At the same time, Chelsea had been experiencing what Hyland terms “a slowdown” with some departments—IT and the Inspectional Services Department (ISD) among them—facing staff reductions of up to 15–25%. For Joseph Cooney, Director of Inspectional Services, servicing the FOIA/public records requests his department received every week from real estate agents and lawyers was affecting overall service levels. “We’re down enough staff that to devote one or two people to spend a whole day finding and copying paperwork to fulfill requests was just brutal,” says Cooney.

Filling a need, launching a vision

In 2009, Chelsea IT and ISD combined efforts to go before the Chelsea City Council to propose implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) system to address the problem. “It was a pretty easy sell,” recalls Hyland. His vision was to acquire a system that eventually all departments would use, with ISD leading the way. “ISD had the immediate need and the 100-year-old documents that made the case for digitization that drove the project.”

Out of the three vendor responses to the city’s RFP, it was the Laserfiche Avante ECM system proposed by Mike McDonough of area reseller Duplitron that met all the city’s requirements the most cost-effectively. “Several cities in our area were also already using Laserfiche,” Hyland notes. Faced with his own staff reductions, Hyland was especially encouraged by the idea of using Web Access to deploy, administer and eventually expand the system. “We have a virtualized environment, so the Web-based client made the most sense for us,” Hyland says. “The less desktop installation we need, the more resourceful it is for my staff, and Web-based deployment means more users can use the system from any browser in our intranet.”

For his part, Cooney was won over when Chelsea’s Deputy City Manager, a resident of neighboring city Peabody, showed him how that city’s Laserfiche Web Portal made public information instantly searchable and available from its website. “He literally typed in his name and every document came with his name in it came up right away. I was like, ‘That’s awesome. I’m sold.’”

Searchable, viewable, sendable

In April of 2009, the city purchased a 10-user Laserfiche Avante system with Import Agent and Web Access. Initial deployment targeted the ISD’s overflowing storerooms. Cooney’s staff began scanning in the 45 filing cabinets of building, electrical, zoning, etc. inspections, ranging from bulky legal size file jackets to 3×5 cards. Laserfiche in turn made all the documents, regardless of size, age or number of pages, immediately searchable by address and viewable as a series of thumbnail images. The improvement for Cooney and his staff was immediate. “We could literally be on the phone with a request, type in the address, ask, ‘What’s your email?’ And ‘Boom, boom, boom, see ya later’—it’s sent and done,’” says Cooney. “All our inspection notices coming in now are scanned in. We’re not bogged down at all.”

Building on the ISD’s initial success, deployment has followed to the City Clerk’s office, which has merged with the Licensing office to further consolidate and optimize departmental functions and systems. Planned implementations include the city’s Law Department, which, like ISD two years ago, has nowhere to go but the attic of City Hall with its file cabinet overflow. Hyland expects more to follow. “We envisioned the system to be something more and more departments will be using,” he says, noting that this makes sense not only from an IT resource perspective, but also in terms of establishing a single point of control for governance. “Our next step would be to securely open up our information to the community.”

Turning ‘physical ROI’ into a practical framework for increased efficiency and governance

To that end, Chelsea is considering a potential upgrade to Laserfiche Rio, which would include a WebLink Public Portal, similar to the one used in neighboring Peabody. With the ISD success as a cornerstone, he says, the idea at least has a fighting chance. “The reality is that using Laserfiche has given us a ‘physical ROI’ in terms of getting rid of hundreds of filing cabinets, so we have that foundation and momentum to work from.” With modest IT resources and city staff often wearing many hats (City Clerk Deborah Clayman also serves as de facto Records Manager, for instance), a Rio upgrade would offer Chelsea bite-sized benefits of an ECM strategy (incremental deployment/licensing; increased governance; simplified records management; test server environments) without the city—or Hyland’s modest staff—biting off more than they can chew.

