’re delighted to partner with Datawatch to provide our customers with a robust framework for gaining analytical insight into their content.”

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 30,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—use Laserfiche® software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure while still offering business units the flexibility to react quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built on top of Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports the Microsoft SQL platform and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

About Datawatch Corporation
Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH) empowers organizations to transform the massive amounts of valuable information that is trapped in static reports, PDF files, HTML and other content-rich, but difficult-to-use data sources, into a dynamic information analytics system that accelerates and improves decision-making throughout their operations. Datawatch’s technology allows its more than 40,000 customers worldwide to leverage the investments they have made in reports from ERP, CRM and other custom applications into a high performance analytic information system at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional approaches. Datawatch is headquartered in Chelmsford, Massachusetts with offices in London, Munich, Sydney and Manila, with partners and customers in more than 100 countries worldwide. For more information, visit www.datawatch.com.

The company faced four major challenges:

• Storage: Lack of space in the office for filing cabinets cost the company $650 a month to rent storage sheds. Temperatures inside the sheds often topped 110 degrees, degrading documents and discouraging retrieval by accounting employees.
• Decentralized Files: Every vehicle tow resulted in the creation of documents by multiple departments, each with their own filing methods—which meant accounting employees had to contact at least three departments to complete a vehicle file. From gathering vehicle photos from the sales department and inspections from the vehicle storage facility to tracking down titles in the title department, staff spent more time searching than billing.
• Security: Transferring files among departments compromised security and led to a proliferation of outdated copies.
• Customer Service: Spread-out storage and misfiled contracts made it difficult to deliver towing contracts to customers by 2:00 p.m. on the day following a tow, as outlined in vendor contracts.

“The vehicle could sometimes be moved to another storage or auction facility, and sometimes the files would not get to the new vehicle storage location,” notes Sheila Gallegos, project manager at United Road Towing.

The company put out a request for proposals for an enterprise content management (ECM) product that could:

• Quickly and easily scan documents.
• Read vehicle barcodes and file documents with minimal human effort.
• Perform quality checks on barcoded scans.

After reviewing RFP responses, United Road Towing saw that Laserfiche could easily set a company-wide standard to transition it away from inefficient paper-based processes.

“Laserfiche was the easiest to understand and the most user-friendly by far. Quick Fields and Workflow sessions were doing most the work, instead of our staff,” says Gallegos. “Most importantly, Laserfiche was an enterprise software solution, whereas the other vendors had to piece together other products to create the solution we were looking for.”

Gallegos led a three-month installation and in-depth training process which brought 73 employees in seven departments and seven locations—as well as 23 vendors—onto the Laserfiche system.

“Laserfiche has helped us streamline our processes, and it also helps us make sure that the processes are standardized from location to location,” she says.

Giving the Green Light to Better Records Management

The first step for United Road Towing was standardizing the documentation process from the time a vehicle hitches to a tow truck to when it leaves the tow lot—which brought immediate improvements in customer service and employee efficiency.

A custom integration between Quick Fields, Workflow and the company’s towing software now takes data from vehicle barcodes, driver invoices and customer-submitted documents across many departments for cradle-to-grave records management.

Because the towing software doesn’t contain an open database, the company worked with Laserfiche to create a custom Workflow script with an HTTP post. The script automatically pulls information from the towing software to fill in additional data in Quick Fields.

As outlined below, records management is now much simpler and more consistent:

• When the company tows a vehicle, the truck driver places a barcode sticker on the vehicle to identify it in the vehicle inventory and places a barcode sheet in the storage reports.
• Storage facility staff scans the barcode sheets into Laserfiche.
• Quick Fields reads the barcodes, places the inventory number into a field and saves the storage report in the Laserfiche repository.
• The custom Workflow script runs a session that searches the towing database using the barcode. Quick Fields then fills in additional template fields with retrieved information about the vehicle, such as the vehicle’s make, model, year and VIN number, as well as customer information and invoice and payment dates.
• When all fields are complete, the Workflow session electronically files the documents by tow date.

With the automated system, the average user can process five documents a minute. Each day, the company as a whole can easily process 1,500 customer documents and 500 driver invoices.

WebLink Revs Up Customer Service

The integration has also improved the availability of customer documents within the contractual one-day grace period. Prior to Laserfiche, one employee would collect 200 documents a day from the accounting department, scan the documents into a network folder, rename all the documents, move the documents to an FTP folder and then make the documents available to customers on a Website in PDF form. This time-intensive process often resulted in late documents and $75 in vendor fines for each delayed delivery.

With Laserfiche WebLink, an automated process ensures that customers can view documents on the same day of the tow—many hours before the deadline.

• When a towed vehicle is added to the storage inventory, storage facility employees scan documents from the drivers along with customer-supplied paperwork like driver licenses into a network folder.
• From the network folder, Quick Fields brings the documents into the Laserfiche repository and identifies the documents by reading their barcodes.
• The custom Workflow session retrieves the vehicle information from the towing software using the barcodes, and Quick Fields completes the template fields.
• The accounting office then e-mails digital invoice copies to customers.
• Quick Fields files the documents and automatically makes relevant documents, such as storage reports, driver licenses, private party impounds and pre-tow pictures of the vehicles, available for customers via WebLink.
• Customers can view the files related to their tow with an assigned, secure login.

This fast flow of information empowers United Road Towing as well as the customer. The customer may view the document on the same day as the tow, and United Road Towing now:

• Saves half a pallet of paper (50 boxes) per month.
• Eliminates $650 a month in off-site storage costs.
• No longer needs to train storage employees on a formerly laborious customer service process.

“In the past, a dedicated staff person spent eight hours completing this process. Now, it only takes 30 minutes to verify all the documents that were scanned,” says Gallegos.

Overhauled Processes Bring Big Benefits

United Road Towing counts centralized data as the most basic gain from Laserfiche, which has completely eliminated the company’s reliance on a carrier to move documents from remote sites to the main office.

The rewards multiply when it comes to customer satisfaction. “Now anyone who answers the phone can answer inquiries about the status of a vehicle by doing a simple search in Laserfiche,” notes Gallegos. “We used to have to transfer calls to the storage lot where the vehicle was stored.”

The company’s five storage facilities follow the same procedures, but the company can shift tasks around depending on the available employees and their skill levels. For example, when a customer calls requesting paperwork from their insurance company to release the vehicle to a body shop or the police department inquires after proof of ownership forms, dispatch staff can now look up the related information in Laserfiche instead of relying on lot staff.

More employees can be cross-trained to complete work in multiple departments. Whenever the staff has downtime, employees input and check metadata in Laserfiche from any documents that don’t include barcodes. Recently, the company even changed its file clerk positions into quality assurance roles.

With Audit Trail, Gallegos can run a report that outlines which employees have accessed certain documents. Every month, she uses the report to check productivity and conduct any back-training
for employees based on their efficiency.

United Road Towing is close to completing an expansion to the corporate office in Illinois. Instead of spending money on overnight mailing costs, the company will now digitally send Department of Transportation documents to corporate employees via WebLink.

Other plans for growing United Road Towing’s Laserfiche system include:

• Using the Laserfiche Mobile iPad app to digitize the signed agreement binders that tow drivers currently carry in paper form. Capturing and storing the most current authorization forms will ensure that drivers remain in compliance with local regulations.
• Working with municipalities to write laws that standardize the authorizations needed to tow a vehicle and giving cities access to signed agreements via WebLink.
• Expanding the Laserfiche system to 11 additional sites to further standardize procedures and bring cradle-to-grave records management to the rest of the company.

“Laserfiche has helped to ensure that processes are consistent throughout the company while allowing us to improve processes and gain efficiencies,” Gallegos says. “It’s one of the best investments we’ve ever made.”

The integration takes advantage of a variety of Laserfiche 8.2’s new features, including:

• Enhanced PDF support, including native page and text generation.
• Dynamic fields and metadata.

It also adds support for the Laserfiche Web Access thin client and Laserfiche WebLink public portal.

The integration was developed under the Laserfiche Professional Developer Partnership™ (PDP) program, which provides customers access to a variety of third-party integrations, configurations, plug-ins and Web tools. LincWare has been a member of the program since 2008.

“LincDoc delivers tremendous value for Laserfiche customers that are looking at enhancing their systems through document automation and electronic forms,” said Alex Wilson, director of the Laserfiche PDP program. “We appreciate having partners like LincWare who give Laserfiche customers excellent options for extending and expanding their Laserfiche systems.”

With LincDoc, users can automate common documents and forms and connect them instantly to Laserfiche. Documents can then be routed using Laserfiche Workflow business process management and managed using Laserfiche’s fully integrated Department of Defense 5015.2-certified records management functionality. LincDoc also has a native iPad application that allows users to capture forms and data, which are transmitted automatically to Laserfiche.

“LincWare is proud to offer a premiere solution that combines our flexible eForm and document automation tools with Laserfiche’s industry-leading enterprise content management capabilities,” said Darren Mathes, CEO of LincWare. “Since both Laserfiche and LincWare are dedicated to improving enterprise efficiency, our partnership is a natural fit.”

About Laserfiche:
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 30,000 organizations worldwide use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

Laserfiche launched the Professional Developer Partnership (PDP) program in 2007 to democratize content management by allowing customers to benefit from the customizations, configurations and integrations designed by more than 75 PDP partners. Leveraging the experience and creativity of PDP partners helps customers create ECM solutions that are best suited to their unique needs.

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

About LincWare:
LincDoc’s eForm creation and document automation tools empowers businesses and organizations to better serve their customers and constituents, reduce costs and better leverage bottom line critical information. LincDoc is available in the cloud, and on-premise, and on devices like the Apple iPad. For more information visit www.lincware.com.

“We were about to cross the $25,000,000 AUM threshold for SEC registration. With that milestone also came the millstone of an SEC audit sometime during that first year of registration,” says Margaret Hubbard, CPA.

The firm identified a link between compliance and operational efficiency, and outlined their requirements accordingly:

1. SEC compliance proof.
2. Easy access to files.
3. Managing the sheer weight and volume of records even as a small firm.

The answer came later that year at a TD Ameritrade Institutional Conference Hubbard attended.

“Speakers there were talking about an industry-wide need for electronic document management and it rang true with us, both in terms of operational efficiency as well as simplifying compliance,” Hubbard recalls. Researching what other firms were using led Hubbard to Laserfiche. “We wanted a large, reputable solution provider with a lot of experience and excellent references,” she explains. “The biggest draw was that the U.S. government was using Laserfiche.”

Implementation took place over two days in late 2005. With five years of confirmations, monthly brokerage reports, forms and correspondence to input, as well as current paper-based processes to streamline, EMM looked to Laserfiche Quick Fields, especially its zone optical character recognition (Zone OCR) tools, to automate the capture process. Laserfiche installation was completed in a day, while fine-tuning the Quick Fields capture process took another day. “The operational improvement was immediate,” says Hubbard.

“Quick Fields became our file clerk”

“We had been manually filing every confirmation as it arrived by mail. After installing Laserfiche, we had the brokerage houses switch us to electronic delivery. Quick Fields became our file clerk,” says Hubbard.

EMM now receives a monthly download of client statements from its brokerage houses, which Quick Fields reads, processes and imports into each client’s Laserfiche file. “We used to get a heavy package by mail much later in the month than the current downloads are available. That took time and resources to sort through and file. If we ever needed to access a record, we had to locate the big fat file book by month, manually cross-index between alpha name and account number and then manually find the report by account number,” she explains.

“Now we get the information earlier, file it faster, find it instantly when needed, have a nice clear electronic copy if we need to print it out—which is rarely—and we don’t have to hurt ourselves moving all those bankers’ boxes.”

With Laserfiche now doing the heavy lifting, so to speak, the firm was able to use part-time help to complete backlog scanning and conversion of the five years’ worth of existing files over the course of the following year. That first year also marked another milestone/millstone: the first SEC audit of the newly-registered firm. Before Laserfiche, the process would have involved compiling paper files manually, taking staff time and resources that, to a small firm, significantly impact or distract from revenue-generating day-to-day operations.

With Laserfiche, Hubbard says, preparation was as simple as using the system’s comprehensive search functionality to respond to the auditor. “Our original need was really to successfully complete the SEC audit process, and that was more than met within a year of implementation when we had a very clean audit,” she says. “The auditor only stayed onsite half a day because we were able to almost instantly hand her everything she requested. We were able to clearly demonstrate our compliance with all regulations. Laserfiche was essential to that demonstration.”

Hubbard says the firm is encouraged with the improvements to both its day-to-day operations as well as the relative ease with which it proves compliance. EMM is now planning to implement a new CRM system (likely Junxure, according to Hubbard) in the second quarter of this year. A major selection consideration is the ease with which the chosen CRM system integrates with Laserfiche. “We’ve been consulting with Laserfiche and our reseller [Bits and Bytes Document Solutions of Dacula, GA] to help with our selection to make sure it integrates with our existing applications including our portfolio management software, Schwab Performance Technologies® PortfolioCenter®, and Microsoft® Outlook®.”

Proving the wisdom of implementing proven technology

Hubbard admits that the firm’s steps toward more automated business processes have belied a conservative approach to technology. But, she says, that’s all the part of the long-term vision: to be innovative—just with proven innovations.

“We seek to be second-generation adopters in terms of determining the best technology we need for our next level of growth,” she says. “We want solutions others have tested through trial and error so we don’t have to. None of us in our firm are techies, so we’ve learned we get more out of technology by working with proven solutions.”

The way Hubbard sees it, Laserfiche provides a modest-sized firm like EMM with the best of both worlds: industry-recognized success with the scalability to do more as the need arises and uses evolve. “Laserfiche has provided more power than we have been able to harness, and that’s exactly where we want to be. We discover more uses for the system monthly, and we’re confident that Laserfiche can more than keep up with our needs as we keep growing.”

When two of the 10 departments in ECOM’s Dallas office came to Zandi with what she recognized as a need for an electronic document management system (EDMS) in August of 2009, she saw an opportunity to introduce full-scale ECM/BPM functionality into the company, one familiar process at a time.

“I’d been preaching the importance of using workflow and document imaging, but I didn’t have any business groups with that burning need,” she says. “Then a year ago our tax and real estate departments each came to us with some ideas about streamlining and automation, and we told them, ‘If all your documents were electronic, you could.’”

Hitting the Ground Running—with the Vision to Go the Distance

ECOM had a relationship with Jeff Flory of Dallas-area reseller Datamax Technology Group, who suggested Zandi look into Laserfiche as an ECM solution agile enough to answer ECOM’s pressing needs while also possessing the potential to expand in size and scope. “Laserfiche was easily the most user-friendly solution we looked at, but it was also scalable to meet more and bigger needs as we evolved the system,” Zandi recalls.

ECOM purchased a 25-user pilot system with Audit Trail and the Laserfiche SDK with an eye toward future integrations, expanded deployment and automated business processes —once the immediate document management fires had been put out.

“We had the vision for BPM and automation upfront,” she says. “The important part for me was the Workflow and the scalability. We started with the two departments that were on fire, and we’re capturing that momentum to implement Laserfiche in other departments. The system lends itself to that flexibility.”

First up were HR and Accounting. Zandi explains, “HR saw that it could use Laserfiche for archiving and historical information, while Accounting could jump in with day-forward scanning of active records.”

Operational improvements followed these departmental implementations. For example, “Our Treasury Department has a variety of companies depositing checks and money. Those checks are now automatically scanned, so that when the bank receives checks it no longer copies them—and a notification that the bank has the check is automatically printed in Laserfiche as well,” says Zandi.

Unanimous User Adoption, Magnanimous Enterprise Expansion

Building on this initial success, ECOM is now upgrading from its pilot system to Laserfiche Rio with a goal of standardizing content and business process management worldwide. “Rio makes sense for us because it gives us the flexibility to add servers and licenses incrementally, in whatever way we need to,” Zandi explains.

Currently, the system is being rolled out to more departments in ECOM’s Dallas headquarters—with unanimous adoption. “The familiar interface, being able to save searches, being able to use sticky notes—these are things that helped people catch on right away,” she says.

Zandi is confident that Laserfiche’s ease-of-use is paving the way for bigger and better things for the enterprise by encouraging users to do bigger and better things with their information. “Laserfiche is flexible enough that departments can implement it in a way that mirrors their current system, but once they’re comfortable, they can say, ‘I don’t even need a folder, now I can start thinking about changing my business,’” she says.

That change, she says, will come from implementing business process management (BPM) initiatives using Laserfiche Workflow. To that end:

• ECOM is working with Datamax to integrate Laserfiche with its Navision accounting software to set up distributed approval A/P processing for 10+ departments. Invoices will be automatically updated, then filed according to payment type and date using Workflow.
• The Real Estate Department is planning to integrate Laserfiche with its Timberline accounting system to update contracts and payment histories and file them automatically.
• The HR Department plans to integrate Laserfiche with its ADP system to automatically create and update personnel folders.

The most extensive—and potentially impactful—use of Workflow, however, is in ECOM’s Traffic Department, which is developing 35 workflows with up to 250 different outcomes. “I can’t even get my head around it!” jokes Zandi. She credits the simplicity of the Workflow Designer for lending itself to such an extensive deployment. “Workflow is created graphically—the Designer is essentially drag and drop, so you don’t have to know Fortran to use it.”

With an operational model and foundation in place, Zandi says ECOM is well on its way to standardizing its approach to content management worldwide using Laserfiche Rio. “This is where the scalability of Rio is so, so important,” she explains.

“Once we have integrations with the ERP up and running in our office, we can roll it out to our offices around the world literally overnight,” Zandi says. “We’re developing what has the potential to be the global, centralized ECM/BPM standard for the company’s business processes. Even before we’ve done all our analysis or know where that infrastructure will go and how our repositories will break out, we know Laserfiche has the scalability to do it.”

Led by Stormwater Quality Coordinator Alan Searcy, Central Records Administrator Sharon Blackstock, and Imaging Technician Greg Buchanan, DAG evolved into an ad hoc governance committee, setting recordkeeping and retention policies for each department, as well as standardizing document indexing for interdepartmental use. “My goal in the beginning,” says Searcy, “was to get as much ‘buy-in’ as possible for our fledgling imaging program. Working together on interdepartmental projects is a proven recipe for success in Lakewood.” The Digital Archives Group is a prime example of that fact.

DAG initiated the purchase of Laserfiche in 2001 from Colorado-based reseller Phil Landreth of S. Corporation, with several departments sharing in the cost. “Laserfiche was the most user-friendly solution we looked at, and we knew that was going to be very important,” Blackstock says. “Laserfiche also had a very strong presence in cities around our size (population: 145,000), so we knew that support for local government operations was in place.”

Although Laserfiche was first used only by the Engineering Division and the City Clerk’s Office, it eventually spread to other departments. As new departments joined in the project, they sent representatives to DAG meetings.

Initially, Laserfiche was used for archiving permanent records and closed case files. After a couple of years, the Finance Department became the first to manage active records with Laserfiche by scanning sales tax returns. More active records management followed as Laserfiche use began spreading to DAG members’ departments. Eventually most of Lakewood’s 10 departments used Laserfiche, each relying on DAG’s training and best practices to scan and manage their own records.

“With every new project, people really welcome our support and suggestions. We all listen to each other and are willing to hear new ideas,” Buchanan says. “At the same time, people don’t just say, ‘I’m going to do this’ and call up IT—DAG helps define the project and gives the go-ahead.” The City Clerk’s Office created Buchanan’s position as Imaging Technician in 2002 to facilitate Laserfiche projects by assisting departments in training users and developing and managing scanning projects.

Today, DAG’s goals are being met—long-term records are being archived and protected, concurrent retrieval of imaged records is possible, and storage space for maps, plats and plans has been reduced. What’s more, interdepartmental cooperation has resulted in a citywide sense of pride and ownership of Laserfiche.

Breaking Down Silos to Build an Agile Enterprise

IT Software Services Manager Tom Charkut credits DAG with addressing the training element since Lakewood began using Laserfiche in 2001 “in a way IT just couldn’t.” But by 2005, Charkut says, “There were so many departments using Laserfiche that it just made sense to centralize the software maintenance and support.” IT took over Laserfiche system administration in 2006, as well as the software maintenance costs.

