• Aspire Zone Foundation: Qatar’s largest athletic foundation chose Laserfiche over competing FileNet, Documentum and Ever Team solutions. Itqan was chosen to implement a 100-user Rio system for all five of Aspire’s companies after showing Aspire how easily Rio could integrate with existing line-of-business applications.
• Qatar Financial Markets Authority: Laserfiche was chosen as the ECM standard for the agency—which oversees the nation’s securities exchange—due to Laserfiche’s localized Arabic interface and extensive SDK.
• Lekhwiya (Qatari Royal Internal Security Force): After a six-month sales campaign, Lekhwiya chose Laserfiche Avante with Web Access to standardize reports and provide secure, remote access to records.

According to Mustafa Siddiqui, Head of Applications and Laserfiche Solutions, the sales increase has resulted from adopting a more consultative sales methodology. “Our success this year has come from positioning Laserfiche as the flexible, scalable ECM solution that adapts to meet an organization’s specific and changing needs,” Siddiqui says.

He mentions the Aspire Zone Foundation Rio project that will replace Aspire Logistics’ legacy Primavera Expedition construction management system while utilizing 10 workflows and establishing an ECM infrastructure. “We’re looking to close another 1,000 licenses in Q2,” Siddiqui adds.

The success has been good for Laserfiche’s profile in Qatar. “FileNet has traditionally been the prominent EDMS player, but we’re proving how relevant the Laserfiche Agile ECM messaging is to the market here,” he says. With the support of Muath Khatatbeh, CEO of parent company Itqan Holding, Siddiqui’s team added staff to establish its own separate Laserfiche division last quarter.

• Kaplan International Centers. AMI leveraged PDP partner Cambridge Conections’s Docs-on-the-Cloud to develop a 200-user Rio pilot system for the Fortune 500 company, beating out a competing CompuThink solution.
• City of San Luis Obispo. The reseller recently added Web Access to a 100-user Avante system as part of an ongoing implementation that includes EnerGov and ESRI GIS integrations.
• Northrop Grumman. AMI is completing a MSSQL-to-Oracle server upgrade and utilizing the Laserfiche SDK to complete customizations for the aerospace company.

According to President George Bandarian II, the increase in sales is the direct result of “embracing” Laserfiche agile ECM messaging to successfully present function-rich solutions with the flexibility to grow with a customer’s business. “We don’t sell ‘document management,’” says Bandarian. “Everything we talk about is related to process optimization.”

Bandarian adds that AMI has supported this message by promoting staff to Technical Support Specialist positions. As a result, AMI has become more competitive as an ECM provider, as evidenced by the success of the Kaplan International Centers project.

“We utilized PDP partner Docs-On-the-Cloud to implement a cloud-based pilot implementation to satisfy the company’s UK IT Director,” he says. “With the encouragement of Kaplan’s U.S. IT Director, we were then able to show his counterparts in Australia, New Zealand and Canada that Rio’s scalability made it the most efficient and cost-effective way to implement a global ECM standard for managing international student records and automating student onboarding.

“Our success is being able to create partnerships with our customers so they ultimately choose the best Laserfiche ECM solution for their needs,” Bandarian adds.

• Access to the most up-to-date information. With online help, Laserfiche staff can add information to the help files after release, so you can always access the most current information.
• You can now e-mail links to a particular help page to someone else. The Laserfiche 8.2 Online User Guide and Administration Guide each have a button that will generate a link to the current page. You can send this link to someone else to direct them to the precise topic you need.

The Laserfiche Administration Guide has been expanded as of Laserfiche 8.2. It contains information on the new features for this release, as well as the help files for other products, including Laserfiche Snapshot, Audit Trail and Laserfiche Records Management Edition.