The possibilities are many—from simply having a single, centralized repository for documents generated by all city departments to replacing its current PDF-based online documents available with links to view documents (with appropriate redactions) right from subdirectories in the Laserfiche repository. There are also other potential projects, from image-enabling the Police Department’s CAD/RMS system through its current SharePoint deployment to linking the city’s cloud-based GIS system to the centralized Laserfiche repository. Hyland is as hopeful as he is realistic. “Right now our concept of ‘workflows’ are limited to file-sharing,” he says. “But I think when once we get all the departments online, we’ll be able talk about how that will work for us and what ECM can do project by project.”

The Facilities Services/Plant Management Department was using Laserfiche to digitize content like electrical drawings and floor plans, but other departments still relied on third-party storage and manual search methods. Filing, storing and locating records were not only extremely difficult processes, but also very time consuming.

“Managing primarily paper records in an organization of our size was often a slow, arduous and expensive task,” says Hiltz. “We were forced to rely on outside storage facilities, and manual workflow processes were extremely inefficient.”

In addition to eliminating the need for paper storage altogether by building a digital records repository, HWDSB also needed to improve its ability to readily locate records—both for faster customer service and easier compliance with government regulations.

Compliance Complications

The Ontario Ministry of Education requires a student’s records to be kept for five years after the student graduates, while other information is to be held for 55 years, including:

• Student transcripts.
• Special education information.
• Disciplinary records.
• Copies of diplomas and certifications.

In a district of 50,000 students and 7,000 employees, this amounted to an enormous quantity of records that were on paper, CD-ROMs or microfilm—often stored in boxes in basements of schools that had the extra space. “If someone graduated in 1960 and contacted us for a copy of their diploma, we had to take the time to manually search through each box until we found the record,” Hiltz explains.

Overhauling Old Methods

In an effort to overhaul its paper-based approach to content management, streamline processes in multiple departments and ease regulation compliance, Hiltz pushed for change. “The IT Department began an education campaign around content management. We held information sessions and group discussions to figure out how additional departments could use Laserfiche and if it was the right choice across the board.”

Turns out it was: Citing ease of use as the number-one selection criteria, Hiltz says that the scalability of Laserfiche allowed HWDSB to roll it out at a workable cost, expanding use by one department at a time.

“The biggest user of Laserfiche is the Director’s—or Superintendent’s—Office,” he says. There, the Director and other senior officials use Laserfiche on a daily basis, not only as a mechanism for storing records, but also to manage:

• Committee meetings and minutes.
• Trustee meeting agendas.
• Ontario policies and procedures.

Hiltz’s own IT Department also uses Laserfiche to manage its forms, invoices, purchase orders and records. Rather than wait for other departments to respond to information requests—which entailed locating the information, making necessary copies and then sending them over—now Laserfiche allows authorized users to retrieve records themselves from the Laserfiche repository. “All of the departments working with Laserfiche are eliminating storage and getting rid of excess paper, but we’re also focusing on improving interdepartmental access to records and making them faster to retrieve.”

In addition to IT, Facilities and the Director’s Office, HWDSB deployed Laserfiche in Business Services as well. “Accounting, Payroll, Purchasing—they all use Laserfiche now. When it comes time for audits of our invoices and purchase orders, everything we need is easily accessible,” Hiltz explains. “Previously, we had to send this information to offsite storage, which made retrieval extremely difficult.”

Winning Results

HWDSB was pleased to see several immediate benefits after expanding its Laserfiche implementation, including:

• A reduction in the need for offsite storage.
• Optimization of office space.
• Easier compliance with government mandates and a streamlined auditing process.
• More efficient use of staff time.
• Quicker searchability and accessibility of records.

“Laserfiche has become a part of how people do their jobs on a daily basis,” Hiltz says. “It’s evident people are committed to using it—it’s just a more efficient way to operate.”