The City of Lakewood’s IT staff of 27 supports more than 1,000 city employees. “We’re a small team with big shoes to fill,” Charkut admits. Filling big shoes with different sizes and styles, he says, requires an agile development philosophy.

According to Charkut, one key component in solving the diverse but often overlapping information needs of Lakewood’s business units was utilizing the Laserfiche SDK and its Microsoft-standard .NET API to integrate with legacy business applications. “Since Laserfiche was an enterprise-wide system,” he says, “we needed to figure out how to integrate it with our other line-of-business systems.”

A recent example is an integration between Laserfiche and the Planning and Public Works Department’s new building permit system. “The user will be in the permit system, and using the permit number, they click on a ‘documents’ button we developed that shows them the documents in Laserfiche,” he explains. “If they need to e-mail those documents, then we send URLs linking to those documents using Web Access. Laserfiche gives us the ability to arrange the information so it’s at the user’s fingertips.”

The user, Charkut notes, never leaves the permitting application. What’s more, the additional content is referenced from its single, centralized Laserfiche repository. Similarly, integration with the city’s GeoSmart GIS application geo-enables searches for employees across various systems whether it’s for code enforcement cases or service requests from residents, as well as for any documents—including plats, plans and forms—already in Laserfiche.

“For us, Laserfiche integration has helped break down silos,” Charkut says. “It’s all about decentralized capture, centralized storage and an enterprise library.”

What a Transparent Web We Weave

Now, as the City maps out an overhaul of Lakewood’s Web strategy, Laserfiche is one of the ingredients. “Our Web strategy in the past has been a patchwork of stuff. Just last year we said, ‘We have to do something about this—we’re getting 5,000 hits a day,’” says Charkut. “Part of our plan is to promote government transparency through the use of Web self-service, including access to records contained in the Laserfiche system.”

Lakewood also finds itself in the middle of an electronic records management inventory and assessment, where consultants are actually suggesting new and future uses of Laserfiche. Building on DAG’s solid support foundation and Lakewood IT’s agile, integrated Web strategies, the city is now assessing whether and when to upgrade to Laserfiche Rio, with its scalable, flexible user and module licensing—as well as its unlimited servers—to meet the needs of more and more departments, business processes and users, both internally and externally, from a single enterprise application.

“We are evaluating the ROI of Rio,” jokes Charkut. “We will assess that model on a 7- to 10-year timeframe.”

Part of how TS drives Cary’s business units is to, whenever possible, follow an internal shared services model. The challenge, Stice says, is accommodating “fairly dissimilar” business processes with the same technology foundation, so answering to these unique needs has made agility an important factor in infrastructure investments. “When we look at purchasing new applications, we want them to be flexible enough to meet departmental needs, but able to be tied together with everything else when we need it to be.”

Stice offers the town’s GIS system as an example. “Everything we do is geo-spatial,” he explains. “Addresses are used and shared by departments. But where the Engineering Department does business by project number, Planning uses case numbers.” The challenge, he says, is finding a way to accommodate the unique ways individual departments work with information, while still providing a common foundation to link that information together across departments.

“We want the business to drive the software, not the software to drive the business,” Stice concludes.

The Need: Uniting Content and Contract Management

This was the mindset in 2003 when Rodney Overton, one of Cary’s three business analysts, first looked at content management to manage the over 300 contract documents received annually by the Town Clerk’s Office. Town staff was accessing contract documents by traveling to the clerk’s office, having the clerk look up reference numbers from an AS/400-based Contract Control System (CCS), then locating the paper contract from a labyrinth of file cabinets and making copies. The search was on for a more efficient way.

Overton was aware that many North Carolina municipalities already were using Laserfiche as their enterprise content management system, so he contacted Kevin Smith of Laserfiche reseller One Source Document Solutions to learn more. Smith demonstrated how, using Laserfiche, staff in the clerk’s office could scan and store contracts while making them available to town staff—even multiple staff simultaneously—right from their desktop computers. Overton recalls easing staff concerns following a prior experience with a cumbersome imaging system. “Laserfiche had an easy-to-use Windows look and feel everyone could see themselves using,” he recalls. For his part, he liked how Laserfiche Web Access could create URL shortcuts to documents. “I saw tremendous potential for integration with a lot of our primary departmental applications as we rolled it out.”

In spring 2003, implementation took place in the Clerk’s Office. The Engineering Department followed a month later, presenting the challenges of larger document volume as well as different types of documents. Laserfiche’s ability to categorize documents according to several template fields proved significantly effective. “We started out with about 15 template fields, which we’ve narrowed down to about seven that we use today,” Overton says. “In 2007, ‘Project Number’ and ‘Document Type’ fields became very useful as we began to find ways to integrate Laserfiche with our GIS software, MapInfo.”

Rounding out this initial deployment, One Source assisted the Cary Police Department with a massive migration of some 190,000 documents from its legacy imaging system to its own volume within the Laserfiche repository. Since then, the Cary Police Department hasn’t looked back, adding more than 10,000 documents a year to its Laserfiche system.

System Integrations “Just a Click Away”

A 2006 upgrade to Laserfiche 7.2 brought with it enhanced opportunities to integrate Laserfiche with line-of-business applications. “Laserfiche 7.2 allowed you to save searches; we felt that if you could save a search in Web Access, then you should be able to execute a search using a URL link,” Overton says. “Through testing, research and help from One Source, we were able to create a URL search where we could pass search information from a simple browser shortcut and have Web Access perform a search and pull up the desired documents.”

Overton soon wrote an AS/400 CL program that uses the Contract Control Number in the Contract Control system to display a contract in Web Access. While the user is viewing contract information on the Contract Control System, all they need to do is press a hotkey to initiate a Web Access search that displays the contract image in detail.

“Now users don’t even have to log into Laserfiche—with the press of button they can see all related documents for a contract,” he says.

A few months later, Overton developed another “hotkey” integration for Cary’s MapInfo GIS software. The ability to search across multiple templates, such as the clerk’s as well as engineering departments’, is helpful to bring up all documents for projects outlined in MapInfo. With this integration, a MapInfo user only needs to click an address, select a project and a search is launched that pulls up a list of all related project documents in Web Access—quickly focusing searches in a town where, “everything is geo-centric,” as TS Director Stice puts it.

To simplify multi-template searches, Overton—along with co-workers Wilson Farrell and Ken Guttman—created a small internal website to perform central searches using Web Access. “So instead of running into character limitations with MapInfo when we have more than one template search, we can pass critical information to an internal website to launch the remaining portion of the script,” says Overton. “This helps tremendously in minimizing the character length of the URL needed for integrating into other applications.”

Creating a Standard for Imaging—and Image-Enablement

This image enablement has proven so useful Overton says he’s now looking at ways to integrate Laserfiche with the Police Department’s RMS software as well as the Accounting Department’s Sungard Public Sector financial software. “Sungard has an imaging interface that was built specifically around a few select products on the market,” he says. “Now, with the ease of use and flexibility of Laserfiche, we hope to utilize this part of the Sungard interface to integrate the two.” Overton says that after taking part in the inaugural Eastern North Carolina State Laserfiche Users Group earlier this year, he’s looking forward to sharing his experience with fellow users.

“From our User Group meetings, I know lots of municipalities here in the Southeast that have both Sungard Public Sector and Laserfiche software,” he says. “So having that network of fellow users is very helpful in terms of sharing experience and ideas.”

And it ends up being more cost-effective, too, he adds. “You’re talking about tremendous cost savings when you don’t have to consult with a third party to write an integration. For our MapInfo integration, if we had to hire a consultant, it would have been at least $10,000, if not more. Multiply that per application and the savings can really add up,” Overton says. “The way we are able to link to documents in Laserfiche from another application really makes a difference in terms of value and functionality.”

As such, Laserfiche has become the integrative middleware used by several departments to access and share content. Besides Engineering, the Town Clerk’s office and the Police Department, the Parks and Recreation and Planning Departments have also implemented Laserfiche, with plans to expand to the Accounting Department as well as Inspections and Permits.

“Laserfiche has become a strategic application,” Stice says. “It’s the standard we use to manage paper and it’s the only one we use to access that information and tie it to other information.”

Tying that information together, Overton notes, has proven its value both in terms of saving IT resources, but also in the value of enhanced functionality to deliver shared services. “Laserfiche’s Web Access has made integration just a click away,” he says.

As Jennifer L. Litchfield, IT Manager at Palladium, remembers it, onboarding more than 1,000 accounts all at once left almost no time to learn a new electronic document management system in their new Norfolk, VA, offices—even as the need to implement one to ensure the breakaway firm could hit the ground running was clear.

“We added $1 billion in assets under management within three months, so we needed to have everything come together very quickly,” Litchfield recalls. Experiences from a prior firm had proven how cumbersome and costly paper was, from the staff effort to file and find information to the yearly accumulation of paper that took up valuable—and expensive—space. “We used to have six or seven employees spend two full weeks every year just merging each client’s file with the historical files, purging information where appropriate, and making room for the next year’s paperwork,” she says.

As owners of their new firm, Palladium’s principals knew that the right technology would make a long-term difference. “We wanted to start off our new company with smart decisions when it came to technology and electronic document management,” Litchfield says. “We made decisions that required upfront commitments of time and money, but produced ongoing savings of both.”

“We needed it to be user-friendly, customizable to our needs, and manageable on-site.”

The search for a document management system began with three criteria in mind—and one given: value. “We needed it to be user-friendly, customizable to our needs, and manageable on-site,” Litchfield explains. “Cost is always a consideration, so we were looking for a balance between use and cost while considering long-term scalability.”

Litchfield was referred to Laserfiche through the Advent Users Group, a resource made up of companies that use the portfolio management products from Advent Software. John Caso, solutions consultant at Laserfiche reseller One Source Document Solutions, Inc., showed Palladium how Laserfiche:

• Enabled users to process and store documents according to customizable template fields.
• Offered multiple searching options using those templates as well as full-text keyword searches.

Litchfield invited users from each department to the demonstration for their feedback. Each, she says, agreed Laserfiche was the most user-friendly solution they’d looked at.

“Managers wanted to be able to answer client questions over the phone, so they liked how we could set up the Laserfiche system to feel like their paper files, with the same tabs as the old paper files. The client service administrators really appreciated the advanced search capabilities that helped them find documents quickly and easily,” Litchfield recalls. “Other solutions seemed like they had a pretty big learning curve; Laserfiche is a product that you can open up and it’s immediately apparent how you use it.”

The advanced searching, Litchfield adds, would play a significant role from a compliance perspective as well, allowing easier auditing and monitoring of documents. “Our compliance officer really needs to be able to slice and dice information, and it was clear Laserfiche was the right choice. Plus everyone would be using the same system, on the same server, so everything’s in one place. From a technology, disaster recovery, and business continuity standpoint, this was important.”

Long-term, Litchfield and fellow staff agreed Laserfiche was flexible and scalable enough to grow with the firm. “We liked how we could set up the folder structure like our paper files and then change it at a later date,” she says. “We have ever-changing needs and it was important to have a product that could grow and change with us.”

Palladium purchased Laserfiche in May 2008; implementation took place over a two-day period. “We opened in late January, so by then we already had the bulk of the accounts on our portfolio accounting system,” Litchfield explains. “We had onsite support for those first two days to get Laserfiche up and running and train users and administrators. We didn’t have a backlog of information, so that helped.

“We just set the system up, set up individual scanners and got the users trained so that they could start working in the system right away,” she adds.

Improving the Day-to Day, Keeping Pace with Compliance

Since then, Litchfield says, Laserfiche has been instrumental in streamlining the day-to-day operations of the firm. “I hear all the time from our client service administrators how much they love using Laserfiche as opposed to the old way of filing paperwork. Every day, they scan all account documents into the system so all the original paperwork and correspondence is in a single location. We don’t have to worry about the storage space and cost for paper documents, or the annual clean up and purging of those documents,” she explains.

“Besides our client folders, we also maintain other folders within Laserfiche with information that cannot be changed, including marketing and compliance folders. Because we store copies of custodial statements in Laserfiche, we don’t have to keep those hard copies onsite. The only hard copies we keep are our original signed agreements,” she adds. “Our onsite storage is minimal.”

In the future, Litchfield says the firm is looking forward to the advanced search functionality that will come with upgrading to Laserfiche 8. “Everything is changing in our industry, and compliance is such a huge part of that,” she says. “Our compliance officer is one of our biggest Laserfiche users. Because she needs to be able to search for multiple criteria, being able to search throughout the file structures , as well as the further capabilities that are available with upgrading to Laserfiche 8, will be a big step forward for compliance.

“We use Laserfiche a lot for in-house verification, so having what we call that ‘wildcard’ capability to search according to a manager’s code, that’s a great oversight tool for auditing,” Litchfield adds. “Also, if we have auditors in house, we need to be able to get information to them immediately—not in three days or four days. Having these features available shows us that Laserfiche is keeping an eye on the changing environment and is adapting to keep pace.”

Along with their upgrade to Laserfiche 8, the firm is investigating implementing Workflow business process management. “We’d love to automate a lot of our processes that cross departments. Where we currently use Outlook or walk paper around, each person could sign off on a section of a document in the workflow and automatically the next person would get an e-mail saying it’s ready for them. We could move paperwork through much more effectively and efficiently,” Litchfield says.

“The ability to integrate [Laserfiche] with our portfolio management software is a big step forward. This will make the opening of new accounts a single point of entry, where fields will be populated automatically directly to Laserfiche. Additionally, allowing us to monitor personal trading within the firm from a compliance standpoint is another improvement. Automating that process will save time and money,” she adds.

When Diane Ward became City Clerk in 2000, she found the city’s Administration office had a legacy ECM system in place that wasn’t being used to manage much. “I found the application cumbersome and not user-friendly,” she says. From an IT perspective, the legacy system was even less friendly. “The company was purchased by other document imaging companies twice. The second time would have required us to migrate to a different system and the maintenance agreement was already pretty high,” remembers Rose Holman, MIS Director. “Since we needed to convert existing data anyway, we were able to make the case to our city council that we needed to find something that fit our needs better.”

Ward and Holman contacted Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital. “The Laserfiche system seemed easier for the end user, which is really important, and the administration of the system seemed easier to understand,” Ward says. Implementation began in Stillwater’s Administration Department in 2005. “That allowed me to familiarize myself with the program and set up the folder structures, templates, and administration console, so we had that foundation in place for future deployment,” Ward says.

Ward began by making agenda packets, minutes from council meeting and various city boards and commissions, as well as resolutions and ordinances, available to staff through the Laserfiche repository, and the impact was immediate. “I knew the system was successful because it was easy to use and manage. Requests that would have taken me days to complete, sometimes weeks, were able to be completed almost immediately,” Ward says.

Leveraging the Value of ECM Agility through Standardization and Integration

A year later, backlog conversion began in the Finance Department – at times duplicating scanning done into the department’s Springbrook financial management software. Staff soon discovered that finding content using Laserfiche was easier, so Holman contacted Cities Digital to integrate the two applications. “It’s a daily timesaver that enables staff to put information into Laserfiche more quickly and locate it more easily.”

In 2009, Laserfiche deployment extended to the Planning and Building Inspection Department, turning into another chance to explore the value of Laserfiche as integrative middleware, which makes existing data easier to find and use. “As we started putting planning documents into Laserfiche, we realized we could create better searches of, say, address files if we integrated some of the information with the PermitWorks applications we used to do building permits,” so Holman again contacted Cities Digital to integrate Laserfiche with PermitWorks. Key to the integration’s success was standardizing the metadata of the property file folders when it was migrated from the city’s legacy ECM system. These folders constituted the bulk of the city’s information requests, so adding the parcel identification numbers (PINs) used by other departments and applications to the Laserfiche folders made information even easier to find.

“The benefit is again the ease and scope of research now that the Planning and Building Departments are also using Laserfiche,” Ward explains. “We can see what planning cases involved a specific property, which building permits were issued and the actions of any board or commission or the City Council on that property.”

It’s this ability to align Stillwater’s information assets with ways it can be more useful and therefore more valuable to the community that are at the core of Ward’s ECM strategy. In 2008, for instance, Ward lobbied for and received funding for Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME) to mitigate compliance risks. “If I could do it all over again, I would have purchased Records Management Edition when we initially purchased Laserfiche,” she sighs. “Because I didn’t, there was some extra work involved in setting up RME.” But once set up, she says, RME’s automated retention schedules by document type give Ward the ability to easily comply with State policies that the city had been manually following for over 20 years.

Implementing a Popular Public Portal Strategy

The City of Stillwater's WebLink 8 Public Portal, where searchers can access council meeting minutes from as far back as 1888.

This potent combination of automation and transparency has also guided the city’s Web portal strategy. When the city implemented Laserfiche, Ward made resolutions, ordinances, agenda packets, and minutes from council meeting and various city boards and commissions (some dating back as far as 1888) available to the public using Laserfiche WebLink. The public portal proved so popular that Stillwater recently upgraded to WebLink 8 to take advantage of new features including customized searches, new customization and layout tools, and support for the iPhone and Android mobile devices.

“Our Planning Department developed an On-Line Property Information Lookup Application through our Website which links any planning cases related to a particular address and can be viewed through that application and opened through WebLink,” says Ward. “We hope to make easements and building permits available as well.”

The next step, Ward says, is making WebLink a one-stop shop for Stillwater’s public information. “Presently we post PDF minutes of our City Council and Boards and Commissions meetings on our site,” she says. “We hope to eliminate some staff time by placing them only in Laserfiche. Right now we get 250 hits a month, but that will increase immensely once we direct people to WebLink.”

Holman, for her part, has been impressed by the utility and versatility of Laserfiche. “As we move into other departments such as the police and fire departments, we’ll find ways to make life easier there, too,” she says. “Laserfiche is becoming the backbone for many of our departmental programs, which makes it even more valuable as the central repository for all our content.”

Ward, understandably, sees the value of Laserfiche agile ECM a little differently. “Our City Administrator, who is not real computer savvy, is just amazed at how fast we can find information,” she says. “I have been in municipal government since 1981 and, next to replacing a typewriter with a word processor, Laserfiche makes my job responsibilities easier to complete and manage.”

“Essentially, Laserfiche has become integral to our way of managing information,” she concludes.

• Faster audits.
• Streamlined lending.
• Improved business continuity planning.
• More efficient processes for opening new accounts.
• A 33% reduction in hard copy document production and an 85% reduction in paper storage.

Original Pain Points: Data Storage and Accessibility

When Tato Munoz joined D.L. Evans as IT director in 1998, one of the first challenges he set out to tackle was the bank’s approach to data storage. “With the incredible amount of information we had, keeping everything accessible and knowing where it was all located at any given time was difficult,” he says.

At first, the bank considered simply finding a more efficient way to manage its paper-based documents. However, as Munoz explains, “That wasn’t really an option because we were filling up our secure storage facilities pretty fast.” At the time, the bank’s storage space included a 20×13 room, a 12×12 vault and an off-site warehouse. According to Munoz, “Keeping track of what was due for disposition, finding it in that crowded warehouse and then shredding it all was a nightmare.”

In addition to the headache associated with storing paper records, Munoz knew that paper was a frighteningly fragile medium, and he wanted to ensure that records would be accessible even in the face of tragedy or natural disaster. “If we gave documents to an auditor and he got into a car crash and the documents were destroyed, we had no back-ups,” he says. “It would have been extremely detrimental to our business.”

To break the bank’s reliance on paper records without breaking the IT budget, Munoz began investigating enterprise content management solutions.

Pioneering Laserfiche within a Banking Environment

It was September 15, 1904, when a group of enthusiastic and dedicated pioneer businessmen led by D. L. Evans met to organize and open the first bank in Cassia County, Idaho. But it was nearly a hundred years later that Tato Munoz brought that same pioneering spirit to the bank’s approach to content management.

“Back when we were evaluating content management systems, there were no other banks using Laserfiche,” says Munoz. “I saw what government, education and healthcare customers were doing with it, though, and I knew that we could realize the same benefits.”

According to Munoz, the deciding factors in selecting Laserfiche were reliability, security and ease of use. Chief among these, however, was ease of use. “It was clear that Laserfiche was very easy to implement and use,” says Munoz. “And now we have 10 years of experience to back that up!”

Streamlining Lending

When it came time to deploy the new Laserfiche content management system, D.L. Evans started with its consumer loan department, where loan packets routinely numbered 500 pages and frequently had to be photocopied as many as 20 times.

