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.”

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.

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

That’s the lesson from 2008 Run Smarter Award winner Thurston County, WA. Until implementing Laserfiche in 2007, the rustic county, peppered as it is with forests and Puget Sound waters, was beset with what could best be described as information management logjams.

But in less than two years, Thurston County has evolved its use of Laserfiche from a pilot project handling backlog conversion to the backbone of a department-by-department phenomenon. In short, Thurston County has realized the very essence of what it means to Run Smarter.

The County must have heard other departments’ pleas, because suddenly several departments’ annual IT portfolios had requests for imaging systems. The County’s IT Manager, Brian Ferris, stepped in with the authority from its Information Technology Committee (ITC) and Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), and the search for an enterprise content management (ECM) system was on.

Back in 2006, IT Consultant (and now Laserfiche Administrator) Bonnie Hilyard and appointed imaging committee members were given the task to look at bringing an enterprise content management system into the county for all the departments to use. There was additional urgency because the overflowing records building had already spilled over into a second storage building. “We were looking at possibly needing a third down the road, and we knew we had to stop the insanity,” she recalls.

The imaging committee’s vision for the County’s ECM system was more than simply a virtual storage building. “The system would have to do more than address both our short-term and long-range needs for document imaging. We definitely needed an application that had open architecture, regional support, Web capabilities, document and records management as well as a powerful workflow engine,” she says. “Plus, a huge requirement was the ability to integrate with all of our existing business applications.

The County’s initial goal was to meet current and anticipated business requirements for 10-15 years, promote efficiency of county operations, save the time and costs of filling public record requests, as well as to save storage space. Whatever system they chose would have to allow for decentralized use for all levels of staff through easy desktop access, as well as the ability to integrate primary business applications with the system—all while providing multi-level security features.

What Hilyard and the team were looking for was a solution as enterprise-wise as it was enterprise-wide. Where did she find one?

“The county identified requirements for an Enterprise Imaging system and then released a Request for Proposal based on those requirements. After an extensive review process which included matching the county’s requirements with each proposal and visits to other jurisdictions in Washington and Oregon that used the proposed systems , we determined that Laserfiche was the best choice” Hilyard says.

“One of the biggest moves for us was to be able to certify the system we purchased with the State of Washington State Archives Certification process,” she adds. “This certification would allow us to eventually destroy some of the paper documents that were scanned into the system—a big move for shrinking our storage costs.” This was such a big move, in fact, that Hilyard and her team made sure only records associated with the records retention schedule set by the Secretary of State were added to their system.

Initial implementation was rolled out in three pilot offices: the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (PAO), and Development Services Department (DevSvcs).

The BOCC had ordinances and resolutions dating back to the 1910s, as well as board meeting minutes that staff scanned into Laserfiche. Almost immediately, citizens and staff could search and print out documents themselves, which was a huge time saver for the board’s secretary. Says Hilyard, “Now she scans them in and they are automatically posted to the Web with WebLink. She can then send an e-mail notifying everyone that it’s posted, and she’s done.”

Next, Hilyard’s team is installing Laserfiche in the PAO, mostly due to the office’s sheer amount of paperwork. By law, cases must be kept for at least 20 years, but this retention period can stretch even longer when the appeals process is included. After an outside vendor scanned 3.7 million pages into TIFF files, Hilyard’s team used Quick Fields to automatically import them into file structures organized by year. As the documents were imported, Laserfiche’s OCR engine automatically extracted searchable text, simplifying retrieval. In 2009, Hilyard says, the PAO hopes to be scanning the documents as they come in, but she’s realistic about the process.

“We know that this transition will be hard on some staff, so we’re not going to completely eliminate the ‘safety folders’ at this time,” she says. “We’re hoping the attorneys will see they can use their laptops to locate all the up-to-date paperwork for the case in the court room or office.”

To help the effort, Hilyard’s team designed a folder structure where each case has its own file folder so all subsequent incoming information could be routed to these folders by staff using Snapshot or through Laserfiche Workflow.

“We decided to go this direction because as a case is closed, Workflow will move the active folder to the Records Management module to begin its records retention,” Hilyard says. The PAO has almost finished linking Laserfiche (through an application programmable interface (API) created by VPCI) with their Damion business application.

Next, Development Services Department technical staff and VPCI programmer are working together to create an API for their business application, Amanda, and Laserfiche using Web tools, a project, Hilyard notes, that is now 80% complete.