A substantial amount of paper has been removed from HWDSB’s offices as files can now be accessed from the secure Laserfiche repository, both optimizing much needed office space and allowing the staff to work more efficiently.

“Laserfiche has allowed our staff to work more productively, saving our Board money and providing us with the confidence that we can quickly access critically important documents when needed,” Hiltz continues. “Staff is able to complete tasks in a fraction of the time and reduce the possibility of lost or late arriving documents.”

Positive Projections

In addition to using Laserfiche for enterprise content management, Hiltz says that HWDSB is also working to develop a SharePoint Enterprise Portal, with plans to use Laserfiche as the ECM component to provide content management, search and retrieval and Workflow automation. The integration will enable staff—and eventually students and their parents—to access documents stored in the Laserfiche repository right from the portal, eliminating the need to launch Laserfiche separately or toggle between screens. Staff-related documents types will include:

• Staff benefit statements.
• Vacation requests.
• Professional development portfolios.
• Mileage requests and reimbursement claims.

Staff will be able to log into the portal from anywhere and search information stored in Laserfiche. “One of the keys to this integration is the ability to instantly search for documents. Laserfiche makes it so easy,” says Hiltz.

Although HWDB is still at the beginning stages of implementing Laserfiche Workflow, Hiltz says that the organization is planning to use the full range of BPM functionality. The Director’s Office is eager to use Agenda Manager, while the HR department is very interested in using Workflow to automate processes for job applications, benefits information and staff records. “Using Workflow to complete forms and requests, while integrating with the portal, will boost efficiency in paper-heavy departments like HR immensely,” Hiltz explains.

HWDSB also has plans to make Laserfiche a part of its education initiative called 21st Century Fluencies. “We’re asking, ‘How can teachers teach like they’ve never taught before?’ The classroom needs to prepare students for careers, and of course technology is a huge part of that,” says Hiltz. “Both students and teachers are adjusting to learning and teaching with technology, and Laserfiche is the perfect fit with the idea of paperless classrooms—where reference materials, student papers, grades and so on are accessed and organized electronically.”

Hiltz concludes that HWDSB decided to expand its Laserfiche implementation because it is “far superior” to other ECM systems. “Even if Laserfiche is implemented in individual departments at first, the benefits are clearly enterprise-wide. It’s definitely important to focus on working toward implementation across the entire organization.”

From its Onamia, MN, headquarters, the Corporate Commission of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians operates Grand Casino Mille Lacs and Grand Casino Hinckley, which includes hotels, convention centers, entertainment venues, a golf course, food and beverage venues, gift shops, an RV park, and a marina. In addition, the Corporate Commission operates an RV and auto shop, gas stations, a movie theater, a Subway franchise, and a wastewater management facility. “We have 12 separate businesses in all, spread out over 55 miles,” says Lance Dutcher, Systems Engineer for the Corporate Commission.

The Problem

A more efficient way was needed to manage the 500 contracts a year that keep these businesses serviced, supplied and staffed, says Dutcher. Each contract requires multiple approvals, which created ample opportunities for bottlenecks—sometimes costly ones. Missing deadlines could result in 10-15% fee increases because a discounted quote would expire, or due to penalties. And there was the potential for service contracts to lapse. “We could have a major piece of equipment go down and find out we had no contract,” Dutcher notes.

By 2008, Grand Casinos identified a need for an automated contract management system with three major requirements:

• Routing documents from outlying properties to the Corporate Commission’s office in a time sensitive manner.
• Tracking documents to enforce deadlines and address bottlenecks.
• Generating a required monthly report summarizing the activity/expiration of contract-related documents.

The Solution

For almost eight years, the Corporate Commission had been using a Laserfiche system with Quick Fields advanced capture to scan HR documents. When Dutcher saw the document routing and tracking capabilities of Laserfiche Workflow at the 2008 Laserfiche Institute Conference in Los Angeles, he realized he already had the enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) tools to build a contract management system using Laserfiche. “I literally went to one Workflow session at the Conference, came back, and started designing workflows,” he says.