Originally, the bank planned to focus on converting loan applications and supporting documents into an electronic format on a day-forward basis, only back scanning about a year’s worth of files. It wasn’t long, however, before D.L. Evans decided to scan and store all existing loan records in Laserfiche. “Once we started processing our paperwork, everything was so quick and easy that we decided to go all the way back,” says Munoz. “We also extended our deployment into the commercial loan department pretty fast.”

Today, lending documents are generated electronically at the branch locations and captured into Laserfiche using Snapshot, which creates TIFF images of electronic documents for long-term archival—and eliminates the need to print paper documents in order to scan them into the system. Missing information, along with supporting paper documents, is later scanned into the system at the head office.

The bank has one centralized Laserfiche repository, which is critical for ensuring that staff from different branches can access and review lending materials at any time.

According to Munoz, “What used to be an extremely time-consuming, cumbersome process is now fast and easy, especially on the document retention side.” He adds, “We used to store one year’s worth of lending documents in a 12×12 vault. With Laserfiche, electronic document retention is unlimited, and our vault has been freed up to hold seven years’ worth of titles, which must be stored in a physical format per the FDIC.”

Expanding Laserfiche throughout the Organization

Building on the success of Laserfiche within the consumer and commercial lending departments, D.L. Evans soon rolled the system out to departments enterprise-wide, including:

• New Accounts, where staff streamlines document capture for 258 different types of documents, including signature cards, CD applications and ATM requests, using Quick Fields.
• Tellers, who automatically access client documentation from the Laserfiche repository through an integration with EZTeller, the bank’s branch automation software.
• Human Resources, where staff uses Laserfiche to securely manage confidential employee information.
• A/R and A/P, whose staff tracks and stores incoming and outgoing invoices.

When asked whether there have been any issues with user adoption, Munoz laughs and replies, “Yeah, we’ve got a little problem with adoption: Once people see Laserfiche and how easy it is to access information that’s in the system, they want to use it for more and more things. Our problem is that people like it too much!”

In fact, over the past year, the bank implemented Quick Fields in response to the new account desk’s requests to streamline its processes by automating data capture and eliminating the need to populate template fields manually. With 258 different types of forms brought into the system via both Snapshot and manual scanning, “the new account desk uses Quick Fields extensively,” says Munoz. “They run approximately 450 Quick Fields sessions every night on all kinds of documents, including signature cards, CD applications, ATM requests and so on.”

For tellers, Laserfiche has become a significant part of their daily business processes due to an integration with EZTeller, the bank’s branch automation software. EZTeller links ups with Laserfiche, automatically pulling up relevant documents stored in the repository so that customer service is faster and more efficient. HR staff, meanwhile, particularly appreciates the ability to easily and automatically redact confidential employee information using Laserfiche’s secure black-out and white-out redactions. Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable digitize all of their invoices, making them simultaneously accessible to multiple people and easier to keep track of.

Laserfiche has also shored up D.L. Evans’ data retention and compliance policies. And it’s cut down the time it takes to perform external FDIC audits and internal audits by approximately 50%. “We give our auditors encrypted USB drives with all of the electronic documentation they need to review, so they can complete most of their work off-site,” explains Munoz.

“Audits used to take three to four weeks,” he continues. “Now they take two weeks at the most.”

In terms of security and disaster recovery, Munoz says that all of the bank’s information “is encrypted and backed up to disk. Laserfiche is mirrored on an external drive that we pull out once a week and store offsite as an encrypted drive. The system’s images and SQL database are also mirrored and continually sent out to another location via the network. I never worry about security, and I never worry about business continuity anymore, either.”

With ten years of savings and streamlined processes in multiple departments under its belt, the bank is now considering adding Laserfiche Workflow to its arsenal for improving institutional efficiency.

From a Supporting Application to a Critical One

Overall, using Laserfiche has “changed the way we do business,” Munoz explains. “It’s changed our mindset and streamlined all of our processes. In the past, people used to think, ‘If I don’t have it on paper, it’s no good.’ That way of thinking has totally shifted, and now it’s more like: ‘If it’s not electronic, it’s not as accessible, it’s not as affordable, it’s not as secure.”

A happy early adopter of Laserfiche content management in the banking space, Munoz concludes, “Laserfiche went from being a supporting application in a couple of departments to being a critical one enterprise-wide. It’s a great product and we’ve been extremely satisfied.”

With ten clinics and two in-vitro fertilization (IVF) centers located throughout the greater Chicago area, the Fertility Centers of Illinois (FCI) already had an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system in place. However, the ArtWorks EMR system only stored patients’ current, FCI-based medical data—historical medical records were kept as paper files, as were lab results, surgery reports and other outside correspondence.

After turning to Laserfiche in order to convert the processing of insurance company explanation of benefit (EOB) reports from paper to a digital system in May 2006, FCI quickly realized that its use of Laserfiche could be expanded to encompass additional medical data—such as lab results and X-rays—that was not stored in ArtWorks. According to Bonnie Kelly, IT supervisor at FCI, “When we switched from paper to Laserfiche for EOBs, the patient account representatives were working with it like veterans by the end of the first day. Over the next several weeks, we saw so much improvement and so few problems that we felt confident that we could move on to patient charts.”

Laserfiche reseller TKB Associates integrated ArtWorks and Laserfiche, working in conjunction with the ArtWorks support team at IntegraMed® America, Inc. (NASDAQ: INMD), FCI’s New York-based national network. “With the integration,” says Kelly, “our doctors have complete access to every bit of their patients’ records, both current and historical.”

In July 2006, the FCI clinic in Glenview began converting its paper charts into digital Laserfiche files. Eleven weeks later, nearly 7,000 charts had been scanned into the system, freeing up enough storage space to create a new nurses’ station.

Quick Capture with Quick Fields

According to Kelly, the conversion process was swift because Laserfiche Quick Fields, a high-volume document capture and processing tool, makes scanning “foolproof and easy.”

FCI knew that it wanted its digital repository of charts to be alphabetical by patient name, with each chart divided into 16 sections, including Demographics, Insurance, Previous Medical Records, Ultrasounds and X-Rays, Lab Results and so on. With the help of Jerry Breitbarth at TKB, FCI used Quick Fields to design a process that accelerates scanning and makes the electronic information readily accessible:

• FCI created a template in the ArtWorks EMR that prints a collection of header sheets for each chart.
• Header sheets contain a keyword (NEWF) that tells Laserfiche it is dealing with a new record.
• Patient’s last name, first name, middle initial, social security number and birthday are printed onto the header. There is a new header sheet for each chart section.
• Quick Fields reads the information off the header sheets and creates a file (including subfolders for each chart division) for each new patient.
• Laserfiche files new charts alphabetically within the folder structure, and files each patient’s documents within the appropriate subfolders in their chart.

This way, people do not have to stop and tell Laserfiche where each page of the chart is supposed to go; they simply print the header sheets, replace the chart dividers with the appropriate header sheets and scan the charts—Laserfiche does the rest.

To date, nine of FCI’s clinics have fully transitioned their patient charts to Laserfiche, with another clinic and the two IVF centers next in line.

Running Smarter

For Tracy Guzman-Barron, administrative services supervisor at FCI, there are three major benefits associated with the company’s Laserfiche implementation:

• Increased information access.
• Enhanced security and easier compliance with HIPAA and other privacy regulations.
• Savings from reduced couriering, storage and paper usage.

First, says Guzman-Barron, “In an emergency, our doctors don’t have to wait around for someone to retrieve a patient’s chart. With Laserfiche, you get instant access.” It’s also next to impossible, Guzman-Barron reveals, to lose a chart in Laserfiche. “Even if something gets misread and misfiled, if it’s in Laserfiche, you can use the system’s search functionality to track it down. That’s not the case when you’re dealing with fifty, sixty or seventy boxes of paper files.”

Second, in terms of data security, “It’s much safer having patient information in a secure, electronic repository than to have paper copies of records lying around on people’s desks,” Guzman-Barron says. “No one can access Laserfiche without a log-in and a password. Even then, everyone’s level of access is tailored specifically to their role and responsibilities. For example,” she adds, “there are only two of us who have the ability to delete.” In addition, Laserfiche Audit Trail tracks and records user activity within the repository. “If anyone is doing anything incorrectly,” Guzman-Barron says, “I can address it with that person right away.”

Third, FCI has experienced a wealth of savings in a number of different areas. “With Laserfiche, we reduced our off-site storage bill by $500 a month,” says Guzman-Barron. “As we scan and destroy old paper medical records, the cost for record retention will continue to decrease.” Documents are shredded after they’ve been scanned into Laserfiche, and several of the clinics been able to convert old storage space into office space as a result. And because electronic records can quickly and easily be printed and mailed or faxed to authorized healthcare providers, FCI saves $50-$75 in couriering and processing costs per chart with Laserfiche.

Furthermore, in these tight economic times, Laserfiche is helping FCI to do more with less. In fact, when the company had an internal reorganization and had to let go of five administrative staff members, it was able to continue doing the same amount of work within Laserfiche thanks to the system’s ease of use. “We used to have seven dedicated staff members who scanned everything into Laserfiche,” says Guzman-Barron. “Now two of us go to the different clinics and train the office staff on how to scan and organize things for themselves. We create centralized templates and standards and then give the offices the flexibility to import files as they see fit.”

She adds, “This isn’t a hard system to learn. I was a novice when I started here in 2007, but it was extremely easy to get into the swing of things. All of our doctors use Laserfiche. It saves us a ton of time, money and frustration.”

Looking Ahead

As FCI gets close to having all patient charts at all of its locations securely stored in Laserfiche, it is planning to expand its system use to various other departments. According to Guzman-Barron, Human Resources will get the next big efficiency boost. After that will come Payroll.

“Laserfiche makes everything easier,” concludes Guzman-Barron. “It’s been a godsend for us.”

As these seasonal influxes fueled Vail’s local economy and luxury real estate market, they also highlighted a need for the town to address the resulting challenges to its infrastructure. By 2007, town administrators looked for ways to lessen municipal government’s footprint on the mountain community. An idea from years prior had by now developed into a need: conducting government with less paper. “We were at the point where we had so much paper, it was either build a warehouse or go electronic,” Wolfe explains. “Vail real estate is so expensive; you really can’t build a warehouse in the valley.”

When Wolfe joined the town in April 2007, he was encouraged that its records manager position was an IT one. “Business technology and information management are enough of a priority that the Content Manager is part of the IT group. It seemed logical given our overall goals for greater reliance on automated tools and the establishment of an electronic records management system,” he explains. “So often, when IT takes on the task without adequate content management, the result is an electronic black hole that corresponds to the former paper black hole.”

With technical support for the idea, Wolfe began to develop staff support as well. “Each department had one or two people who dealt with records and were interested in making some changes. I worked with them to look at applications.” After a needs assessment and departmental demonstrations by Laserfiche reseller Jen Harris of Peak Performance Imaging Solutions, Wolfe and the record custodians chose Laserfiche.

In addition to the great support from Peak Performance, he cites both ease of use and flexibility of administration as deciding factors.

“Laserfiche is an application easily managed by someone in a non-IT position. The security and other administrative elements of the application are easy to administer,” Wolfe explains. “We could provide tight security to anything we didn’t want disclosed, such as social security numbers and other PII, as well as broad access to other town departments and eventually, to the public.”

In July 2007, implementation began with the scanning of clerk’s records and the conversion of Human Resources PDF images from a legacy imaging system to TIFF files, which Wolfe notes “made it a lot easier to search and a lot easier to add pages to later.”

With his strong background in nuclear and legal records management, Wolfe made it a point to establish quality guidelines and procedures for storing content in the new system. “In Colorado you can replace paper with electronic records if you follow certain guidelines. The Colorado Municipal Retention Schedules were developed for the paper environment, but they apply regardless of media. Vail had actually done a pretty good job of managing paper records in accordance with municipal retention schedules, so our job was really just taking the right next steps to better management in an electronic environment.”

Wolfe set up the Laserfiche Records Management Module using retention schedule numbers mirrored in the e-folder structure. “The records management structure reflects the retention requirements, while the document management side mirrors the Town’s organizational structure and the paper world,” he says. “So it’s easy to check the records management folders, click on the Record Series Properties and update retention information as the State schedules are updated.”

By April 2008, several other departments began their respective pushes to reduce paper volumes. The progress was steady and growing. “We have 105 users in about a dozen departments,” he says. Now, Human Resources and Risk Management are completely paperless, the Clerk’s office uses Laserfiche to publish municipal agendas and town council minutes, while Community Development, Legal, Public Works, Fleet Management, the Fire Department and Finance staff have all been accessing the system in various capacities.

The holiday season in Vail

“One of the future challenges is to change work processes, creating efficiencies with an increase in document sharing,” Wolfe says. “We’re doing a lot with paper we could be doing in Laserfiche. But we also know how important it is to build a comfort level with people and their ability to access records in Laserfiche. When they see how much time they can save, it builds confidence and they’re ready to make the next step.”

For their next step, departments are eyeing various ways to automate how information is gathered, updated and, most importantly, used. “We want to do more to save user time in Community Development. We use Accela’s Permits Plus, and we’d like to populate selected data into our Laserfiche ‘Building Activities’ template,” Wolfe says.

Other integrations in the planning stages include a link between Laserfiche and the Public Works fleet management application. “We are just beginning to examine the fleet management application and, if possible, would like to send reports directly to Laserfiche,” says Wolfe.

And, inspired by nearby Aspen, Community Development is also eyeing a GIS integration to, as Wolfe puts it, “drill down further” into their records. “Our GIS operator liked what Aspen is doing and would like to able to access Laserfiche documents in Community Development, the Town Clerk’s office, Public Works and other departments using GIS and parcel numbers,” he adds.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been some very real tangible progress already. “We’ve been trying to build up our volume of records to make the system more powerful and useful – like it is to HR already,” Wolfe says. “We have over 42,000 documents, which consist of 1.7 million TIFF files weighing in at 189 GB and 12,300 electronic documents which include PDFs and Microsoft Office documents totaling 114 GB in Laserfiche at this time,” he adds.

“From a paper management perspective, we’ve been able to destroy 664 boxes of records. We scanned 364 boxes of backfiles and got rid of 300 boxes of duplicates and records beyond retention. We even built out a couple of offices from the saved space,” he adds.

The real benefits of Laserfiche, he’s found, are the ongoing ones. “The most savings come from recovering staff time. For example, Open Records Requests that used to take two weeks and many photocopies to fill can now be addressed in minutes by looking up the information in Laserfiche and posting the response via WebLink or sending an e-mail.”

Scenic view of the Gore Range from Blue Sky Basin at dawn.

This has done more than make existing staff more efficient, Wolfe says, it’s actually lessened government’s footprint in the townspeople’s eyes.

“Laserfiche helps us create a situation where we’re not growing staff and, over time, the existing staff will be able to do more because they have better tools. You’re touching on goals the community has – even finding parking for municipal employees can become an issue.

“The broader community is very diversified with second home owners from all over the world, so that’s the next step. The longer term goal is to get information out there and available on the Town website for residents,” he adds.

But even now, the system serves the informational needs for life safety officers regarding locations and traffic re-direction during seasonal celebrations. “Our Special Events Coordinator can post event permits which include street closures and barricades on WebLink,” Wolfe explains. “Officers used to have to paw through files to get the right wad of paper. Now our naming convention is by day and event, so officers can just call up the information via the Town’s Wi-Fi network and review the actual permit right in their vehicle.”

Usefulness to law enforcement is also driving Vail’s next project: bringing the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office onboard to store case photos in Laserfiche with an integration into its Intergraph public safety system. “We just purchased an additional repository and the Laserfiche Software Development Kit (SDK),” Vail IT Director Ron Braden says. “Once we beta the Sheriff’s Office, we will bring all our law enforcement agencies on board.”

In most industries, being unable to access the right information can be costly and inefficient. But in law enforcement, it can be inconvenient—even deadly.

“Officers respond to calls uninformed of safety precautions,” says Elk River, MN Police Chief Jeffrey Beahen bluntly. “They’re on the scene without knowing if the suspect has any violent history, if they own any guns – nothing.” Once back at the station, he says, the real work began – only it wasn’t exactly police work.

“Officers would have to go through multiple locations and cabinets to find anything, which could take up to three days if it was over a weekend,” Beahen says. If officers could find what they needed, he adds, they would often have to return to the office from the field, get the documents and then return to the field—or take someone into custody who could have been cited in the field and released. Either way, that was valuable police time officers in the city of 24,000 at the edge of suburban Minneapolis could more effectively spend patrolling the streets.

Beahen saw the impact of paper on his department was not just organizational, but procedural. “Lost paperwork could impede prosecution,” he says. “Sometimes we’d be unable to coordinate multiple pieces of information and evidence to solve crimes.”

Chief Beahen

The cost—well that was a whole other story. “Man hours used to manage documents and case files was the biggest drain on the department,” Beahen says. By his estimates, the ERPD spent over $17,000 a year and needed 3.5 full-time employees just to process and store the paperwork generated by the department’s 24,000 cases each year. “Files might have three or 3,000 pages. But then we had to sort them all, and everyone would to have them – defense attorneys, prosecutors, courts, the state, FBI and other government and county agencies. So they’d all have to be copied, mailed and delivered. That killed a lot of trees.”

Besides case files, there were the gun permits, alarm files and other forms the police department was required to maintain. “We were going through 36 reams of paper a year, which, if you add up all the different copies we’d have to make for everybody, wound up at 251 reams of paper, which was 2.2 tons of paper or 54 adult trees,” Beahen says. He estimates the paper alone cost well over a $1,000 a year, not to mention the storage costs of four shelves required to house all this paper.

Beahen saw that going paperless would transform the way his officers dealt with information, both organizationally and procedurally. Since arriving in Elk River as Assistant Chief in 1998, Beahen had been a proponent of technology, working after hours to install computers and build a network “just to get everyone on e-mail.”

In 2002, Elk River purchased Laserfiche, and soon the city’s reseller, Cities Digital, Inc., expanded Laserfiche to the Police Department. However, the Police Department’s records management system (RMS) worked on a proprietary SQL-based server. “While Laserfiche had an open architecture, there was just no way to bring the RMS together with it. Everybody’s desktop had two icons, so you’d pull up the case number and go into Laserfiche to find supporting documents. There was a lot of jumping back and forth, and no access in the squad cars,” Beahen says. “We wanted to get to the point where everything for a case file could be scanned in and filed by case number and the whole thing could be sent out as an attachment, or accessed from a laptop in a squad car.

“We just wanted to make it simple,” he adds.

In 2007, it became just that simple. Beahen was approached by the Law Enforcement Technology Group (LETG) with a Web-based police records management system. “It wasn’t proprietary, so anything we could scan into and store in Laserfiche we could attach right to the record from the RMS. It turned the process of accessing records and documentation into a one-stop shop.”

Interoperability with Laserfiche was key when Beahen worked with LETG to set up the RMS, which Beahen describes as “friendly with Laserfiche,” in a way that media attachments from Laserfiche and police records are simultaneously accessed from a combined repository. “What we were really impressed by is how easy it was to integrate Laserfiche into our Web-based RMS. This kind of interoperability was really important to us because it was simply a matter of knowing how things are stored in one system and how it’s stored in the other and being able to build that bridge between them in a matter of days,” he says. “This is the kind of thing that you hear stories about seven engineers working on and two months and $85,000 later, it still isn’t working right. Our integration was done in less than a week.”

An Elk River PD officer accessing Laserfiche from his squad car

These days, Beahen says, “Everything that we scanned goes into our browser-based RMS system. Officers have a wireless card in their squad car so the computer automatically updates to the central repository. Photos, maps, reports, names – everything is accessible from our squad cars.”

With only the fuzziest of details to search the database, officers responding to a scene can instantly access a criminal’s history and an incident’s full details. “This keeps officers safe all the time, because we have specific and related information available to police in the field instantly,” Beahen says.

Besides resolving the organizational issues associated with the old paper-based filing system, Beahen says the department has seen significant procedural improvements as well. For starters, all content is scanned into Laserfiche using Quick Fields advanced capture. “The time required to fill out paper forms used to be enormous, now it’s just, boom, drop it in the scanner, predetermined templates and voilà!”

