“With Laserfiche’s 25-year history and experience with over 30,000 installations worldwide, we were able to conservatively approximate the savings associated with using ECM to ‘go paperless’ and automate document-related processes,” said Tim Welsh, CFP, Senior Consultant at Laserfiche. “In total, firms that use ECM can increase profitability by 64.1% to 125.6%.”

Table 1: Summary of Staff and Cost Savings by Firm Size

In particular, firms that embrace ECM realize five major benefits:

• Reduced paper storage costs.
• Automation of back-office processes for increased efficiency.
• Integration with CRM software for increased productivity.
• Simplified compliance.
• Increased business valuation.

“For a relatively small investment in ECM software, RIAs can make a powerful improvement in today’s income as well as tomorrow’s long-term business value,” said Welsh.

The paper, “ROI for RIAs,” is available for free at the Laserfiche booth (#335) and Website.

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

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

Filling a need, launching a vision

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

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

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

Searchable, viewable, sendable

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

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

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

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

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

Delivering agile process through agile ECM enables organizations to maximize value creation. From supporting client communications to managing life cycles, agile ECM expands the business case beyond the usual ROI by enabling complex, cross functional processes at the value chain level.

Join special guest Holly Muscolino, Research Director of IDC, and Kimberly Samuelson, Director of Government Strategy for Laserfiche, Thursday, April 7 at 10 am PST for “Agile ECM for the Agile Enterprise,” a Webinar focusing on leveraging technology to improve value at every level of your business.

Why Attend:

• If you are in IT and must have a fast way to bring value to your customers.
• If you’re a department head and want to improve the way client content and interactions are organized.
• If you’re a business owner and need to find one way to solve multiple problems for your organization.

What You Will Learn:

• Why business value is shifting from technology toward the people who use it and the processes they use it for.
• How to use ECM to quickly impact the value chain, from standardization to governance.
• Creative ways to improve technology without buying new software and hardware.

You won’t want to miss out—register now.

“Managing multiple applications detracts from the time advisors spend on profitable activities,” said Senior Laserfiche Advisor Timothy Welsh, CFP®. “Rehmann Financial and Asset Dedication are just two examples of advisory firms that have improved productivity and shored up their compliance programs by integrating Laserfiche with their CRMs.”

During the Laserfiche workshop, Welsh will highlight how to deploy Laserfiche in conjunction with both cloud-based and on-premise CRM systems. “Laserfiche’s open architecture allows advisors to instantly access critical client documentation from within their CRM applications, saving time and effort,” Welsh said.

Available as both a Web-based and a desktop solution, Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) systems includes:

• Document imaging capabilities that enable advisory firms to go paperless.
• Records management automation that lowers the cost of compliance.
• Powerful, DoD 5015.2-certified security features that protect confidential client information.
• Comprehensive auditing and reporting capabilities that monitor all system activity.
• Workflow functionality that enables advisors to automate standard business processes.
• Windows-like interface that minimizes user training and improves productivity right away.

Conference attendees who attend the workshop or stop by the Laserfiche booth (#301-303) will receive in-depth case studies on both Asset Dedication’s and Rehmann Financial’s ECM implementations, as well as a white paper titled “What Financial Advisors Need to Know about the Dodd-Frank Act.”

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

The Laserfiche ECM system gives financial advisors the ability to simplify regulatory compliance, improve profitability and limit exposure to civil and criminal liability. It allows advisors to prepare for audits more easily and ensure compliance with multiple state, SEC and FINRA regulations—all while accelerating business processes and making staff more efficient.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

When the firm built its own broker/dealer in 2008, Chief Administration Officer (CAO) Phillip Fournier and the rest of the Spire management team saw the opportunity to streamline operations. “We knew there would be countless audits, reviews and requests for information from the various entities,” Fournier says.

Coming from other broker/dealers, “we’d experienced lost forms, high overnight charges, delays in getting business processed and audits that required home office staff to keep coming back to us for forms they had misplaced,” he remembers. “We knew we could do it more efficiently—for compliance supervision and oversight, for operational efficiencies, for field reps to access information from everywhere.”

Fournier says right away Spire’s management team had the vision to build a system that included both enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM). “We were talking about more than going paperless, we were talking about setting up workflows and automating processes,” he says. “Our management team is always trying to remove friction points, like lost documents. We really wanted to be able to say, whether you’re five miles or 500 miles away, you’re submitting your OSJ and principal approvals the same exact way.”

Spire was referred to Laserfiche reseller John Caso of One Source/ADI. “We were impressed that ADI had about 100 financial services customers using Laserfiche,” Fournier says.

Making Work Flow

For 18 months, the Spire team considered options. “We just couldn’t find anything on par with Laserfiche. We were either going to have to build our own homegrown system—or we could just customize a proven and established software solution. And we didn’t want our consultants to be beta testing a homegrown system.”

The firm purchased Laserfiche Avante for its 100 consultants working between 17 offices. “We asked them how they would like the system set up, and then we set about doing it in as few clicks as possible,” says Fournier. For compliance and auditing purposes, each client file would have three different sets of folders: fee-based accounts, commission-based accounts and insurance accounts. One Source/ADI helped design workflows to automate processes for OSJ and principal approvals, branch audits of sales literature and correspondence, as well as security protocols.

Within the first 18 months of implementing Laserfiche, 80% of Spire’s offices were regularly processing content through Laserfiche; today, all of them are. “We use our Laserfiche system for required paperwork for FINRA, but our offices have the capability to scan anything they want, and many scan paperwork for their entire book of clients,” Fournier adds.

Laserfiche data is stored offsite in a data bunker with Equinix to ensure its safety and security, while Spire consultants have instant access to all their forms over a virtual office system. The business continuity advantage this brought to Spire became apparent two winters ago. “We had several snowstorms that shut down the whole Washington D.C. area for two weeks, and we were able to continue working remotely,” says Fournier. “We’ve basically got our information in Fort Knox as opposed to being one burst pipe away from it being lost forever. “

Accelerated Transfer, Halted Costs

Now it doesn’t matter if an office is five or 500 miles away, since Spire’s Operations Department is capable of processing direct and custodial business the same day—removing the delays and costs of overnight shipping.

“Many of our accounts are fee-based, so each day assets are delayed during transfer adds up quickly,” Fournier explains.

The accelerated transfer allows Spire to process business with immediate feedback. If a set of forms is not in good order (NIGO), Workflow pushes it back to the rep’s assistant with an e-mail that tells the assistant exactly what information is missing. “The assistant knows exactly what the situation is and can fix it, so we reprocess business in real-time.”

With no physical forms to lose—they’re scanned directly into Laserfiche and indexed immediately—there are no processing bottlenecks. “One of our biggest complaints at our previous firm was lost forms. An overnight package would show up, and when it was opened, forms would be lost or attached to other forms accidentally,” explains Fournier. “Now, if a form is incorrectly filed, the Laserfiche search and indexing system can find it in seconds.”

From Days to Hours: Audits Made Simple – and Less Onerous

To facilitate auditing, Spire Operations configured a compliance folder in its Laserfiche repository where consultants scan in their required documents—correspondence, advertising and bank statements, among others—that the firm’s Compliance department needs to review.

“Our Compliance Department can be much less onerous in its supervision,” says Fournier. “Much of what we need can be searched, reviewed and saved right in Laserfiche.” Secure access to each folder can be scripted individually, further mitigating compliance risks.

Fournier points to a recent FINRA audit of the firm’s 529 college fund business. “On the fly, the FINRA auditor asked to see all our new 529 accounts opened from April 2008 through April 2010. Using Laserfiche, our staff was able to search through the entire database and provide him a copy of all our new account forms. We had all 300 forms for him on a zip drive in less than an hour. He was really impressed,” he says. “If we had to find all those paper files, it would have required days and countless staff hours to satisfy that one request.”

Quantifying Success

Fournier says Spire gauges the success of using Laserfiche in several ways, starting with the fact that each of its 17 offices saves approximately $3,500 in overnight charges annually. “Add the cost of storage, file cabinets, the business continuity issues of having that paper in the same place as our facilities, hours of file maintenance, lost paperwork, overnighting paperwork to be signed, not to mention the lost dollars due to delays in processing, and the numbers become even more significant.” 

The most significant benefit to Spire, Fournier says, is not hiring extra staff. “We estimate we’re saving two or three bodies because of how we use Laserfiche to automate compliance, operations and trading.

“We knew it would enhance our operations center and create synergies between our field reps and our home office, but the smoothness of the system and the removal of friction has been really remarkable,” he adds. “After only 2 ½ years, if we tried to remove Laserfiche, our reps would revolt.”

Allen Adjamian of Laserfiche reseller Adjamian Affiliated was called to demonstrate how Laserfiche could lighten the firm’s paperwork load. Adjamian showed how Laserfiche could be integrated with the firm’s Lacerte tax software and other accounting software programs to create a central storage repository for the entire firm’s paperwork in a way that all but eliminated printing—even scanning.

Rocha says his fellow Olmsted staffers were particularly impressed by how user-friendly Laserfiche was, because it “had the look and feel of Windows and search engines we were used to using.” Another plus, he adds, was the comprehensive single solution Laserfiche offered. “Other programs you had to buy more products to get to that level of functionality. Laserfiche suited our needs right out of the box.”

Olmsted herself notes that even with all its functionality, Laserfiche offered a focus. “We looked at a lot of systems where the document management component was usually one component in this canned system,” she says. “What stood out about Laserfiche was that it was a stand-alone program that focused on a single, separate function that provided a higher level of security.”

The firm purchased Laserfiche with Web Access to serve staff internally and remotely, as well as its clients. Implementation began in late 2006 with a backlog conversion of seven years’ worth of paper files. Adjamian and fellow solutions consultant Kristina Yassi worked with Rocha and Olmsted’s staff to set up templates and document types to establish the file structure that, with some enhancements, the firm still uses today. “Allen and Kristina helped us a design a folder and subfolder structure that allowed us get started scanning our documents right away,” Rocha recalls. “We’ve been able to improve on it since then, which is actually something we’ve come to appreciate about Laserfiche: It’s flexible enough to grow with us, without making a big project out of it.”

The impact of using Laserfiche was immediate. “A lot of the time when we complete a project, we have to make associated information almost immediately available to meet deadlines and client demands. Once things are in Laserfiche, we can make that data readily available through e-mail or Web Access,” Rocha says.

A big time- and resource-saver, he says, is the ability to print directly to Laserfiche from the firm’s Lacerte tax software. “Printing to Laserfiche from Lacerte takes about 10 to 15 seconds for about 40 pages. There is no need to print, prep and scan paper copies for review, whether it’s for managers or staff. They go directly to Laserfiche to review it,” Rocha explains. “This allows us to move tax returns through the office for input and review without printing out any pages, which also saves time and money.”

This saves time making changes to tax returns and statements, Rocha says. “Whereas before we would have to recycle the old version and reprint the new one and file it, now we just delete it in Laserfiche and re-print/download to Laserfiche. It’s also very convenient that we don’t need to go track down the client’s file to review data, because it’s already in Laserfiche.”

Rocha also says that Laserfiche’s interoperability with other programs and file types has brought efficiency and convenience to other business processes. “We transfer all our disparate types of data and document types into Laserfiche—QuickBooks, PDF documents, and Excel,” he says. “We can print directly to Laserfiche, save-to, or just drag-and-drop it. It’s that easy.”

For her part, Olmsted says the Laserfiche system inspired rapid adoption for its ease of use, but again, its focus of use. “Laserfiche feels like an independent program in that it’s this standalone entity that’s open to all of the types of files we work with. Our staff and customers have adopted it really well.”

The ultimate customer service, she says, is Laserfiche’s DoD 5015.2-certified security. “It can take some time to get people used to not working with paper, but for us it’s the only way to secure information moving forward by making sure you don’t have sensitive information laying around the office. Our clients look to us as their accounting firm to secure their information at the highest level,” she says.

At the same time, Olmsted sees Laserfiche making her business more agile and responsive to staff and clients alike. “Laserfiche provides us a lot of mobility. Auditors going out in the field can scan in documents and access company files. We have everybody reviewing tax returns online as well.”

Now, four years since implementing Laserfiche, the firm is seeing its return on investment (ROI) from regained staff time and cutting overhead costs. “I can say we save about 25% across the board, as far what it takes us to process paperwork now,” Rocha says.

And Rocha says that Olmsted & Associates has found a new way to work. “With Laserfiche we’ve found a document management system that offers us control in terms of securing and centralizing information, but also the flexibility to handle all kinds of content and make it readily available to our staff and clients securely and conveniently.”

That, Olmsted says, has given her firm a competitive edge. “The only way to move forward is to get your efficiency up and your costs down. For us, Laserfiche has been a big part of that.”

• Providing in-home services to help homebound older people live in their own homes as long as possible.
• Helping active older people stay fit, healthy and involved through senior center programs and volunteer opportunities.
• Providing family caregivers the resources and support they need to maintain their own lives while caring for older loved ones.

But with 19,000 clients, CareLink was contending with a challenge of its own: filing, storing and accessing customer charts and other documentation in a timely and efficient manner.

Paper’s Pain Points

According to Luke Mattingly, CareLink’s chief operation officer, the agency employs 740 employees, with many of them providing home-based customer care. Some of these field employees live and work nearly 100 miles away from CareLink’s main office, which made filing and accessing customer charts a time-consuming and difficult task—one that took away from the face-to-face time they could spend with customers.

“Our employees are kind and compassionate people who entered this field in order to help senior citizens,” says Mattingly, “not spend hours filing and retrieving reports.”

In addition to staff productivity concerns, CareLink’s paper-based processes also caused delays when it came to funding. As a nonprofit, the agency receives funding from a variety of sources, including:

• Medicaid.
• Federal awards.
• State assistance.
• Private insurance companies.
• Personal donations.
• Private individuals (fee for service).

