“Ensuring that our ECM solutions meet the needs of our customers around the world has always been a top priority for Laserfiche,” said Sean Tang, Vice President of International Business at Laserfiche International. “By launching Laserfiche UK Services, we are able to provide local support for our VARs and customers in the United Kingdom.”

According to Phil Burke, IT Projects Manager at Basildon and Thurrock University Hospital, “Laserfiche’s UK office represents a real commitment to its UK customers with increased training opportunities and round-the-clock support. Laserfiche is a core component of our EMR solution, which is being delivered by a supplier consortium including Adobe and Fortrus. We very much look forward to working face-to-face with Laserfiche staff as our project evolves.”

The London office bolsters Laserfiche’s strong global presence, including corporate headquarters in Long Beach, California; international headquarters in Hong Kong; international offices in Shanghai, China, and Ottawa, Canada; recently opened offices in Washington, DC, and Fort Lauderdale, FL; and a robust reseller network across the United States, the Middle East, Mexico, Latin America, the UK and Canada.

Laserfiche currently provides enterprise content management (ECM) solutions to nearly 1,000 UK-based organizations, including South Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and Arthur McKay, among others.

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.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche®, Run Smarter® and Compulink® are registered trademarks of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

Mergers and acquisitions account for much of SEPT’s growth, but innovation, says Dominic Malvern, Head of Information Systems Development, accounts for much of its ongoing success. “It’s never been a stereotypical government ‘Mental Health Organization,” Malvern says.

In fact, when SEPT transitioned from a purely state-funded trust to a more privatized “Foundation Trust,” one of its primary initiatives was to partner with Adobe to develop an EMR system using its LiveCycle products supported by a Laserfiche ECM system from Laserfiche reseller ScanDoc/Fortus. Malvern saw the chance to hit the ground running with a pilot project in the trust’s Forensic Services Department, which was moving to a new building as part of a modernization program.

“It was the ideal opportunity for us to modernize how our live patient records were accessed, as it was apparent that continuing with a manual process was not in keeping with the state of the art service we provide to our patients,” he says. That process, he adds, had remained manual by default because the legacy imaging system in Forensics didn’t meet the Trust requirement for working with live patient records.

“A single patient record could run for several years, sometimes through a person’s entire adult life, so it would extend into several volumes,” he explains. “Constant patient monitoring meant frequent updates to records for many reasons such as observation or treatment plans, sometimes every 15 minutes.”

A Pilot That Needed To Fly 24-7

When choosing a department to establish proof-of-concept before deploying a full-scale EMR system, SEPT couldn’t have chosen a more challenging one than Forensics Services—or one in which the impact of a successful ECM implementation would be so pronounced.

Malvern worked with ScanDoc’s Steve Livermore to implement a Laserfiche pilot system for active patient records management system using:

• Quick Fields advanced capture to input, sort and file the steady stream of patient information.
• Workflow to automatically route information for reviews, approval and distribution.
• Web Access to allow both remote deployment and access to the system over SEPT’s broad geographic service area and affiliated agencies.

SEPT implemented a clinical pilot project in 2009 and, over the course of a year, the new system kept up with the staff’s round-the-clock demands, amassing over 500,000 documents in the Laserfiche repository in the process.

Malvern says the real breakthrough operationally was having a system aligned with the increasing need for information sharing between regional service offices. “Increasingly we have to work on a multi-disciplinary and multi-agency basis, so having shared but secure access to patient records and notes is vital,” he says.

From an IT perspective, Web Access gave the organization one more tool to centrally control system administration while capitalizing on Laserfiche’s flexibility to configure various access levels remotely.

“Being able to deploy the system through our server or using Web browser options allowed us to control the type of access we wanted to make available,” says Malvern. “Web-based deployment is key because of the ease of maintenance when working with such a large group of users. Updates and upgrades would be unwieldy to deploy with a large number of single desktop clients.”

Going from EMR to ECM Saves $1.5M

The vision to extend Laserfiche from its supporting role in SEPT’s EMR project to a full-scale ECM deployment came with the support of ScanDoc/Fortus’ Livermore, who helped Malvern make the case to SEPT’s directors to implement Laserfiche for the trust’s non-clinical side.

“Once I heard the directors were looking at other solutions, and knowing what Laserfiche was capable of, it seemed a waste to restrict its application to purely clinical processes,” says Malvern. “Of course, it seemed an even bigger waste to spend further public money on more software that would be superfluous when we had a perfectly good system that would likely be better than anything else on the market.”