Tickets and case paperwork are filed immediately in Laserfiche, which prevents the risk of evidence tampering. “We can cross-reference with other resources prior to disturbing crime scenes,” he says. “That means greater coordination and access to evidence, so we’re solving crimes faster.”

There is also the freedom and necessity of being able to collaborate with other police departments and cities, state agencies, courts, FBI, the Department of Human Services and other county authorities. Beahen cites an example of how effective this information sharing can be. “A missing person’s body washed up about 50 miles down the Mississippi River from us. Because of Laserfiche we were able to quickly provide identifying information to local authorities, identify the victim, and within hours, we were able to notify the family.”

As the Elk River Police Department’s use of Laserfiche shows, you don’t have to be the biggest department to realize real and valuable benefits from using Laserfiche; you just have to have some vision. In fact, the ERPD’s use of technology was recognized with a 2008 award for Excellence in Information Technology from the International Association of Chiefs of Police– alongside some of the biggest, most advanced police agencies in the world.

Beahen is encouraged by the fact that a lot of skepticism about digital information has been put to rest by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Hesitance on electronic records and processing is not really a big deal anymore, but some people realize this sooner than others,” he says.

And his advice for other law enforcement agencies facing the challenges he was? “Have patience, a plan and a budget. Get past your fear of courts not liking electronic documents, put the old ways in the file cabinet you’ll be getting rid of, and make the quantum leap.”

That meant finding a way to help staff keep up with processing the 50,000 pages of statements that arrived in the mail each month, adding to the 20 years of back files spread out over 400 square feet of file cabinet space that had already spilled over into two storage lockers filled with statements and account records.

“We decided to go paperless,” says Mike Adams, Cambridge’s Director of Information Technology, who turned to Laserfiche reseller Gordon Flesch Company to help tailor a solution that could capture the up to 50,000 pages and merge them seamlessly with the firm’s own business processes and existing information systems. “When they recommended Laserfiche, we decided to go for it.”

“Going for it,” meant capturing the maximum amount of information per page at the point of entry, and that required configuring Laserfiche Quick Fields to accommodate the 100 different formats of broker statements arriving every month. Adams and Cambridge’s IT developers used the Laserfiche SDK, which, with its powerful integration tools, sample C# and Visual Basic.NET source code, allowed them to create custom connections between Lotus Notes/Domino, the firm’s CRM, and Quick Fields. As Adams explains, once a document is scanned into Quick Fields, Zone OCR and Pattern Matching match it using one of the 90 broker and bank statement sessions. “Quick Fields recognizes the broker account number on each document and populates the Laserfiche template fields with information from Lotus Notes/Domino and our portfolio management  software,” he says. Adams’ team also created custom scanner profiles to use for each broker’s forms that would optimize scanning on documents with, say, background anti-tampering lines or colors that would otherwise reduce OCR accuracy.

The effect of this enhanced automated capture was pronounced and immediate. Cambridge was already required to reconcile incoming statements with their internal accounting system within 14 days; just processing the incoming statements could take up to three days. But thanks to the custom connections Adams’ IT team built for Quick Fields, this now could all be done in a single day. “We get our statements processed and viewable in Laserfiche in less time than it used to take to sort the paper before,” Adams says. “It used to take up to three days with our old information management system, now they’re in the database and the information’s in use the same day it arrives. To date we have scanned 1.8 million pages.”

Cambridge has recently upgraded to Quick Fields 8 to turn what was a multi-step process into a single one during an actual Quick Fields session. “We want to take full advantage of the new real-time capabilities for database matching,” he says. “We want to move custom scripting out of Quick Fields and use Quick Fields Agent to extract data as documents are being scanned at the point of capture instead of post scanning.”

Besides providing better service to its customers, Cambridge has proven itself a valuable contributor to the Laserfiche Community. Adams notes some of the firm’s staff are members of the new GFC Laserfiche User Group in the Columbus area. Adams adds that Cambridge will be publishing its Quick Fields template files for other registered investment advisors to use, with details and specifications available at his class in the Industry Solutions track at this year’s Laserfiche Institute Conference January 11-13 in Los Angeles.

Cambridge is also a member of the Laserfiche Professional Development Partnership (PDP) program. “Gordon Flesch Company suggested that there was a demand among their clients for more custom programs,” explains Adams. “We plan to keep developing these tools to integrate Laserfiche directly into the menus of applications such as Great Plains and Auto CAD. We have everything we need,” he says, “but we are looking to help other Laserfiche users. Everyone wins.”

No one as much as Cambridge staff themselves. Staffers can process 35-60 pages a minute, with an error rate of less than 0.5%, and whatever errors do occur are automatically corrected through a series of tools built to correct common OCR mistakes. Misfiled and lost documents have been reduced to virtually zero. The process is so efficient, the firm has implemented all tasks without additional staff. Additionally, Cambridge has reclaimed 400 square feet of file cabinet space and two storage lockers, since Laserfiche allows for off-site storage backup – meeting SEC and broker dealer contingency plan requirements. The efficiency is so cost-effective, Adams says Cambridge has realized its ROI in less than one year after implementing Laserfiche.

For his part, Adams credits the company’s success so far with being able to take full advantage of the expanded functionality of Quick Fields using the Laserfiche SDK to automate and enhance very unique and important business processes.

“I like that Laserfiche has an SDK available and that it works well. A number of programs don’t have one available,” Adams says. “It’s malleable to all sorts of enterprise applications.”

Of his probationers, Eyrick says, “They’re just people who make some bad decisions. I try to focus on their issues and their individual dynamics, while at the same time testing them and making sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

In recognition of his commitment and personal dedication to the job, Eyrick received the 2009 “Order of Augustus,” an annual statewide probation officer award named for John Augustus, the father of probation in America.

But Eyrick’s responsibility extends beyond offering assistance to individual offenders: He’s also tasked with developing and coordinating the direction of the probation department as a whole.

For Eyrick, technology plays an important role in shaping departmental strategy. Under his direction, the department recently rolled out a video conferencing system, which has improved security by keeping inmates in jail during their arraignments. The department has also benefited from the chief probation officer’s decision to implement Laserfiche content management more than seven years ago.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche,” Eyrick says, “we were storing piles of files that had accumulated over the course of more than twenty years. Organizing everything was a problem, as was finding enough storage room. Laserfiche changed all of that.”

Specific benefits the probation department has realized since implementing Laserfiche include:

• Increased efficiency. Without leaving their desks, employees are now able to instantly locate probationary records within the superbly-organized Laserfiche content repository. Staff members are more productive because they no longer have to waste time searching for client files in cluttered filing rooms.
• Easy integration. Laserfiche provider BOLT Document Management created a useful integration with the probation department’s case management system that allows probation officers instant access to clients’ files while viewing case information in the database.
• Storage savings. Scanning old records into Laserfiche allowed the department to destroy thousands of hardcopy documents and reclaim a large storage room that had been in utter disarray. The Court Clerk, who shares the space, benefits from how neat and organized the room is today.

Eyrick’s success with Laserfiche soon attracted attention outside of his department, and it wasn’t long before Darlene Hale, IT director for the entire county, came calling.

The Tipping Point: From One Department to Many

Charged with delivering the most effective and affordable technology to all LaPorte County offices including the auditor, treasurer, probationer, surveyor, juvenile detention and more, Hale had noticed a few problems with the way content management had been rolled out county-wide. Chief among them was that, in the years before she’d taken the helm, individual departments such as Eyrick’s had been allowed to choose and deploy their own preferred IT systems. As a result, interoperability was lacking, sharing information was difficult and costs were high.

It was time to standardize.

In the course of Hale’s research, she determined that if one of the content management systems already in use could be expanded, the cost of conversion wouldn’t be quite so high. Two systems rose to the top: Laserfiche and Docuware. Ultimately, after talking to Eyrick and his department, comparing features and functionality and considering ROI, Laserfiche won out.

According to Hale, “The biggest thing that sets Laserfiche apart from other content management solutions is the sheer ease of use. The layout is simple and intuitive, so it’s easy for users to pick up, but just as important for IT professionals like me is that it’s also easy to administer. Setting up templates and user licenses, integrating it with other products and external applications: everything is just so easy.”

BOLT helped LaPorte County migrate the content stored in Docuware into Laserfiche by completing the following five steps:

• Examining the document and information structure of the old Docuware repositories.
• Obtaining samples of documents and data from every unique document set.
• Using the samples to determine the logic and structure incorporated in the repositories.
• Creating a unique conversion program for each document set.
• Importing and testing samples from each set in Laserfiche.

Once the testing was successfully completed, the conversion process began—one department at a time.

Each phase of the migration project was carefully defined and scheduled, since departments needed continuous access to stored content even while the process was underway. Employees were allowed to look up existing information in Docuware, but to prevent “orphaned” records, staff was not allowed to make any additions or changes. After the process was complete, the converted information was mounted as new volumes to the county’s Laserfiche server. BOLT then installed and configured the Laserfiche client software on department computers and trained each department’s personnel.

Users Love Laserfiche

Although LaPorte County now has centralized control over all of its content (ensuring that information from all departments can easily be shared), Laserfiche grants each department the flexibility to adapt the system to the way they work and manage their files. “Our users love Laserfiche,” Hale explains. “It just has so many more uses and capabilities than what they were using before.”

The county, too, has reaped the benefits of standardizing on Laserfiche. Overhead costs for content management have diminished, and information management throughout county offices has dramatically improved. In addition, all of the advantages that Steve Eyrick’s probation department realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche—increased staff productivity, storage savings and easy integration with mission-critical applications—have now materialized for all of the departments under Hale’s purview.

“Better system, more functionality, lower overhead costs, excellent ROI,” Hale concludes thoughtfully. “What’s not to love?”

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.”

For example, she says, an everyday business process like new account opening mandated a flurry of paperwork and duplication, consuming valuable time, space and resources to manage it. “If we had a person opening an account, he would need to fill out a form and then we would copy it; if it was a double-sided form, that meant making two single-sided sheets so we could fax it,” she explains. “Once it was faxable, we would send the forms one at a time to be opened.” Plus, she adds, each file had to be copied at least twice—once for the client and once for the firm’s records. This process created unnecessary duplicates that filled 20 filing cabinets, taking up valuable office space and increasing overhead costs.

At the recommendation of a firm using Laserfiche to manage its information and business processes, Rossi-Weida contacted Patrick Welsch from Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital, Inc. for a demonstration. Working from a short-list of approved vendors handed down by Kowal’s former broker-dealer, Rossi-Weida then whittled it down to four providers, ultimately choosing Laserfiche, she says, for three main reasons: Laserfiche’s ease of integration with ACT!, Kowal’s contact management software; its ease of use; and the fact that the software interface allowed the repository’s folder structure to mimic the filing system firm staff were already used to working with.

One question that did come up in the consideration process was the choice between going with a Web-based hosted solution or a system Kowal would own itself. Rossi-Weida says the fact that the ACT! integration was only an option with the Kowal-owned Laserfiche was a compelling factor. The other reason, says Rossi-Weida, was the peace of mind of knowing the firm’s information was not only safe and secure, but in the firm’s possession. “The biggest issue for us, being an independent firm, is what happens to your information if something happens to that company?” she says. “If something happened to a Web provider whose services we were using, how could we recover that information from them? We feel more secure with the Kowal-owned Laserfiche.”

But as Kowal staff soon found, a system that offers sophisticated security doesn’t have to be complicated for the user. Cities Digital spent a day training the staff and with that, they were off. “We were struck by how easy Laserfiche was to use and how easily we were able to duplicate our old file structure,” says Rossi-Weida. “That was really nice.”

Cities Digital’s LaserACT integration allows users to browse, scan, import and export the client folders stored in Laserfiche from within a tab inside ACT!, which made implementation relatively simple because employees were already familiar with the ACT! interface. Before Laserfiche, whenever an advisor needed information from a file he or she would need to go into ACT! to look up the client record and then ask the client service team to retrieve the paper file to get the rest of the information. Now the advisors can click on a button in ACT! that pulls information from the Laserfiche repository and view all their clients’ information instantly. What once took five to ten minutes of staff time is now done at each advisor’s desk in a matter of seconds. “It’s so simple, even an advisor can do it!” laughs Rossi-Weida.

Having Laserfiche also makes Kowal 100% compliant with SEC regulations, a major concern for firms facing increased regulatory oversight and visits from auditors. Audit Trail allows administrators to regularly review user activity, assess the effectiveness of internal control mechanisms and demonstrate regulatory compliance. Using Laserfiche also expedites audits by producing reports of all the actions taken on a particular document. “Laserfiche makes audits easy,” says Rossi-Weida. “Auditors can come in and sit down at a computer and I don’t have to go grab a bunch of different files. They can just click through everything they want. I think it makes them much more efficient from their standpoint as well.”

Though Rossi-Weida says the firm has yet to face a major audit since implementing Laserfiche, it is reaping the benefits of a progressively paperless environment. “We’ve gotten rid of 20% of our paper processes,” she says. “Before we needed to make two copies of each form so we could send the original to the client. We went from two copies to no copies. It’s great.” She adds the firm will repurpose the space that once housed the filing cabinets into offices for new employees.

In fact, Kowal’s experience with Laserfiche has been so successful, it’s inspired the firm’s new broker-dealer to ask Cities Digital to talk to other advisors. “We were sort of pioneers within the broker-dealer network because they didn’t have a lot of offices that were using electronic storage. They were very impressed,” Rossi-Weida says. “They asked if they could have Cities Digital present to other advisors within the broker dealer.”

Can the “Paper Retirement Clinic” radio show be far behind?

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.

Over 80,000 files resided in a hardcopy storage facility that cost more than $2,000 a month to maintain. And even with six full-time staff members dedicated to managing hardcopy documents, some records took as long as three days to locate and cost $4 each to retrieve and deliver; others were lost for good.

Realizing that an enterprise content management system would ensure access to high-quality services in a more cost-effective way, the center turned to Laserfiche for help.

Complete Content Management within a SharePoint Site

Spindletop was already leveraging SharePoint for the company’s intranet site, but scanning and storing 80,000 documents in SharePoint required more comprehensive content management functionality.

“We wanted to centralize access to patient records without forcing our employees to go out of their way,” explains Jerry Carnley, CIO at Spindletop. “Our intranet seemed to be the natural place to do this, but we needed to implement a content management solution that would be easy to implement, easy to install, and eliminate extra work for the people who deal with patient documents every day.”

Spindletop selected an Agile ECM system engineered with Laserfiche and SharePoint, which met its content management needs in three key ways:

• Seamlessly added document imaging functionality to SharePoint with minimal requirements for installation, support and maintenance.
• Dramatically expanded the amount of content that can be stored online while also improving document security.
• Provided federated search across content stored in Laserfiche and SharePoint.

“Given Laserfiche’s experience and dedication to the Microsoft suite of technology, we saw that it delivers a complete offering to customers seeking an integrated content management and SharePoint solution,” Carnley says.

Specifically, Agile ECM engineered with Laserfiche and SharePoint enables Spindletop to:

• Bring comprehensive document imaging and records management functionality to Spindletop’s existing SharePoint intranet. Employees scan and upload documents directly through the SharePoint interface, then view and manage them with the easy-to-use Laserfiche document viewer.
• Supply superior security, records management and content distribution capabilities when content is moved between SharePoint and Laserfiche—manually, as part of a workflow process or automatically based on a SharePoint expiration policy.
• Provide the ability to retrieve content from both Laserfiche and SharePoint using Spindletop’s intranet search box.
• Automate content-related processes based on activities occurring in both SharePoint and Laserfiche with graphical, drag-and-drop .NET-based workflow configuration that makes workflow design simple for IT staff.

As a whole, Agile ECM provides a cost-effective complement to Spindletop’s SharePoint intranet site—with all of the content management capabilities the company needs.

Results of Running Smarter

With the assistance of DynaSource, a Laserfiche reseller located in Texas, Spindletop implemented Laserfiche and transformed the way it manages content, most notably in the four following ways:

• Instant search and retrieval. From any internet access point, staff can instantly locate scanned records by using the “Electronic Imaging” tab on the SharePoint intranet site. Offsite employees have
  access to the Laserfiche digital records repository through a password-protected Citrix site.
• Sure-fire security. Because Spindletop’s SharePoint intranet uses full Laserfiche security enforcement, employees are granted access to records by department. Employees can view the records for their
  own clients, but restricted patient, employee and financial information remains confidential.
• Easy and efficient scanning. Laserfiche templates enable employees to scan ten times more content than they could before the custom templates were implemented.
• Time-saving automation. When new content is scanned into the system, Laserfiche automatically populates template fields and generates and organizes new folders and subfolders. Because each client has between six and eight subfolders with a total of 25-52 documents to be scanned, this eliminates redundancy and extra work.

According to Carnley, implementing Agile ECM has had a number of noteworthy benefits. “We’ve increased productivity, and morale has jumped in every department that uses Laserfiche,” he says.

“There’s no more waiting around for days for hardcopy documents to be found, and no more lost or misfiled records resulting in huge institutional fines. And we aren’t spending thousands of dollars each month on offsite storage facilities,” Carnley adds.

But best of all from Carnley’s perspective as a CIO is that because Agile ECM engineered with Laserfiche and SharePoint supports developers who need to extend collaboration, scan images and set up workflows to quickly respond to business needs, deployment was quick, easy and affordable. There was no need to hire expensive programmers or IT consultants and no need to build customized plug-ins from scratch. In addition, the intuitive user interface makes the solution easy to administer, since drag-and-drop functionality enables IT staff to permit line-of-business employees to easily make changes to existing workflows and folder trees without IT staff assistance.

“Laserfiche provides a scalable solution that’s easy to install, easy to administer and easy to use,” concludes Carnley. “We’re very happy with the way Laserfiche has enabled Spindletop MHMR Services to expand our use of SharePoint and improve the way we manage content.”

“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.”

For Pittsburgh, PA-based Xpyria Investment Advisors, Inc., Laserfiche has already helped the Firm minimize labor costs by helping existing staff use their time more effectively. The Firm has grown to ten full-time employees since being incorporated in 1990, and now manages approximately $400 million in assets with clients in 14 states and three countries.

But before Xpyria could begin using Workflow functionality to automate paper- and labor-intensive business processes, they had to start by eliminating inefficiency from their daily tasks. So Salpietro and his Firm began implementation by working with their Laserfiche reseller, One Source/ADI, to integrate Laserfiche with Advent Axys, the Firm’s asset management platform, and Junxure, the Firm’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Watch Joesph Salpietro describe his Laserfiche success in his own words.

A trading applet pulls information directly from Axys to automatically populate the trading sheet, which saves time and prevents errors. And by integrating Laserfiche with Junxure, when a client calls, staff are able to access all related client documents stored in Laserfiche from the client’s record in Junxure—so they can answer customer inquiries instantly. “I’m not sure you can put a price tag on the efficiency gains,” Salpietro says. “We can access information in one or two keystrokes, which creates more time for mission-critical investment research—which ultimately benefits the client and our performance.”

Since the beginning of the year, Xpyria has focused on implementing Avante’s BPM functionality. Laserfiche Workflow, included in the Avante system, promotes constant productivity with rules-based document routing, e-mail notification and activity monitoring.

“Our trading process used to be paper and time intensive,” Salpietro says. “Each trade involved multiple pages that needed to be circulated to six people in the office for processing and approvals, but you never knew exactly who had it or where it was In the process.

“It was organized chaos,” he adds. “With Workflow, we can push this document in a very systematic fashion to the people who are required to sign off at various stages of the process.” In fact, if anyone in the workflow process is out on vacation or otherwise unavailable, Workflow automatically redirects the document to the appropriate on-duty personnel. Anyone can check the status of a trade by finding it in Laserfiche, and, if there’s a bottleneck, it’s easy to identify. Trades are automatically uploaded as a .csv file for final processing with the custodian and completed trades are stored in Laserfiche.

“Automating the trading process has given us better control, because we know exactly where the trade is in the approval process. Also, there are fewer data entry errors, because the trade sheet only needs to be keyed once during the process,” Salpietro says.

And now, the trading process isn’t just automated—it’s also more secure, because it relies on electronic signatures. “Electronic signatures are more secure than handwritten ones, because they are password protected, ” Salpietro adds.