The Laserfiche help files are available from the Help buttons throughout the product interfaces or by pressing the F1 key with the product open. You can also find the main tables of contents for the Laserfiche 8.2 User and Administration Guides through the following links:

• Laserfiche User Guide: http://www.laserfiche.com/support/webhelp/laserfiche/8.2/en-us/userguide/laserfiche_client.htm
• Laserfiche Administration Guide: http://www.laserfiche.com/support/webhelp/laserfiche/8.2/en-us/adminguide/lfadmin8.htm

Local copies of the help files are also installed and accessible. We recommend using the online help unless you’re on a machine that doesn’t have an internet connection. This way, you can be sure to get the most recent information.

As the documentation is now readily accessible and updated as needed, we will only produce two print manuals: an expanded Administration Guide that focuses primarily on the Administration Console (but touches on admin tasks in other products) and a guide to the Laserfiche SDK. All other help will be available in electronic format only. The information in the print manuals has always been the same as the information available electronically, so there will be no alteration in the resources available.

Serving Ada County, Boise County, Elmore County and Valley County, CDHD manages the Board of Health and the Community Health, Communicable Disease, Immunization, Reproductive Health and WIC Departments in addition to the Environmental Health Department. The planning and zoning authority of each county requires the Environmental Health Department to review every subdivision’s application for sewage permits, which can include:

• Test hole inspections for sewage installation.
• Plot plans.
• Building permits.
• Zoning certificates.

“Paper copies of the records were located in each county’s office, which made them difficult for us to access without a lot of copying and faxing,” Ross explains. Efficient storage, organization and access to the documents crucial to the permit process was compromised until CDHD decided to implement Laserfiche ECM.

Powering Permitting

After the previous director of CDHD saw Laserfiche featured at an environmental health conference in 2004 and was impressed with its agility, the department decided to implement the software later that same year. The initial objective was to find a program that could scan in past and present septic permits and applications, while providing central access to the records across all the offices in the health district.

Today, CDHD uses Laserfiche not just to scan and store permit documents, but also to enable external clients to access the information themselves using Laserfiche WebLink, which provides read-only access to records stored in the Laserfiche repository. Clients include:

• Realtors selling homes that need permit information for potential buyers and appraisers.
• Septic pumpers looking to access permit information to find the location of septic tanks for pumping.
• Septic installers who are on-site and legally in need of a copy of the permit before proceeding with the installation.

Although clients applying for permits are supposed to provide a copy of their permits to septic installers (permits are required on the job site at all times), this frequently doesn’t happen. In the past, installers would have to come into the department and wait for a copy of the appropriate paperwork to be located and copied, or sometimes faxed over from the appropriate county. “Locating permit information for clients sometimes took hours to accomplish,” says Mike Reno, Supervisor of Land Based Programs for CDHD. “It slowed things down for both us and them.”

He continues, “With Laserfiche, the installers and other external clients can view the permit online and print their own copy if needed. This saves our clerical and field staff a lot of time making copies of permits and faxing them over.”

Ross notes that CDHD saw a significant reduction in information requests from external clients and that they continue to decline—especially from realtors—as clients realize most of their questions can be answered by accessing Laserfiche WebLink through the department’s Webpage.

“The ability to access data that resides in other offices is extremely helpful. It’s my favorite feature,” Reno says. If for some reason clients are unable to access the internet and attain records themselves, Reno can pull up the permit information on his desktop and provide the information within minutes.

With secure and easy public access and more efficient staff response time, Ross is pleased to report that CDHD “can concentrate on customer service, not paperwork.”

Empowering the Enterprise

After the initial deployment of Laserfiche, several other offices within CDHD got on board with goals of streamlining their specific work processes. Because Laserfiche integrates so easily with CDHD’s custom applications—written in-house with Microsoft Visual FoxPro—it’s especially easy to use across multiple departments. Employees are able to access Laserfiche features in a familiar way, which means CDHD can keep training to a minimum while maximizing staff efficiency.