“We have thousands of customer charts and documents related to a variety of funding sources, and we get audited by third parties in conjunction with their funding requirements,” explains Mattingly. “Paper is just not conducive to quick and easy audits, particularly in the document collection phase.”

Electing to Go Electronic

In 2006, CareLink decided that enough was enough: the agency needed to find a solution that would allow it to do away with paper records and manage electronic content instead.

After evaluating several systems, CareLink found that “Laserfiche had the features and operational capabilities we were looking for, including excellent security, comprehensive records management and ease of use.” Plus, adds Mattingly, “Laserfiche was offered by Datamax Micro, one of our long-time, trusted vendors, and we knew that we could count on them to implement the system according to our needs.”

How ECM Helps

Implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) solution has transformed the way CareLink handles customer information in a number of ways:

• Electronic customer charts increase employee efficiency. With Laserfiche, field employees no longer have to travel to the main office to retrieve and file customer charts, which greatly enhances their efficiency. They simply access Laserfiche via a Citrix connection and find and file electronic records in the Laserfiche repository. According to Mattingly, this ability to capture documents in the field saves significant staff time. With distributed capture, CareLink has created a five-day filing rule that ensures data is uploaded to Laserfiche on a regular basis. This keeps charts current and protects against the possibility of losing files due to local hard drive failures.
• Automated filing process increases organizational efficiency. Using Laserfiche Quick Fields and Workflow, CareLink has created a quick and easy way to capture, index and auto-file documents in its Laserfiche repository. “Quick Fields captures our customer charts, saves them to the correct location and extracts index field data from specific areas of our forms in order to pre-fill our templates. Workflow further enhances the process by automatically populating template data based on folder name/designation. The automated filing process has been marvelous at eliminating manual data entry and saving staff time,” Mattingly reveals.
• Enhanced security eases HIPAA concerns. Prior to implementing Laserfiche, customer charts were kept in a large file room where it was impossible to be 100% sure that personnel only had access to the records of their assigned customers. In addition, staff sometimes forgot to record when a file was removed for review. “The granular security controls in Laserfiche eliminate the possibility that employees can view customer files they’re not supposed to see,” says the COO. “The system also provides an audit trail so that administrators can easily see all the activity that’s taken place on any given file.”
• Easier access to information eases audits. “In conjunction with our funding requirements, CareLink is audited by third parties on a regular basis,” Mattingly explains. “Laserfiche sped up the process of retrieving documents when those entities show up unannounced.” The system has also simplified internal audits that are designed to ensure that various departments and individual employees are completing an appropriate amount of work. “With Laserfiche’s advanced search capabilities, we can quickly determine the number of documents filed by any employee or department during a given date range. This has been very helpful and saves us a lot of time,” Mattingly says.

But customer charting isn’t the only area of agency operations that has been enhanced by ECM. Finance uses Laserfiche to manage financial documents, check registers and payables invoices. The fundraising department uses it to keep track of content such as proposals and thank you letters. HR uses it to control personnel files, time sheets and employee training files. In addition, the repository also houses organizational policies and procedures, letters, correspondence and individual employee files.

“Laserfiche started out as a solution for electronic charting but it’s grown to encompass so much more,” Mattingly says.

Return on Investment

According to Mattingly, Laserfiche has enabled CareLink to cut its paper consumption in half. Over the past three years, paper savings and the reduction of off-site storage costs have completely covered the cost of purchasing the system. “Over the next seven years,” Mattingly states, “eliminating off-site storage entirely will offset the annual maintenance fees for Laserfiche.”

Mattingly reminds us, however, not to forget about the cost savings associated with the efficiency gains CareLink has gained through its use of Laserfiche: “We estimate a 40% efficiency gain for audits, for example, and our field staff has absolutely seen a productivity boost. Although we haven’t assigned these gains a dollar value, this is where the real savings lie.”

Kenneth Samuelson, one of the firm’s principals, brings over twenty years of experience in the financial services industry to his clients. With this experience, Samuelson places an emphasis on technology to get the maximum potential out of his operations. “I refer to it as tightening the bolts,” he says. “We need to get as much as we can out of our technology investments and make our operations faster and more efficient—and make our staff happier.”

It was this need to improve operational efficiency that led the Morehead Group to purchase a Laserfiche enterprise content management solution. Staff used college interns and a part-time staff member to scan all existing files into the system. “It did not take us nearly as long as we’d projected,” says Client Services Specialist Kris Balot. “We tailored our filing structure in Laserfiche to match how we’d kept our documents in paper format, which was in chronological order by policy.” Documents were further separated by document type, including policies, confirmations, legal, trust, statements, and pre-issue/underwriting.

Balot believes strongly that the success of the Morehead Group’s Laserfiche system is due to their strong partnership with their reseller, ADI-Laserfiche, who worked with the firm from the beginning to develop their filing system and integrate Laserfiche into daily operations. “Their support has been exceptional and unparalleled,” she says.

It’s this integration into daily operations that has resulted in the “tightening the bolts” that Samuelson emphasizes. These faster and more efficient operations have given way to an impressive ROI—and when it comes to the way things work at the Morehead Group, Balot outlines six distinct areas where Laserfiche increases the value of operations:

• Rent savings. “Previously, we had 12 filing cabinets stored in a room the size of our conference room,” Balot says. “Paying rent on space you can’t use is a waste of money. With Laserfiche, we were able to eliminate the filing room and turn it into two offices. The conversion of the space has paid for our entire investment in Laserfiche many times over.”
• Customer service improvements. “When a client calls, I pull up their Laserfiche documents on one screen and our contact information in Smart Office, our CRM, on another. Now I have all their information instantly available, so I don’t have to make them wait for a call back while I look for the answer to their question,” Balot says.
• Improved referrals. The Morehead Group’s client base is built on referrals from attorneys, accountants and other local professionals. Improved customer service doesn’t just build rapport with clients, but also with these outside professionals. “It’s amazing how many times we have more information on a client than their attorney or accountant,” Balot says. “In one case, the trustee did not even have a copy of the trust document, but because we had it in Laserfiche, I could e-mail it to him while we were still on the phone.”
• Operational cost savings. Balot outlines other areas where the firm has saved money thanks to Laserfiche, including paper, printing, postage and office supplies. “In a paper world, if someone requested that we send them information, we would have to pull their file, make a copy of the documents and then either mail or fax them,” Balot remembers. “Today, we simply e-mail the document directly to the client, right from Laserfiche, in a matter of seconds.”
• Easier audits. “I was getting ready to go on vacation. The day before my plane left, we had an NFPSI audit,” Balot explains. “When the compliance officer arrived, I sat them down with Laserfiche and let them search for what they needed. They had their notebook with their checklist, and for each item that was on their checklist, they found the corresponding document in Laserfiche. They were really pleased with our organization, because the entire examination only took about two hours!”
• Simplified—yet stronger—security. Through Laserfiche security, documents have built-in protection that meets requirements for HIPAA, Regulation S-P and both SEC 17a-4 and FINRA requirements. Document access is easily controlled, allowing compliance to just get the documents they need, and also prevents unauthorized access to client information.

According to Balot, Laserfiche has become an integral part of daily operations. “It’s more than just a central filing cabinet,” she says. “It’s the central repository for all our current work activities, including underwriting and client service. We use Laserfiche for all stages of the document’s life cycle, and it allows for several people to work on the same file at the same time—something you can’t do with paper.

“Laserfiche’s capabilities extend far beyond meeting the needs of our back office staff. Our principals and sales reps also have immediate access to client documents,” she adds.

But when it comes down to it, for Balot, the real value of Laserfiche is simple. “Laserfiche is the number one best improvement we have made in technology. It has had the biggest and most successful impact on our operations over the past six years, especially when it comes to ROI.”

While we have ROI white papers for financial services and healthcare, here are some examples of Laserfiche customers thinking creatively to save money, time and resources by running smarter.

Brownsburg, IN: After ten years using Laserfiche, Brownsburg upgraded to a Laserfiche Avante system last year and hasn’t looked back. Although right now the Town’s Boards and Commissions is only using one workflow, the Committee has already produced ROI figures showing that single workflow will pay for their system expansion in just 2 ½ years – although staff expect a faster ROI once they develop additional workflows in more departments. What are some of those workflows? Automating permitting in the Planning and Building department, automating the HR onboarding process and moving court-bound information from the Police Department to the County Prosecutor’s Office, to name just three.

Cambridge Financial: At Cambridge Financial, thanks to capture and processing automation through Laserfiche Quick Fields, staffers can process 35-60 pages a minute, with an error rate of less than 0.5%. Internal accounting reconciliations that used to take up to 14 days are now completed in a single day. The efficiency is so cost-effective, the firm’s IT director says Cambridge has realized its ROI in less than one year after implementing Laserfiche.

D.L. Evans Bank: Using Laserfiche, D.L. Evans was able to reduce audit time, streamline lending and realize a 33% reduction in hard copy document production and an 85% reduction in paper storage.

Elk River Police Department: Laserfiche has helped the ERPD eliminate 251 reams of paper, which was 2.2 tons of paper or 54 adult trees. The Department’s Chief estimates the paper alone cost well over a $1,000 a year, not to mention the storage costs of four shelves required to house all this paper. By his estimates, the ERPD spent over $17,000 a year and needed 3.5 full-time employees just to process and store the paperwork generated by the department’s 24,000 cases each year.

Fertility Centers of Illinois: FCI initially used Laserfiche for EOB management, and then moved to a hybrid EMR approach where they integrated Laserfiche with their EMR for total paperless chart management. Nine of their centers have switched to managing all their patient charts in Laserfiche – which saved $75 in shipping costs per chart.

Hamilton, ON, Police Service: HPS’ Records Supervisor points to $200,000 saved annually, due to downsizing 4 civilian staff in the Records Business Centre, as officers are able to access vital information directly. And redacting documents in Laserfiche saves “a fortune in paper and time,” he adds, helping staff more easily meet file requests from the Courts and outside agencies.

RMS: Using Laserfiche, medical device manufacturer RME has cut their formerly 8-10 week processing time to 72 hours. Laserfiche also accelerates shared business processes across its plants in Minnesota and Tennessee.

Saco, ME: City employees in every department have embraced an ecological and economical paradigm shift in how the city does business and offers services, setting a standard for e-government so high that its regional neighbors are beginning to look into it as well. Saco’s savings so far total over $10,000 a year, but as Laserfiche Administrator Fran Beaulieu points out, “We also look at the value of the system for not departments, but individual value to users. Service to constituents is a big factor.”

Texas A&M University Corpus Christi: TAMU-CC used Laserfiche to develop their Report Upload Bifurcation Engine (R.U.B.E.), which processes continuous BPP/FAMIS report files and splits them into individual ‘reportlets’ before filing them into Laserfiche – which saves 2 reams of paper daily.

Texas A&M University Department of Entomology: Since implementing Laserfiche, the department has removed almost 40 file cabinets, creating enough space for a new office and laboratory. Even better, they expected to receive an initial ROI of $54,000, but actually achieved an ROI of $272,000. (This doesn’t include the over $22,000 they save each month!) All told, in five years, the department estimates they will save nearly $1.4 million from their Laserfiche implementation.

Westminster, CA: Westminster chose Laserfiche as an enterprise solution to replace a previous solution that had only been rolled out in the City Clerk’s Office – and that required all documents to be entirely re-scanned to append additional pages. In their formal needs assessment, the City discovered that Laserfiche would ultimately save the city over $273,000 by freeing up enough office space to create a total of 13 workstations.

Xpyria Investment Advisors: Xpyria is using Laserfiche to automate two formerly paper-intensive processes, and as a result, has saved over $4,000 annually in hard costs and 72 hours of labor.

I’d love to hear how you’re saving money from your Laserfiche system. Please leave a comment and let us know!

But with state facilities in College Station, TX, a major USDA entomology research laboratory, and members of the department’s graduate faculty stationed in nine major agricultural areas in the state, sharing information efficiently had become problematic for department staff.

Beginning in 2004, different programs and departments within TAMU began investigating document management solutions in order to more efficiently and cost-effectively share information—not to mention save space. Ultimately, they chose a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) solution to securely store paper, implement business process management and eliminate file cabinets.

Currently, nearly 1,200 staff in 10 departments and divisions within TAMU use Laserfiche.

The Department of Entomology was introduced to ECM by Business Administrator Roberta Priesmeyer, who had read an article on document imaging during a business trip. She thought that an ECM system could help the department with administrative functions, and after learning about Laserfiche, she says that she couldn’t conceivably consider any other competitor due to the enormous difference in cost.

Laserfiche’s ease of use was a major selling point for the department; Priesmeyer reports that its user interface is simple to master, which increases staff adoption.

Once the system was installed, staff created a digital filing structure which replicated the department’s paper-based system. Before Laserfiche, department staff had difficulty finding documents if employees were unavailable, on vacation or had left. With Laserfiche, filing is standardized, so information retrieval is simple. Kathy Seaton, a staff member in the accounting department, previously had to return a vendor’s call after manually searching cabinets and folders. What previously took 30-45 minutes and several phone calls now takes 30 seconds and a single phone call.

IT Director Dr. Mark Wright believes that Laserfiche hasn’t just made life easier on the department head, but also for staff. “Staff really are happier as a result of their ability to increase productivity without expending more effort,” he says.

In addition, Laserfiche enables the department to adhere to their records retention schedule much more easily, something that was nearly impossible with paper. “It really helps us keep the auditors happy,” adds Wright.

With Laserfiche, researchers can easily access reprints that previously required them to spend up to half a day sifting through files to retrieve a single document. Laserfiche’s optical character recognition (OCR) capability and unified metadata model have allowed the department to virtually eliminate this necessary but inefficient use of time. Since 2007, peer review articles have increased by 11.7%, with total faculty publications increasing by 22.4%. In fact, Department of Entomology tenured and tenure track faculty rank #1 in term of peer-review publication output in the US (from data published by the Chronicles of Higher Education).