Now moving ahead with full-scale deployment of its Rio system to what will eventually be 3,000+ users, SEPT is effectively standardizing its information management on Laserfiche, eliminating the need for multiple departmental systems—and their corresponding service agreements and upgrades.

“Initially Laserfiche was envisaged solely as a clinical and medical records solution, but we have now realized that it can be a complete multi-functional document management system for the whole organization,” he says.

“We’ve begun implementation in non-clinical areas such Human Resources and Finance, as well as Vehicle Service Management, where we’re using Quick Fields and Workflow to automate our lease applications.” Additionally, another major project is underway to use Laserfiche to meet Information Governance Corporate Records retention regulations.

“From a roll-out prospective, it makes life much easier to have one multi-tasking system that all employees are trained on no matter what their function. It makes live support a far more streamlined and efficient activity,” he explains.

Malvern says the efficiency—and cost-savings—are starting to add up. “Within 18 months to two years we’ll be able to replace all our legacy imaging systems with Laserfiche. Implementing Laserfiche and its enterprise licensing enables SEPT to discontinue several annual contracts and service agreements. It also delivers savings on labor and print costs for information requests, as well as paper document archive and retrieval services. Realistically, this will save us US$1.5 million over the next three fiscal years,” he says.

Since implementing a Laserfiche enterprise content management solution in 2006, the Rangers’ season ticket office has automated the capture, search and retrieval of information used to renew the club’s 40,000 season tickets. The result has been improved customer service that uses less staff time— while eliminating 50 filing cabinets to free up office space and reduce storage costs.

Before Laserfiche, Reporting Analyst Jenny Burnie remembers, renewals season only seemed to point out how much the club was outgrowing its manual filing and paper processes. “We have 30-40,000 season ticket holders each season, and for every one we had to store renewal forms, their proof-of-age copies, their match ticket applications, as well as other documents,” says Burnie. “Filing all these forms was extremely time-consuming—not to mention all the space the file cabinets took up.”

While filing season ticket holders’ documentation was time-consuming, retrieving it was even more challenging. “Our contact centre is off-site, so staff would have to phone someone in the ticket office and then depend on their being able to source the paperwork for them.” Customers renewing season tickets either waited on hold, or had to wait to be called back.

In 2006, Jacqueline Gourlay, Head of Business Management of the Rangers Football Club, worked with Guy Outram of Laserfiche reseller Capital Solutions to envision a content management solution. It had to be powerful and robust, but also easy to use. The club purchased Laserfiche with Quick Fields advanced capture tools just in time: the season ticket office installed Laserfiche and its printer-scanner just as renewals season began.

Staff was assigned to scan the forms from the filing cabinets and then the newly processed renewals. “We used Quick Fields to process large volumes of documents and pick out the unique identifier—what we call the ‘Rangers number’—from each form and enter it into a template to make searching faster and easier,” says Burnie. “We also scanned in all the associated documents – proof of age copies, letters, etc. The renewal forms are the main purpose of Laserfiche on our site, but we can retain all that information from more past years in Laserfiche, so we’re saving on storage and reclaiming office space.”

Operationally, Burnie is satisfied so far—both in terms of the ease-of-use of the Laserfiche system, as well as the benefits to the organization. “Quick Fields was relatively easy to work with, and I’ve been able to set up more targeted scanning processes to make it as user-friendly as possible and to categorize the different types of scans,” she says. “For example, if you want to scan a two-sided document you choose a button on the scanner specifically for duplex documents. Then we have a Quick Fields session specifically set up to take documents for processing from that folder, and divide the two-sided documents into two separate pages when moving them into Laserfiche.” Even then, she admits there’s room for improvement, but is happy with the gains in productivity. “Right now, we have it where our staff goes from the scanner to a PC with Quick Fields installed and manually runs the session file. But it’s still much faster than filing paper forms.”

The overall effect, she says, is that staff provides better customer service to the most loyal Rangers fans—the season ticket holders. “The major benefit is that people dealing with supporters don’t have to phone supporters back or leave them standing while they dive into the back room to find their paperwork. They can call it up instantly in Laserfiche.”

With its initial success in the ticket office, Burnie says the club is looking at how Laserfiche could benefit the HR and finance departments—when it can find the time. “It’s just a bit frantic here,” she laughs.