Once staff at Xpyria completed the Workflow automation for its trading process, they moved on to the Firm’s “Chron (chronological) folders,” folders the firm uses to keep a record of all activity on a client’s accounts. “These folders need to be reviewed each week, and we used to physically print out or copy every piece of paper coming or going,” Salpietro remembers. “We’d put it in the Chron folder and that would get passed from associate to associate, and they’d check off that they’d reviewed it.”

Now, thanks to Avante’s BPM functionality, that process happens automatically. All relevant documents are automatically extracted from the Laserfiche repository and are put into an electronic Chron folder. The folders are then pushed out to all the associates simultaneously, so they all can review it when they have time. Salpietro estimates that Xpyria has saved over $4,000 annually in hard costs and 72 hours of labor by automating the Chron-folder process.

And he believes Laserfiche has helped Xpyria save tens of thousands of printed pages per year. “We walk around less and we push around less paper,” Salpietro says. “We find information more quickly.

“We used to print over 30,000 pages a year just for this one [Chron] process,” he adds. “We’re saving on paper, printing supplies, and service related to wear and tear on our office equipment.”

Xpyria doesn’t plan to stop there. It plans to implement Laserfiche Quick Fields to automatically index and file quarterly reports, correspondence and other client mailings, saving the administrative time spent filing electronic documents after they’re scanned. “While the cost savings will be nominal—we estimate them to be less than $400 a year—the automation will eliminate the possibility of filing errors and future service delays,” Salpietro says. “Our plan is to get Quick Fields up and running before the end of 2009.”

Salpietro encourages more firms to investigate BPM solutions like Avante. “If a firm has a process that involves multiple touches, multiple points of entry, and time sensitivity, then Avante’s workflow capability is a viable solution to streamline the process and gain better control,” he says.

“I would recommend that anyone considering Avante assign an internal project manager to improve the probability of benefiting by better matching your firm needs to the software’s capabilities. And having a committed reseller that understands the financial services industry, like One Source/ADI, is also recommended,” Salpietro concludes.

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 ever leaving their work station.”

Hermann-Brown was inspired by a trip to an International Institute of Municipal Clerks conference—“that triggered the spark,” she says—to start investigating digital records management systems. After three years of requests, funding was approved in 2005. In early 2006, Laserfiche was chosen after reseller Cities Digital, Inc., outlined a three-phase implementation that first addressed simple search and retrieval needs.

The immediate goal, says Cities Digital’s Jessica Welsch, was to get the City Clerk’s, City Administrator’s and City Attorney’s offices, as well as the Planning and Finance departments, up and running with Laserfiche. At the same time, Cities Digital worked with city staff to implement best practices and efficiency-building techniques into their Laserfiche use. “We knew we were asking people to let go of their paper and work a little differently than they were used to,” says Welsch. “It’s easy for us to tell them their jobs were going to get easier, but we wanted to make sure we weren’t creating any new work for them by asking them to learn the software.”

From Hermann-Brown’s vantage point, the city’s new Laserfiche system had to meet three main goals:

1. Automate document management while maintaining a system of records management.
2. Meet compliance requirements regarding retention schedules with state auditors and regulators.
3. Scale to meet both the city’s growing number of users and extended uses of Laserfiche’s capabilities.

The first point presented an initial challenge: How to standardize the file folder structure and naming convention that would satisfy all the records requests that would come in through the Clerk’s Office? Hermann-Brown spent a lot of time meeting with department heads, then talking to staff that would be using the system. Next, a test group of users reviewed the various naming conventions that were used by the departments. “We had a lot of boxes,” Hermann-Brown laughs.

A consensus was going to be hard to come by, so Hermann-Brown says she put her foot down and a small group of Department Heads made the final decision on the naming conventions. The naming conventions would not only standardize records, but word processing documents as well, which, with so many different departments used to doing things their own way for so long, created resistance. “Sometimes you have to just make a decision which is in the best interest of all departments,” she says. “People had to change, but it wound up making things easier for them. Now that they’re using it, they see how it makes sense, because they can find things on their own—they don’t have to call up people in other departments when they’re searching for documents. In the end, it saves them a lot of time.” Establishing central control went a long way to enabling more productive departmental flexibility, she adds.

This was especially beneficial to the Finance Department. In fact, owing to the range of documents the department scanned (receipts, bills, check stubs), the standardized naming convention and document types enabled the advanced capture capabilities of Quick Fields to automate much of the hand-keying and filing that staff used to labor over. Now, finance staff prints all of its reports from its General Ledger to Laserfiche and scans all of their Accounts Payable documents, while staff from other departments can retrieve their own past invoices, payment checks and other documents, instead of requesting them from Finance staff.

Just in the Finance Department alone, six three-drawer filling cabinets were sent packing, which freed up office space for additional personnel, which the department was able to hire, thanks to the savings from more efficient use of work hours. Now, finance staff can access vendor invoices immediately. It’s a vast improvement over a process that used to involve manual retrieval of records kept in a dark, disorganized basement.

City Auditors likewise have seen the added value of immediate and searchable access to documents and supporting paperwork. Auditors had to be sure the new software would integrate securely with their growing applications (they are currently in the middle of a MUNIS deployment). “Before any implementation of software in the Finance Department, we had to get it approved by our Auditors,” explains Jan Thomas, Deputy City Treasurer. Cities Digital had extensive experience with successful Laserfiche integrations, and after deployment, a backlog conversion added Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivables documents, banking statements, and financial records dating back to 2005 into Laserfiche.

The City’s 2007 audit was the first to use Laserfiche. “Oh did the auditors love it! Because we’d been scanning in our information from day one, we were able to audit our AP, AR, banking statements and financial records right from Laserfiche,” says Thomas.

The second phase of the city-wide deployment was to implement Agenda Manager in the Clerk’s, Planning and Finance departments to automate and simplify the multi-departmental, often multi-headache-inducing management of weekly and monthly meetings. Welsch and her Cities Digital team worked with the City to create role-based training documents that made it easy to get users performing their functions in Agenda Manager’s powerful interdepartmental workflow and agenda preparation and publishing tools.

“Agendas are very time-consuming, especially when you have four levels of approval like we do,” Hermann-Brown says. “We have ‘Agenda Fridays’ and we used to have to try to track people down on Friday afternoon to approve items and make changes. Now an administrator can be in a meeting, get an e-mail notification and send comments via e-mail to the individual preparing the agenda. Especially in a municipality our size, with so many layers of approval, it really saves a lot of time and effort not having to walk these big packets of paper around trying to find people.”

Hermann-Brown had a chance to preview the upcoming release of Agenda Manager 8 at this year’s IIMC conference. “It’s more user friendly and has more helpful features and processing options, which will make it a lot more advantageous and efficient for our users,” she says, referring to, among other new features, Agenda Manager 8’s new in-place document editing and enhanced notification capabilities. “It’s good to see that Laserfiche is still evolving Agenda Manager to meet the changing job and changing job requirements of our users.”

Hermann-Brown is cautious but optimistic about the coming year. “How are we going to respond to the needs of staff and public when it’s hard to convince the city council to spend money on technology when budget funding will be very challenging—even when what’s needed to improve service might cost the taxpayers some money?” she asks. “Residents have higher expectations for a responsive government then they did 10 years ago, but they also do not want to see spending increased.”

With Laserfiche, she feels her local government is responding to the residents needs efficiently, as well as being financially accountable. And thanks to Laserfiche, everyone’s needs are being met.

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.”

Tunnel: Vision.

Laserfiche helped Riverside PD escape "The Tunnel"

Before, however, “progress” just meant that you didn’t have to use a flashlight to find an old police report. The main Records Bureau housed 20 file cabinets while older reports were sent to what Vinson calls the “tunnel.” Boxes were literally stored in a locked tunnel where Records Specialists – flashlight in hand – searched for reports. “It became a running joke that people would leave a trail of bread crumbs for co-workers to find them if they didn’t return within a few hours.”
Complicating the storage and retrieval challenges were the security and retention requirements for the constant influx of paperwork:

• More than 100,000 pages accumulate each year due to high volume and long retention.
• Every day, nearly 300 new reports are filed.
• Homicide records are never destroyed. Other felonies have a 10-year retention; California’s three-strikes law mandates permanent retention for related records.
• Compliance with transparency demands of Freedom of Information Act, the California Public Records Act and court orders; Bureau staff must verify each requestor’s right to know before releasing sensitive documents.

Captain Blakely faced his own challenge. “We simply couldn’t afford to have officers off the streets long enough to pull together all of the details they might need,” he says. The push for electronic document management started in the mid-1990s with senior police officials who were very pro-technology.

In 1996, Riverside successfully appealed to the Federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services’ Making Officer Redeployment Effective (COPS MORE) program for funding. (If it sounds familiar, it is: last March the U.S. Department of Justice announced $1 billion of the Obama administration’s ARRA’s funds would be available for new COPS funding as well). Blakely put a do-more-with-less twist on it: officers would spend more time on the streets and less time waiting for records.

But before deploying the new system, Vinson worked for directly with Laserfiche developers to analyze key business processes.

Vinson insisted on two things before going live: an integration with Riverside’s CAD system to initiate creating reports in Laserfiche, and an auto-populater program that would automate scanning in supplemental reports. Vinson explains: “The CAD call’s the first source of information – the who, what, why and where. The dispatcher is the only one that ever has to enter that information.” The integrated solution creates an archival TIFF image of the CAD history, auto-populates index information from the CAD system and places it in the Laserfiche folder. That folder then becomes the primary holder of case information, including supplemental reports, toxicology reports, photo sheets, CLETS teletypes and more. “Imagine a homicide report with 60 documents, and every single one requiring someone to type in the same information,” she says. “That integration alone has literally saved me millions of keystrokes.”

Records Bureau staffers were the first authorized users to begin using Laserfiche in 2000. Besides saving the aforementioned millions of keystrokes, Vinson says they regained countless hours formerly used making copies of records for the Legal Department, the District Attorney and other law enforcement agencies.

It took a year of proven use before detectives were given access in 2001. “You just can’t afford to have computer programs down if you are a detective working a case,” Vinson explains. Since then, she says, “We’ve slowly increased the number of users, making sure we did sufficient training to prevent errors.” By 2006, that number was 250. “Now we have over 500 users,” she says, adding that there are now six unique law enforcement repositories–internal affairs, permits and subpoenas, an audio repository, the master reports repository, personnel and training, and special investigations.”

Along with expanded use came he need for expanded functionality. A 2003 integration stores digital audio recordings of interactions between police and the public in Laserfiche the same way the CAD system works. She’s starting to add video files, which the department’s current upgrade to Laserfiche 8 and Workflow 8 will facilitate, allowing workflow rules to be established to route all related documents to single files. “The vision is to have everything in one place,” she says. “We’re going to be able to merge audios and visuals. Workflow’s going be a big part of my life.”

An Evolving Vision of Innovation in Automation

Vinson is encouraged by the watermarking capabilities of Laserfiche 8 and Web Access 8 to uphold stringent security protocols. “Having the watermark embedded in the document is huge for me,” she says. “When I export [a document] to the DA, I can track back to where it came from with Audit Trail.”

Now every Records Bureau workstation is equipped with high speed scanners. “They’re part of the way we do business,” says Vinson. “We also have front counter scanners where staff can immediately scan driver’s licenses and any other documentation needed for either filing a report, releasing a vehicle, or obtaining a legal copy of a police report.”

Staff used to have to walk back to make a black and white copy and attach the copy to their documents for scanning by other staff members. “Now,” says Vinson, “the employee doesn’t leave a citizen at the counter unattended – which is back to that desire to only handle the paper once!” Riverside citizens can report a non-emergency crimes on-line, and since launching in 2008, the system has taken in 1600 reports. “This is the bulk of the types we take in in Records,” Vinson explains. It’s even more efficient now that it’s been integrated with Laserfiche. When the supervisor approves the non-emergency report, it automatically generates a TIFF image that Import Agent inputs to the Laserfiche case file “exactly like our CAD system does,” says Vinson. “That’s paperwork we aren’t going to have scan to process. We’re not even going to touch it.” She estimates this saves her staff the time it used to take to scan 35 reports a week. “I’m always looking for ways to enhance what I’ve got now,” Vinson says. “It’s inherent in my operation.” For 2010, that will mean integrating Laserfiche with CrimeView, where, as Vinson puts it, officers will “Click on a map, click on a dot, and pull up police reports.”

Blakely says it’s this kind of automation that ultimately better informs – and protects – officers in the field. “Thanks to our document management project, the reports are available – and they do read them. Knowing the full details, including descriptions of suspects, means that they are going to be more prepared and, therefore, safer.”

“The answer in our case is absolutely not,” says Renee Geyer, City Clerk of this farming community in Western Kansas with a population of 1,700. “These tools enable us to serve our constituents much more effectively.”

“In our view, smaller cities and towns should all be looking to bring in these capabilities. They’re needed now and are only going to become more necessary in the future.”

Leoti is investing a portion of a $2.1 million USDA Rural Development grant and loan into an information management system featuring ESRI GIS and a Laserfiche document management system.

“The grant is specifically for waterworks improvements,” Ms. Geyer says. “As a byproduct of that project, however, the grant will also enable us to improve our ability to deliver every municipal service.”

“We need ESRI for our waterworks, for example, so that we can pinpoint the location of water mains, hydrants and valves when we need to get at them for repairs and upgrades. At the same time, we see that other services, including telephone, cable, gas and electricity, are going underground. You can’t deal with these things visually any more and have to recognize that GIS is the wave of the future for taking care of them, too.”

As the ESRI maps are built and populated, Leoti is also implementing a Laserfiche document management system to create a searchable digital archive of all city records. City officials have three distinct goals in mind:

• To make it possible for ESRI users to retrieve supporting information, such as maintenance reports on a particular water hydrant, with the click of a mouse.
• To create a central, instantly searchable records library accessible to all authorized city employees.
• To serve as the link between ESRI and the city’s Summit finance and accounting system.

“Most importantly, the integration of Laserfiche with the other programs will enable us to automate the transfer of information from one system to the other,” Ms Geyer says. “In addition, Laserfiche is a user friendly application. Having it as the integration point will enable city employees who are not experts at ESRI or Summit to retrieve information needed, especially when responding to requests from citizens.”

Ms. Geyer recognizes that cost is the biggest obstacle facing other small municipalities thinking of following Leoti’s lead. “We could not have made the budgetary commitment without the grant, even though I believe that the two systems will more than pay for themselves,” she says.

“In addition to seeking their own grants, small cities and towns could look into joining forces with other agencies such as the schools and county government or putting together a group of small municipalities to share the costs. In my opinion, they will come to agree that the benefits far outweigh any possible drawbacks.”

The county seat of Wichita County, Leoti consistently ranks high in state surveys of per capita income and education levels. In addition to its many farms, employers include one of the largest cattle feedlots in the US, a feed mill and a corn-to-alcohol conversion plant.

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.”

The county published its RFP in December 2006, and soon after a committee drawn from several county offices (District Clerk, County Clerk, Auditor, Sheriff, Tax Office, Juvenile Probation, Adult Probation, Purchasing, IT and Records) determined that Laserfiche (as bid by reseller MCCi) was the best fit for Collin County.

Anderson notes that she had had county-wide support from the start. “The success of the project is directly attributable to getting these larger user departments involved in both identifying the requirements for the RFP and making the selection,” she says.

Anderson had visited the Laserfiche booth at past ARMA conferences (an active ARMA member, she was a presenter at last year’s conference and is scheduled to present again at this year’s conference, October 15-18 in Orlando, FL). Anderson looked to Laserfiche for three things: its scalability and extensibility; the Laserfiche Toolkit, for integrating Laserfiche with existing and planned software applications; and the Records Management Edition (RME), in order to manage retention for electronic documents.

“RME provides a standard methodology for administering the state mandated retention requirements for all records as well as providing an audit trail for disposition,” Anderson says. “And all of this occurs in the background, so it’s transparent to the user.”

Collin County installed Laserfiche in mid-2007, followed by its first production implementation that November, starting with 100 user licenses and 500 WebLink retrieval licenses just to accommodate cross-departmental use.

The first offices to deploy were the District Clerk, County Clerk (which handles vital records, land recording, and county court at law records), District Attorney, Auditor and Records Department. Because the county was migrating from a legacy system dating from the ‘80s, a massive backlog conversion to Laserfiche was first priority. “Records was actually already scanning for the DA and Auditor, so we switched this to Laserfiche first,” Anderson says.

In the District Clerk’s office, a massive backlog conversion of documents from 1846-2000 into two million images added to the county’s Laserfiche system. “While we eliminated some paper files, we did keep the 1800s paper files for their historical value,” Anderson notes.

When it came to the auditor’s office, the County focused on integration to optimize business processes. “We added a property tax receipts interface with our RT Lawrence receipt processing system,” explains Anderson. Because the tax assessor/collector relied on paper documents, the 10 days it took to process mail resulted in over $1 million lost each day in interest. The county was able to get the assessor’s office up and running by the end of the year to coincide with the heaviest period of property tax receipts.

“Now we process payments much more quickly—up to 10 days faster,” Anderson says. “In fact, we eliminated almost 400 records storage boxes just with this one Laserfiche implementation.”

The County Clerk’s Office also uses RME as the back end for the court’s case management system, where it provides records retention for closed and inactive case files.

Finally, the Justice of the Peace, which manages traffic, truancy, small claims and evictions records, came onboard in June 2008.

With an implementation this extensive, there were understandably some hiccups along the way. “One of the mistakes we made was only purchasing one license each for Quick Fields, Zone OCR and Real-Time Lookup,” Anderson says. But with the approval of the FY2009 budget, the County will be adding Workflow, to be installed when the county upgrades to Laserfiche 8 by the end of the year, as well as additional licenses for ScanConnect, Quick Fields, Zone OCR, and Real-Time Lookup.

The biggest hurdle, however, hasn’t been what modules to use. “I’d say one of our biggest initial challenges was helping departments understand their business processes so we could develop a records series plan tied to record management and retention,” Anderson says. “It’s really an educational process.” Anderson and her team of what she calls “Customer Department Advocates“ employ business plan questionnaires, user guides and demos of successful intra-county implementations, and even help departments choose the right scanners.

These Advocates identify training needs, review business processes, records series structure and templates, and scan sample boxes of files into Laserfiche so departmental staff can see how their records series and template structures will work in the new environment.

As more departments successfully use Laserfiche, even more want to get on board. The Commissioners Court has a planned deployment through September 2009, which includes implementations in IT, the Auditor’s Department, Development Services (permitting and animal control), Human Resources, Sheriff’s Office records, Tax, Motor Vehicle and Purchasing.

“We based our 2009 deployment plan on several factors, including percentage of permanent records maintained for the department, volume of records, distributed accessibility requirements, and overall reduction in paper storage space in the new administration building for the departments moving their this year,” Anderson explains.

The County’s still quantifying ROI from using Laserfiche, but Anderson can point to a windfall of newfound efficiency.

“By using Laserfiche and changing the internal process to take advantage of the system’s new capabilities, the Auditor’s accounts payable office has already identified 300 hours of staff time saved, and reduction in volume of file folders and labels formerly used to place each paper copy of a check and the backup into a separate folder on their departmental shelving,” Anderson says. “The internal audit staff is able to review case files and receipts as part of their auditing process —freeing Auditor-, departmental-, and records staff from pulling paper files for auditors to review.”

Then there’s the peace of mind knowing that Collin County’s doing its part to provide better and more sustainable customer service now and in the future.

“We’re finally getting a handle on our electronic records, even though it’s going to take three to five years to fully implement,” Anderson says. “And we’ve definitely enjoyed faster response time when a customer or citizen requests a file. Even better, multiple users can access the same record from different locations simultaneously.”

Speaking of simultaneous, Anderson says that her biggest obstacle is handling the requests from remaining departments to implement Laserfiche. “The hardest thing I have to do is tell someone, ‘Not yet –can I work with you to make sure your needs are included in next year’s budget?’”

But as Collin County is proving department by department, the results are worth the wait—and the planning time.

Business Processes In this Case Study:

• Accounts payable
• Automated life cycle management
• Back-end records retention
• Backlog conversion
• Business continuity
• Case management
• Internal auditing
• Microfilm conversion
• Property tax processing
• Transparent records management
• Web retrieval

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.