To further conserve space, the department plans to eventually add accounts for faculty members who each use 4-5 file cabinets to store their publications, to make researching even easier.

Due to the University’s Vision 2020 plan, the department has been hiring more professors, and Laserfiche is indirectly helping them reach this goal by freeing up office space formerly used for storage. Since implementing Laserfiche, the department has removed almost 40 file cabinets, creating enough space for a new office and laboratory.

The department expected to receive an initial ROI of $54,000, but actually achieved an ROI of $272,000. ROI is tracked in areas as varied as staff costs, the cost of lost files, consumables, storage, current and proposed purchases, and lease tax savings.

ROI mainly derives from savings on accounting staff ($7,385), professional staff ($4,865) and management positions ($10,597). The department also reclaimed nearly $1,000 in storage space and nearly $1,000 in monthly printing and distribution costs, for a total monthly savings of over $22,000.

In five years, the department estimates they will save nearly $1.4 million from their Laserfiche implementation.

“I love Laserfiche,” Priesmeyer says. “I’d fight anyone who tried to take it away from me. Choosing it is literally the best decision I’ve ever made.”

Relying on paper was an inefficient use of TAMU’s monetary and staff resources. In addition, board requirements frequently limit the amount of office space to conserve space for classroom and labs, so space used for paper storage was at a premium. What little space was available could have been better used for professors’ offices.

Beginning in 2004, different programs and departments within TAMU began investigating document management solutions, in order to more efficiently and cost-effectively share information—not to mention save space. Ultimately, they chose a Laserfiche enterprise content management solution to securely store paper, implement business process management and eliminate file cabinets.

Currently, nearly 1,200 staff in 10 departments and divisions within TAMU use Laserfiche. The Health Sciences Center (HSC) reaches across Texas to educate health professionals and researchers through its seven components: the Baylor College of Dentistry in Dallas; the College of Medicine in College Station, Round Rock and Houston; the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; the Institute of Biosciences and Technology in Houston; the School of Rural Public Health in College Station and McAllen; the Irma Lerma Rangel College of Pharmacy in Kingsville; and the College of Nursing in College Station.

When the HSC was planning to build its 200-acre new central campus, it wasn’t planning on using space that could house students and labs to house file cabinets. Add to that a system that spanned the state and often required costly overnight delivery of paperwork to its central office, then a need to duplicate and store copies of that paperwork, and Laserfiche was just the cure Project Manager Kristin Nace was looking for.

Nace, the director for fiscal services, was formerly in the HSC accounts payable division. While working in that department, she scanned documents into a basic system that used a centralized network drive. In 2007, the HSC formed a committee to find an alternative system and a vendor to provide it.

Because of Laserfiche’s successful implementation in the Texas A&M AgriLife program, it was considered for the HSC, and was ultimately chosen due to ease of use. Nace says that Laserfiche’s interface is simple and self-explanatory, and the system’s ability to import and export Microsoft Office documents was critical to its ultimate selection.

As in other departments, the HSC’s implementation committee chose to implement Laserfiche in stages. The implementation began in the Finance Department, which includes accounts payable, payroll, human resources and the contracts and grants division and has 180 users. The Finance Department was chosen for the initial implementation because it is the number one paper consumer in the entire HSC.

The HSC’s Laserfiche ECM system was implemented on February 1, 2008, and was completed by May 31, 2008. During the implementation, staff were trained and the department established scanning requirements for their component offices. Nace was surprised at how easily the staff embraced Laserfiche, and how easily the implementation went. “Adoption was extremely easy,” she says. “When it comes to Laserfiche, I don’t have to make anyone do anything.”

In fact, potential users approach Nace nearly every day and ask when they will get to use Laserfiche. Nace is also impressed by how her colleagues are constantly approaching her with new ways they can use Laserfiche to streamline their workflow. In fact, there is even competition between component offices over scanners, because everyone wants one.

The HSC implementation took place without IT support; in fact, IT staff only perform standard server maintenance. “Besides file structure and security, we’re really using Laserfiche straight out of the box,” Nace comments.

Since implementing Laserfiche, the finance office has quit accepting paper documents, and instead requires all internal documents, such as invoices, payroll documents and contracts, to be submitted electronically. They have been able to eliminate most of their 69 file cabinets, which cost $2,100 annually to maintain. And they have been able to adhere to their records retention schedule much more easily.

Even better, the department has eliminated nearly all their overnight shipments from regional locations. Previously, regional offices would overnight documents to the finance department on a daily basis. Because 95% of these overnight shipments were internal, they are now handled electronically through Laserfiche—eliminating nearly $55,000 spent in shipping costs.

“We’ve already seen a cost savings by reducing our overnight delivery charges for sending documents, which also translates into a smoother more efficient business process,” Nace explains. “Utilizing Laserfiche security, we’ve moved to only having one copy of the document and are allowing our departments access to many of those folders – which they love because they no longer have to keep their own copy, which of course means fewer files in their offices.”

Nace says an intangible benefit of Laserfiche is its ability to eliminate clutter from offices. She believes that employees are happier now because their offices are free from file cabinets and paper.

In the future, HSC plans to expand Laserfiche into Student Business Services (SBS). After the SBS implementation, stage three will be to implement Laserfiche in the medical records department (MR). MR stores performance review files for doctors practicing medicine in the state of Texas, which are reviewed by other doctors to determine if they have the potential to become a malpractice case. Nace plans to use Laserfiche to redact sensitive information, and also plans to segregate them on a separate Laserfiche repository, to maintain security. She would then be able to give non-departmental users, such as doctors from across the State, access to only the specific documents they need to review cases.

Also, HSC has just received a land grant from the neighboring city of Bryan, and the state has approved construction for two buildings. One of the stipulations is that these buildings be used mainly for classrooms and research, so offices located on the new campus will have to be extremely small. In an effort to maximize available office space, the department head has already made Laserfiche mandatory for document storage.

In addition, the board has also approved the establishment of a campus in Round Rock. Like the Bryan campus, storage and office space will be limited, so a Laserfiche implementation is planned for this campus as well.

Nace has recently created a position to manage the expansion of Laserfiche into new HSC departments. Eventually, every department in the HSC will be using Laserfiche.

“Our largest unexpected benefit came in realizing how popular Laserfiche has become within our organization,” she says. “I’m regularly getting requests from our departments to set up additional folders, processes, or even repositories. I knew people would love the product, I just didn’t expect they would love it this much.

“In the planning stages I remember wondering what I was going to do if our departments didn’t buy into Laserfiche,” she adds. “How was I going to get them to use it? I’m so pleased to say they bought in after the first training class. As a matter of fact, I’ve not had to convince anyone to use it, if anything I cannot keep up with all of their requests to bring more documents into the system. We are excited it has taken off as quickly and easily as it has.”

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

Original Pain Points: Data Storage and Accessibility

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

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

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

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

Pioneering Laserfiche within a Banking Environment

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

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

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

Streamlining Lending

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding Laserfiche throughout the Organization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From a Supporting Application to a Critical One

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick Capture with Quick Fields

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

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

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

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

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

Running Smarter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chief Beahen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Elk River PD officer accessing Laserfiche from his squad car

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a contract manufacturing company that specializes in medical device implants and surgical instruments, precision is a chief concern for RMS. For over forty years, the company has ensured the accuracy and quality of its products, spurring expansion and business growth. But as the organization grew, some of its processes failed to evolve along with it.

“As a contract manufacturer, we fulfill a substantial number of jobs every year,” explains Michael Eklund, information systems coordinator at RMS. “We used to place all of the order information into a file folder and pass it around to multiple teams throughout our 155,000 square foot machine shop. As you can probably guess, files went missing and people spent a lot of time trying to track them down.”

In order to improve the efficiency of its manufacturing processes, RMS began to look for a technology solution that would:

• Store information in a reliable, consistent form.
• Electronically route orders to multiple manufacturing teams.
• Increase employee accountability and decrease wasted time.
• Automate repetitive manual tasks.
• Guarantee that essential, job-related information could always be found.

After considering multiple technology vendors, RMS selected Laserfiche because of its comprehensive capture, search and workflow functionality, as well as the strength of Laserfiche reseller Crabtree Companies.

Leveraging Laserfiche Workflow for Business Process Management

RMS relies heavily on Workflow to accelerate shared business processes across its plants in Minnesota and Tennessee. “Our biggest accomplishment is our ‘green folder system,’” says Eklund. “It’s what we use to distribute the information that’s necessary for creating every instrument and every device.”

As the first step in constructing the green folder system, key RMS stakeholders came together to define and standardize the sequence of steps necessary to electronically distribute new order information to machinists and engineers.

“From a management perspective, developing the green folder system helped us to identify inefficiency and created consensus around the best way to eliminate it,” says Eklund. “It was clear that using Laserfiche Workflow to electronically route information was the best way to accomplish our goals.”

Using Workflow’s graphical user interface, RMS configured the system to perform activities based on the newly defined steps and sequence. When a new product is requisitioned:

• Order information including POs, prints, quotes, and manufacturing data is scanned into Laserfiche.
• Order information is electronically—and automatically—delivered to the departments involved in the manufacturing process.
• Department heads digitally sign off on the information.
• Supervisors can log into Laserfiche and see which departments have acknowledged receipt of the information.

“In the past,” says Eklund, “employees would physically walk hard copy folders between departments on the plant floor. It was hard to figure out which departments had seen what, and where exactly each order was in the manufacturing process. Thanks to Workflow, information now has a clear and consistent path around the factory floor. It never gets lost and it’s easy to track exactly what’s going on at any given time.”

Today, RMS has eight major workflows in effect across the company. According to Eklund, it only took a matter of weeks to get the primary workflow written and running. “From an IT perspective,” he says, “one of the best features is how easy it is to change and test the various workflows. Four of our major workflows could halt production if they stopped working properly. Because it’s so easy to make adjustments, we never have to worry about downtime.”

Ensuring Access and Saving Time with WebLink and Quick Fields

Aside from using Workflow to automate and streamline key business processes, RMS employs Laserfiche WebLink to provide employees with immediate access to job-critical information; it also leverages Quick Fields to cut down on manual data entry and save staff time.

WebLink is a secure Web publishing tool that distributes information to authorized users. Designed to protect the core content repository, WebLink prevents users from altering, deleting or tampering with digital data. At RMS, WebLink has made life much easier for machinists, who now have instant access to engineering blueprints and specs from virtually any computer on the factory floor.

“Prior to Laserfiche, our machinists had to wait for engineers to show them the prints and specs for the various parts they were responsible for producing,” explains Eklund. “Today they can access that information directly. It saves a lot of time.”

Quick Fields is another time-saving tool for the company, one that enables automated data capture and indexing. According to Eklund, the company uses Quick Fields for a variety of tasks, including:

• Creating Device History Records (DHR). Contract medical device manufacturers are mandated by the FDA to create and preserve DHRs indefinitely. Employees used to generate these records manually, and because RMS processes so many jobs each year, this meant hundreds of hours of employee time spent on data entry. Today, the company includes barcodes on job-related paperwork so that when a device is shipped, a DHR is automatically generated by scanning the barcode and ensuring that the record is properly named.
• Electronically filing accounts payable paperwork. RMS uses barcodes on accounts payable paperwork so that it is electronically filed after it is scanned into the system. This practice saves the accounting department two hours every Friday.

RMS also appreciates how much more quickly employees across the company can locate indexed information contained in the Laserfiche repository. “Nobody has to search through filing cabinets anymore,” says Eklund. “With Laserfiche, it only takes 30 seconds to find exactly what you need.”

Moving Forward

Although Eklund acknowledges that it is difficult to put a dollar amount on the savings RMS has experienced over the last four years as a result of implementing Laserfiche, he believes that the company recouped its initial investment within the first year.

To get the most out of the system, the company is currently in the process of upgrading to Laserfiche 8, which features:

• Greater interoperability with Microsoft Office applications.
• An enhanced system architecture that simplifies firewall configuration and improves performance over wide-area networks.
• A redesigned Workflow module that’s built on the Windows Workflow Foundation engine and uses the .NET framework.

Eklund’s parting advice to IT professionals who are interested in implementing Laserfiche is to “be patient. Users will follow your lead once they realize how good the system is. Laserfiche is the heartbeat of our company. It’s a great system to administer, and a great system to use.”

Meanwhile, Town Council member Bill Sibbing had the idea to do something about the amount of paper Council members received each week, as well as the storage and staff costs to file it and then decipher just which paperwork needed to be schlepped back and forth between meetings. Sibbing contacted Christine Curtis, Assistant Town Manager, about adopting a paperless system that could archive files, interconnect information between departments and manage each department’s information. Curtis created a committee to move the plan forward.

Curtis learned the Town actually already had an underused Laserfiche installation, now a decade old, that could do just that. Curtis discussed the idea of reinvigorating it with Smith who, remembering her time at the Laserfiche Conference, contacted Indiana reseller Nancy Mathes of Paper-Lite. Mathes had worked with Smith’s friend in Carmel, and over the next month or so, Smith gathered information to assist with moving forward with a like-minded program in Brownsburg. “I kind of beat up Nancy for information,” she jokes.

A month later the Committee’s research had inspired a town-wide “Go Green” initiative centered around an enterprise Laserfiche deployment. “We are so busy with such a small staff that we’re looking for ways to do more with less,” Curtis says. “We thought Laserfiche could be one of the tools.”

A Laserfiche Committee was formed, consisting of Smith, Curtis and Sibbing, as well as Planning Technician Jon Blake and IT Director Pete Palanca. Its first task was to make Council meetings paperless. As Curtis notes, “Those packets literally represented hundreds and hundreds of hours of staff time and effort.”

Blake redesigned the Council Room desk to accommodate an additional 12 monitors and additional hardware for each member to access their computer during the Boards and Commissions meeting, an engineering feat, notes Smith, that had the bonus effect of making members more visible to the public because the original monitors were lowered. Score one for transparent government.