With pilot projects underway in the first three departments, Hilyard started looking across all departments to see who could benefit from the relatively new system. She admits, though, that for as inevitable and organic as the County’s enterprise-wide adoption of Laserfiche seems now, it wasn’t always easy.

“Implementing such a large scale roll out has been challenging for myself and our Records Manager. Keeping up with the demand for all the scanning requests has also been a big challenge,” notes Hilyard. “It’s amazing now that the cat is out of the bag how many people in the county are knowledgeable about this technology. I hear no negative comments about the implementation, just a lot of thanks.”

Up next is exploring the possibilities of Laserfiche 8, which TC implemented just this month. “I’m hoping that maybe somewhere along the way I can find the time to learn how to use the Toolkit myself so that I can develop API’s internally,” Hilyard muses.

Somehow, she always finds time to sing the praises of Laserfiche to local governments. “I recommend Laserfiche on an ongoing basis. I share all my stories, documents and knowledge whenever I’m asked,” she says.

“It’s nice to have a community in Washington and Oregon State where we all get together and share. You know you’re not alone and if it’s something that can be done, maybe it’s already done and I don’t have to re-invent it.”

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

But after a 12 month review of 32 software packages, Michael Sundberg, Commonwealth’s Due Diligence Officer, recommended Laserfiche to CIO Ed Bell, and the solution has been working well ever since.

Laserfiche Winners Circle VAR Duplitron of Brockton, MA, invited Commonwealth to a seminar in suburban Boston eighteen months ago. Duplitron director Steve Woolner and his team impressed Sundberg immediately. After certifying Laserfiche as compliant with SEC regulations, and reviewing Duplitron’s credentials as an outstanding solution provider, Sundberg agreed that Laserfiche and Duplitron were the right team for Commonwealth.

“My responsibilities include overseeing Commonwealth’s Help Desk, so I know what products are well received in our offices from Maine to Hawaii,” Sundberg says. “Laserfiche was rated by consultant Gartner Group as the kind of product we wanted, and once we saw a demonstration and studied its cost-effectiveness, we decided the fit was right for us.”

Laserfiche enables investment professionals to scan, store and retrieve client records electronically, speeding customer service while remaining compliant with SEC and FDIC records management requirements. Using Laserfiche, financial planners can eliminate expensive filing cabinets and end frustrating searches for missing paper.

“Laserfiche enables our financial planners to communicate with the home office electronically and access client statements, confirmations and other critical paperwork on the Web,” Sundberg says. “This gives the planners more time to actually run their businesses and take care of customers, instead of handling clerical duties.”

Sundberg says Commonwealth advisers appreciate Laserfiche’s ease of use and its non-proprietary file formats, as well as its ability to work with standard scanners and PCs. He adds that competitors’ products required users to buy specialized equipment and save files in formats that might not be accessible in the future. He was also impressed with Duplitron’s plan for implementing the system.

“Ed Bell and Mike Sundberg are sophisticated IT professionals who wanted assurances that their field offices would get the same level of service as headquarters,” Woolner says. “Because Duplitron has developed strong business relationships and friendships with top Laserfiche VARs around the country, I’ve been able to assign installations and follow-up service to them, knowing they’ll be taken care of in the same way as if we have done them ourselves.”

Commonwealth, a six-time Investment Advisor “Broker-Dealer of the Year” winner, is recognized industry-wide for its use of advanced technology to improve customer service and make its independent financial planners more productive. Sundberg appreciates Laserfiche’s Integrators Toolkit, allowing him to tie Laserfiche into other Commonwealth applications.

Laserfiche has aggressively pursued the financial services market in recent years, recognizing that document imaging technology offers broker-dealers a number of key customer service and productivity differentiators. Thousands of financial planners are using Laserfiche worldwide, often from wireless laptops, as they work with clients in their offices and homes.

It took only a summer for Geneos to develop its document management system, consolidating records from more than 60 locations into one central repository. As Geneos implemented straight-through processing, the firm eliminated faxing altogether and greatly reduced printing and mailing costs and audit preparation time. The firm’s key players gained enough confidence in their electronic system to hold their first document destruction session, doing away with 250,000 pages of paper.

