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

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

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

Compliance Complications

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

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

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

Overhauling Old Methods

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winning Results

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

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

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

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

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

Positive Projections

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technical innovation just sometimes needs to be preceded by a little budgetary innovation, and this kind of group effort to pool resources to share the cost of investment is not uncommon, according to Laserfiche reseller Clay Behr of Crabtree Companies. The Marshall, MN, school district and city hall, for instance, joined with Lyon County to share services in an ambitious project dubbed “Prairie Net.” In Anoka County, 11 police departments joined forces to purchase a county-wide Laserfiche system.

This kind of collaboration between bureaucracy-encumbered government agencies can often make for slow progress. But bonded by a common need, they did indeed make progress. Behr notes that, besides the year of business manager meetings Carr mentioned, “Really, what took the longest was getting everyone to agree how to set up the template and folder structure and how the volume security would work.”

School districts present particular document and records management issues owing to both state-mandated retention and privacy policies, as well as to the constantly growing documentation amassed over the course of a student’s K-12 career. But as NE Metro 916 shows, a school district can also present a unique staffing opportunity.

At around the same time Laserfiche was being deployed, Cindy Sapinski, work coordinator with Work Experience Life Skills-North (WELS-N), a program of NE Metro 916 providing work and transition services to students, read an article in Autism Advocate magazine about young people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) finding employment digitizing paper files. Coincidentally, Behr just happened to serve as a Technical Advisor to the Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities, a council dedicated to finding employment opportunities for people with ASD. Behr pointed Sapinski to examples of how document management processing and capture was being handled by people with disabilities by two of his existing clients.

Inspired, Sapinski approached Carr with the idea of an in-house digital imaging project staffed by her students. “We’ve had students prep documents before we used to outsource scanning, but when I saw what other people were doing, I asked if we could take the whole project over.”

Sapinski did just that, and before long, instead of outsourcing scanning to a vendor, a dozen or so students were handling the work spread out over four two-hour shifts a week. Right away, she saw Laserfiche was a perfect fit for its new staff. “It was so easy to learn that the transitional students were very accepting,” she says. “They were working on it within several days.” She found an internal Laserfiche champion in Aaron Erdman, a student with Asperger’s Syndrome, who became something of the ad-hoc Laserfiche administrator, overseeing QA and troubleshooting operational snags. “I was a little wary of handing over the manuals to him because I knew it wouldn’t take long for him to know the software better than me,” Behr laughs.

Erdman has since transitioned out of the program, as have another 15 or so students. They’ve made their way into the working world with their experience with Laserfiche technology on their resumes. As the program enters its third year, it has been an across-the-board success, helping graduates find jobs while the school districts have some 120,000 documents scanned a year—roughly 1,500 pages a shift.

The cost, Sapinski says, of using transitional students to staff the scanning service is roughly a third of what it would cost to outsource the work, owing in no small part to tax incentives for hiring the disabled. Behr and other Laserfiche resellers have helped organizations utilize the skills of people with unique abilities for scanning while creating opportunities for people where none existed.

But the benefits extend far beyond tax incentives. “This kind of work is perfect for people who like repetitive tasks and enjoy being meticulous in what they do,” adds Sapinski. “I think it really shows the potential for people to do more than sweep floors.” She notes that other schools have either contacted her directly or are interested in starting their own in-house imaging services, while area Day Training and Habilitation (DTH) Centers have also started offering imaging training. “I’ve even made phone calls about our program—I called a lady in Milwaukee who was having trouble placing students, and they had never even thought about imaging.”

Carr sees the success of the program as part of the larger success of Laserfiche for document and records management. “Reinvesting in our own students makes sense in a lot of ways because I know we’re not spending more to outsource it and we’re not having to lease space to store our HR files anymore,” says Carr. “That’s what’s unique about being a special school district—we offer programs and approaches to programs that really show an efficiency of scale.”

As for NE Metro 916’s own use of Laserfiche, conversion efforts have expanded into permanent contracts and expanded use by HR and the finance departments. “Every year we’ve gotten more people in more departments using the system because everybody’s realizing what great access they have to what they need.”

It may have taken a year’s worth of meetings to get Laserfiche, but now, Carr says, “It runs so smoothly we don’t have to have meetings to talk about it—that’s the beauty of the system.”

• 2007: Four public school districts including North Branch Area, Roseville Area, Stillwater Area and NE Metro 916 Intermediate partner to purchase a shared enterprise Laserfiche system, hardware and scanners.
• 2008: Reseller Crabtree implements system with “Crawl, walk, run” strategy, starting with search and retrieval. NE Metro 916 founds digital imaging program as part of its transitional training curriculum.
• 2009: Quick Fields added for barcoding applications from vendors for Accounts Payable; NE Metro 916’s Digital Imaging Program enters its third year.
• 2010: Planned upgrade to Laserfiche 8, Workflow and Records Management Edition (RME).

“We just kept hard copies of all our data. Right now, we have three large rooms, former classrooms in what used to be a junior high building, filled with four-drawer filing cabinets – 150 to 200 to a room. I don’t think we have space for another one.”

Gonzalez was named to his present post two years ago, and, he said, record storage was one of his first challenges. “Would we put in more rooms to store more file cabinets? That didn’t seem to me like a really practical way to solve the problem. And I didn’t see microfiche as a future kind of tool either. There’s still a storage problem with that because you’re still storing film, you’re basically creating a smaller file, which you still have to go to and look for,” said Gonzalez. “So we opted for Laserfiche. One of the advantages that we saw with Laserfiche is that you’re doing two things – one, you’re indexing the information and two, you’re storing it in a portable, compact, secure kind of a vehicle.”

The compactness of the Laserfiche system also was important to Gonzalez. Once scanned into the system, data is stored on a CD-ROM. One disk, can hold as much data as a four-drawer file cabinet. “Once we’ve emptied all those file cabinets, I think we’ll renovate this building and open it as a school again,” said Gonzalez.

“We have looked at some other types of equipment, especially an optical disk which was much more expensive,” said Gonzalez. “But it didn’t seem to have the flexibility and compatibility with all computers that Laserfiche has. Laserfiche is expandable; it has the capability of faxing, e-mailing, and networking information. That was a real selling point for us.”

“The other selling point was that the software interface is user friendly. There is a very small learning curve. We could teach people who aren’t that familiar with computers very easily how to use it. It has a Windows interface so it’s very familiar to a lot of people. That was a real plus.”