For her part, Mathes presented her paperless solution in a way that was likewise transparent—one that didn’t demand that council members change their way of working. “They didn’t want a link to an agenda, they wanted their own copies of the agenda delivered to them that they could mark up and use at the meeting just like they were used to doing with the paper packets,” Mathes explains. Using Laserfiche Workflow, she showed Brownsburg council staff how to prepare and route individual files containing the agenda packet. And with that, Brownsburg’s “Go Green” initiative had its engine. “That council meeting really was the first driving force to the whole Town using Laserfiche,” says Curtis.

The Laserfiche Committee mapped out a three-phase implementation, first training department administrators in how to use Laserfiche, then training staff, with the idea to eventually push it out to the public and workers in the field via Web Access.

Installation began in July with Jessica Mathes of Paper-Lite holding week-long training sessions for Town staff in virtually every department, from Accounting and HR to Department of Public Works, regardless of their computer experience. Mathes also sat down with HR department staff to create templates and a folder structure. Plans are in place to automate the HR onboarding process with a custom workflow where individuals will fill out a form online to be sent to the Human Resources Coordinator, who then sends it to a department head for viewing – all while Audit Trail ensures that the documents remain confidential to manage liability and compliance risks.

But for the first real-time use of Laserfiche, just not having to make those 14 two-inch thick paper packets for the town’s August council meeting was enough. “Workflow was up and running,” Curtis says, “and we went live.” Now with all systems up and running, and the Council members comfortable with the transition, Council meetings will be completely paperless by October 22, 2009.

It is significant that the Town of Brownsburg’s success so far, as well as its future plans, owes as much to having active, enthusiastic internal champions – Smith, Curtis and Sibbing among them – as it does to having targeted improvable business processes where using Laserfiche can really shine. Like producing the Town’s newsletter, Curtis says. “Each department writes its own articles and adds its own pictures, even though they’re all in different buildings,” she explains. “That saves a lot of time and effort.”

Curtis admits Brownsburg’s use of Workflow is rudimentary so far, “because we had to move quickly on this,” she says. But she can already point to enterprise efficiencies – and savings – based on the Town’s investment in Laserfiche. Though the Town’s Boards and Commissions use just a single workflow, the Committee has already produced ROI figures that calculate Laserfiche will pay for itself in just 2 ½ years. “The ROI that was calculated was just for use with the Boards and Commissions going paperless, including what we’re spending now in staff time and supplies,” Curtis explains. “When we start adding additional licenses and using it more, we’re getting above and beyond what we originally expected in our ROI.”

At the same time, certain processes are quietly reaping the benefits of automation while fostering collaboration. “When we walk through our budget process, we’re working with all our charts and our documents. The budget committee can log in from home and see the latest budget being utilized,” offers Curtis. “It’s true interdepartmental sharing of information.”

Future projects include the Planning and Building department integrating Laserfiche with Laserfiche PDP partner Energov to link documentation from permits and blueprints and also create a custom Workflow that will allow builders and residents to submit permit applications and documents online, using Laserfiche not just to push information out to residents, but to pull it in as well —saving time and even generating revenue in the process.

Police Captain Jeff Gray is also looking into utilizing Laserfiche to move court-bound information to the Hendricks County Prosecutor’s Office via Workflow so that multiple drives across the county will no longer be necessary to deliver documents.

The possibilities are as endless as the cost savings are real. Now the challenge is keeping up with evolving scale of Laserfiche use, which now includes all town departments and a growing number of workstations. Until now, Smith, Curtis and Blake have administered the system internally. “Really it’s been a discussion of who can dedicate the time and interest,” Curtis explains. “We wouldn’t be where we are today without the help of Nancy and Jessica and Paper-Lite. We were lucky Wendi had a solid computer background and could take time to wear an additional hat.”

Now, to keep up with the town’s growing overall IT needs, including supporting Laserfiche, a new IT Technician, Adam Kirby, has been brought on board. Curtis adds that, just like Smith did last year, Kirby will be attending the Laserfiche Conference this January, although this time he’ll be going for work and not vacation—to get his own idea of just what Brownsburg can do with Laserfiche.

“A lot of people think if you have an office in a metropolitan city that the highest cost to a business is rent, it’s not. It’s the people we employ. So I’d rather have them doing mission-critical, profitable work.”

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

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

[See post to watch Flash video]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It’s this kind of progressive approach to information and process management that’s transformed the Hamilton Police Service from a command-and-control police model to a community-based-and-problem-solving service over the last decade. As HPS Records Supervisor Gary Holden puts it, “Laserfiche has allowed us to spend more time in the community and less time travelling back and forth to the station.”

But this progressive approach had to begin somewhere, and it started in 2000 when IT Manager Ross Memmlo began investigating document management to alleviate storage costs and repurpose valuable office space. Franz Gangl of Laserfiche reseller IKON Office Solutions demonstrated Laserfiche’s information management capabilities for Memmolo, IT Administrator Diana Scime, Shari Moore and Holden.

Holden says they chose Laserfiche based on four criteria:

• Business Functionality: “It needed to be really user-friendly, no matter how comfortable staff were with computers. Our reseller showed us an example of an agency about our size using a system similar in size and capacity to our proposal.”
• System Architecture: “The flexibility and expandability to allow for future development and integration was important.”
• Organization/Support Training: “We knew whenever we had a question, all we had to do was make that call to the 1-800 number.”
• Project Schedule: “According to our funding cycler, the system needed to be up and running by year’s end.”

Working with IKON, Memmlo planned a phased implementation that would begin with current reports, advance to backlog conversion, and finally establish Web access for officers and staff. Phase I began in fall 2002, scanning current incident reports and Motor Vehicle Collision (MVC) reports.

• Learn more about how enterprise content management drives a dynamic user experience at our new Webinar, “Collaborative Case Management for Government = ECM + BPM.” Reserve your seat here.

In early 2002, the implementation team developed “banner pages” to enable Quick Fields to index various reports, which helped with a massive backlog conversion project that would eventually add 860,000 images to the system. “We were able to scan anything and everything – photographs, willsays, handwritten notes – into folders,” says Holden. By 2004, the Laserfiche repository held over 300,000 active and historical incident reports, DNA records, MVC reports, pardon files and sudden death reports.

“One challenge we faced was reworking our existing paper processes,” explains Holden. “Many of our serious offences needed to be disseminated to many different officers and divisions. The new process had to ensure the report was coded according to Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, then scanned, entered on the Canadian Police Information Center (CPIC) system and reassigned for further investigation. The process changed how our Records Business Centre handled the reports.” To remedy the situation, Holden created a color-coded folder system staff use to process reports prior to scanning.

Quick Fields’ automated indexing also helped Holden to standardize the record keeping process, which, along with Laserfiche’s fuzzy search capabilities, has almost completely eradicated misfiling. “If a report is improperly indexed, we simply run a search to locate it within the database,” explains Holden.

This search capability has become especially empowering to police officers. “Optical Character Recognition (OCR) allows the front-line officer to glean valuable information from reports that wasn’t possible in the past,” Holden says.

“If an officer wants to know more about a rash of Breaking & Enterings where all he knows is a red pick-up that has a unique decal on the side door was involved, he can use Laserfiche search to look up other reports,” he adds. “We can’t possibly index every piece of information within a police report, but OCR and fuzzy search addresses that problem, making it a valuable investigative tool.”

It has become even more valuable since Hamilton deployed Laserfiche WebLink in 2004. Police Chief Brian Mullan, responding to a need for heightened police presence, realized he didn’t necessarily need to hire more officers if officers spent less time looking for paperwork. Holden explains. “With Internet access to the Laserfiche repository, officers can view police reports on their MDT [mobile data terminal],” he says. “It’s effectively made our cruisers an extension of our Records Management System (RMS). They can search five historical reports right away without linking.”

Adds Holden, “The ability to view active missing person photos or photographs of lost or stolen property is critical when locating a missing youth on the street or locating previously stolen property.”

For 2009-2010, the HPS Laserfiche team plans to expand Laserfiche to Hamilton’s Human Resources and Legal departments, but not before answering concerns about employee confidentiality and security rights.

For support, Holden looked to the Laserfiche Police User Groups he’s been attending for three years. “I knew York Police Service used Laserfiche in its HR department, so I thought, ‘Why re-invent the wheel?’ I asked them about their implementation and training process and what worked.” Based on what he learned, Holden formulated his own strategy, highlighting the ability to assign multi-layer security to employee records in transit, the ability for assigned HR staff to view documents from their desktop, as well as reducing paper files and better controlling retention.

The three patrol divisions in the City of Hamilton.

“We have three separate divisions. Laserfiche will allow yearly performance reviews to be shipped electronically between offices,” he explains. “It’s easy to understand Laserfiche as a simple storage repository, but you can move things around so you’re actually managing active records. The security capabilities of Laserfiche were a huge benefit for me to ensure confidentiality during this process, because I could assign rights that allowed a user to browse a report but not open it. They’d be directed to see the proper authority to obtain a copy of the report where necessary, which facilitated our disclosure processes.”

The ability to redact sensitive information was also key to the Records Business Center’s ability to process disclosures to the Courts and outside agencies. “The redaction ability of Laserfiche is by far, one the greatest assets to address these needs,” Holden says. “We used to copy our reports—twice—then black out the information and then copy the vetted version again. Redacting in Laserfiche saved us a fortune in paper and time. We also use stamping and sticky note annotations to address disclosure/non-disclosure issues and verification/validation processes of ongoing police investigations.”

It wasn’t until Holden could show that Laserfiche Audit Trail would ensure the integrity of legal documents that the Crown [District] Attorney signed on. “I had meetings with the Crown Attorney to ensure them there were no legal issues producing these documents as evidence in court,” Holden remembers. “We discussed the quality of the images and how we’d be using Audit Trail to confirm when a document was scanned or modified. We were ultimately able to scan in every document—except for witness statements, which they requested to remain in their original paper form.”

Ultimately, the Hamilton Police Service has realized a significant amount of savings by using Laserfiche to refine its business processes:

• $200,000 saved annually, due to downsizing 4 civilian staff in the Records Business Centre, as officers are able to access vital information directly.
• Officers spend more time in the community because they no longer need to attend Central Station to view reports.
• Clerks save time, because they no longer need to locate reports and read them to officers over the phone.
• Valuable floor space has been reclaimed from paper storage.
• Redacting documents in Laserfiche saves “a fortune in paper and time,” as Holden puts it, helping staff more easily meet file requests from the Courts and outside agencies.

• Spring 2002: The Project Team chooses Laserfiche.
• Fall 2002: Phase I begins. Staff start scanning in current incident reports and Motor Vehicle Collision (MVC) reports.
• 2003: Indexing is automated with Quick Fields. Backlog conversion of historical occurrence reports (860,000 images) takes 30 weeks.
• 2004: Phase I is successfully finished, with over 300,000 records and reports scanned into the system. Phase II begins. When it is finished, every officer and designated civilian will have direct access to Laserfiche through the Internet.
• 2009: Web access expands Laserfiche access to 120 additional users, including officers in their patrol cars.
• 2010: The Police Laserfiche Team plans to expand use to Human Resources and Legal Services departments.

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.

“Our objective is ‘Online, not in-line,’” says Michaud. “We had a vision of public documents available 24/7 without ever having to wait in line again.” Now all they needed was a way to implement it.

In 2006, General Code Solutions Consultant Herb Myers demonstrated Laserfiche for city staff, prompting Saco’s IT Department to choose Laserfiche. Ease of use, scalability, “going green,” and establishing a portal for improved public service all factored into the decision. Myers, for one, was impressed. “I was amazed at how forward-thinking they were,” he says. “They wound up teaching me as much as I taught them.”

With the foresight and commitment of both IT and Michaud that, as Myers puts it, “’green’ starts with technology,” Myers and IT mapped out an implementation strategy in meticulously planned phases (see sidebar).

Saco’s initial roll-out called for multi-departmental implementation almost immediately, which prompted the appointment of Laserfiche Luminary Fran Beaulieu as the in-house Laserfiche Administrator. Beaulieu underwent what Myers and the City refer to as “’train the trainer’ training.”

Beaulieu admits progress was slow, owing to the need to assess each department’s willingness, as she puts it, “to let go of the paper.” Key to ensuring user buy-in, she says, was not so much dictating a way of doing things, but establishing a standard by “planning with each department’s staff, hearing their needs and wants, and helping lead the way.” This included weekly meetings, discussions of how to avoid duplicating files and coming up with a consensus of what would be the “logical place” to centralize information. “Some visualized immediate benefits, others required a bit more help in the vision,” she says.

This help began with all Administrative Assistants—Beaulieu dubbed them “power users”—training on the Laserfiche client for importing and scanning documents. Department Heads learned how to use the system via Web Access. “I sat down with them one-on-one and made sure they felt comfortable with what I was showing them before I left.”

Beaulieu also worked with the Assessing Department, one of the City’s biggest paper users, to import deeds into Laserfiche. “Once they were able to see the speed of a search and ease of use, they became my highest achievers,” she adds. “The Assessor’s Department has almost completely added a deed for every parcel within the city for constituents to view and access.”

Beaulieu used this experience to identify and standardize procedures and file structure in creating the City’s all-important Document Management Manual (DMM). Beaulieu’s committee determined that the addition of folders, renaming of documents and deletion of documents would be done only by Laserfiche Administrators.

Trainings were limited to certain shift times, so, inspired by General Code’s own training Webinars, staff created a short “how-to” video for Web Access users along with a simple guide—customized using the file structure created by the City—available internally.

By April 2008, expanded training and more departmental buy-in paved the way for enterprise adoption and Phase 3 public access. Saco’s Department of Public Works and Wastewater were by now online via Web Access. And implementing Quick Fields enabled the Assessor’s Department to automatically scan and index Property Tax Cards where OCR had been formerly problematic and manually typing the information was, as Beaulieu puts it, “not an option.”

