When Wendi Smith accompanied her friend Kristy DeLong from the City of Carmel, IN, to the Laserfiche Conference in Los Angeles last January, she was supposed to be on vacation. But as the Administrative Assistant for the Town of Brownsburg’s Planning and Building Department, Smith started to get her own ideas about the kinds of cost-savings and operational efficiencies Laserfiche could bring to the modest but progressive Brownsburg, a town of just 20,000 that Money Magazine named the 33rd “Best Place to Live in America.”
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When we last heard from Joseph Salpietro, President and CEO of Xpyria Investment Advisors, he was looking forward to implementing Workflow to streamline his Firm’s repetitive work processes. As one of the first Avante customers in the financial services industry, one of the reasons Salpietro chose Avante was because of its built-in business process management (BPM) functionality.

“A lot of people think if you have an office in a metropolitan city that the highest cost to a business is rent, it’s not. It’s the people we employ. So I’d rather have them doing mission-critical, profitable work.”
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Time was, when an officer from Ontario’s Hamilton Police Service (HPS) responded to investigate a call about an EDP (emotionally disturbed person), they’d have two choices to determine risk factors as they proceeded: Drive back to the station with the EDP to look up past reports - or place a call and wait for a Records Clerk to pull the report and read it to them over the phone. Either way, the officer would be off the street, sometimes for hours, waiting for the necessary information to act on.

These days, however, an officer responding to the same call can pull up reports right in their patrol car, accessing information vital to the safety of the EDP – and the public – using just a name, incident number or other simple keyword.
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Maine’s state motto is “The Way Life Should Be,” and the City of Saco’s could well be “The Way Laserfiche Should Be.” Thanks to a commitment to user education and establishing an in-house Laserfiche administrator, city employees in every department have embraced an ecological and economical paradigm shift in how the city does business and offers services.

So much so that in just three years, Saco has set a standard for e-government so high that its regional neighbors are beginning to look into it as well.

So why has Saco been so successful? For starters, when City Administrator Rick Michaud and Saco’s IT staff looked into document management three years ago, they didn’t have a problem, they had a plan.
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Since implementing Laserfiche in 2007, Collin County, TX, home to the Dallas/Fort Worth area’s fastest-growing northeast suburbs, has enjoyed enterprise-wide success automating and integrating its business processes. But as Records Manager Margaret Anderson points out, it’s been as a direct result of equally enterprise-wide pre-planning working with the county’s myriad departments.

The County saw its population increase nearly 50%—from nearly 500,000 in 2000 to 725,000 by 2007—straining the county’s infrastructure. As Anderson puts it, “The exponential growth rate of our county is reflected in the increased demand for essential county services.” The governing body of the county, the Commissioners Court, then issued a strategic direction to improve efficiency and customer service. “This caused us to look at an enterprise solution to managing our records with emphasis on migrating to electronic records,” she explains. “We had to reduce our paper and microfilm records volume.”
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One of the things we get asked a lot is “How much money can I really save with Laserfiche?” We have two great white papers that show the possibilities - one for financial services and one for healthcare - but, as usual, our customers’ success stories speak for themselves.

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

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Win-win situations are not good enough for information technology staff in Marshall, part of Minnesota’s Lyon County. They’ve got to have win-win, win-win.

That’s because the Marshall school district, its city hall, municipal utility department and the Lyon County government all have built their IT infrastructures around Laserfiche. So when one part of the quartet undertakes improvements to Laserfiche, everybody benefits—and it seems that the improvements aren’t stopping any time soon.

“That’s the thing about Laserfiche,” says Todd Pickthorn, an IT expert with the Marshall School District. “Once you’ve completed one project with Laserfiche, your eyes open up to the new projects that are possible. That’s been the case with all the agencies we’re working with. When one makes an improvement, everybody reaps the rewards.”
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Many financial advisors consider technology an expense, no matter how necessary. Joseph Salpietro of Xpyria Investment Advisors felt the same way, until he came to a crucial realization.