Geneos Wealth Management offers estate planning, investment advice, time management systems and financial planning. With such diverse roles and an eye toward retail rather than institutional bank arrangements, Geneos needs to store, share, search and reference hundreds of thousands of client documents. In addition, the firm’s relationship to its representatives means joint ownership of the majority of their records, requiring access from multiple locations by various individuals.

Geneos management understood the significance of eliminating as much paper as possible from day-to-day operations with a compliant, electronic document management system. Decision makers saw that the time spent physically searching through paper records and shipping or faxing them from location to location could be better spent delivering financial services.

Any solution would need to keep up with the influx of as many as 60,000 paper documents per week with the ability to securely scan, share, store and route them for approval. It would also have to make documents accessible from the main office in Denver, the 61 OSJ branch offices in 24 states, and 400 representative and affiliated investment advisors across the country.

Geneos management looked briefly at simple scanning solutions, but these were inadequate. Geneos needed an economical way to have its clients scan into a centralized solution while complying with SEC regulations for a clear audit trail. One branch had been using Laserfiche and introduced the product to the home office. “We made the decision to go in the middle of May,” says Dean Rager, CIO. “By September our system was in place in over 50 offices. It was very quick.”

Geneos started using Laserfiche to allow all the branch offices to ensure compliance while scanning their documents into one central repository. Rager notes the enthusiasm field representatives have shown for Laserfiche. “They love it,” he says. So far, Geneos has scanned in over 100 gigabytes of data, keeping up with the 60,000 new documents that come in each week.

System Administrator Sean O’Reilly notes, “We have made Laserfiche an indispensable component of our day-to-day operations.”

Using Laserfiche has enabled Geneos to link its remote offices, and the results have been dramatic. Remote offices can instantly send documents requiring overnight approval to the home office. “Before,” says O’Reilly, “documents were scattered all over the place in e-mail attachments and snail mail packages.”

“At our last NASD audit,” says CIO Rager, “we provided auditors with 80,000 pages of documents—six months’ worth of correspondence—on one CD. In years past, we had to box and send them. It took about an hour to gather the 80,000 pages and create the CD. Before it meant weeks and weeks of staff time.”

Implementing straight-through processing has brought Geneos an added benefit—the decommissioning of some old, very noisy dot matrix printers. “Now everything that came through those printers is accessible through a simple search in Laserfiche,” says O’Reilly.

In addition to celebrating the retirement of the printers, Rager adds that Geneos has saved a great deal of time and money on faxing. Laserfiche is handling input from all three virtual print servers and all the firm’s virtual faxing. In the year or so since installation, Laserfiche has captured close to a million pages—enough to stretch 150 miles if laid end-to-end.

Geneos also appreciates Laserfiche’s open architecture, and IT staff have used the Integrator’s Toolkit™ to complete a number of integrations between their in-house applications and their document repository. IT staff have also worked with two major clearinghouses, National Financial and Pershing, to establish a system for submitting paperwork electronically.

“As a major broker-dealer, we route large amounts of documentation to the clearinghouses,” O’Reilly says. “We’ve established an electronic document link so that staff can quickly submit documents stored in Laserfiche to either house, simply by clicking a custom toolbar button. Our staff really appreciate the ability to send documents electronically rather than printing and mailing them, and this functionality has taken us a long way toward becoming a fully paperless firm.”

Rager doesn’t equivocate when discussing the installation of Laserfiche at Geneos: “This is the best damn thing we’ve ever done. Period.”

Processing the thousands of paper documents associated with these accounts, however, was limiting MDS’s productivity. “We needed a system to provide three key features: security, accessibility and accountability,” says Solutions Architect Matt Brown. “We also wanted to cut down on paper-related costs. We spent the better part of a decade looking for a system that could accomplish all these goals.”

MDS first experimented with a Web-based product in an attempt to eliminate paper documents and streamline work processes. “It did a very good job of storing and retrieving documents, but that was about the extent of its usefulness,” Brown says. “It proved difficult to administer. So we then built a second system ourselves, using Microsoft® SharePoint® as the foundation.”

This second solution provided a clear demonstration of the benefits of an enterprise-quality system. “We could see the possibilities, such as ease of retrieval, improved business intelligence and the efficiencies of automating work processes,” Brown explains. “However, SharePoint isn’t a document management system, so we were asking it to do something it wasn’t designed to handle.”