Presumably a little less so, thanks to Laserfiche. As Rangers fans say: Go Gers!

“In the past, we’ve always had a specific topic, like ‘Document Management’ or ‘Business Process Automation,” Leaton explains. “‘Cost’ was simply themed around how all the technology solutions we offer can save costs. Whereas last year we might have been talking about compliance and disaster recovery, now the biggest driver is efficiencies.”

Leaton credits the success of “Cost” with being able to talk to financial services companies in their own language. “We’ve developed a very good understanding over the years of how these organizations operate, where their pain is and where most of their inefficiencies are,” he says. “The key is to have a clear understanding of your client’s business processes and apply technology solutions with ‘real world experience’ to meet their individual requirements.”

Key to that “real world experience,” he’s found, has been real world technical support. MBS has made investing in its support relationships key to ongoing success—both its own and its clients. Leaton and Julie Hammonds founded MBS in January of 2008, combining their 41 years of industry experience to strike out on their own after careers with another reseller. “We believed we could offer a better service to our customers,” Leaton says simply.

Their strategy’s working: MBS has already surpassed last year’s Laserfiche sales figures in just the first half of 2009, already qualifying for the Winners Circle. They expect to double that by the end of the year.

But Leaton admits it hasn’t been easy. “We had no idea what was about to happen with the global economy!” he says of striking out on the eve of 2008’s financial meltdown. But Leaton and Hammonds did know about the very real value of superior technical support to a financial services industry that was already facing enough challenges without having to add technical hurdles to the list.

“Given that most of our customers are global financial institutions, we have to have experienced technicians to not just provide support, but also the expertise to integrate with other applications,” Leaton says. “Laserfiche also gives us the ability to easily integrate with other applications, which adds more value to the overall solution.”

Leaton sees Laserfiche Avante as especially aligned with MBS’ strategy of reaching any-sized financial services companies with technology-driven cost efficiency. “A lot of our prospects are smaller businesses, and with Avante we are now able to offer workflow to them, where previously it would not have been cost effective,” he says. “Avante dramatically increases our offering, giving us a very comprehensive product suite to cover most eventualities.”

Between its investment in superior support services and its timely message of technology-driven cost efficiency, Manx Business Solutions has managed to succeed at a time when others might only survive.

“We have seen that with financial organizations, if they’re making money, then they are obviously happy and not too bothered about changing their infrastructure,” Leaton offers. “Now times are tougher, so they are far more open to listen to how technology can help them work smarter. So we see the current climate as a big opportunity!”

The strict oversight of the Isle of Man Government’s Financial Supervision Commission (FSC) means that independent financial advisers require a secure, enterprise-wide platform for tracking and managing both paper and electronic records. Proliferating work process documents, extensive audits and strict records-retention rules leave many financial services firms struggling to maintain productivity in a highly-competitive industry.

For Jon McGowan, managing director of MAC Financial, these challenges multiplied with his business’s increasing success. With three major acquisitions in three years, McGowan and his staff were dealing with more customers, more work and significantly more paper. They needed a solution that would not only organize their records, but would also assist them in following compliance directives. Whatever solution they chose had to have enterprise capabilities, be able to manage a large volume of documents and integrate with their customer relationship management (CRM) system to enable fast, efficient and flexible client service.

It took less than half a day for MAC Financial to implement a Laserfiche solution, enabling instant document retrieval and freeing up an entire floor of office space. Now, MAC Financial runs more efficiently, saving time, money and staff resources while increasing revenue.

The Situation

MAC Financial, a firm of financial advisers based on the Isle of Man, boasts over twenty-five years’ experience providing employee benefits advice to large multi-national and small corporate clients. As a Corporate IFA (Independent Financial Adviser) for investment business, they also provide a full range of bespoke services to private clients.

With over 5,000 individual clients and more than 300 corporate schemes encompassing 4,000 employees, MAC Financial operates in a complex environment. Recent acquisitions made it even more difficult to keep up with business demands. McGowan knew his team needed a solution that would enable efficient document management procedures while also providing the tools for superior customer service and comprehensive compliance procedures.

MAC Financial required a proven and reliable document management platform that could produce benefits in several key areas: customer service, compliance and operations. Integration with their CRM system was also crucial, because their solution had to function not only as a system for storage, search and retrieval, but also as a workflow management system integrated with their existing CRM software.