How effectively? “The process used to require approximately 2 to 2 1/2 days of printing time for one person to accomplish and used about a whole toner cartridge and 20 reams of copy paper,” Beaulieu says. “Now the cards will be downloaded into Laserfiche in a matter of minutes. This process will save time and money.”

The final frontier was to break down the fourth wall of government and push it out to the community. WebLink would allow public access to city documents through the “Find-A-Doc” interface, with a how-to video and on-line instructions leading the way. Roll-out took some time due to customization, but General Code’s Brian Hoody set-up quick search links to bring users directly to a specified folder, even getting audio files to work for the City’s Planning Department via the “Find-A-Doc” portal.

Saco's "Find-a-Doc" Public Web Portal

Though just a few months old, “Find-A-Doc” is already resonating with staff and citizens alike. Maggie Edwards, an Administrative Assistant in the Planning Department, admits to being “a little intimidated at first” by the Laserfiche system, but now shares in Saco’s vision of a successful portal strategy. “If there’s a subdivision or site plan you want to know about, you can view the entire files online. If you wish to hear an audio of the minutes from the Planning Board meetings, you may do so,” she says. “Laserfiche has made it very easy to maneuver.”

Saco’s savings so far total over $10,000 a year, but as Beaulieu points out, “We also look at the value of the system for not departments, but individual value to users. Service to constituents is a big factor.”

• Planning and Engineering saves $7,580 a year by scanning large format maps.
• Inspection Reports saves $1,780 and 1,335 sheets of paper a year.
• The Assessor’s Office saves over $1,600 a year.

And now with the economy forcing municipalities to do more with less, neighboring Scarborough has requested a look at Saco’s Document Management Manual while other budget-strapped cities are investigating sharing services to access various documents and parcel information. Saco is also looking into integrating Laserfiche with its GIS application. “We’re already sharing some personnel so the idea of shared services and ‘umbrella IT’ makes sense,” Beaulieu says.

“The lines are so blurred in areas like road repair that regional administration makes the most sense,” she adds. “When you can see what documents are attached to parcels, that saves you phone calls and extra trips and that makes their life easier as well as ours.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Xpyria Investment Advisors Xpyria, an investment advisory firm that works with high-net-worth individuals, didn’t just save money by using Laserfiche to eliminate off-site storage. “We always figured we’d have to hire more people to create the efficiency we needed,” President and CEO Joseph Salpietro remembers. “We’d talked about needing two or three administrators over the next five or so years at a cost of, say, $30,000-40,000 each. And when we found out that we didn’t have to hire those people to help us with the paper chase—well, that’s a smart business decision.”

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

Remember: the savings are out there.

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.”

In a world where government bureaucracy is the norm, the Marshall collaboration’s streamlined operations are a remarkable accomplishment which is earning national acclaim—and in an arguably unexpected part of the world.

Marshall, a quiet prairie town, is 40 miles from the nearest interstate and 200 miles from Minneapolis. Yet in the late 1990s, a forward thinking group of residents and elected officials calling themselves “Prairie Net” vowed the information superhighway was going pass a lot closer than Interstate 29 in South Dakota. Monthly meetings were held, resolutions were passed, grants were received and bonds were issued. And with official commitment clear and money in hand, Marshall soon had ISP providers waiting to wire up the community. It took a few years but eventually a brand new fiber optic cable stretched some 75 miles from Sioux Falls, SD, down every street in Marshall.

Next step was deciding what to do with that cable. Prairie Net knew it was crucial to provide Web access to serve the whole community, including residents, government and businesses alike. And they knew Laserfiche was going to play a large part in it, they just weren’t sure how to go about it. That’s where planning came in.

“It’s all about planning and having the group meetings where we all talk about our road map for this system and how to plan on using Laserfiche down the road,” Pickthorn says. “We knew that having that new fiber optic cable in place opened a lot of opportunities to us.”

It was in those meetings that the idea surfaced to have a shared document management system connected by the new cable. Prairie Net recognized that different government agencies were responsible for similar tasks in their respective offices—and that duplication of effort would be eliminated by having all their records maintained in a single location.

Bringing four distinct government operations together under one IT roof was no small task. City Hall and the city’s utilities already shared a Laserfiche system, while the school district and county had their own systems. The district decided to merge their system with the city’s, and the county followed suit soon after. With an enterprise Laserfiche system encompassing the four different agencies, staff were able to share ideas on its construction, upkeep and expansion.

“Each entity had its own unique challenges on how they wanted to organize and store their data,” Pickthorn says. “We were able to take the efficiencies we learned through working with multiple schools and apply them to city government and municipal utility operations. We’ve been able to take things we’ve learned through experience, such as file naming conventions and standardization, and apply them throughout the system.”

“In a big city it would be very difficult to get something like this done, simply due to the politics involved,” says Clayton Baer, software designer for Marshall’s Laserfiche reseller Crabtree Companies.

Not to say that there hasn’t been opposition, including intervention by the courts when one judge questioned the legality of the collaboration, says Marshall’s City Director Harry Weilage. However, the system’s success has won over most of the skeptics.

“The last departments in the various agencies that wanted to get into this technology were the financial departments,” Pickthorn says. “Now, it’s staff in those departments who use Laserfiche the most.”

For the four agencies, sharing a single enterprise system means that costs are managed more easily. According to Pickthorn, a single IT staff member is able to serve three of the four different agencies. And with one large system instead of four smaller ones, there is also considerable savings on costs.

“The initial investment is one-quarter of the price,” says Baer. “That was probably the biggest selling point when it came to getting grants. Why would we build four separate infrastructures when we could just build one? They all serve the same taxpayers.”

This cooperative approach is appealing to more than just grant issuers. National computer experts Daniel Pink and Daniel Tascot accepted invitations to review the Marshall system and were duly impressed, says Weilage. There has also been plenty of local attention, particularly through a program that recruited developmentally disabled residents to undertake some of the scanning needed to get the original paper documents into digital format.

All the attention has helped spread similar collaborations among government agencies in other parts of the state, Weilage adds. In Anoka County, 11 different police departments all use a county-wide enterprise Laserfiche system. Ditto for the 10 school districts in Northeast Metro 916 Intermediate School District.

“Where this might be too expensive in another rural school district, Northwest was able to manage it because they all worked together to create a system that serves the entire school district,” Baer says.

Right now, Marshall is in the most ambitious phase of its IT infrastructure project. The Marshall Portal, as it’s being called, is a multi-media interactive website with links to every organization and agency in town. Prairie Net now wants to upload the various Laserfiche repositories onto that portal, so town employees will be able to access their work documents from home and students and taxpayers alike will be able to research public records.

“We want to offer one-stop access to information, whether it’s local government, school district or county government records,” Weilage says. “The Marshall portal will offer quick and easy access to all the information we have in Laserfiche. Whether a resident is looking for sports schedules, meeting minutes or to sign up for little league, it will all be there.”

Marshall has more than its residents in mind with its portal plans. This community of 12,500 hosts three billion-dollar industries—Archer Daniels Midland, Schwan Foods and US Bank—and having all this information on-line is going to be helpful for them as well, according to Weilage.

But ultimately, the benefit of Laserfiche is in how the community—of residents and staff alike—has embraced it.

“You can spend as much as you want on new technology, but the key is getting the most out of it,” Weilage says. “That takes getting the community to take advantage of it, and here, they are.”

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

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

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

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

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

Or spend all their time implementing new software.

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

President and CEO of Xpyria Investment Advisors, Joe Salpietro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Regal, a firm of financial advisers based in Bristol, offers advice to both individual and corporate clients on all aspects of financial planning, including pensions, investment and portfolio planning, life assurance, mortgages and general insurance. With eighteen advisers working remotely throughout Southern and South West England, as well as South Wales, James and his advisers needed a solution that would both allow secure remote access to documents and enable better management of paper records that were rapidly taking over the office.

As a whole-of-market, independent adviser, Regal is required by the FSA to store documentation of the entire research and sales process, from fact-finding documents, copies of insurance policies and correspondence to client illustrations—files so extensive that one four-drawer filing cabinet could only accommodate one to two hundred customers’ records. Staff wasted endless hours locating, copying, printing and faxing multiple copies, and audit preparedness was becoming more and more taxing.

“Every time we make a new sale, that equals hundreds of pieces of paper produced, copied and delivered,” says James. “Records often have to be kept for an infinite number of years.”

Any successful solution would have to be nimble enough to quickly and easily manage large volumes of paper while still ensuring compliance with strict FSA regulations. Enabling centralized access to files for remote workers was a priority, as Regal financial advisers working throughout the U.K. needed fast, effortless and dependable access to client records.

“Our goal was essentially to kill paper and eliminate the filing cabinets,” says James. Through a referral from CFS, his hardware supplier, he got in touch with Harvey Burgess of RB Document Solutions. Burgess recommended a Laserfiche document management system, primarily for its ability to securely protect documents while still permitting quick and easy access, even for remote users.

Regal purchased a multifunction machine and in no time had the new system up and running. It took a mere three days for Regal to implement Laserfiche. Almost instantly, piles of paper began to disappear as office space was reclaimed.

“Even with training to get people up to speed, there was a noticeable monetary benefit,” James recalls. “Because Laserfiche is Windows-based, it was much easier for staff to adapt to the new solution.”

Ending the paper chase created immediate, appreciable cost savings in both postage and labor. Documents that once had to be photocopied and faxed are now sent electronically. Regal’s Compliance Department requires the files from 10% of monthly sales to be provided for audit. Before Laserfiche, Regal copied, packaged and shipped each piece of paper. Now, they easily submit customer files via e-mail. “If you really look at it, they reckon Laserfiche saved 10% of gross revenue,” says James.

Regal also realized immediate space savings. Staff digitized and shredded 3,500 client files, eliminating almost 400,000 sheets of paper and nine filing cabinets. The space that used to house overflowing file cabinets is now home to two new desks. Off site deep storage is no more, saving monthly rent and staff time required to find documents.

The entire company accesses the central repository, with two administrative staff scanning and indexing all newly generated documents. Thanks to Laserfiche, filing is quick and easy and the supply chain process has been reduced to five simple steps.

In addition, the Laserfiche repository enables advisers working remotely to quickly access information located up to 100 kilometers away via virtual private network (VPN). Being able to instantly locate information like an applicant’s date of birth, mortgage details or the last date of policy review gives advisers an opportunity to re-visit their clients immediately, rather than waiting for files to arrive through the mail. Sales have increased, business has become more transparent and advisers are much more efficient in renewing business and keeping in contact with clients. Not only are advisers much happier, calling Laserfiche “a godsend” to their business, but clients are more satisfied too.

As a company, Regal has grown considerably since implementing Laserfiche and is now planning a move to larger offices. “The beauty of it is, when they were looking at premises, they didn’t have to consider storage or filing space,” Burgess remarks. “They just got to pick an office they liked.”

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.

The challenge

Operations Manager Amy Flourry oversees Rehmann’s myriad wealth management efforts. “We’re very diverse, with many different specialists,” she says. “When you put all of us together, you get a lot of different ways of working.”

Rehmann’s kaleidoscopic business interests make it simple for clients to handle all their wealth management needs with one firm—but aren’t so conducive to managing operations cohesively.

“It was difficult to remain consistent,” Flourry continues. “We had local network drives where we could share some information, but they became a huge burden on our IT department to keep making different drives available in different locations.”

As often happens with firms spread out over regional offices, paper-based processes were hampering inter-office communication. “Our compliance department is located at our home office in Lansing [MI],” she explains, “but with staff in other offices, they needed to be able to do audits, review paperwork and perform quality control for multiple locations.”

Rehmann’s advisors also suffered from limitations on the accessibility of information. “Our advisors frequently meet with clients on-site rather than at the office,” she continues. “But regardless of location, they still need access to their client files and our marketing materials.”

Then there was the ubiquitous problem of dwindling storage space. “We’re growing so fast,” remarks Flourry, “and we were adding offices and filing cabinets to maintain our paperwork. Never mind the problems with accessing information—it’s just not cost-effective.”

The choice

Solving a broad-reaching challenge required input from each corner of the organization. So Rehmann assembled a team of administrative, compliance and IT staff, along with advisors of varying technical skill, to develop a detailed feature matrix for potential solutions. The top priorities were integration with Junxure, the firm’s CRM software, ease of use and customizability.

Operations Assistant Katie Rambo, who administers the firm’s numerous software systems, needed a way to centralize all of Rehmann’s information—while working with all of its daily-use applications.

“We have a saying around here,” she notes, “‘If it’s not in Junxure, it didn’t happen.’ So integration with Junxure was very important to us.”

And how did Laserfiche fare in that respect, compared to other solutions Rehmann considered? “Very well,” she laughs.

Laserfiche also stood out for its ease of use. “We knew we’d never be able to obtain buy-in from our staff if the systems weren’t easy to use,” remarks Flourry.

Adds Rambo, “Laserfiche looks and feels a lot like Windows, so we knew it would be familiar to our advisors. That has also made for a smooth transition from paper for our support staff.”

Rehmann was equally comfortable with its Laserfiche reseller, Cities Digital, Inc. “They really know the wealth management industry,” Flourry says, “and that knowledge was very important to us.”

After narrowing down the list of potential software solutions to three, the multi-departmental task force looked at the feature matrix and reached a unanimous conclusion. “We held a group vote,” Flourry says, “and everybody felt like Laserfiche would work best for us.”

The change

With just a few months of Laserfiche use under their belts, Rehmann staff have already made impressive strides. As Flourry puts it, “We have so many different advisors and professional staff and administrative staff, all with different ways of learning and levels of technical expertise. Overall, I’ve been really impressed at how quickly people have gotten used to it.”

Rehmann’s compliance department has seen the most immediate, discernible benefits since installing Laserfiche. As Flourry explains, “They’re now doing audits remotely, whereas before they would have to travel to all the other offices. We’re saving on mileage, hotel costs, time out of the office, meals—a whole laundry list of expenses that we’ve reduced just by using Laserfiche.”