This experiment, however, helped staff envision an ideal solution. “Our immediate goal was to store billing records electronically, but our eventual goal was and still is a completely paperless workflow,” Brown says. “We needed to make sure that billing records were easily retrievable, that protected health information was secure and that we could account for all our documents, but we also needed a solution that was cost-effective and scalable.”

Laserfiche® fulfilled all these requirements—and more. Thanks to its open architecture, Laserfiche can serve as the document management back-end for many line-of-business applications, including Med/FM™, the application MDS uses to manage billing and claims processing. With help from their Laserfiche reseller, JPI Data Resource, MDS integrated the two systems so that staff can instantly access Laserfiche documents from within Med/FM. “That was the system’s number one selling point,” Brown notes.

After MDS selected Laserfiche, things moved quickly. “Installation was completed in less than a day, and training took less than a week,” Brown remembers. “We were able to initiate a completely paperless workflow for one of our clients by the week’s end. Then we started bringing our other clients online.”

MDS has two Laserfiche servers, one in each of their two divisional offices. Over 30 users in those locations—and in smaller offices throughout California—use the system daily to process billing documents submitted in both paper and electronic formats.

Some clients still send MDS paper billing documents, which must be processed manually. Staff scan those documents, separated by bar-coded index sheets, into Laserfiche. The Quick Fields™ Bar Code Plug-In™ reads the bar codes and automatically indexes the scanned files. “We simply attach the cover sheet to its corresponding billing record and Quick Fields does the rest,” Brown says. “Quick Fields fills in all the necessary document metadata—such as the patient’s name and identifying information—that is stored in the bar codes.”

When clients submit electronic documents, staff use the client’s daily log to create empty documents in the Laserfiche repository that serve as place holders for corresponding billing documents. Staff then use Snapshot™ to convert the electronic information into unalterable TIFF files and import them into Laserfiche, where they are matched up with the empty documents created earlier.

To further automate work processes, Workflow™ routes documents among the various departments that create the billable record and generate the final claim. If any information is missing, Workflow automatically routes the record to the appropriate department for further follow-up.

While Laserfiche speeds up the entire collections process, it has specifically streamlined the process for submitting claims that require supporting documentation. “Before Laserfiche, there was a delay of several days, given that a staff member would have to physically locate the billing record, pull it and copy it,” Brown says. “Now, we can send claims out the same day. Employees simply pull the account up in Med/FM and press a function key, which automatically generates a search in Laserfiche for the patient’s billing record.

“These efficiencies have enabled us to shift job priorities from one department to another—or eliminate tasks altogether,” Brown continues. “Before, we needed a rather large staff just to manage all the paper. Our medical records department has been completely transformed. Now, they simply handle scanning and document printing for claims attachment.”

In addition, Laserfiche has given MDS greater oversight of business processes. “We use Microsoft SQL Server™ Reporting Services to query the Laserfiche database, which provides us with a wealth of real-time data we didn’t previously have access to,” Brown says. “This data gives us greater awareness of our business processes, which helps improve decision-making.”

MDS’s clients benefit from this improved reporting as well. “The medical director at one of our client sites requests a monthly time study showing how many patients their physicians see each hour,” Brown says. “Before Laserfiche, this was a laborious process that required manually entering statistics into a spreadsheet. Now, we use Laserfiche to pull this information directly from the ER log and store it in the document template fields. Our reporting server queries this information and automatically generates and sends the report—with no user interaction required.”

In the future, MDS plans to completely eliminate paper from their billing processes. “We’re in the beginning stages of adding additional automation and integration with our billing management system that will eliminate manual demographic and charge entry. We also plan to implement a paperless workflow in our payment processing department,” Brown says. “We are constantly looking for new ways to extend our Laserfiche system with integration and customization—so we definitely appreciate the ability to purchase components separately and add new ones over time.”

Customizing MDS’s Laserfiche system comes easy to Brown, who values the flexibility of Laserfiche’s open architecture. “As a programmer, I appreciate the expansive features of the Integrator’s Toolkit™,” he says. “With the Toolkit, you can create additional functionality with just a little effort. I also enjoy interacting directly with Laserfiche Developers through the Laserfiche Institute Conference, the Support Site and the forums.”

Brown doesn’t hesitate in recommending Laserfiche to his peers. “I would unequivocally recommend it,” he says. “After years of evaluating just about every document management system there is—and there are a lot—none of them comes close to matching the breadth of features Laserfiche provides.