“We used the Laserfiche SDK to write code in our Visual FoxPro applications. The custom code allows users to click on ‘search’ or ‘scan’ buttons from within our custom applications to invoke Laserfiche, which then searches for related images or fills in the template fields for new scans,” Ross explains. “This eliminates the user’s need to manually open Laserfiche, manually search for related images or manually fill in any templates. In turn, it reduces the possibility of data entry errors and mismatched key fields.”

Ross explains that a number of CDHD departments rely on Laserfiche in the following ways:

• Land Development and Subdivisions scans and stores permit information.
• Child Care Inspections manages, approves and files inspections.
• Immunizations scans all client records to improve access and searchability.
• Accounting scans contracts and other documents for improved access and storage.

CDHD plans to make Food Inspections, Pool Inspections and Tuberculosis records available through Laserfiche next, while records for the Daycare and Food Establishment Inspections Departments will soon be available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink.

The transition to Laserfiche has been embraced across CDHD and has already yielded an incredible ROI in terms of staff time saved. Prior to Laserfiche, one to four staff members were required to spend 15 to 30 minutes researching each document request from both internal and external customers. Now, due to interdepartmental and public access to records via WebLink, requests for information are either handled by clients themselves, or quickly managed by the department through fax, e-mail or the Web.

In fact, Reno estimates that hundreds of hours of staff time have been saved thanks to Laserfiche.

CDHD also found another enormous benefit of implementing Laserfiche: a dramatic reduction in the cost of Quality Assurance (QA). “Prior to Laserfiche, we had to send someone to each county to assure the quality of data on the permit applications coming in. Outlying offices were required to make copies of applications and permits and then fax that material to the person conducting quality control of the data in the particular county. Now, we have one person who does all QA from their desktop in Laserfiche,” says Reno.

With one person able to quickly locate and manage the data for permits in multiple counties, Reno notes, “The quality of our data has improved and we have saved significantly on travel costs.”

Ross, meanwhile, concludes, “The great thing about Laserfiche is that it grows with you. Even after you solve your initial problem it can do so much more than you imagined.”

The Road to Rio

According to Chandresh Sharma, vice president of solutions sales at Sigma-Tech, Essar became interested in Laserfiche Rio after seeing how capably the system would complement Microsoft SharePoint. Specifically, Essar wanted to integrate Rio with SharePoint to establish a shared service center for processing invoices.

A key selling point, Sharma says, was being able to show video examples of how Laserfiche integrates with SharePoint. “The videos really ‘broke the ice’ with the Essar CIOs,” Sharma says. “We were able to show how Laserfiche functionality could complement SharePoint, not overlap it.”

Sharma says he then showed how Laserfiche’s imaging functionality was an obvious fit for SharePoint’s capabilities. This led to more detailed demonstrations of Workflow and Quick Fields to address specific issues regarding Essar’s invoicing processes, namely how to avoid duplicating invoices.

The Workflow Designer, Sharma says, was instrumental to this part of the presentation. “One of the CIOs asked a really good question about how a third value could be added to a Workflow, and using the Workflow Designer I was able to set it up and publish it in less than ten minutes,” he says.

In the end, Essar was sold. The first phase of the implementation began last November with 100 users in the financial departments of 12 Essar companies. That number will grow to 500 by the time the implementation is complete early next year, and there are plans to eventually expand Rio into all 55 Essar companies in the future.

Achieving Success with Shared Services

Sharma says Sigma-Tech—and all Laserfiche resellers—can leverage the success of the Essar Rio implementation: “There is a remarkable shift in the market towards big corporations looking for shared service centers to centralize business processes. We see ‘Agile ECM Engineered with Laserfiche and SharePoint’ as a great enabler of that.”

In particular, Sharma believes that Workflow 8 and the SDK offer IT departments the flexibility and confidence “to establish shared services across their enterprise.” He also believes that Rio’s promise of unlimited servers bolsters confidence in Laserfiche. “The ability to create test environments is very important—and it allows us to be more competitive,” he concludes.

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.”