Laserfiche Workflow has also simplified and accelerated client agreement approval. Staff at remote offices immediately scan client agreements into Laserfiche, upon which Workflow routes them for approval. Then it’s on to the OSJ, where they’re electronically signed. Finally, the agreements are routed to the home office. If the agreement is rejected, it enters another workflow for reprocessing. It’s a dramatic improvement from stamps, envelopes and wet signatures, and it’s helped drastically reduce the amount of paper involved in the firm’s operations. “It’s definitely more efficient,” Rambo says. “Instead of sending documents through the mail, everything gets routed through Laserfiche Workflow.“

But what about the thousands of paper client files generated pre-Laserfiche? Flourry and Rambo have cultivated a playful competition between regional offices to encourage back-file conversion. Flourry explains, “We might say to our Troy office, ‘Hey, the Grand Rapids office already has all their client agreements scanned into Laserfiche—are you going to let them beat you like that?’

“We’re incredibly competitive,” she laughs, “but in a good way. A productive way”.

Thanks to this encouragement, and an enterprise-wide enthusiasm for increasing efficiency, Laserfiche has caught on like wildfire among staff. But Laserfiche isn’t just popular with current Rehmann associates. “It’s highly attractive to other firms thinking about merging with us,” Rambo notes, “and to new and prospective staff. They love to see that we have processes and best practices in place, and that we have a progressive stance on implementing new technology.”

Then there’s a less alluring, but equally important benefit—the support of senior management for future technology initiatives. “Once they saw Laserfiche’s cost savings and return on investment,” Flourry says, “they were all over it. They’ve been incredibly supportive of going paperless.”

With their Laserfiche implementation experience fresh in their minds, Flourry and Rambo have a few words of advice to share with other advisory firms considering going paperless.

“At first, it can be a challenge to get people on board with using a new system,” Rambo says. “That’s why you really need to get input from people throughout your office. By bringing in others’ opinions, some really great ideas will emerge.

“Also, be flexible. We approached implementation expecting certain issues, but we ran into a completely different set of problems—not worse, just different.”

Flourry has this to say about taking the paperless plunge: “Just rip the Band-Aid off! The longer you wait to go paperless, the more work it takes. If you can adopt your system early on, when you have a manageable work load, it makes things so much easier.”

And despite Rehmann’s success so far, Flourry admits to having one regret. “I wish we’d done this sooner,” she laments. “If I could do it over again, I would have done this three or four years ago.”

“Life before Laserfiche was full of frustration,” remembers Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue and Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.

Collins was often as confused as the seasonal staff she’d hire to help keep up with the mounting file load. In the city’s personal property area, for instance, a two-index paper filing system meant records older than four years had to be hauled down to the basement. If active incoming documents related to a past tax year, they had to be stored with older records. Business licenses were shuffled between active files and archives when they closed, only to be moved back if the business re-opened—always with more and more paperwork. “You could have 15 years of license applications and papers,” Collins says. “Name order wasn’t that great so there was always confusion about indexing business names: by the last name of the proprietor or the trading name or the first name of the legal name?”

Rosalind Collins is the Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.

Retrieving information was even worse. “Trying to find things was the biggest frustration,” she says. “My desk was nearest to the filing cabinet room. I can’t tell you how many slammed drawers and expletives I heard on a daily basis!”

And the inefficiency of the city’s information management system bordered on the tragic. “It took all year to file our documents, so most of what you needed was in a big pile of ‘stuff to file.’ Some years, we had a full-time employee, bless her heart, she was over 90 years old and a sweet petite woman. I’ll never forget the image of her folded up on the floor between cabinets filing in the bottom drawers.”

The last straw was when the city was reminded the hard way it had no disaster back-up plan when a plumbing accident damaged the basement records room. “I knew there had to be a better way out there somewhere,” says Collins.

There was—Collins just had to find a way to fund it.

“They say ‘pick your battles’ and I chose this one,” she recalls. “It took me three years of lobbying every way and everyone I knew and becoming a general pain in the rear, but we finally were able to set up an intra-departmental team to choose a system and, even better, we had funding to implement it.”

A view of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate, from its gardens

Her team reviewed almost 15 bids. “Some of the biggest names with the biggest price tags weren’t even meeting our minimum requirements, but Laserfiche met them all and then some.” Collins had done her homework; what she envisioned the new system doing read like a list of signature Laserfiche features: “OCR, scalability, public web access, configurable indexing, ‘print to scan,’ the ability to use any scanner hardware and to integrate with other systems, the ability to automate workflow and add routing capabilities,” she says, leaving one to ponder what else she could possibly ask for.

But the question wasn’t “what?” but rather “how easily?” Again, the answer was Laserfiche. “We were especially interested in ease of use and its fast learning curve,” she says. “We wanted something that stored our images and data in non-proprietary formats—especially since we’d been burned with an imaging project before that put thousands of HR files into a system we could no longer get into!” Collins also liked Laserfiche’s other qualities, including its price. “We were impressed with the security, multiple indexing ability, configurability and ease of maintenance and to top it off, it was the lowest bid.”

A pilot implementation in the city included five departments. The Commissioner of the Revenue’s office started day-forward scanning within months. The City Council Clerk archived city council minutes as well as current documents. These days, Human Resources and City Attorney offices are using Laserfiche, with more departments asking how they can be brought on board every year.

The Rotunda at the University of Virginia was designed by Thomas Jefferson

Progress has been gradual. “People have a hard time letting go of the tangible,” Collins says. “Then they see how much easier it is to get what you need with a few keystrokes. The person who was digging in the boxes of scanned documents the first year because they didn’t trust the digital system is now one of the most vocal advocates of this system.”

Managing index data quality and workflow took a little finessing as well. “Just as with misfiled paper documents, if an index key is entered incorrectly, the document may as well not exist since no one will find it,” she says. Collins automated indexing using Ascent Capture by Kofax and then Quick Fields (see sidebar) to improve accuracy and speed. “We centralized scanning and indexing to a few people with additional training,” she explains.

These days, Charlottesville’s new-found efficiency has taken many forms. “Time to find a document went from hours or sometimes days to seconds,” Collins beams. Using Laserfiche also inspired a paradigm shift in how the city considers what’s worth keeping around. “You start to see the value in that information, but also what isn’t valuable,” she says. “We eliminated the filing requirement for vehicles, which saved us not just money, but also from having to index and store over 20,000 documents a year. Today we stay current within a week in the personal property scanning area—in many cases, a document is stored with its metadata the same day it comes in!”

And there’s the cash savings. “We used to hire a full-time person for six months a year, just to open and file mail. We were usually just catching up for the year when the December bills went out. Now, we’ve saved half the cost of a FTE and only have one person scanning personal property files part-time just one day a week. We were able to eliminate another half of a position and reinvest the time into audit programs designed to increase City revenue,” she says. “That’s real dollars.”

Still, Collins realizes getting other municipalities to see the Laserfiche light means thinking of ROI in broader terms. “Getting funds is a challenge because the costs of doing things the old way aren’t staring people in the face. You’ll save a lot of time for your staff, but no one wants to eliminate staff or positions. Real estate isn’t a factor for a government that doesn’t pay rent or taxes. Nobody factors in the cost of lost documents or a disaster destroying all your files,” she says.

“You have to look at it as part of process improvements and think about what you could do with the time you save and the value of bringing data and paper together. Another wise user told me that to gain support for expanding the system to other documents, departments and processes, show them how it would work, because the truth is that it’s much simpler than people imagine it will be,” Collins adds. “We recently had a ‘what we like about our office’ meeting and so many people responded ‘Laserfiche!’ That’s why I recommend it. It’s easy to use, easy to learn, easy to configure, adapt or improve in particular—because of its incredible focus on the user.”

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.

“Before we undertook this project, we had 14 companies interested in exploring natural oil and gas deposits in our country, and now we have 60,” says PASA’s Sithembiso Ngubane. “We have to make sure they all play by the rules.”

Yet at the same time, PASA did not want to discourage interested applicants with burdensome paperwork, so it needed to make its application process as fast as it was thorough.

In each application, performance bonds have to be signed and credit histories also must be documented. Each company permitted to drill must also donate $150,000 for educational programs aimed at educating South Africans in exploration-related sciences.

And any company that’s allowed to sink exploratory wells must provide a plan to clean-up and restore damaged areas, in the event of a disaster. Mineral rights and royalty agreements must also be secured in iron-clad contracts.

There are many documents in each application that, once filled out, need to be instantly accessible to make sure all those agreements are adhered to when the exploration starts, Ngubane says.

From the start, it was clear that an electronic document management system was needed to keep it all straight. Any such system had to have a workflow module capacity with Web-based portal software options and sufficient security features to enable the database to go online without allowing public access. The system that could deliver all that at a reasonable price tag, Ngubane says, was Laserfiche.

It took a year before South Africa’s official record keeping agency, the National Archive and Records Service, would sign off on PASA’s plan to digitize its documents and records.

Ngubane says Laserfiche provided a secure database to manage PASA’s information assets, as well as streamline its processes. “Keeping all the contractual specifics in a friendly and secure electronic database will keep everybody aware of the agreements and commitments made,” he adds. “This way if there is a dispute over agreements, we can quickly pull the pertinent documents out of Laserfiche to settle it.”

With Laserfiche it is also more difficult for missed obligations to go unnoticed by PASA staff. When performance timelines are broken, Laserfiche notifies the system operator accordingly when the applicant’s file is opened, Ngubane says.

The system is still very much a work in progress. A GIS integration module is being developed that will tie spatial information into PASA’s current Laserfiche database. Once this takes place, PASA hopes to offer interested companies the ability to preliminarily explore South Africa’s oil and natural gas prospects online.

An electronic library of geology, hydrology, topography and myriad other data surveys that PASA scanned into Laserfiche will also be tied into the spatial information module, all of which will be made available to qualified prospectors through a secure Web-based portal. That will let tech savvy prospectors know early on if field exploration in South Africa is warranted.

Using Laserfiche, PASA will benefit from a much quicker turnaround time in responding to inquiries, another strong selling point for potential customers. And Laserfiche could eventually help cut millions off the cost of extracting natural oil and gas in South Africa, making the country even more attractive to prospectors—a big return on a comparatively small investment.

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.

In 1998, the State of Arizona had the forward-thinking idea to get all its counties on the same page with digital records management by creating the position of Records Manager. The first holder of this title in Mohave County was Steve Beller from the County Recorder’s office, who began the search for scanning software to contend with the mountain of paper the county had generated throughout the years.

Chuck Chlarson has served as Mohave County Records Manager since January 2005.

Beller chose Laserfiche for its flexibility and expandability, instead of the standard system the state had mandated for use in all the state’s courts. “Steve saw in Laserfiche all that he thought we needed or could grow into,” Chlarson recalls. “It was a case of ‘buy what you need now and expand when the need arises.’”

But though Beller had succeeded in finding Laserfiche, he hadn’t yet found a reseller that could offer the technical guidance to help the county follow through on its potential. It wasn’t until Beller’s successor Gordon Buchanan became Records Manager that Mohave County began its vital relationship with Laserfiche reseller DocUnited. Under the mentorship of “the girls from DocUnited,” as Chlarson affectionately terms co-owners Marta Hortel and Susan Mosby, the software was installed and plans for county-wide implementation were laid out.

Buchanan visited all the departments of the County to inform them of the install and of the need to begin scanning their permanent documents into the Laserfiche system. But the rest of the county wasn’t as ready to shift their paper filing paradigm to the scanner just yet, and Buchanan ran into resistance in virtually every department. “Gordon approached the departments with a new concept,” Chlarson says. “And at that point, it was just too new.”

By the time Buchanan retired in 2005 and Chlarson became Records Manager, Mohave County had just four scanning stations and seven viewing licenses.

Building from this small but vital start, Chlarson eventually succeeded in bringing Laserfiche to all the county’s departments (except its courts, which were still bound by state law to use its legacy system). “As the third person in the position, I had the value of learning from previous experiences—both good and bad,” he says. “It was a good jumping off point for me to get started dealing with the departments of the County. I was able to demonstrate scanning and how easy retrieval was with Laserfiche’s search functionality. Also, my boss, the Recorder, agreed to fund additional scanning stations and licenses, so we could start expanding our system.

“One of the advantages we found early in our relationship with Laserfiche and DocUnited was the ability to expand our system as needed,” Chlarson continues. “When new departments came on board, it was so simple to add additional scanning stations and more user licenses.”

Again, Chlarson points out how effective the support of “the girls from DocUnited” has been to the county’s success. “Marta and Susan were instrumental in the training and education program that we implemented after we added more users to our system. Their unwavering dedication and desire to drive the 200-plus miles up to Kingman [from Phoenix] was great. Frankly, we probably wouldn’t have gotten as far as we have without them. They are everything a reseller is supposed to be!”

He also found that getting departments to actually buy in to the software itself by getting them fiscally invested in its upkeep ended up encouraging user buy in. “Two years ago, I required each Department pick up their fair share of the maintenance fees, which brought them more into the Laserfiche family,” Chlarson says. “Typically, the county’s budget process is well in advance of the fiscal year, and budgeting new items needs to be addressed very early in that process. Initially, we weren’t knowledgeable enough about this. Our boss, the Recorder, had been paying all the bills for Laserfiche, even as we added new scanners and users. In 2006, I finally got each department to pay their fair share of the bill, and now each is billed separately.”

The inter-departmental ownership encouraged broader use, and, of course, with more use comes more efficiency. Chlarson points to successful automations like the county HR department’s newly-termed records as well as the Medical Examiner’s shift to electronic recordkeeping. It wasn’t until last month’s elections, however, that the benefits of using Laserfiche became apparent. “Our real success was to scan and index all the 5”x8” paper voter registration forms so the Voter Registration Division could verify signatures from their desks rather than going to a storage room and pawing through years of forms hoping to get lucky. And with this last election period, it saved a tremendous amount of time for them.” He hesitates to limit discussion of the benefits realized to the bottom line on a balance sheet. “How do you put a dollar value on convenience? The time the Voter Registration folks saved in not having to finger through thousands of paper cards to just doing a name search on Laserfiche was immeasurable.”