With a solution from Laserfiche document management, MAC Financial has improved productivity, streamlined their workflow and even enabled an employee to telecommute from Australia—not to mention benefited from savings of 25-35% achieved through reduced staff and a more efficient use of time.

The Solution

Before Laserfiche, staff needed to walk up three flights of stairs to the attic to retrieve documents. They were spending enormous amounts of time searching for information and filing documents, not to mention impeding profitability due to the overhead costs of paper used to print correspondence and copies for their files. Since implementing Laserfiche, MAC Financial has cleared the attic of paper, completely freeing an entire floor of office space. Staff spend less time searching thanks to instant document retrieval and only print out documents for correspondence, cutting down on printer output and storage space. According to Chris Reynolds, senior consultant at Viking Office Systems Ltd., the value-added reseller that implemented MAC Financial’s Laserfiche solution, “They don’t print anymore.” With over 5,000 clients, that’s an incredible amount of paper that has been eliminated.

Eliminating paper was only one aspect of the implementation; McGowan knew that MAC Financial needed a document management platform that would support integration with the company’s CRM system, MIG Turbo®. “Everything we do begins and ends with client information that we enter, store and manage in MIG Turbo,” McGowan says. “We knew that we needed not only the document management aspects, but also scalability and the ability to custom integrate into how we did business.”

Viking provided the integration between Laserfiche and MIG Turbo that met MAC Financial’s needs. This integration dynamically searches the Laserfiche repository from within the MIG Turbo interface, while automatic login to the Laserfiche platform saves time and makes the integration easy to use. This seamless integration means that users only see one program—MIG Turbo—which has, according to Reynolds, “revolutionized the way they work since everything is in the same place.”

The benefits of this integration between Laserfiche and MIG Turbo are enormous. “Without Laserfiche, we would have had at least twice as many staff employed at our offices,” McGowan says. “Not to mention the space saving through the absence of paper documents and filing cabinets.”

Since implementing Laserfiche, client service has noticeably improved. Comprehensive search capabilities enable staff to search through client information instantaneously, without leaving their desks to go up to the attic. In addition, staff can access documents simultaneously, something impossible with paper files. “There’s no more shouting ‘Where’s the file?’, as any person can access the records in conjunction with our core CRM system,” McGowan comments. “We’ve definitely noticed faster, more dedicated responses to client queries.”

The benefits aren’t limited to enhanced front-end customer service; Laserfiche’s flexibility has also helped MAC Financial improve back-end operations. When an employee emigrated to Australia, instead of losing a valuable employee, McGowan and his staff used Laserfiche to enable her to work on their systems through a virtual private network (VPN), a set-up that was, according to Reynolds, “straightforward and uncomplicated.” Taking the time difference into account, this means that MAC Financial is able to update accounts on a nearly round-the-clock basis.

In the future, McGowan plans to continue enhancing the integration between Laserfiche and MIG Turbo. He’s also considering implementing WebLink™ to enable clients to access information from their home computers. “We’re definitely considering whether an ‘extranet’ offering to clients for our financial services products is required,” he says. “We would like to see what role Laserfiche could play in this.

“It’s been an exciting process getting to this point, and we continue looking for ways to streamline wherever we can,” McGowan adds. “Our philosophy is to continue to innovate in both technology and process, and Laserfiche is a critical component of our plans going forward.

“Essentially, Laserfiche has moved us from the paper century to the electronic century.”

The Eastleigh Council Revenue and Benefits Department faced a considerable challenge: increasing operational efficiency while transitioning from their rapidly-declining Document and Image Processing System (DIPS). Their current DIPS was slowing down information access and hampering staff productivity, due to an aging, ineffective query function. Whatever system the department chose, however, had to eventually integrate with the council’s planned enterprise-wide customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Lesley Cox, Local Taxation Manager, knew that the revenue and benefits department was working with a limited budget and had to procure the best-quality system available. By implementing a Laserfiche® digital document management solution, she was able to centralise the department’s records in a single repository, saving her staff time and aggravation while simplifying future integration with the council-wide CRM system.

The Situation

The legacy DIPS was causing more problems than it solved for the department’s 20 employees. Slow inputting, incorrect indexing and inefficient searching meant that department staff were spending significantly more time looking for information than actually acting on it. Their most urgent needs were to first replace the dying system that was slowing their workflow down and, second, to increase operational efficiency.