“Along with our medical billing system, Laserfiche is one of our core applications,” he continues. “We would be hard-pressed to function without it. Employees benefit from rapid access to the information they need to do their jobs, and management benefits from the peace of mind of knowing the documents that are integral to our operation are safe and secure. It’s a win all around.”

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.”

“I attended the Toolkit sessions almost exclusively, and they had a lot to offer,” O‘Reilly explains. “After the sessions, I was able to meet and speak with the software developers. I really liked how accessible they were.”

When he returned to his office, O‘Reilly implemented some sample code that he received during one of the conference sessions. This was, however, just one of the many tips he picked up at the conference and put to immediate use when he returned home. “Those are the kinds of things you can‘t pick up over the phone,” he says. “You really have to be at the conference.”

O‘Reilly particularly benefited from meeting with other Laserfiche users in the financial services industry. One seminar given by another financial services professional was like getting help from the competition: People who knew exactly what O‘Reilly needed to do with his system were showing him exactly how to do it. “It really helped to hear it from someone who was very familiar with all of the industry language,” he says.

Whereas O‘Reilly primarily attended the conference to learn more about integrating Laserfiche with third-party applications, his co-worker, Ben Hauger, attended to learn more about indexing and the day-to-day administration of a Laserfiche system. Hauger says he found what he was looking for in courses given by system administrators who‘d indexed much larger systems.

“I came back to work feeling energized—and far more confident. We hit the ground running and started making improvements to our server almost immediately,” he says. “Sean worked on development, and I worked on redeploying our hardware platform. Everything we did was based on what we‘d learned at the conference.”

O‘Reilly has attended the Laserfiche Institute Conference twice, and he recommends it to other Laserfiche users in the financial services field. O‘Reilly is not sure who will be attending this year, but Geneos CIO Dean Rager confirms that, based on O‘Reilly‘s and Hauger‘s experience, he definitely intends to send at least one staff member.

“They really got a lot out of it,” Rager says.

After the City of Wichita had been using Laserfiche for about four years, staff from the IT department met with police records staff to discuss new ways of using our system to provide more innovative public service. We decided to start by putting traffic accident reports online.

When Wichita citizens are involved in traffic accidents, they are required to send copies of the accident reports to the state Registry of Motor Vehicles and supply their insurance companies with the case numbers. Insurance companies then request copies of the reports so they can use them to settle claims.

We were already using Laserfiche WebLink™ internally to retrieve documents, so we thought we could integrate it with a third-party payment solution that would enable citizens to purchase copies of the reports online. The big question was whether we’d be able to set up a payment system that could tell our document imaging system to release an imaged file.

The programming solution turned out to be relatively easy using the Laserfiche Integrator’s Toolkit™, particularly because Laserfiche was already integrated with our public safety software program. Basically, we use the case number of the report to set everything in motion, and it works beautifully.

We’ve had the system up and running for about three years, and most citizens prefer to pay $16 online rather than come to city hall. Our happiest customers are the insurance companies. They love how the system saves them both staff time and messenger costs.

Using the accident report model, we’re looking at automating other city business as well. Once we sort out some issues with the payment system vendor, we plan to use WebLink to enable citizens to pay traffic tickets online. We also want to use the system for pet licenses and garage sale licenses. Our attitude is, Why should people have to come to city hall when they can pay their two dollars online for a printable garage sale license in PDF format?

We’re happy to post our ideas and some of our code in the Laserfiche Code Library. The Code Library is a great place to learn from other users. For example, we’re in the process of putting our metropolitan area planning documents online, and we are also looking to put engineering project plans online. We’ve been looking at the solution from a pure WebLink standpoint. We really needed to focus the search capability to a particular set of features within the repository because of the way we’re storing those documents. We’d love to hear from other users who have experience with this process, particularly in returning PDF files.

Since installing Laserfiche, our document imaging system has grown by over 9000 percent. That points to Wichita sharing a long future of continued success with Laserfiche.

We’re constantly hearing about the different ways clients are using their Laserfiche systems and integrating Laserfiche with third-party applications. We also hear that IT staff at most organizations are happy to share their work with other Laserfiche users. We designed the Code Library as a central location where IT staff and other developers can post their code and answer questions about it.