The Situation

MAC Financial, a firm of financial advisers based on the Isle of Man, boasts over twenty-five years’ experience providing employee benefits advice to large multi-national and small corporate clients. As a Corporate IFA (Independent Financial Adviser) for investment business, they also provide a full range of bespoke services to private clients.

With over 5,000 individual clients and more than 300 corporate schemes encompassing 4,000 employees, MAC Financial operates in a complex environment. Recent acquisitions made it even more difficult to keep up with business demands. McGowan knew his team needed a solution that would enable efficient document management procedures while also providing the tools for superior customer service and comprehensive compliance procedures.

MAC Financial required a proven and reliable document management platform that could produce benefits in several key areas: customer service, compliance and operations. Integration with their CRM system was also crucial, because their solution had to function not only as a system for storage, search and retrieval, but also as a workflow management system integrated with their existing CRM software.

With a solution from Laserfiche document management, MAC Financial has improved productivity, streamlined their workflow and even enabled an employee to telecommute from Australia—not to mention benefited from savings of 25-35% achieved through reduced staff and a more efficient use of time.

The Solution

Before Laserfiche, staff needed to walk up three flights of stairs to the attic to retrieve documents. They were spending enormous amounts of time searching for information and filing documents, not to mention impeding profitability due to the overhead costs of paper used to print correspondence and copies for their files. Since implementing Laserfiche, MAC Financial has cleared the attic of paper, completely freeing an entire floor of office space. Staff spend less time searching thanks to instant document retrieval and only print out documents for correspondence, cutting down on printer output and storage space. According to Chris Reynolds, senior consultant at Viking Office Systems Ltd., the value-added reseller that implemented MAC Financial’s Laserfiche solution, “They don’t print anymore.” With over 5,000 clients, that’s an incredible amount of paper that has been eliminated.

Eliminating paper was only one aspect of the implementation; McGowan knew that MAC Financial needed a document management platform that would support integration with the company’s CRM system, MIG Turbo®. “Everything we do begins and ends with client information that we enter, store and manage in MIG Turbo,” McGowan says. “We knew that we needed not only the document management aspects, but also scalability and the ability to custom integrate into how we did business.”

Viking provided the integration between Laserfiche and MIG Turbo that met MAC Financial’s needs. This integration dynamically searches the Laserfiche repository from within the MIG Turbo interface, while automatic login to the Laserfiche platform saves time and makes the integration easy to use. This seamless integration means that users only see one program—MIG Turbo—which has, according to Reynolds, “revolutionized the way they work since everything is in the same place.”

The benefits of this integration between Laserfiche and MIG Turbo are enormous. “Without Laserfiche, we would have had at least twice as many staff employed at our offices,” McGowan says. “Not to mention the space saving through the absence of paper documents and filing cabinets.”

Since implementing Laserfiche, client service has noticeably improved. Comprehensive search capabilities enable staff to search through client information instantaneously, without leaving their desks to go up to the attic. In addition, staff can access documents simultaneously, something impossible with paper files. “There’s no more shouting ‘Where’s the file?’, as any person can access the records in conjunction with our core CRM system,” McGowan comments. “We’ve definitely noticed faster, more dedicated responses to client queries.”

The benefits aren’t limited to enhanced front-end customer service; Laserfiche’s flexibility has also helped MAC Financial improve back-end operations. When an employee emigrated to Australia, instead of losing a valuable employee, McGowan and his staff used Laserfiche to enable her to work on their systems through a virtual private network (VPN), a set-up that was, according to Reynolds, “straightforward and uncomplicated.” Taking the time difference into account, this means that MAC Financial is able to update accounts on a nearly round-the-clock basis.

In the future, McGowan plans to continue enhancing the integration between Laserfiche and MIG Turbo. He’s also considering implementing WebLink™ to enable clients to access information from their home computers. “We’re definitely considering whether an ‘extranet’ offering to clients for our financial services products is required,” he says. “We would like to see what role Laserfiche could play in this.

“It’s been an exciting process getting to this point, and we continue looking for ways to streamline wherever we can,” McGowan adds. “Our philosophy is to continue to innovate in both technology and process, and Laserfiche is a critical component of our plans going forward.

“Essentially, Laserfiche has moved us from the paper century to the electronic century.”

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.

When Levitz began investigating document management solutions, he surveyed his broker/dealer network about solutions they were using. A few were already satisfied Laserfiche users. “Because we’re semi-independent, we were free to make our own technology decision. Other firms that were using Laserfiche see it as a great solution. For us, it was a common-sense decision, a real no-brainer.”

To deploy Laserfiche, GCG used what Levitz calls a “phased but quick implementation,” where the firm “focused on fixing small things instead of large things.” The firm began scanning individual business files, then on to advisor and administrative files, compliance files, new investment business files, new group files and finally HR files.

“Taking baby steps at first is what made our implementation a success,” Levitz adds. “You have to start small if you want to be successful when you eventually go big.”

The firm employs a full-time staff member to scan documents, which Levitz finds helps processing move faster, while Human Resources, Licensing and the Group Department all handle their own scanning, which saved the firm from having to hire additional staff. And because GCG began with day-forward scanning, its business processes were paperless immediately. “Eventually we’ll get to back-scanning,” Levitz says. “It just wasn’t an immediate priority.”

What was an immediate priority was finding a way to integrate Laserfiche into their daily work processes. Working with their Laserfiche reseller, Cities Digital, Inc., GCG designed an integration with the two databases, EZData’s SmartOffice and Zywave’s Brokerage Builder, that support their primary business lines. With this integration, staff use a “hot key” to pull information from the database into Laserfiche. Because the file structure in Laserfiche mimics the file structure of their databases and original hard file system, staff have found it very easy to work with, according to Levitz.

In fact, Levitz speaks highly of Cities Digital’s support. “They’re more than just a reseller, they have been a business partner,” he says. “We couldn’t ask for more from them. They’re awesome, and they’ve really made our lives easier.”

He emphasizes the importance of working with a reseller that understands the financial services industry. “Cities Digital works with a lot of financial services firms, so they were able to provide us with a folder structure so we didn’t have to spend the time creating one ourselves,” Levitz explains. “ We continually send them our document archives on CD, which satisfies the SEC’s third-party download retention requirements. And they’ve really spent the time to understand how we operate, so they can help us become more efficient.”

But before Cities Digital could understand how to improve their business processes, Levitz adds, he had to first understand them. “Speed is very important for our advisors,” he says. “Any way you can reduce the time lags and the cost of paper processing is vital.”

What Levitz immediately realized was that Laserfiche could automate new business processing. When an order arrives, it’s immediately scanned into Laserfiche. Workflow files the documents to the correct subfolder within the individual client folder, then routes it to a principal for approval. The principal approves the order by signing on a secure digital signature pad – another Cities Digital custom integration, which, remarks Cities Digital CEO Patrick Welsch, enables compliance officers to approve documents more efficiently, regardless of where they’re working. And, finally, Workflow automatically routes the approved order paperwork to GCG’s broker-dealer for processing.

Welsch believes that GCG’s willingness to challenge accepted business processes was key to their success. “GCG has a dedicated spirit of innovation,” he says. “Their relentless search for efficiency gains brought about many creative solutions. We love working with customers like GCG that push the envelope and challenge us to create unique applications to solve new problems.”

Levitz is continuing to search for those creative applications for the firm’s Laserfiche system. Since attending the 2009 Laserfiche Institute Conference, Levitz says he realizes how much more Workflow could do. “There’s a whole new world out there with Workflow that we need to get to. We’ve done three workflows already, but I dreamed up 20 more in the two days of the conference,” he laughs. “Laserfiche is really a piece of clay. The question comes down to, ‘What can we do with it?’

What started as a flexible document management solution has transformed the very way GCG manages its business processes. “Laserfiche has become the center of our operations. It’s helped us define and refine our work processes,” Levitz says. “We recently lost a key staff member, and it wasn’t nearly as devastating as we thought it would be. Two or three years ago, that would have been an entirely different story.”

In fact, Laserfiche has streamlined operations so much, Levitz realized advisors no longer needed individual assistants. Instead, GCG restructured its support staff into a “pod system,” with one pod focused on communications and another focused on new business processing. “Even though our advisors and support staff may not be in the same location, we were able to bring them together with technology,” he says. “It’s really a case of doing more with less.”

Though Levitz was able to cut down on operating costs, his advisors see Laserfiche as an investment in their time and effort, which has been key to Laserfiche being so unanimously adopted throughout the firm. “We told them, ‘We’re building this around you, and you can decide when you want to be a part of it,’” he says. “We gave people what they needed to make the right decision. When they saw that there wasn’t a single instance of Laserfiche losing information, eventually, they all bought in.”

Even though Laserfiche’s ease of use won over reluctant advisors, Levitz says the biggest revelation has been how powerful Laserfiche actually is. “When we first got Laserfiche, I was faced with rooms of skeptics, including my brothers. I thought, ‘Oh, it will file paper.’ But the reality is, to get the most out of the software, you have to think about what you should be doing that you aren’t.

“Now we can’t live without it.”

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.

Bakersfield, CA Bakersfield uses Laserfiche in all 19 of its city departments, as well as to provide documents to citizens over the Web. Thanks to Laserfiche, most public information requests are “D.I.Y.,” so when staff leave or retire, they don’t have to be replaced with new hires. And because the city has integrated Laserfiche with their GIS application, ArcIMS from ESRI, and their ERP application, Sungard Naviline, the savings are even more apparent. “With Laserfiche, you get more bang for the buck than with other imaging systems,” IT Director Bob Trammell says. “And when you make Laserfiche available to all your city departments, not just the City Clerk, that’s when you really begin to realize the benefits.”

BC Biomedical By scanning in the more than 10,000 patient requisitions received daily, BC Biomedical eliminated more than 25 hours a day spent filing original documentation. “The old way of doing things around here was extremely time-consuming and ineffective. Laserfiche has allowed us to multitask across several departments. I cannot stress enough how reliable, fast and easy the system is,” saysBusiness Systems Analyst/Project Manager Chris Fiorucci.

Bloss and Dillard, Inc. Quick Fields automatically creates the repository’s folder structure, files documents in the appropriate folders and sends policies to the appropriate underwriters. Without Quick Fields, staff would have to manually locate each folder after scanning it into Laserfiche. This automation saved 20 minutes per policy, resulting in more than $23,000 in saved labor costs.

Eaton County, MI, Prosecutor’s Office After implementing Laserfiche, the prosecutor’s office withdrew their request for an additional legal secretary, only one month after beginning to scan felony files. Additionally, they saved more than $10,000 in clerical staffing costs, and decreased office supply usage by nearly 35%. “These additional savings are annual, not one-time savings,” Jeffrey L. Sauter, the county’s prosecuting attorney comments. “In fact, I expect my supplies budget to decrease even more next year.”

Elk River, MN, Police Department Chief Jeffrey Beahen and his department saved more than $17,000 just in paper costs while realizing more energy and resources savings than they expected. When combined with budget cuts and man hours spent on other tasks, the savings really add up.

Feenan Financial Group Firm founder Tom Feenan discovered that he was spending $13,000 per year to rent space for file cabinets. Since implementing Laserfiche, they’ve eliminated the file cabinets and used that space as an office for a revenue-producing advisor.

Iredell Memorial Hospital Before Laserfiche, Iredell had to write off $40,000 per month due to lost and misplaced records. Now? They’ve reduced paper usage by 80% and eliminated lost records—and the write-offs that go along with them.

Meg Green & Associates Todd Battaglia, partner with Meg Green & Associates, a firm which manages $600 million in assets, saves $35,000 to $40,000 per year with Laserfiche. In addition, Laserfiche saves the firm an additional $8,000 a year by reducing filing space, so they could turn a former file room into an office for an advisor.

Rehmann Financial For this dually-registered RIA firm with 13 offices in 2 states, Laserfiche has streamlined workflow enterprise-wide, but it’s their compliance department that’s seen the most immediate, discernible benefits. As Operations Manager Amy Flourry explains, “Our compliance staff are now doing audits remotely, whereas before they would have to travel to all the other offices. We’re saving on mileage, hotel costs, time out of the office, meals—a whole laundry list of expenses that we’ve reduced just by using Laserfiche.”

Surrey, BC The city of Surrey Planning and Development Department issues 100 building permits per week, generating anywhere from 60 to 100 records related to each property and a minimum of 6,000 records weekly. By using Laserfiche, the department estimates they’ve reduced search and retrieval costs alone by $30,000 to $50,000 annually.

Wichita, KS Using Laserfiche as the foundation of their Web-based accident reporting system, the city of Wichita saved 50 to 60 staff hours and was able to raise fees by delivering an online service with immediate value. Wichita now charges $16 for each report, and charges to insurance companies have also increased from $2 to $16 per report.

Xpyria Investment Advisors Xpyria, an investment advisory firm that works with high-net-worth individuals, didn’t just save money by using Laserfiche to eliminate off-site storage. “We always figured we’d have to hire more people to create the efficiency we needed,” President and CEO Joseph Salpietro remembers. “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.”

Have you realized tremendous savings from your Laserfiche system? Let us know! We’re always interested in hearing from the Laserfiche community. If you’d like to share your story, I encourage you to comment on this post or e-mail me at melissa.henley@laserfiche.com.

Remember: the savings are out there.

“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.”

Pittsburgh, PA-based Xpyria had grown to ten full-time employees and two adjunct professionals since being incorporated in 1990. After joining the firm in 1996, Salpietro now serves as Xpyria’s president and CEO. The firm now manages approximately $400 million in assets for 140 clients in 14 states and three countries, providing investment and supervisory services to primarily institutional clients and high-net worth individuals.

Salpietro had been aware of the need for Xpyria to implement a document management solution since becoming an owner eight years ago. “It was always on our radar, but was never within reach,” he remembers. “But as our business evolved, it became more and more reasonable to pursue.”

Once faced with hiring more staff members to keep up with the paper chase, he realized Xpyria could simply use Laserfiche. “The technology was there, the expertise was there and it was applicable to our industry and the way we did business,” he says.

Xpyria needed Laserfiche to do two things. First, integrate with Advent Axys, the firm’s asset management platform, and Junxure, the firm’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Secondly, Laserfiche had to help Salpietro’s team minimize labor costs and maximize leverage, because while managing client records and documenting phone calls and e-mails were important, he didn’t want to pay his top earners to do it. “I always want to have talented people doing mission-critical, profitable work. What I don’t want to do is pay someone top dollar to file documents.”

Or spend all their time implementing new software.

When Salpietro and the Xpyria team investigated a competing document management system, they were disconcerted with the amount of effort staff would have to expend on developing the system. But once they met their Laserfiche reseller, One Source/ADI, they realized that they could turn most of their system’s development over to the experts.

President and CEO of Xpyria Investment Advisors, Joe Salpietro

“We were trying to figure out how to streamline our file trees, and they said, ‘Let us take a crack at it based on what we know about your industry and then you look at it.’ That’s what we needed,” Salpietro says. “Thanks to them, we only have one person functioning as a project manager instead of 10. I don’t want 10 people implementing Laserfiche—I want 10 people educated on Laserfiche and using Laserfiche, but I want them focused on our business, not on the technology behind it.

“Having a partner to ease the pain of implementation, especially one who understood our industry, was key, because the reality is that without a good service partner, things can fall apart very quickly,” he adds.

Salpietro worked with One Source/ADI, the firm’s reseller, to integrate Laserfiche, Junxure and Axys so staff could immediately improve client service. The results, he says, were instantaneous. “When we’re servicing our clients, I can access information in one or two keystrokes. I can retrieve correspondence from two years ago without moving from my desk,” he says. “And that just creates more time for me to handle additional client research, which ultimately helps the client and our performance.”

Salpietro also realized the firm’s paper storage would still be an issue, especially with respect to meeting SEC requirements. With One Source/ADI’s experience and Laserfiche’s reputation in the financial services industry, he felt confident that the firm’s Laserfiche solution would meet, if not exceed, SEC requirements. “I really didn’t want to spend too much grey matter figuring out what the SEC wanted and didn’t want in a technology solution.

“What Laserfiche has afforded us is the confidence that I’d have an advantage in audit time, when it next comes around,” he continues. “Compliance has always been a major challenge, but it’s become far more intense in the last five years. When the SEC used to come in 10 years ago, we’d pull the boxes they were looking for, and they had to spend the time going through the boxes. Now, they call you a week or two before they show up and ask for the specific information they want to see in electronic form. Everything else was swept to the sidelines for a week or two until we found everything. We didn’t want to go through that anymore.”

The SEC also requires the firm to store documents for three years on-site and then an additional four-to-ten years (depending on document type) off-site. “We’d ship stuff off to cold storage, but because you’re charged by the square foot, as you accumulate more and more documents, it gets pretty pricey,” Salpietro says. How pricey? “We were indirectly involved in litigation, where our records were subpoenaed by court order for another firm who was being sued, and it cost us over $1,500 to retrieve those documents—and we weren’t even a party to the case.”

Once Laserfiche was up and running, the firm started with day-forward scanning, and then moved on to capturing the three years’ worth of documents stored on-site. “I don’t have to send another box off-site for storage,” he says. “And it’s not just one box a year, it’s dozens of boxes. And that’s a big cost that’s going to go away.”

For 2009, Salpietro’s looking forward to implementing Workflow and Quick Fields to further streamline the firm’s repetitive work processes. “Eliminating the highest cost to my firm has never been my rent,” he says. “A lot of people think if you have an office in a metropolitan city, the highest cost to a business is infrastructure, and in that regard, it’s not. It’s the people I employ. So I’d rather have them doing mission-critical, profitable work.”

For firms considering implementing document management technology, Salpietro stresses the importance of choosing a quality local service provider to the success of his firm’s implementation.

“The lesson I’ve learned is that it’s all about the integrity of the organization you’re working with. And we’ve gotten the support we need from both our reseller and from Laserfiche,” he says. “The long term outcome will be just what we want.”

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.”

With staff in 38 offices across the city’s 148 square miles, Bakersfield achieves a broad range of benefits.

“There’s no reason to limit Laserfiche to a single department or use,” he adds. “Using Laserfiche in all departments means we really achieve results.

“For example, our human resources department puts performance evaluations into Laserfiche. Our fire department has a HazMat folder that only department personnel have access to, so the locations of hazardous material won’t become public knowledge. But it’s available in Laserfiche to the fire crew 24/7, so they can know any potential danger at a fire site.”

Bakersfield, CA, IS Director Bob Trammell

According to Trammell, the city was recently asked to cooperate with the California Attorney General’s office, which was conducting a major probe into price fixing. Staff had to collect all purchase records that met certain pre-determined criteria. “This would have required a lot of city resources,” he says. “Instead, we set up the Attorney General’s office with a Laserfiche account so they could access and search the necessary records themselves—which saved a great deal of time for us.”

But besides using Laserfiche to eliminate paper and simplify information retrieval, Bakersfield has also expanded Laserfiche enterprise-wide by integrating it with the city’s ERP system, Sungard NaviLine, and their GIS system, ESRI ArcGIS.

Bakersfield uses Laserfiche as the foundation of an innovative program to combat graffiti, which Trammell believes wouldn’t be practical—or possible—without integrating Laserfiche and Sungard.

When a citizen reports graffiti, the city’s goal is to remove it within 24 hours. The graffiti removal crew uses the Sungard NaviLine Work Order module to record how much paint and time was required to remove the graffiti. Photographs of the graffiti are stored as JPEGs in Laserfiche and attached to the work order, so retrieving a work order also brings up photographs stored in Laserfiche.

Next, the Bakersfield Police Department analyzes the photographs stored in Laserfiche, recording repeated patterns as Laserfiche template field values. When police arrest a suspect, officers retrieve all recorded examples of their “work” from Laserfiche and use the Work Order module to calculate the cost of the graffiti removal. Then, the city files a civil lawsuit against the parents to recover cleanup costs.

“That’s a pretty good deterrent when you consider that the bill could add up to six figures,” says Trammell.

Prior to implementing this program, Bakersfield found itself in the situation of most cities—they would arrest a tagger and overcrowded courts would let the perpetrator out on probation until they were arrested again. “Civil suits are a much better deterrent,” Trammell says.