Working with solutions consultant Clay Baer of reseller Crabtree Company, Dutcher laid the groundwork for a Laserfiche contract management system by:

• Moving the Laserfiche 7.2 server to a single virtual server running Windows Server 2003 SP2 and SQL 2005.
• Installing Laserfiche Workflow, Web Access, Quick Fields, and Audit Trail on the virtual server.
• Upgrading to Laserfiche 8.0.

Dutcher then worked with a five-member project team drawn from Management, Legal, Training, Purchasing and IT to develop and refine contract workflows over a two-month period. The team worked out routing processes, deadline times and designated the approvers.

While designing that process, Dutcher’s team found it made sense to have a backup person for every approver in the routing process, to keep the process moving efficiently.

Turning Months into Days—Without Incurring Costs

Following a month of designing and programming workflows, Dutcher led three months of trial testing using the IT Department’s own contracts. After training users, the system went live with all 39 departments in 12 businesses.

“Within six months, we had 22 Workflows,” he says. “We did all the training in-house without a consultant, so we were able to implement our contract management system without any outside services or additional costs.” Dutcher notes this is in sharp contrast to stand-alone contract management systems he had researched prior to implementing Laserfiche Workflow. “I looked at half-a-dozen contract management systems and went through all their bullet points, and I couldn’t find anything we needed that we couldn’t build ourselves using Laserfiche.”

Security and viewing is configured using Microsoft Active Directory groups, so only department heads can see their own contracts. Dutcher notes this keeps system administration to a minimum. “There’s actually no administration in Laserfiche.”

As a result of using Laserfiche for contract management, Dutcher says, the Mille Lacs Band has been able to:

• Centralize and standardize management and storage of contracts.
• Provide remote access to location-specific information and documents using Web Access.
• Track all contracts.
• Share documents between businesses and departments.
• Eliminate printing costs and duplication.
• Automate reporting.

The greatest benefit is time. “Most of our documents are now routed within 3 days or less, instead of weeks and in some cases months. We used to have an administrator at each location distribute paper copies for signatures that were faxed—and sometimes re-faxed if they weren’t legible. Now the documents are emailed to a single contract administrator, who uses Snapshot to add them into Laserfiche, and the contract is automatically routed for approval,” Dutcher says. “Upper management can review contracts from anywhere using Web Access. We’ve been able to have 12 people at different properties sign a document in less than 90 minutes.”

User accountability and timeliness has come from being able to track documents using stamps and annotations. “Anyone that has the ability to view the document can track where the document is and how long someone has had it,” Dutcher says. “We don’t need a spreadsheet of where a contract is or to search from office to office because we have automatic reminders to make sure that documents continue to be routed.”

Finally, using an “expiration” metadata field added to all contracts, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services creates monthly reports of contract activity for the company while alerting appropriate department heads of relevant contracts in danger of expiring. “It used to take an administrative assistant a full day to make these reports,” Dutcher notes. “Now, they’re generated automatically.”

For example, it was nearly impossible for employees to append pages to scanned documents that were stored in Alchemy; typically, in order to add pages, the whole document needed to be rescanned and resaved.

Jacquez-Nares urged the city to find a more sophisticated, user-friendly solution. It was at this point that a collaborative, inter-departmental team was formed with Jacquez-Nares as the project manager.

All of the City’s departments—City Clerk, City Manager, Community Development, Community Services, Finance, Human Resources, IT, Police and Public Works—came together to define their requirements for the RFP. The selection came down to two choices: Laserfiche and LibertyNET. In the end, the balance tipped in favor of Laserfiche for two reasons:

• Its comprehensive search functionality and easy-to-use Web interface made Laserfiche the most user-friendly choice.
• A formal needs assessment showed that implementing Laserfiche would ultimately save the city $273,200 by freeing up enough office space to create a total of 13 workstations for essential city services such as traffic management.