Fueled by Mohave County’s steady but palpable success, Chlarson has become active in the Laserfiche Luminaries program, singing the praises of enterprise-wide electronic records management whenever he can, including at this year’s ARMA conference in Las Vegas.

“I’ve had the opportunity to testify to other counties and organizations about our experience with Laserfiche, and just how completely satisfied we were with the products,” he says. “As I talk with folks interested in scanning, the one thing most people see is the initial expense. I explain to them that all software has a pretty good price tag, but to look at what follow-up can they expect, and upgrades as they are fielded. I also stress the annual maintenance fees and what they include, at least for us.”

In the near future, Mohave County is planning an upgrade to Laserfiche 8.1. “Obviously, Records Management Edition (RME) will allow me to fix retention metadata directly to documents as they are scanned, and have schedules implanted to aid in the destruction of old material,” he offers. “We should be in great shape.”

But Chlarson is definitely looking forward to sharing his county’s success story in a presentation at the Laserfiche Institute Conference, taking place January 12-14 in Los Angeles, CA. “As you can tell, we are certainly pleased with Laserfiche, and not shy about telling people,” he laughs.

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.

“Wayne has been the man all along,” says Glens Falls City Clerk Robert Curtis. “Without him, probably

none of this work would have been done. Laserfiche has truly been a wonderful asset to this office, and Wayne has been the point man all along. Whether it’s securing the funding or keeping the database updated, Wayne is the one that puts it all together.”

Glens Falls is a city of about 15,000 residents located in Upstate New York’s hardscrabble Lower Adirondack Region, an area not known for investing in novel government technology. Still, when the city’s microfilm vendor showed Wright that Laserfiche brochure, he couldn’t help but think about that old copier.

“We were probably printing out about 1,200 certificates each month,” Wright says. “Every day you had to drag out those books, find the record, flip the books over, cram them onto the copier glass, and then hope you got a shot you could actually use. It got to where I hated doing it.”

So, Wright applied for—and was rejected for—a grant from the New York State Archives. At that time, the State Archives was concerned about the long-term prospects of what was still a novel technology. When the grant was turned down, Wright turned to the City’s Common Council and, with the City Clerk’s blessing, the Council approved a three-year lease-to-own purchase plan for a Laserfiche software license, scanner and computer.

With the city’s commitment to document imaging backing him, Wright applied for another Archives grant, only this time he specified the money was to be used only for back-scanning archived records. With a $12,800 state grant in hand, Glens Falls began scanning its vital records—and Wright began getting less of a workout at work.

A vendor was hired to do the back-scanning, leaving Wright free to begin creating the city’s first electronic historic archive. This was evening and weekend work for which Wright, as city historian, was paid a stipend augmented only by his love for the project. He traveled from city businesses to homes to government record rooms pulling out, copying and scanning documents, postcards, building plans and proclamations.

As he was reconstructing the city’s past, Wright was also building its future as one of the Northeast’s leading small cities in electronic document management storage, according to Bruce Cadman, regional sales representative for Rochester, NY-based, Laserfiche reseller General Code.

“Wayne has done an incredible job getting all sorts of documents into Laserfiche,” Cadman says. “He made it his personal mission to make a searchable database that can be much more easily accessed by everyone in City Hall.”

As Wright’s co-workers were getting to know Laserfiche better, so were the folks at the State Archives’ grant office. Glens Falls was awarded a $22,000 grant for its Laserfiche project a few years after the first, followed by a third grant for $32,000 and a fourth for $43,000.

Along the way, the city’s computer has been upgraded three times, a server was installed to store scanned images and the first scanner was replaced with a smaller and faster color unit. Glens Falls also upgraded from Laserfiche 5 to Laserfiche 7, which helped Wright to expand his database to incorporate other City Hall departments, according to General Code tech support engineer Brian Hoody.

Laserfiche streamlined the city’s scanning and storing operations, so Wright was able to expand the system’s scope. He used grant funding to start scanning city court indexes, personnel, cemetery and public works department documents, winning him friends outside the clerk’s office, nowhere more than in the building department where, again with the help of State Archives grants, Glens Falls has been aggressively scanning both new and old building plans.

It’s the latter that can be particularly useful to residents renovating an older home, building inspector John Ward says. Residents can even get copies of the municipal code and master plan on compact disc. Now, when residents want copies from the building department, Ward sends them over to see Wright, who pulls them out of Laserfiche within minutes, instead of hours.

“When Wayne showed me what he wanted to do with this system I thought it was great,” says Ward. “It’s been very, very helpful particularly with all the older buildings we have in Glens Falls.”

As the database has expanded, so has its sophistication. Laserfiche Snapshot instantly stores Microsoft Word files and other internal documents in Laserfiche. And scanned images are exported to the city’s microfilm vendor, who creates permanent microfilm copies of the records using a Kodak Archive Writer.

The last State Archives grant written by Wright was to scan records which had been microfilmed years before. The original records were destroyed after they were filmed, so using the film was the only way to add them to the Laserfiche database. Through the help of then Mayor LeRoy Akins, Jr., the funding was used to purchase a Canon microfilm scanner and pay two temporary employees to run the machine. This project was a great success and the City plans to share the microfilm scanner with other local governments when possible.

When Wright dons his City Historian hat, he has the ability to bring the Laserfiche historic records archive with him on CD. Doing field research with Laserfiche, Wright says, enables him to more easily separate the historic documents he already has from those he wants to add to the archive.

Still, there is much more Laserfiche could be doing for the city. The city bought Laserfiche Quick Fields but Wright still indexes documents individually after they are scanned. Hoody plans to work with Wright to install Quick Fields and make Wright’s job even more manageable.

Then there are Agenda Manager, Workflow, WebLink and Web Access, which are all firmly on Wright’s list of possible purchases. Mayor Akins died in August 2008 from cancer and council-wide elections are also slated for next year, so such purchases will likely be deferred, Curtis says.

Then there’s always the matter of finding the money, but that’s where Wright’s work as a State Archives grants writer comes in. Over the past few years, the granting agency has seen more and more benefits in funding electronic document management systems for small communities like Glens Falls, according to State Archives Director of Government Records Services Geof Huth.

“There have been plenty of grants submitted for Laserfiche, because it’s fairly popular with medium-sized governments,” Huth says. “The reason the State Archives is awarding more imaging grants is that more people are interested in document management—and that’s because of the work of people like Wayne.”

“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.”

Lafayette said most medical practices began introducing automated billing and scheduling software within the past 10 to 15 years. Many have since introduced electronic medical records systems (EMRs) as well. But the key to streamlining offices staffs and improving productivity is to tie those technologies together with Laserfiche, a sophisticated electronic records management system enabling office staff to access all stored records on their computer desktops.

Physicians Support Group next intends to launch a regional educational program to show medical practices how to use technology to improve operations. Lafayette is planning an ambitious campaign throughout the Sunbelt to advise specialty groups how to securely convert every paper document, including patient identification, explanations of benefits, “superbills” (which itemize all services, diagnostic and medications) and medical records, into searchable electronic records.

“My goal is to show that creating the ‘ideal medical practice’ is within the grasp of any group willing to employ today’s technology.” Lafayette said. “This will allow physicians to devote their full attention to patient care, reduce the number of support staff while improving the morale and productivity of those processing documents for payment and eventual archiving. This is really a win-win for medical groups.”

Many medical groups around the nation have in recent months explored and selected Laserfiche for compliance with federal HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act) requirements, according to Stephen Wheeler, Laserfiche’s National Health Care Sales Manager. Laserfiche’s advanced security features are critical in that regard, but Wheeler said integrating document management with other office automation products provides the comprehensive solution required in today’s health care market.

Lafayette’s ROI calculations factor in Laserfiche’s ease of installation and short training cycle, which means workers become quickly productive when using the software. The Laserfiche intuitive interface, combined with its filing structure which mirrors traditional filing methods, make immediate sense to workers.

“Clinic administrators like the idea of replacing copiers, which spew thousands of pieces of paper a day, with affordable scanners, which generate electronic images for paperless files,” Lafayette said. “Once an electronic file is created, it is stored on a hard drive, where it can’t be lost and can be immediately retrieved without time-wasting trips to dusty file rooms. And all electronic records can be backed up and stored off site, providing desirable disaster recovery requirements.”

Faced with trying State v. Valentini, the largest gambling conspiracy case in Arizona history, criminal defense attorney Howard Snader knew his old paper-based system wouldn’t work any longer.

“I was retained in a criminal defense matter where the state’s discovery documents were provided in digital format,” Snader says. “Although I could read the documents, I couldn’t search them in any meaningful way.”

Snader found that opening every single page was cumbersome and completely ineffective. “I would have had to print each page as I read it, and with more than 30 defendants and an initial discovery of nearly 150,000 pages, that’s a significant amount of paper,” he explains. “I would have spent weeks reading and marking the necessary evidence, and I’d have to do it each time I needed to prepare another motion.”

“In Arizona, court systems are forcing attorneys to move into the 21st century, because many of them are now providing all evidentiary documents electronically,” says Greg Dutton, managing partner of ArcWare Solutions, the Laserfiche reseller that oversaw Snader’s Laserfiche implementation. “From our experience, law firms in Arizona are significantly behind the curve and need to catch up.”

Snader’s firm was a prime example of this. “I believed I had no need for document management, so I had no system in place,” he remembers. “After I saw what Laserfiche could do, I realized the need was there. Not only would I be able to deal with the ongoing discovery of police reports, medical records and financial statements, I’d also be able to securely archive files, destroy hard copies and save on storage fees.”

A practicing attorney since 1988 and a certified specialist in criminal law since 1995, Snader knew that minimizing time spent on discovery and money spent on storage was key to his firm’s success. When he found Laserfiche, he knew that its upfront cost would return enormous dividends. “I really looked at Laserfiche as an investment,” Snader says. “The ease of access, support and training, as well as the software’s capabilities, made this the best choice for my practice.”

Dutton believes that, like Snader, many attorneys underestimate the utility of a document management solution. “Case preparation software does only what it was designed to do. Laserfiche can provide case preparation functionality, as well as manage all of the documentation for the day-to-day business of your entire practice, including accounting, billing and HR records,” he says.

“When you consider that attorneys receive information in so many formats—including paper, PDFs and other types of electronic documents—a system that can manage all those disparate formats from a single screen ends up providing an incredible ROI,” Dutton adds. “In fact, Laserfiche could be a law firm’s single best software investment.”

Faced with the mountain of evidence in State v. Valentini, Snader wholeheartedly agreed. “With Laserfiche, it’s not just about saving time, money and providing a valuable resource for clients—which it certainly does. It’s also about competitive advantage. Laserfiche is a powerful tool that enables me to show prosecutors and clients the strength and weaknesses of a case by just pushing a few keys.”

In fact, with Laserfiche’s sophisticated search tools at his disposal, Snader was the first defense attorney in the case to submit a motion to remand for his client—and the only one to submit his motion by its original due date in June.

“I’m amazed how quickly and easily I can locate information,” he says. “I was able to show the prosecutor that he failed to provide any testimony on a key issue, simply because I could immediately find the information.

“That would have been incredibly time-consuming with boxes of documents or printed PDFs,” he adds.

Dutton agrees, “The way the county provided documents to Mr. Snader made discovery even more difficult—and Laserfiche even more important. Because each page was provided as a separate file, it was quite difficult to tell what pages belonged to what records.

“Worse yet,” he adds, “it was nearly impossible for someone without technical know-how to figure out. But by using Laserfiche, in just a matter of hours, I was able to reconstruct all the discovery documents, fully migrate them into Laserfiche, make every page full-text searchable and teach Snader to do it all himself.”

“It took less than four hours to get Laserfiche installed and for me to learn how to use it,” Snader says. “Laserfiche’s help tools are phenomenal, the tutorials are excellent and the software is very user-friendly. It has a learning curve like any other software, but the end result was much better than I expected. I’ve definitely saved more time than I thought was possible.”

Snader plans to complete the discovery issues in State v. Valentini and continue on to scanning and archiving all his closed files. In fact, Laserfiche has even helped him market himself, as he can handle larger cases with even larger volumes of discovery documents.

“Laserfiche is a perfect complement to my growing practice,” Snader says. “It’s an easy-to-use product that provides fantastic results and is a great value for the cost.

“Other products may be less expensive,” he adds, “but they certainly don’t provide the same quality or capability.”

“We used to print out e-mails to conduct surveillance,” remembers Operations Manager Kelly Buda. “And when you consider we have over 260 representatives and home office staff, that was a lot of paper.”

Buda began investigating document management solutions, and, after a presentation by Laserfiche Solutions Group (LSG) consultant Jeffrey Green, was sold on going paperless. “I’d been pushing the paperless concept for almost four years, because I was the one looking at files and dealing with most of the paper,” Buda says. “Laserfiche looked promising, but it wasn’t until I met Jeffrey at a conference and spoke to him at greater length that we realized it could work for us.

“When Jeffrey came in to do a demo, Laserfiche really sold itself,” he continues. “With the Windows®-like file structure, it was easy to learn—in fact, the ease of use was its best feature. And Jeffrey made it so easy to understand. He really showed us what was possible.”

Green believes that for financial services firms, the benefits of eliminating paper are clear, with a compelling return on investment. “Most firms think digital solutions like this are complex, difficult to implement and prohibitively expensive, but I showed Workman Securities that a digital solution was more affordable than they thought it would be,” he says. “Ultimately, e-mail archival proved to be the most important component for them, so that’s where we started.”

