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

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

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

Powering Permitting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empowering the Enterprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prior to the creation of the Central Contra Costa Sanitary District (CCCSD) in 1946, however, Contra Costa County—located east of San Francisco, CA—was in crisis. A post-war building boom had brought an influx of new residents, most of them relying on septic systems that didn’t take well to the area’s heavy adobe clay soil. With septic tanks overflowing and waterborne diseases such as typhoid becoming a potential threat, health authorities considered the polluted conditions in the county to be among the worst in California.

As a result, the CCCSD was formed as a special district, a sewer system and treatment plants were put in place, and the public received much-needed access to safe water and sanitation.

By 2002, CCCSD had expanded to meet the needs of 450,000 people by maintaining 1,500 miles of sewer lines and treating an average of 45 million gallons of wastewater per day. But with 56 years of service came 56 years of records—including permits, construction plans and Board documents. Storage space was at a premium, gaining access to information was difficult and time-consuming, and the district wanted to strengthen its disaster recovery plans.

“Over the years, CCCSD has created a reliable and efficient infrastructure to handle the wastewater needs of thousands of Central Contra Costa residents,” says John Phillips, IT systems analyst for CCCSD. “Laserfiche is helping to add similar efficiency and reliability to our IT infrastructure, allowing us to provide our staff with faster access to the content they need to do their jobs.”

Implementing ECM

The special district enlisted Laserfiche reseller ECS Imaging to build out its information management infrastructure with Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM).

The first department to implement Laserfiche was the Secretary of the District, which converted critical Board documents from CCCSD’s inception in 1946 through the present into an easily accessible, digital form. The Permits operation was next, with a much larger and more complicated filing backlog of permits and record drawings. This conversion process is still underway today.

“It was important for us to select a system that could handle many different forms of content,” says Phillips. “Documents are simple. Maps and drawings are where things get more complex.”

Today, permit job files (including maps and drawings) are scanned into Laserfiche offsite by ECS Imaging. This practice centralizes content management, reduces the need for physical storage space, minimizes wear and tear on the originals and enables convenient access to them by CCCSD employees.

Since 2002, many other departments have begun using Laserfiche to manage a wide variety of content, including:

• Maps and drawings (Engineering Support)
• Right of Way agreement files (Right of Way)
• Employee and retiree files (Human Resources)
• Standard operating procedures (Lab)
• Discharge permit documentation (Plant Operations)

Expanding ECM by Integrating GIS

To further improve information access, the special district expanded its use of Laserfiche by integrating it with CCCSD’s GIS system, AutoDesk MapGuide. The in-house integration grants engineers, permit counter staff and field maintenance crews instantaneous access to scanned permits and record drawings. This is particularly important for CCCSD’s field crews, which operate out of a separate facility without convenient access to paper records.

“Prior to the integration of Laserfiche and the GIS system, field crews were unable to access any of these records directly,” explains Carl Von Stetten, information systems analyst, Engineering Support, CCCSD. “They had to take the time to retrieve copies from a variety of filing rooms.”

To access scanned permits and record drawings, users simply double-click on a parcel or pipeline within a map, and then follow the links in the subsequent reports to content stored in the Laserfiche repository. According to Von Stetten, “This has eliminated time spent looking up hard copy permits and drawings and enabled our crews to be more productive in the field.”

Business Benefits

“Our deployment has focused on achieving specific business goals rather than on technical bells and whistles,” explains Phillips, “which is why we’ve had so much success.”

The key benefits CCCSD has realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche include:

• Increased efficiency. Today, all employees have easy online access to current and historical records, which are centralized in the Laserfiche repository. Access to additional content such as permits, HR files and operating procedures is granted to authorized users based on Laserfiche security protocol. Laserfiche search tools enable staff to locate information quickly, so time is no longer wasted on finding, copying and distributing content. The system has also reduced CCCSD’s need for storage space.
• Easy integration with GIS. By linking Laserfiche to its GIS system, CCCSD engineers, permit counter staff, and field maintenance crews can instantly access scanned permits and record drawings. This is a particular timesaver for CCCSD’s field crews, which operate out of a separate facility without convenient access to paper records.
• Improved disaster recovery. In the past, disaster protection focused on preserving and protecting vulnerable paper copies. The installation of Laserfiche, with redundant off-site storage, has greatly improved the district’s ability to protect historical and vital records. “We hope we never face an emergency that will demonstrate the benefits of having Laserfiche,” says Phillips, “but we have to be prepared.”

“My best advice for companies that want to extend their information management infrastructure with ECM is to talk to other users who’ve done what you’re trying to do,” concludes Phillips. “Leverage their experience to ease your implementation and achieve your goals.”