Given the success of the anti-graffiti program, Trammell and his staff plan to continue the city’s integration with Sungard. “We just finished bringing code enforcement online so that the department can store pictures of code violations in the system,” he says. “Our finance department is looking forward to storing invoices in the accounts payable section by next fiscal year. They already ‘cold-load’ auditing reports, storing them in Laserfiche instead of printing them out on paper, which means they’re searchable, so people can find them easily.”

But Bakersfield’s Sungard integration is just the start. The city has also fully integrated Laserfiche with their GIS system, ArcGIS from ESRI.

Downtown Bakersfield with City Hall and Police Headquarters at left and Hall of Records at right

“About 12 years ago, around the same time that we purchased Sungard and Laserfiche, we also purchased an ESRI system,” Trammell remembers. “We needed a good tool to provide GIS services to various city departments. Almost all the work the City does is related to GIS. It’s one of the cornerstones of our IT infrastructure.”

According to Trammell, almost every city department has used the ESRI GIS system, and, in fact, GIS was one of his main goals for building Bakersfield’s IT infrastructure. “I really felt that there needed to be three main components—ERP, document management and GIS. Once we selected Sungard, Laserfiche and ESRI, we began to look for ways to integrate them. With our ESRI system, we store documents in Laserfiche and, through integration, retrieve them spatially,” he says.

In the city’s ESRI system, users can select a parcel or area of the city and search Laserfiche for documents relating to that particular area. “They can retrieve documents ranging from AutoCAD drawings to planning documents to fire HazMat information to photographs, whatever we have in the system,” Trammell says.

The ESRI integration took only about two months to complete, with city IT staff performing all of the work themselves. Currently, Public Works is using the ESRI/Laserfiche integration, with the Fire Department, Police Department and Building Department all planning to use it in the near future. “It’s very useful, because staff can quickly find the information they need,” Trammell says.

With Laserfiche fully integrated into the city’s IT infrastructure, Bakersfield’s IT staff is striving to live up to the city’s motto, “Life as it should be,” both for city staff and residents. “Our residents like the ability to quickly search for documents without having to go to the City Clerk’s office,” Trammell says. “And our staff appreciates the ability to store their own documents for quick retrieval. For our IT staff, we find that Laserfiche requires very little support—which is very important to us.”

CSU Bakersfield's Walter Stiern Library

Trammell believes that all cities can find benefits in Laserfiche, so he does not hesitate to recommend it to colleagues. “With Laserfiche, you get more bang for the buck than with other imaging systems,” he says. “And when you make it available to all your city departments, not just the City Clerk, that’s when you really begin to realize the benefits.

“You really should look at integrating Laserfiche with your ERP and GIS systems, because once you’ve done an integration, you really find that there’s nothing to it,” he adds. “We’ve realized enormous benefits from integrating other applications with Laserfiche, and that’s why we anticipate even more success in the future.”

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.”

Anderson found the ideal solution in Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME), which centralizes scanned paper and electronic records while automating records retention and destruction. “What I like about Laserfiche is that I can manage electronic documents, paper, microfilm and audio and video files enterprise-wide,” Anderson says.

Collin County’s journey to provide order to their paper-based legal system began with a two-year project in the district court clerk’s office, converting paper case files from 1846-2000 into archival images—a total of over ten million images.

Anderson then expanded the plan to manage archiving, retention and management of case files for the county court, integrating RME with the county’s CMS. RME provides back-end records retention for closed and inactive case files. “It’s very easy to use, and it helps us meet our goal of providing quality, cost-effective public service,” she notes.

Laserfiche also helps the district attorney’s office operate more efficiently. “We’ve scanned felony case files into Laserfiche, which has been great,” Anderson says. “Our old content manager didn’t have full-text search capability, and it didn’t manage records retention. With RME, it’s easy to manage retention periods, which can range from 25-50 years, and it’s simple to locate information.”

Anderson realized the value of the county’s Laserfiche system when a flood in May 2007 damaged nearly 1,000 boxes of records—many of them with no backup. “It’s clear how important Laserfiche is for business continuity,” she says. “Had those files been stored in Laserfiche, we wouldn’t have needed to worry when the flood waters started rising. People worry about computers crashing, but in reality, paper documents are much more likely to be destroyed than digital ones.”

Laserfiche also offers the flexibility Collin County needs to expand enterprise-wide—while still meeting each department’s unique needs. The county is implementing Laserfiche in the property tax department to digitally store copies of checks, stubs and letters received as part of the annual property tax receipting process. Planning for the next budget cycle includes integrating Laserfiche with SunGard® HTE in the auditor’s office to manage accounts payable documents. The development department also plans to integrate Laserfiche with its existing GIS application to manage septic system records. Eventually, most county records will be stored in Laserfiche and will be viewable over the Internet.

“I’ve been really pleased with the system,” Anderson says. “But what I’m most looking forward to is expanding our records retention plan to include electronic records—which will make us better prepared to comply with e-discovery orders.”

Anderson isn’t the only one who’s pleased. County staff have been so delighted that they’re spreading the word to other departments. “The response to Laserfiche has been so positive, that it’s been difficult to keep up with demand for new installations,” she says. “I’ve just had to start saying ‘No’ nicely—and tell them ‘You’ll just have to learn to wait your turn.’”

The Toolkit provides an application programming interface, or API, for Laserfiche. Using the Toolkit, you can create your own customized Laserfiche scripts and programs, integrate with third-party applications, and control the Laserfiche client itself. Version 8.0 of the Toolkit provides an updated version of Laserfiche Server Objects and Document Processor to allow integrators to take advantage of all of the new functionality in Laserfiche 8, as well as providing a way to access real-time notifications from the Server. It offers powerful object-oriented API, with several components that enable you to automate a variety of Laserfiche-related tasks.

Don’t forget that the Code Library has sample applications and supplemental information to help you create and customize your own Toolkit applications. You can review code posted by Laserfiche staff, users and resellers – and even post your own. And if you need more information, at the Toolkit Forum you can post questions and get answers directly from the Laserfiche developers, resellers and integrators.

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

Laserfiche is an electronic document management system (EDMS) firm with a worldwide network of value-added resellers. Laserfiche plans to promote the integration of DocXP to end-users and resellers through a variety of channels, including Webinars, newsletters and its annual Laserfiche Institute Conference.

Peladon Software develops and markets an extensive line of automated document processing and data capture solutions, including the DocXP document classification, automated redaction, data extraction and data verification software modules for the healthcare, banking & finance, education, legal, retail, insurance and government markets.

“The integration of DocXP with Laserfiche 8 will greatly benefit end-users looking to automate manual data capture and streamline their operations. We believe our reseller community will have a very positive reaction to this integration,” said Alex Wilson, Product Manager at Laserfiche. “We are very enthusiastic about the seamless integration of these two products and about our partnership with Peladon Software,” Wilson added.

“Partnering with Laserfiche is a fantastic opportunity for Peladon. Laserfiche is a first-class organization with proven, leading-edge products.  We look forward to providing Laserfiche’s end-users and reseller community with a document capture solution that is tightly integrated with Laserfiche 8,” said Noel Flynn, Chief Operating Officer of Peladon Software.

 About Laserfiche

Laserfiche creates simple and elegant document management solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, Laserfiche has helped more than 25,000 organizations—including state and local governments, financial services firms and healthcare providers —optimize business processes and reduce operating costs.

Laserfiche captures and indexes all your organization’s business content—from documents and faxes to e-mails and multimedia files—in a secure, central repository. A unified metadata model helps users easily classify information, while full-text search tools enable them to quickly find what they need. Laserfiche’s open architecture and flexible API promote rapid integration with other Web- and Windows-based applications, allowing users to capture, manage and distribute information in diverse working environments.

Laserfiche software is distributed by a worldwide network of value-added resellers, who have extensive experience creating solutions that meet clients’ specific business needs. In recognition of the outstanding training and support we provide our resellers, the Laserfiche VAR program has received a five-star rating from VARBusiness magazine.

About the Laserfiche Professional Developer Partnership Program

Launched in 2007, the Laserfiche Professional Developer Partnership (PDP) program provides the tools you need to integrate software applications with the leading document management solution. From comprehensive development resources to ongoing sales support, we’ve designed our PDP program to provide software developers, resellers and integrators with the resources they need to successfully develop, complete and market integrations with Laserfiche.

About Peladon Software

Peladon Software, a wholly owned division of Data & Research Services PLC, provides automated data capture solutions for the banking, insurance, financial, healthcare and government markets. The company offers an extensive line of document processing products, including the DocXP modules.  Peladon’s products allow companies across the globe to reduce operating costs, obtain higher information accuracy and speed processing times. Using Peladon’s solutions, clients become more efficient and competitive, allowing better, faster decision making.

With the depth and strength of a parent company such as DRS, a market leader in the data capture arena for more than 35 years, Peladon offers the finest automated data capture technology, combined with world-class customer support. 

Press Contacts:

Noel Flynn
Peladon Software
858-634-5405
Noel.Flynn@peladonsoftware.com

Bridget Baker
Peladon Software
619-743-2899
Bridget.Baker@peladonsoftware.com

We’ve also redesigned the layout of individual entries to make them easier to read and to help you quickly find the information you’re looking for. Click here to see an example.

We invite you to take a few minutes to browse the Marketplace and to learn more about solutions—including digital signatures, electronic forms processing and Laserfiche-GIS integration—that will help your organization work smarter.

Prior to issuing an RFP, the county’s decision makers selected four departments—corrections, finance, human services and environmental services—to participate in a pilot document imaging program. They then assembled a committee that included staff from each department. “Because everyone would eventually use the system, we involved as many people as possible in the decision-making process,” Berg explains. “We wanted to approach the implementation from a county-wide perspective rather than an IT perspective.”

Working with a consultant, IT staff wrote an RFP for an enterprise document management solution. After evaluating the responses, the committee invited four vendors to demo their systems. “Laserfiche^® ranked the highest,” Grossmann remembers. “Staff said Laserfiche had features they could use, while the other systems were unnecessarily complicated.”

Staff in the pilot departments started scanning documents into Laserfiche in 2002, and Berg and Grossmann noticed immediate results. With Laserfiche, staff can retrieve documents in seconds, without leaving their desks. In addition, the Laserfiche Workflow™ module automatically routes documents among staff members, eliminating the need to physically carry file folders between desks or departments. Laserfiche even streamlines the audit process—now, auditors simply sit at a workstation and use the system’s search tools to find what they need, while staff go about their business.

Because the county uses a variety of primary business applications, integration also played a key role in the committee’s selection of Laserfiche. “From the outset, we knew that we needed a solution that could serve as the document management ‘back-end’ for our other applications, without requiring elaborate custom programming,” Grossmann says. With its open architecture and flexible API, Laserfiche fully met this need. “Our Laserfiche reseller, Crabtree Companies, did an excellent job of explaining what we could do with the system,” she adds. “They helped us get started, but we completed most of the integrations ourselves.”

Located in the county seat of Mankato, the Blue Earth County courthouse was built in 1886.

One of the county’s most visible integrations is between Laserfiche and MUNIS^®, which the finance department uses to manage accounts payable. When the department receives an invoice, staff enter information—such as the invoice’s date, number and amount—in MUNIS. At the click of a button, they then open the Laserfiche scanning interface within MUNIS and scan the document into the Laserfiche repository. Thanks to the tight integration between the two systems, Laserfiche automatically pulls relevant document metadata from MUNIS and uses this information to index the scanned image file.

Retrieving a scanned document is equally quick. Staff simply locate the invoice record in MUNIS, then click a button to retrieve it from Laserfiche. Because the integration is so seamless, a lot of users don’t even realize that documents are stored in another system.

For Berg, the MUNIS integration truly exemplifies how Laserfiche has helped the county improve internal work processes. “In the past, retrieving an invoice would literally take days,” he says. “First, I’d log in to our financial application and look up the invoice’s number. I’d then have to call the finance department and submit my request. When staff in that department had time, they’d locate the original invoice, make a photocopy and put it in the interoffice mail.”

Because this process was so slow, Berg began photocopying every invoice he received, so he’d have it for future reference. “I was storing thousands of invoices in my office, and each year the pile would grow higher and higher,” he says. “Using Laserfiche, I can literally find any invoice I need in a matter of seconds, and my office is a lot less cluttered.”

Reducing paper clutter also translates into additional cost savings for the county, because departments can make better use of available space. By scanning its case files into Laserfiche, the corrections department, for example, has eliminated the need for a records room altogether. The 900 square foot space previously needed to house paper now serves as an office for four staff members.

Currently, fourteen of the county’s fifteen departments use Laserfiche, and the county’s repository holds more than six million documents. Using the Integrator’s Toolkit™, IT staff have integrated Laserfiche with several other systems, including the county’s Unisys^® mainframe and the Fidlar^® system it uses to manage property records. These integrations have proven so successful that, as part of the RFP process, the county now requires software vendors to confirm that their applications integrate with Laserfiche.

IT staff have several initiatives planned for the year ahead, including an integration between Laserfiche and the county’s GIS application. They also plan to use the WebLink™ module to provide citizens with online access to a variety of documents, from agendas and meeting minutes to property, birth and death records. They’ll also continue one of their most successful programs—hiring developmentally disabled residents to scan archived documents into the Laserfiche repository.

When asked about the lessons she and her colleagues learned during the implementation process, Grossmann emphasizes the importance of active communication between IT staff and the system’s users. “We definitely had to manage users’ expectations,” she says. “Our probation officers, for example, didn’t want to give up their paper files—we literally had to take them away. But once we showed them how the new system worked, they clearly saw its benefits.

“Thanks to an integration between Laserfiche and our court services tracking system, the officers can access scanned documents with a single click. And they no longer have to carry armloads of case files around. Instead, they simply take their laptops into the field and, using VPN, they connect to the Laserfiche repository and call up any document they need.”

The Kennedy Bridge is one of the few surviving wrought iron bridges in Minnesota.

Other users, she continues, tried to recreate their old work processes in Laserfiche, which often prevented them from making the best use of the system’s tools. “In our corrections department, for instance, the paper files were so thick that they included section dividers, and staff were in the habit of locating a particular form by looking in ‘Section Four’ or ‘Section Six.’

“As part of the process of scanning these files, users attempted to recreate this familiar filing structure in Laserfiche. We had to step in and explain that electronic section dividers or subfolders weren’t necessary, because the system’s search tools would help them quickly find what they need, without having to manually navigate through a complex folder structure.

“We even had a few users who thought that managing documents electronically would add to their workload, or that they’d have to hire additional staff to do all the scanning,” Grossmann concludes. “When we heard this, we simply pointed to our pilot program and all the success we had. Far from adding to anyone’s workload, Laserfiche has provided staff with much faster access to information, leaving them with more time to help the county’s citizens.”

Before installing Laserfiche, Alexandria archived its documents on paper and microfiche. With a rich history dating back to the eighteenth century, the city could ill afford to trust the aging system. Says Milligan, “We have all kinds of documentation dating back to the early 1900s. Our paper copies and microfiche were beginning to deteriorate. We didn’t want to update that technology—we needed an imaging system.”

With the goal of quickly responding to document requests from citizens, city councilors and staff, Milligan set out to implement an electronic document management system. She’d already heard a lot about document imaging from her colleagues, and she believed it was important to get a city-wide system in place that would enable all city departments to share documents.

Milligan already had a good idea of what was important to her in a document management system: “Good support and easy maintenance. I also wanted to ensure we could access the system over the Web and that it could support a Microsoft® .NET™ programming environment. Because we were going to import personnel files to conform to state-mandated retention dates, I knew we had to have security as tight as we could get it—down to the file level.”

Laserfiche security features made the product stand out over the others the committee considered. The ability to redact sensitive information such as Social Security numbers was a big plus for Milligan. “I also liked it because it took different media— paper, microfiche, aperture cards—in different sizes,” she recalls. “And Workflow™ was so easy to set up because it’s so familiar—it’s just like Windows® Explorer.”

Alexandria first installed Laserfiche in the fire and code departments, and it wasn’t long before other departments wanted Laserfiche for themselves. Says Milligan, “When the staff got a taste of it, they loved it. As with anything city-wide, it took a while to get them started, but once we did, we couldn’t stop them. It sells itself.”

Currently, both the accounting and treasury divisions of the finance department, as well as the planning and zoning, police personnel, city attorney, environmental services, transportation and IT departments use Laserfiche. Getting the support of the city was easy once staff noticed the improved work environment and saved storage space. Milligan estimates that it took a few weeks to get each initial installation up and running smoothly. And the results have been dramatic.

“We get a lot of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from citizens,” Milligan continues. “Instead of making all these copies, you can hit one button and print the documents, or e-mail them to citizens.”

“FOIA requests have short turnaround times,” says Supervisory Administrative Officer Virginia Clarke. “They usually require some action within 24 hours—at least to respond with the cost of reproduction. If we don’t meet the deadline, the city is subject to monetary penalties. When we had to go off-site to find the document, the 24 hours were gone. With Laserfiche, we can see how many documents we have and calculate the cost without leaving our desks.”

City Hall overlooks the Alexandria Farmer’s Market.

Searching through files was tough enough when things were properly filed, but misfiled documents were particularly aggravating. “Previously,” recalls Clarke, “if something was misfiled, it was a nightmare trying to find it. But Laserfiche corrected that problem. If something’s been misfiled, we can search for it in any number of ways, get the information we need and file it properly without missing a beat.”

Accounting Clerk Jan Pettey notes the boost in efficiency: “I scan all the AP and payroll documents,” she says. “We were looking for something that would make it easy to search for paid invoices —and we found it in Laserfiche. Now staff can go directly into Laserfiche instead of asking accounting to pull the originals and send copies. They have so many ways to search: by payment voucher, invoice, vendor number or document number. They really like it—we rarely get calls any more.”

Laserfiche has greatly improved efficiency for the IT fiscal analyst by eliminating backlog-related errors due to the huge volume of invoices. “We set up Workflow so that the second the invoices come in, they’re scanned and e-mailed directly to the person who has to approve them,” says Milligan. “Invoices get paid much faster, and they don’t get lost. And I can refer back to them easily to calculate how much I spent on a specific project.”

As Alexandria expands its system, Milligan is overseeing an increasing number of integrations with other applications. Alexandria has already integrated Laserfiche with the city’s real estate receivables software, and will soon do the same with its GIS and permitting programs. The city is also upgrading its treasury department’s collection system to automatically file checks upon scanning. Milligan largely relies on Quick Fields™ to streamline operations for departments using these integrations. “Because it automatically populates the data fields, it greatly reduces errors by filing documents in the right places,” she says.

Milligan is about to roll out Laserfiche to the city clerk’s office, which has long posted past agenda packets and city council meeting minutes to the city’s Website as TIFF files. However, citizen demand to access them in PDF format led Milligan to try a couple of conversion methods, both of which were painfully slow. She was pleased to learn that a simple tweak with the Integrator’s Toolkit™ would enable Laserfiche to import TIFFs and export them out as PDFs all at once.

Alexandria currently has 387 licenses, and is gearing up to add more. Milligan is in the process of installing Laserfiche in the sheriff’s office, with plans to add the real estate asessment, housing and finance revenue departments. “We had to start with baby steps,” she says. “But soon we’ll be city-wide. I hope to get a site license soon to expand access even further. It’s just a great product.”

Milligan’s advice to other cities just starting implementation? Be prepared. “I suggest getting a technical team ready, because it could take off overnight. And when it does take off, you’re absolutely bombarded—I could keep six programmers busy right now.”

But she’s sure next year will be bigger and better, and she’ll have even more valuable advice. Meanwhile, Virginia Clarke sums up the sentiments of Alexandria’s staff: “It’s wonderful to be able to access our documents this way. It’s fantastic.”

Once it had developed a substantial archive, however, Buffalo began to outgrow its initial digital system. In addition to experiencing support problems when the city upgraded its operating system, staff found that the search function became painfully slow when the document database accumulated several years’ worth of records.

MIS Coordinator Chris Shinnick

With an eye toward efficient search and retrieval, as well as integration with the city’s GIS system, Auger and MIS Coordinator Chris Shinnick formed a committee to spearhead the search for a new digital document management system. Shinnick remembers, “We wanted a system that could do a better job of organizing our information, so that we could purge documents to keep them from taking up physical space in our office. We needed to import documents from the previous system, perform full-text searches and save disk space by efficiently storing files. Staff also needed a secure system that would enable the city to share public documents over the Web.”