The Laserfiche Code Library provides resources for anyone interested in working with Laserfiche integration tools, from simple scripts to complex customizations. As a Laserfiche developer, you can submit code to the Library for posting–allowing you to help out other developers and users and receive recognition for your innovative use of Laserfiche.

Alongside resources such as the Toolkit Forum, the Code Library acts as a repository for the collected knowledge of the Laserfiche developer community. Reading Code Library articles can give you a look at the thought processes and coding styles of Laserfiche developers who have contributed samples and utilities.

Some articles on the Code Library, such as “Sending Search Results as E-mail Messages”, are essentially stand-alone utilities, which could be scheduled to run independently. Other Code Library items are intended for educational purposes, demonstrations of specific concepts such as viewing an image, applying annotations or exporting a document. The code in these projects provides an excellent example for beginning Toolkit programmers. How-to articles in the Library cover particular elements of setting up a customization, such as logging in to the Laserfiche server or setting up Windows® and Laserfiche to take advantage of your Toolkit apps.

To celebrate the continued growth of the Code Library, and to salute the innovative work IT staff have done, we’re pleased to announce a special program to award a prize for the best code submission. Give us your favorite Toolkit code, an explanation of what it does and instructions on how to use it. The community member who sends in the best submission will win his or her choice of either an Apple® iPhone™ or a Nintendo® Wii™ bundle, with additional prizes awarded to runners-up. The deadline for entries will be later this year. We’ll post more details about this program on the Support Site.

“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.

Call it e-government, or simply call it a smart way to get things done. Here’s how Imaging Analyst Cliff Thomas and his colleagues at the City of Wichita got beyond the buzzwords and made it happen.

When the City of Wichita IT and Police Records staff met to discuss ways to streamline internal processes that would also improve public service, they agreed to begin with traffic accident reports. Thomas recalls, “We all said, ‘Why not put them online?’”

All Wichita citizens involved in an accident must submit copies of accident reports to the state Registry of Motor Vehicles and send the case numbers to their insurance companies. In turn, insurers request their own copies directly from the Wichita Police Department for use when settling claims.Prior to the launch of the online system, six to eight citizens came to the front counter of the Police Records Division each day to request copies of accident reports. They completed the request form and paid a convenience fee. Records staff told them that the report would be mailed within two weeks.

On average it took more than 20 minutes for a clerk to process each request, including searching for and photocopying each report. The division provided copies of all accident reports to insurance companies for a nominal fee. Delivering these services consumed 50 to 60 staff-hours each month.

Why not put accident reports online? That was just one good question among many. Others included how to link the payment application to the document management system, how to securely roll it out to the public and how to generate new revenue in the process.

In the initial phases of Wichita’s document management project, the City built a Laserfiche repository of more than 6.5 million searchable digital images, reclaiming hundreds of square feet of office space in the process. Currently, more than 5.5 million of those pages are imaged police records, including accident reports.

The City was already using Laserfiche WebLink to provide Web-based, thin-client document retrieval to authorized City staff. Integrating WebLink with a payment processing solution to enable online availability of accident reports seemed a natural progression toward greater electronic delivery of public services.

The remaining “big question,” says Thomas, “was whether we would be able to set up a payment system that could tell our document imaging system to release an imaged file.

“It turned out to be a relatively easy programming challenge, however, utilizing the Laserfiche Integrator’s Toolkit, especially since Laserfiche was already integrated with our public safety software program. Basically, we use the case number of the report to set everything in motion. It works beautifully.”

The new online accident report system eliminates human involvement with transactions and has reduced in-person accident report requests at the Police Records Division to a trickle. When a citizen does come to the front counter, records clerks use the online system to find and print requested reports in seconds.

By delivering an online service in which the public sees immediate value, Wichita is able to charge $16 for each report. Charges to insurance companies have increased from $2 to $16 per report. According to Thomas, because the insurers recognize the value in faster access, they don’t mind paying more for the ability to simply retrieve reports over the Web by case number.

“They love the new system,” says Thomas. “It saves them both man hours and messenger costs. On balance, they’re making out, too.”

Thomas concludes, “In my opinion, the reason we’re doing so well is because Laserfiche software allowed us to scale up. The scalability enabled us to get started, win over staff and figure out where we wanted to go. I think that is an ideal approach for any local government in which cost and staff acceptance are concerns.”