Using Laserfiche’s open architecture and a combination of modules including Workflow™, Audit Trail™ and Quick Fields™, LSG developed an e-mail archival solution that perfectly met Workman Securities’ needs.

When e-mails and attachments are received by the firm’s e-mail server, they’re automatically sent to Laserfiche, converted to searchable TIFF files and indexed in the repository. E-mails with a high ratio of suspect terms, such as “promise,” “sure thing” and “guarantee” are flagged for compliance department review. If needed, Workflow is then able to automatically move these e-mails to a registered principal’s Laserfiche folder and notify them that e-mails are waiting for their review. The reviewer can then open, read and search flagged e-mails.

After the compliance department or a principal reviews the suspicious e-mail, Laserfiche records their approval in a template field. Audit Trail monitors and time-stamps these approvals along with all other repository activities, such as user logins, searches, document views and attempts to print. With this functionality, compliance staff can generate reports that clearly illustrate the identity of the reviewer, what communication they reviewed, the date of the review and whether the review was forwarded on for further examination.

Even with this sophisticated e-mail archival functionality, Workman Securities’ Laserfiche system took less than ninety days to implement. “The increase in our efficiency has been huge,” says Chief Compliance Officer Klaus Siepmann. “Instead of printing a random sample, suspicious e-mails are automatically sent to the compliance department or a supervisor for immediate review.

“In the compliance department, we’re really loving the e-mail system,” he adds.

About a month after Workman Securities implemented the e-mail capture, approval and archival system, SEC auditors arrived on their doorstep. “Thanks to this e-mail solution, the auditors noticed a definite improvement,” Green says.

“In the past, we used to give the auditors a four-foot stack of paper and let them spend a week going through it. But now we can sit an auditor down at a computer, show them the system and generate reports documenting the review process. It’s a lot more efficient for us, and for them,” adds Buda.

After successfully automating e-mail archival, Workman Securities decided to apply the same principles to order processing. Rather than passing copies of order paperwork back and forth, Workman Securities is implementing Laserfiche Workflow to streamline suitability approvals, improve order processing and speed up payment. Once mailroom staff scan new business paperwork into the Laserfiche repository, Workflow automatically routes it to a registered principal for suitability approval, to the operations department for order processing and, finally, to back-office staff for commissioning.

This automated process has already improved efficiency, but to truly maximize its benefits, Workman Securities plans to enable representatives to scan and submit business over the Web, using the Web Access thin client. They may also begin submitting business to clearing firms electronically. “Over ninety percent of our orders are checks and applications, which is why rolling out the solution to the field will be such a benefit,” Buda says. “Because they’ll be able to do their own scanning and access their files online, we think the reps will really like it.”

In fact, Workman Securities is planning on having Green attend their annual compliance meeting to demonstrate the system to the firm’s representatives, something that Buda believes will help their representatives visualize the possibilities of Laserfiche. “We’re a pretty low-tech bunch, generally speaking, but the system is just so easy to use. I’m sure Jeffrey’s demonstration will show our reps how simple it is, and how much it could benefit their practice.”

Buda feels that even though Workman Securities is just beginning to realize the benefits of their Laserfiche system, it’s the right solution for financial services firms like themselves. “I wouldn’t have a problem recommending Laserfiche,” he says. “When we started, we didn’t have an exact idea of what we wanted or what was even possible.

“We’ve just begun to test the limits of our system,” he adds, “but we know it can do so much more.”

“The philosophy behind many of our technology initiatives,” he explains, “is to present information on the Web, rather than face-to-face. Not only is it a whole lot less expensive, but it’s so much more convenient for citizens.”

Before implementing Laserfiche, completing everyday tasks was far from convenient. Jackson describes the working environment as “Paper, and lots of it. Our business processes were mostly manual and very costly, with regard to both lost productivity and excess paper consumption.”

Gaston County had another document management system in place when Jackson arrived, but it didn’t meet all of the organization’s business needs. “Our previous software lacked Web publishing and OCR capabilities,” he recalls, “and its architecture couldn’t scale to support our more ambitious initiatives or additional departments.”

Keeping in mind both present needs and future plans, Jackson authored an RFP, to which seven vendors responded. While two other solutions provided similar functionality to Laserfiche, none could match its cost-effectiveness. “Return on investment was probably our chief criterion,” he says. “Laserfiche offered the quickest ROI of all the potential solutions.”

It offered fast deployment as well. Within 6 weeks, the environmental health department had scanned paper records of over 55,000 septic system inspections dating back to 1955. Jackson gives much of the credit for Gaston County’s success to its Laserfiche reseller, One Source Document Solutions. “Our reseller has been great to work with, and they’re a great representative for Laserfiche as well,” he says.

The HR, finance and building inspection departments were also part of the pilot installation. “It was really a ‘first come, first served’ process,” Jackson says. “These departments really wanted to be the initial adopters of the new technology.”

In addition to these departmental champions, Laserfiche also found strong political support. Gaston County commissioners had recently passed a resolution enabling deployment of new e-government initiatives—many of which fell right into Laserfiche’s wheelhouse. “Our commissioners are very interested in using technology to reduce costs, so fortunately, we didn’t have major problems getting funding for our Laserfiche system,” Jackson says.

Deploying at the departmental level proved advantageous in convincing decision makers that Laserfiche would support their goals. “It allowed us to present concrete cost savings to commissioners,” Jackson recalls, “so they’d be on board with expanding the system. It also helped us persuade the few skeptical staff members that, when all is said and done, Laserfiche would make everyone’s jobs easier.”

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It turned out that staff didn’t need much persuading at all. “The resistance to change has been far less than for other applications or new business processes,” he adds. “Employees all realize how tedious working with paper is, and that the opportunity to digitize will help them tremendously.”

Indeed, after just one year of using Laserfiche, staff and citizens have already realized many benefits. For example, Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME) has greatly simplified the way staff work with records series. “It’s very easy to establish new records series in RME,” Jackson says, “and when it comes to managing them, staff simply scan documents in and let the system worry about the rest.”

Beyond sophisticated behind-the-scenes records management, staff greatly benefit from one of the most basic Laserfiche functions. “Laserfiche gives staff the ability to search in so many different ways,” Jackson notes. “For research and information requests, it’s really reduced the amount of information staff need to find what they’re looking for.”

In a recent case study, the building inspections department documented just how much more efficient they’ve become thanks to Laserfiche searching. With 6,000 building permits filed yearly, staff spent an estimated five hours per day filing and handling research calls. Because they can now index and retrieve documents automatically with Laserfiche, they’ve reduced the time spent answering those calls by 75%—saving almost half a man-year of work.

And that’s just in a single department. “We know that once we start deploying to larger departments, the savings will mount up into the millions of dollars,” Jackson says.

From an IT perspective, Laserfiche offers many advantages to Jackson and his staff. First and foremost among these is ease of administration. “We’re a Windows®-based shop, so we really appreciate the way Laserfiche integrates with Active Directory®. That made it really easy to fit Laserfiche into our operating environment.”

Because deployment was so smooth, Laserfiche delivered quickly on its promises. “Many solutions have the potential to increase productivity or lower costs,” he adds, “but are very difficult to set up. With Laserfiche, the upfront investment to attain these kinds of benefits is very low.”

With such rapid results, it wasn’t long before other departments were lining up to request their own Laserfiche systems—a common occurrence among new Laserfiche users. “Once other departments saw the benefits that the pilot departments were reaping, they came to IT and said ‘sign us up,’” Jackson remembers.

In response to these departmental demands, the 2008 Gaston County IT strategic plan includes a major expansion of their Laserfiche system. Planned enhancements include integrating Laserfiche with their redesigned GIS system, so that staff and citizens can retrieve parcel information and tax histories. The emergency medical services department will begin storing patient records and ambulance call histories within Laserfiche—which will help answer HIPAA compliance challenges. Meanwhile, the county attorney’s office will use the Workflow™ module to simplify the contract review process by automatically routing contracts for approval.

Workflow will also play a major role in some very sophisticated e-government applications. “We’re developing Web forms that will send information straight to Workflow,” Jackson says. “For example, employment applications submitted online will go straight to HR for initial screening, then on to hiring departments, who will route back the applications of individuals they want to interview or extend offers to.” Similar technology will enable citizens to submit permit applications and pay taxes online as well. And the building inspection department, one of the earliest adopters of Laserfiche, has become the first county department to go paperless, after receiving state approval for self-warranty in May 2008.

Internal business process improvements notwithstanding, the number-one goal of implementing Laserfiche was to improve citizen service. The citizens’ response? “They love it,” Jackson says. “Having building inspection reports online has been a major success. They can’t believe how much time they save. Previously, they had to call us, come into the office or travel to an inspection site. Now, they have on-demand access to all that information.”

Not bad for the first year. But Jackson is gearing up for bigger and better things. “I knew that digital document management would be a major asset, not only in the short term, but also further on down the road. I really anticipate that, within five years, Laserfiche will become as widely-used as e-mail.”

Thanks to the enthusiasm of the city clerk, staff quickly adopted the new system and began scanning documents into the Laserfiche repository. But the project lost momentum when the clerk retired. Many departments didn’t take the time to develop effective file structures in Laserfiche, and staff soon began adding documents to the repository without properly recording document metadata. As a result, they couldn’t make the best use of the Laserfiche search tools, and many departments continued to rely on their old, paper-based filing systems.

In 2005, Bill Matson, the city’s records and elections coordinator, undertook an initiative to reorganize the city’s document repository and help staff use Laserfiche more effectively. As part of this process, he worked with departments to recreate their current filing structures in Laserfiche and to design document templates that would capture the most useful metadata. Thanks to Matson’s intervention, staff soon integrated Laserfiche into their everyday work processes, and the city significantly increased the return on its Laserfiche investment.

“I tell people that Laserfiche is a great system—you just have to make sure you’re using it correctly,” Matson says. “Unfortunately, we started scanning documents into the repository without taking the time to think about how we’d search for them later on. Ultimately, our own lack of foresight kept us from using Laserfiche to its full potential.

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“For example, one of our more mundane tasks is to maintain a library of press clippings that deal with city business. Prior to 2005, multiple people scanned these clippings into Laserfiche, resulting in duplicate files scattered across a number of folders. Worse, we didn’t capture consistent metadata—clippings about the city’s budget, for instance, were assigned a variety of subjects, from ‘Budget’ to ‘Finances’ to ‘Fiscal Information.’

“To correct these problems, we created a separate Laserfiche folder for press clippings, with subfolders for each year. We also designed a new template to capture key metadata, including the clipping’s date, type and subject. To ensure consistency, we provided staff with drop-down lists of types and subjects to choose from, rather than allowing them to enter free text. This uniformity has made searches easier—and a lot more accurate.”

Instant access to information helps staff throughout the city work more efficiently. Staff in the clerk’s office, for example, can quickly locate agreements, leases, correspondence and other documents dealing with important city business. Staff in the municipal works department can easily find the maps, schematics and engineering plans they need to improve and repair city infrastructure. And staff in the planning department can promptly retrieve zoning and other information in response to citizens’ requests.

Matson notes that the planning department includes some of the city’s most avid Laserfiche users, and he attributes their success to careful project planning. Over the years, he explains, staff had created around 20 document categories—such as “Zoning,” “Subdivisions” and “Tourism”—and they then organized documents within each category alphabetically. Prior to scanning documents into the repository, they recreated this file structure in Laserfiche. Because of this foresight, staff can locate documents simply by browsing to the relevant folder. They can also use Laserfiche to perform more elaborate searches, including full-text searches across large numbers of documents.

In addition to helping staff find information, Laserfiche helps them share it with citizens. “In the past, responding to information requests usually involved a trip to the records room,” Matson says. “Once we found the correct file, we had to take it apart, photocopy the relevant pages and then either mail or fax them to the requestor. Now, when someone calls with a request, I can locate the relevant documents in just a few seconds, and then e-mail the electronic files from within the Laserfiche repository. The citizen literally receives the documents before I hang up the phone.”

In many situations, however, citizens simply visit the city’s Website to find the documents they need. Using the WebLink™ module, the city’s Information Services staff provide the public with online access to a variety of documents stored in Laserfiche, including bylaws, council agendas and meeting minutes. Matson reports that requests for printed copies of these items have dropped significantly, while citizens have become better informed about issues the council members discuss.

Along with its Web publishing capabilities, Laserfiche includes a number of other features that benefit the city’s IS staff. Integration with Microsoft^® Active Directory^® simplifies security management and eliminates the need to create separate Laserfiche accounts for each user. Support for a variety of standard and specialized scanners enables departments to use their current hardware with Laserfiche. And a flexible application programming interface promotes rapid integration between Laserfiche and the other applications staff use every day.

“We first integrated Laserfiche with our Vadim^® accounts payable software,” says Dave Etherington, the city’s network services manager. “Because of this integration, staff can easily retrieve scanned invoices and other Laserfiche documents from within Vadim, eliminating the need to switch between systems or log in to multiple applications.”

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From Etherington’s perspective, though, Laserfiche’s most useful features are also the most straightforward. “It gives us a great deal of control over who can access information, and it eliminates worries about lost documents and misplaced files,” he says. “It’s also a lot smarter to store documents on one server than in multiple file rooms. We back up all of our servers nightly, and we do an off-site backup of our entire Laserfiche repository once a week. If anything unexpected happens, we know we’ll be able to recover our information and get back to work.”

The city is currently in talks with its Laserfiche reseller, IKON Office Solutions, about implementing two additional Laserfiche modules: Agenda Manager™ and Records Management Edition™. Agenda Manager will help the city automate nearly every aspect of the agenda creation and distribution process, while the Records Management Edition will help staff more easily manage record retention schedules.

As he looks forward to installing these additional Laserfiche modules, Matson thinks about the lessons he and his colleagues have learned in the years since their first Laserfiche installation. “In hindsight, there are things we should have done differently,” he says. “But we’ve really turned things around, and I know we’ll continue to have success with Laserfiche in the future.”