Shinnick consulted with experts from other cities, many of whom recommended Laserfiche^®. After demonstrations from Laserfiche, Fortis^® and DocuWare^®, Laserfiche was the clear winner. Not only could Laserfiche software meet all the city’s requirements, but its ease of use made it the overwhelming favorite of city staff. The user interface was so straightforward that it made the other options seem difficult and cumbersome by comparison. “The search function in Laserfiche was so much more dynamic than in our previous product,” says Auger.

A few months after purchasing Laserfiche, Buffalo had installed all the features it needed and completed its document conversion. The city then faced the challenge of accommodating all the city staff who wanted to scan documents into the system. Buffalo set up a second scanning station to handle the demand. Now, the city’s administration, finance, utility billing, water/sewer/electric and engineering departments all use Laserfiche, with users in different locations connecting to the same system.

“Laserfiche saves us a tremendous amount of room, and the time savings are incalculable. It’s a perfect interface for the way we do business and the operating philosophy we have.”

—Merton Auger
City Administrator

Implementing a geographical information system (GIS) integration was critical to Auger’s vision of collaboration. In addition to office staff relying on GIS for planning and zoning functions and utility services, field personnel needed access to these documents as well. “Whether it was our street department people trying to locate a storm sewer outlet or our water and sewer department looking for a water shutoff valve,” says Auger, “the bottom line was collaboration and cross-departmental functionality. Laserfiche met these criteria.”

Buffalo’s reseller, Crabtree Companies, Inc., helped the city find just the right tool to set up the integration. Geodoc, developed by Urban Crossroads, Inc., enabled Buffalo to link Laserfiche with its GIS software, ArcIMS™ from ESRI^®. Buffalo beta tested the product. “And it worked very well,” says Shinnick. “There wasn’t a lot of room for improvement or enhancement. They’ll continue to make enhancements to it, but for something that came right out of the box, it didn’t function like other beta products—it was already very good.”

Urban Crossroads is now making Geodoc available to users through the Laserfiche Professional Developer Partnership™ (PDP) program, which showcases innovative, third-party solutions to integration challenges. Information about this integration is available through the new PDP Marketplace.

“We have a mobile wireless network here in Buffalo,” adds Auger. “With the Laserfiche/GIS integration, both applications are Web-based so our field crews can access information from their laptops. That really supports the collaboration we need. If a citizen calls in about a broken streetlight or a manhole being plugged, the crew can use the tablet PC in their truck or car, access the database, find the location and fix the problem in real time.

“We also handle some of our Web-based functions for interaction with citizens that way. My philosophy has always been that whatever information we have is owned by the citizens of Buffalo. Basically, we want to get as much information as possible up and accessible for citizens. We also have a very big interest in achieving a paperless office, and that means you don’t exclude anything, except where there are security concerns to prevent access to people with wrongful intent.

“It goes along with our philosophy,” Auger continues, “that citizens should be able to access information any time they want. If they work during the day, they don’t want to get off work and come into our office to access information. They can go to our Website and access information when they want to, so we’re on their schedule. And it cuts down on our desk time, too.

Buffalo is currently in the process of getting the fire department onboard with the system. The city plans to arrange for laptops for the volunteer firefighters so they can log onto the system and realize the full benefit of the GIS integration. “Our plan,” says Auger, “is to push the system out to every department, so they have access to the information they need. Again, it’s all about collaboration.”

Auger, who is directly accountable to the city council, has been preparing agendas electronically for years, using Adobe® Acrobat®. Now he automatically enters those documents into the Laserfiche repository, so citizens and councilors can access them within the same folder structure they use to access all the city’s documents. Auger notes, “As a management practice, we scan almost everything and our people have been instructed how to use a central scanner.” That practice enables Auger to include handwritten or other non-digital supporting documentation with the council agendas.

Since the city installed Laserfiche, Shinnick has noticed positive changes in the way Buffalo conducts business. “Previously, a couple of people might be designated to ‘file’ documents,” he says. “Now each department is becoming more involved in the storing of this information and is taking an interest in it. They know that how they put the information into Laserfiche will determine how they get it out. It eliminates the problem of one person arbitrarily making decisions about where something gets filed because they don’t understand how the filing in each department functions.” Shinnick also notes that the Laserfiche solution has added to staff’s productive time, in some cases eliminating the need to hire new personnel or the need to go off-site to look for a document.

“Laserfiche has saved us a tremendous amount of time, money and space,” says Auger. “All of our property records are electronic, for example. All the building permits and planning and zoning information for particular parcels are stored in the Laserfiche repository. Our office would have to be about three times its current size just to store them, if we hadn’t adopted digital document management in such a big way.

“Yesterday, when someone called with a permit request, all our staff had to do was call the document up from the desktop and ask where to email it. When you do a simple search it comes up so fast—it saves so much personnel time. You used to have to go to the file, find the document, copy it—it could have taken hours. What’s more, a lot of times staff doesn’t even have to be involved—citizens can perform those searches themselves. I don’t even think we know how much time it’s saved us.”

Most valuable to Auger is the quick access to information from anywhere in the city for both staff and citizens. The staff and citizens of Buffalo love the system. “Just yesterday,” recalls Auger, “someone called the office asking for information about a building permit, and he happened to work for a nearby city of 40,000. Our front-desk staff was able to quickly email him a scanned document. He wrote back, ‘That’s really awesome—we can’t even do that where I work!’”

Buffalo’s Deer Lake Orchard produces a bountiful harvest each fall.

Auger finds Laserfiche especially useful when addressing city finances. “It really helps me when the council does the auditing of the bills,” he says. “Before, I had three large file folders full of paid claims, and if they wanted to question something I’d have dig through the whole file to find what they were looking for. It could take the whole hour we had set aside for the review just to find the right document. Now I just open the digital archive on the computer and I can locate the proper file right away. We have two large screens in the room we use for auditing, so I can bring it up on the screen for them to look at. It saves a tremendous amount of time.”

Shinnick is particularly enthusiastic about the Laserfiche Quick Fields™ bar code feature. “We’ve implemented that solution with our finance office so they can scan in paid invoices. It reads the voucher that gets attached with the details of what’s been paid and it automatically files it. They can just throw a stack of these things into the scanner and the system will scan them all, file them appropriately and fill in the template fields. It’s so quick and easy! It’s a tremendous tool for them.

“It didn’t take much to get that mechanism in place, either. We just had the company that supports our finance software add some bar codes to the bottom of the check stub voucher so that Quick Fields could read it.”

Buffalo plans to increase the already-sizable role that Laserfiche plays in its municipal planning, workflow and recordkeeping. Says Auger, “We’re going to be even more successful in the future and make the system even more accessible. I want to market the system so that citizens know it’s there. In order to be relevant to people, we have to do business the way they do it with their bank, or wherever they order online. Government has to be as relevant as anyone else, or more so.

“Laserfiche saves us a tremendous amount of room, and the time savings are incalculable. It’s a perfect interface for the way we do business and the operating philosophy we have.”

With the PDP, we’re inviting vendors of other software applications as well as independent integrators to create integrations with Laserfiche that customers can have demonstrated for them before they buy. This makes the integration much more out-of-the-box, and provides a much higher comfort level for the customer. As Laserfiche CEO Nien-Ling Wacker mentioned in her keynote speech at January’s user conference, we want the PDP to help turn the idea of integration from a monster to a teddy bear.

The Marketplace builds the Laserfiche community by expanding its knowledge base and publicizing innovative customizations and integrations. It’s where PDP members post the integrations and customizations with Laserfiche that they’ve created. It’s where users can share successful innovations for template fields, Quick Fields sessions, folder structures or other helpful configurations. Customers can take advantage of it to learn how better to set up their systems. They can also find out what integrations are available, read more about what each integration does and learn how to take the next step towards actually acquiring integrations they’re interested in. Customers can also request integrations they don’t see. It’s pretty easy for a software vendor to make a business case for an integration with Laserfiche if several of our customers have requested it. As we move forward, we’re also going to give customers the ability to post comments and rate offerings on the marketplace.

By giving our customers more options to run smarter, we strengthen the user community and offer more opportunities for innovation. Integration with Laserfiche can save a lot of time and money, so the more integrations that are available, the more opportunities our customers have to bring useful functionality to their organization. Sharing the success of particular configurations and strategies creates opportunities for other users to streamline their work processes and get the most from their installations.

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.”

Common Clerk Pat Woods kicked off the search for a system to help him meet the legal obligations of his office, which include preparing council agendas, maintaining and protecting documents and making them available to the public. He was looking for an integrated, scalable software tool that would automate document management in the clerk’s office but still be easy to operate and manage.

Business Integration Specialist Cindy Blizzard was project manager for the search, which began in 2004 with a needs assessment. She wanted to make sure that the product the city chose met the needs of the whole organization, not just the clerk’s office. Blizzard formed a committee of eight, from various departments, to develop a Request For Proposals and evaluate the seven responses. “We first ranked the responses based on the quality of the submission, the capacity to meet city requirements and the qualifications and experience of the companies,” says Blizzard.

The search committee then narrowed the field of contenders to three and, after viewing product demos from the companies, unanimously agreed on Laserfiche®. Says Blizzard, “We liked Laserfiche for its ease of use, its search capabilities and the flexibility of the system, particularly its ability to handle all types of documents.”

Elizabeth Gormley, Assistant Common Clerk, served on the committee. “One of our criteria was experience with municipal government projects, and Laserfiche certainly fit the bill there.” Other pluses were the Agenda Manager™ component, easy accessibility of documents over the Web and local support from the city’s reseller.

In April of 2005, Saint John began implementing Laserfiche and by July it had imported most of its electronic documents. Installing Laserfiche Records Management Edition turned out to be a tremendous advantage for Corporate Records Manager David Burke, who began using it in 2006. “Here in New Brunswick,” notes Burke, “the Provincial Archivist mandates that municipalities manage their records across their lifecycles according to specific schedules. The schedules are mated to a hierarchical, subject-based hierarchy known as the Municipal Records Authority for New Brunswick (MRA).” With over 900 different records series linking to 72 unique retention schedules, the requirements can be complex.

“I just knew there had to be some way to automate the process of getting information from the MRA into Laserfiche,” Burke recalls. Initially, Burke found a colleague in Alberta to share code from a custom program to link a spreadsheet with a Microsoft® Access database. Burke then worked with the city’s ISS department to set up a folder structure.

“About that time I found out that Laserfiche was developing a utility called the Record Series Setup,” says Burke. “With the help of our reseller, I integrated the MRA and RME and it works and looks good! It sets up the whole system—pulls all the information we need from the spreadsheet we designed, creates the folder structure and then points to the appropriate retention schedules. That would have been I-don’t-know-how-many millions of key strokes and clicks to do manually. That tool was invaluable.”

Assistant Common Clerk Gormley echoes Burke’s enthusiasm for Laserfiche. Agenda Manager has saved her immeasurable time in preparing city council agenda packets. She’s seen the stress of the job shrink right along with the volume of paper it takes to organize and distribute agendas and supporting documents for the biweekly meetings.

Gormley remembers, “We used to prepare 34 kits per meeting—enough for the press, all the city commissioners, some of the staff and the 11 council members. And they were never less than two inches thick.” Now the number is 16 and falling. The press and most of the commissioners access the agenda kits online and now the council members are beginning to use their laptops to access them online as well.

“In terms of time saved,” says Gormley, “the photocopying aspect alone was about eight hours per meeting. And inevitably, when you’re dealing with that many documents, and each packet contained hundreds, you generate a lot of heat and the machine would break down. Then you’re pushing the clock and adding more stress. But with Laserfiche, it’s just a click of a button and your document is submitted. You can review it right at your desk and it’s already stored in Laserfiche so you eliminate a process there. Now, instead of calling us, both the public and our own staff find what they need online.”

Royal Charter

Saint John, New Brunswick

This Royal Charter from 1785 establishes Saint John as the oldest incorporated city in Canada.

The Laserfiche search function is an added bonus. Gormley recalls the exhaustive process of trying to find an item for a municipal councillor, staff member or citizen in the days before Laserfiche. “It’s not only the agendas we’d be searching, but supporting documents. In the old days we’d manually search the agendas to find out if an item was on council. Then we’d physically have to go into a room, search through a box and dig out the file, find the report, make a copy, replace the report and give the copy to whomever was looking for it. Now we just say ‘Click on this,’ and there’s a report. We save the walking and the looking—it’s just an incredible advantage.”

The sharp decrease in calls to the clerk’s office has impressed Blizzard, too. “Staff used to report spending significant time searching for information on the computers in their shared drives or paper copies in the storage rooms. Now city staff and the public can easily find information with Laserfiche WebLink™ without having to contact the Clerk’s staff.”

Burke applauds Laserfiche search capabilities, too. “I’ve digitized the past council minutes from 1785 to the present. After 1934 they’re all typewritten and searchable through optical character recognition. Citizens can view and search them on the Web and they really see the benefit because council meetings are where all the decisions get made.”

Burke is particularly proud of a research project he did for the Commissioner of Building and Inspection Services on the property rezoning. “It took me three days to generate a 100-page history of a particular set of conditions in the city over the past five years—and at that point I was new to the system. The commissioner was able to present the findings to council and they were able to make an informed decision. Forget how long it would have taken to do manually—I don’t even know if it would have been feasible with paper.”

The integration of MRA and RME is just the beginning for Saint John. Blizzard is enthusiastic about future integrations. She envisions integrating Laserfiche with the city’s GIS application as well as the city’s management software, SunGard® HTE. In fact, after reading about the successful integration of Laserfiche and HTE in the Laserfiche Global Municipal Exchange, staff in Saint John contacted city staff in Bryan, Texas to learn how they did it.

Saint John’s integration of Laserfiche with MRA breaks new ground for New Brunswick. Says Burke, “We’re the first municipality in the province and probably in Atlantic Canada to apply retention schedules to our electronic records. That’s huge. We’re sharing our work with other municipalities, letting them know about that whole integration of the MRA and RME, including the city of Moncton, another Laserfiche user. We’re looking forward to working together with other municipalities, so we can have a uniform, efficient records management system.”

“My vision is: all documents all the time—online. I tell citizens, ‘You can be home in your pajamas at 3 o’clock in the morning reading the city code if you want to.’”

—Mary Feldman
City Recorder
CMO Laserfiche Implimentation Team

“It was a nightmare. Our land use chapter alone is 555 pages,” says Feldman. “We have a subscription service for citizens to get paper copies of the code, which we update five or six times a year. There was no correlation between what was on the Web and the page numbers people saw in their books. One of the big attractions of Laserfiche for me was that everyone could literally be on the same page.”

Now that Feldman uses Laserfiche to update and post the code, she saves about 20 hours of work for each major code revision. And citizens and staff have a common frame of reference—the page numbers are the same in the books and on the Web. Of course, with Laserfiche, residents can search using key words to find what they’re looking for as well.

“As a research tool, Laserfiche is wonderful,” says Council, Public and Governmental Affairs Manager Mary Walston. “Being able to search by key word is a terrific feature.”

Walston was part of the original team that looked at electronic solutions to help the city cut down on paper use and better manage its documents. The other products the team looked at fade in Walston’s memory because she was so impressed with Laserfiche. After a brief demo from her local reseller, V.P. Consulting, Walston was sold. “I was quite impressed with the ability to search as well as how quickly you could store documents,” she says.

There were two driving forces behind the city’s search for electronic document management. The first was the desire to cut down on the paper used to prepare city council agenda packets, running from 200-400 pages each week. The second was to make documents available to citizens over the Web.

Walston notes, “I couldn’t see the value of having Laserfiche only internally for the code, the council materials, the charter. We have people coming in or calling all the time asking for copies. We’d have to run and make a copy, send it, and charge them for it.”

Since converting to Laserfiche in 2004, the city has made documents dating back to the mid to late 1990s available over the Web. Walston, however, has ambitions to make older documents available. “My vision is: all documents all the time—online. I tell citizens, ‘You can be home in your pajamas at 3 o’clock in the morning reading the city code if you want to.’”

But pleasing Eugene citizens, in their pajamas or not, is frequently a formidable task. “We have a very involved citizenry,” says Walston. Frequent users of the city’s Web site, Eugene residents had become accustomed to its look and feel. When they gained access to city documents through the WebLink™ component of Laserfiche, they were met with a different interface. When WebLink didn’t look like the rest of the Web site, “People got confused,” says Walston.

That’s where Rachel Peña, application systems analyst for the city of Eugene, comes in. “Our citizens are really involved,” says Peña with a laugh. “When they don’t like something, we hear about it.”

CMO Laserfiche Implimentation Team

Taking advantage of Laserfiche’s flexibility, Peña has taken on the task of customizing WebLink to give the interface the look and feel of the Eugene Web site. “First we took public folders out of any subfolders and put them into the main folder so the public could find them more easily. Then we created a home page where you find administrative orders, for example. People click on them the same way they do on the main Web site.”

Peña cites the city council packets, including agendas and supporting documents, as a major motivator for getting Laserfiche, with WebLink the key to public access. “City workers would be printing I-don’t-know-how-many copies of 200- and 300-page documents for the public. The first thought was, ‘Why don’t we get this on the Web so we don’t have to print all this out?’”

City staff also uses the tool for research, locating records that are not yet accessible over the Web. “The staff loves it,” says Peña. “Our city recorder got a request for a historical document and was able to bring up city council minutes from the 1800s.”

She’s still refining the advanced search, but she made valuable changes to the interface right away. “I was able to publish the search results for content matches right under the document. That really helped cut down on confusion from the public. We have three Web pages up now. One for city documents—administrative orders, city council agendas and the like. Another is just for city code, with links to each chapter and section, so when residents click the link they are automatically taken to the right section. The third page is just for the land use section of the city code. It’s so huge it made sense to separate it. ”

Peña looks forward to refining the search syntax as well as more integrations in the future as other departments implement Laserfiche. “With planning and municipal courts coming on, we’ll be getting the Integrator’s Toolkit™ so we can further integrate it with other software.”

Council Manager Walston recognizes that document management is always evolving and that the city’s system is a work in progress. “I always tell people, the Wright brothers didn’t fly the SST. Technology changes every day. We want to keep up with it and be sustainable enough to keep getting rid of paper and put the power of the research tool in the hands of the users. In the larger view, you have a better-informed citizenry.”

There’s a lot of progress to point to so far. Feldman notes that Laserfiche has simplified assembling city council agendas. “Information would come in all different formats. Some people would email a Word or PDF file; some people would send paper. It was a challenge to assemble all that into paper packets. With Laserfiche, everything is available electronically.”

Of course, some people can’t be weaned off paper and want the physical packets. But there’s no more gathering files in different formats. “Now,” says Feldman, “we can just print out all the materials directly from Laserfiche and it’s done.”

Walston adds, however, that many people do access the packets online. “We’ve cut our printing budget in half. Laserfiche saves us a lot of paper. We’re going to have a computer installed in the council chambers with access to Laserfiche. So when someone wants to question an item, they can go over and read it online.”

City staff has gotten a lot of positive feedback about online access to documents. Feldman recalls the comments of a title-company employee who relies on WebLink to access land use and zoning information. “She thanked us for making her job easier, and called us ‘miles ahead of most agencies,’” says Feldman. “She said the product was ‘one of best tools I’ve used—and I work with cities all around the United States.’”

The staff takes citizen requests quite seriously. Walston says, “We had a meeting with some representatives from neighborhood groups, our IT people and our office to identify some of their issues with the Web portal. We’re trying to be very respectful of the community and actively work on their issues. Hopefully, Rachel will be able to do further customization.”

Walston sees a positive side to some complaints. “A lot of people were getting ‘access denied’ messages. That meant people were using the system, which is a good thing.” The city increased availability by purchasing more user licenses.

She especially appreciates the time she saves using Laserfiche. “Before, when people wanted copies of the minutes on a certain topic, I’d have to try to remember when the meeting was (was that in 1997 or 1998?), which month, and then sort through and read each document. Now I can just put in a key word and find them right away.”

Walston wants to give the public the ability to research more documents. “It’s great to be able to trace the history of different issues—some have been going on for ten years or more. I want to make all our old minutes available through WebLink.”

All in due time. Eugene may not be flying the SST just yet, but they are a long way from Kitty Hawk.