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

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With the strict oversight of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), independent financial advisers in the UK require a robust platform for tracking and managing paper records. Rigorous audits and record-retention rules, along with numerous work-process documents, leave independent financial advisors drowning in a sea of paper.

Regal Independent Financial Services Director Neil James and his co-directors were fighting a losing battle against rapidly-filling file cabinets and spiraling storage costs, all the while facing the strict compliance and retention pressures of operating in a highly-regulated environment. With files of up to 250 pages, easy searching was a priority, and physical storage space was at a premium.
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Think of the paperwork challenges of a typical registered investment advisory (RIA) firm—new account forms, quarterly and annual statements, client agreements, and floods of general correspondence, all of which must be maintained in compliance with a host of regulations. Now imagine an RIA that’s also registered with a broker-dealer. And that offers retirement planning. And, for good measure, that sells insurance. Finally, picture this company’s paperwork spread out across 13 regional offices in two states.

Have a headache yet? If not, you probably at least have some sympathy for Rehmann Financial. With 60 associates located throughout Michigan and Florida, the rapidly growing wealth management firm faced a formidable information management challenge. But with Laserfiche document and business process management at the heart of its technology platform, Rehmann Financial has standardized business processes, enabled effortless information exchange and, within just a few months, achieved significant cost savings over their former paper-based business model.
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Charlottesville, VA is consistently voted one of America’s best cities to live, marked as it is by its deep history (birthplace of three U.S. presidents) and its college-town charm (home to the University of Virginia). But when it came to records management, Charlottesville’s paper history held little charm for the city staff left dealing with its outdated and overgrown filing system.

“Life before Laserfiche was full of frustration,” remembers Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue and Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.
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With its Democratic government firmly in place, South Africa has become one of the African nations with promising oil and natural gas reserves that are safe for legitimate exploration. The country has an estimated tens of trillion cubic feet of natural gas underneath its wildernesses—a resource that, properly tapped, could assist in nation building.

So the Petroleum Agency of South Africa (PASA) went on a global sales trip of sorts last year, trying to interest outside oil companies in the country’s natural gas reserves. PASA representatives visited Johannesburg, London, Houston, TX, and Long Beach, CA, and now the agency has plenty of potential investors applying for exploration acreage. The problem, however, was managing all the associated paperwork.
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For Mohave County, AZ, the third time was the charm for the county’s Records Manager to successfully implement Laserfiche enterprise-wide.

The dry-witted comedian Steven Wright once joked, “I’m so far ahead of my time, nobody’s there yet.” Mohave County Records Manager Chuck Chlarson can relate. He saw his two predecessors try without much success to implement an enterprise-wide records management system—despite a state mandate to do so—because of a lack of technical support and user buy-in. But as Chlarson has found, in Mohave County, being the third Records Manager is the ticket to success.
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Visionaries are not always thinking about the future as they leave the past behind. Sometimes, they are just looking to make a change.

That was Glens Falls Records Management Tech/City Historian Wayne Wright 11 years ago. When he thumbed through a Laserfiche brochure back then, he was thinking about the bulky bound volumes of birth, death and marriage certificates the City Clerk’s office staff wrestled with on top of the copier thirty to forty times each day. A decade later Laserfiche is helping most every aspect of Glens Falls government run more efficiently, largely through the single-minded effort of an administrator who just wanted to make a change.

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Medical practices large and small are saving money as well as improving patient care by getting rid of traditional record files and going paperless, according to Lee Lafayette, president of Physicians Support Group Inc., a Dallas, TX technology consultant who is introducing Laserfiche Document Imaging to his hundreds of clients.

“Ignorance of electronic document management is costing medical groups millions of dollars in extra payroll costs and hurting the morale of office staffs,” Lafayette said. “It is relatively easy to demonstrate immediate return-on-investment (ROI) for converting traditional files to electronic images to practice administrators; I have numerous references ready to share their successes, too.”
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