Westminster purchased the software from Laserfiche reseller ECS Imaging in June 2008. Because Laserfiche is easy to use and Jacquez-Nares already had a lot of experience with it, virtually no formal training was required. By August, the solution had been installed, the City had begun back scanning the Planning Department’s records and by November, all Alchemy files had been migrated into the new system.

Making City Content Accessible in Seconds

As a part of its Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) solution, Westminster deployed Laserfiche WebLink, a secure Web content portal, to make content immediately accessible to all 402 city employees.

“In the old days, people in our Community Development department had to visit our offsite storage facility three or four times a week in order to locate planning documents,” says Jacquez-Nares. “When you add up the 15-30 minutes it took to drive there, the time spent looking for relevant documents and then the time it took to drive back to City Hall, you’re talking about 4-5 hours a week. With Laserfiche, it only takes a few seconds to call up all necessary documentation.”

The impact of Laserfiche on the City Clerk’s Office has also been great. “As the lead office for Public Records Act Requests, we receive all records requests and hear directly from the public about their concerns,” says Jacquez-Nares. “With Laserfiche, citizens no longer have concerns about transparency or document integrity because digital records don’t get lost or damaged, and they’re available much faster than their paper-based counterparts.”

All the City’s departmental records are currently scanned into Laserfiche on a day-forward basis by Kelly Lore, the centralized scanning records clerk. Just a few of the different types of content stored in Westminster’s Laserfiche repository include:

• Agendas
• Agreements
• Bids
• Building permits and plans, including large format plans
• Deeds
• Planning Department records
• Staff reports

“All of our departments have access to Laserfiche, and people are always coming up with new ideas for how to use it,” says Jacquez-Nares. “It’s much more useful than Alchemy—and much easier to use!”

IT Support Is a Snap

For a city like Westminster, with an IT department of only five employees, software applications must not only be easy to use, but also easy to maintain and administer. In fact, Laserfiche is so easy to support that Jacquez-Nares serves as system administrator, working with users across the City’s departments to structure the City’s content repository, create index fields for various City forms, and set up Quick Fields sessions to automate information capture.

“IT staff members create a backup when they’re updating the server,” says Jacquez-Nares. “Other than that, they pretty much leave everything to do with Laserfiche up to me.”

Future-Forward

Westminster has exciting plans for Laserfiche moving forward. Incoming City Clerk Robin Roberts recognizes the efficiency that Laserfiche ECM brings to Westminster and seeks to build on the project’s success by promoting city-wide use of Laserfiche through added integrations and training sessions.

With the help of ECS, the team is currently in the process of integrating Laserfiche with the City’s GIS system so that all building plans associated with any given address are accessible from within Westminster’s GIS application, CityGIS. Similarly, the City is also working on integrating its electronic permitting application with both Laserfiche and CityGIS. These integrations will save staff from performing time-consuming research to locate information about various addresses or land parcels.

The City also has plans to upgrade to Laserfiche Avante, which will bring Workflow functionality into Westminster’s arsenal, enabling it to automate standard business processes such as approvals and document routing. According to Jacquez-Nares, Westminster is also contemplating integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint, which the City owns but has not yet rolled out. Using SharePoint as a collaborative portal would, for one, help the City Clerk’s Office generate agenda Council packets in a paperless manner. Combining Laserfiche with SharePoint would bring imaging capabilities to SharePoint and enhance the SharePoint repository.

Even without these system expansions, the City is extremely pleased with the Laserfiche implementation. “Many people had to work together to make this project a success, and it’s wonderful to see just how effective a collaborative management team can be,” concludes Jacquez-Nares. “People are using Laserfiche, and the positive results have been staggering so far.”

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

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

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

Albany, OR, Network Administrator Allen Pilgrim

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick Fields, Quicker ROI

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

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

The Future

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

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

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