Thanks to Laserfiche, the department found a solution that met both these needs.

The Solution

“Our system was very basic, and had been on its last legs for years now,” comments Cox. “We needed not only something quicker and more sophisticated, but we also needed a platform for workflow later on. Ultimately, we needed to migrate our legacy data to the new system. So we had to find something that would meet all those needs.”

The department put the project out to tender, and, with the help of their IT Manager, Andrew Walmsley, began reviewing different systems. Specifically, the department needed a system that would enable them to file documents securely. They were also looking for a system that would support a single, centralised electronic repository, replacing their current system that consisted of a repository spread across a number of optical drives. Their system also had to support efficient, quick search and retrieval functions.

Ultimately, they chose Laserfiche not only because it is easy to use, but also because its data and structure would make it simple to move existing information into the new CRM system when it became available. “Although the council is trying to introduce a CRM system across the whole of the authority, we needed to integrate whatever platform came along with our DIPS workflow,” Cox says. “However, the project wasn’t moving forward quickly enough—our old system would have been obsolete far before the CRM system could go live. So whatever solution we chose had to ultimately tie into the CRM system when it was up and working.”

Steve Livermore, Director of Laserfiche authorised reseller Crusader Technologies, helped the revenue and benefits department implement their solution. The initial installation took place over two days, with additional integration and customisation tasks taking about four weeks. “We had around 160 optical drives to convert to Laserfiche from the legacy system,” Livermore says. “These optical drives were over ten years old and worked on a DOS-based system, which made it time-consuming to copy data into a format that Laserfiche could identify—it was possible, however.”

Once the drives were converted, Livermore worked with the department to develop a program that auto-populated the Laserfiche template with data from the current revenue and benefits database. Users can easily identify documents populated with template data and move them to the correct system sub-folder. “The training went smoothly, due to the fact that we built a system that requires minimal operator intervention,” Livermore comments. “We made sure that the user profiles were set up correctly so that users could retrieve information within seconds when on the phone to their clients.”

Currently, the revenue side of the revenue and benefits department is using Laserfiche to store community charge documents, council documents and non-domestic rates documents—all documents supporting the council’s local taxation activities. They have one employee who scans and indexes documents manually. Documents are kept for three months to assure they’ve been indexed correctly and then are shredded—a holdover from the legacy system, which frequently indexed documents incorrectly and required re-scanning and re-indexing. “We haven’t had that problem with Laserfiche at all,” Cox says. “We’re scanning documents in quite happily.

“Compared to our old system, the new Laserfiche system is so much quicker,” she adds. “The problem was, the old DIPS didn’t work. We couldn’t access documents, and our prime concern was to have a replacement. We had to have access to our existing documents and we had to scan and retrieve the documents we receive on a daily basis.”

Because the revenue and benefits department is currently using their Laserfiche system for document imaging, finding information quickly is of paramount importance. Staff usually search under their account reference order, as documents are only scanned in after staff have finished working with them and have placed the appropriate reference numbers on the documents. This makes it simple to track multiple accounts. “It’s a lot easier for staff to access and to interrogate to find things,” Cox says. “Scanning is quicker and simpler—our old system used to be very laborious and would take several minutes. If the information was on an optical drive that wasn’t in the jukebox at the time, you had to go through, find it, put it in the jukebox, install it, reset the jukebox and rerun your search. With Laserfiche, there’s no messing around. You just go in, look for your document and it will search across the entire database in seconds. You don’t have to muck around changing drives in the jukebox.”

In the future, the revenue and benefits department would like to expand their Laserfiche system to include the benefits side of the department, as staff there still use paper documents and manual filing systems to store and index information. In fact, the Department believes that other council departments could implement Laserfiche, and that ultimately, the solution could serve as the backbone of an archival system for the entire council. With its open architecture, Laserfiche is the perfect tool to connect mission-critical front-end applications with a repository full of information.

“We view Laserfiche as our platform for moving on to bigger and better things,” Cox says. “It has a lot more potential for us.”

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.”

With business booming—and paperwork proliferating as a result—Arthur McKay needed to drastically reduce the amount of time it took to process project files, says Account Manager Ian Westwater. “Business was expanding,” he explains, “and the amount of paper documentation was increasing every day. In addition, storage space was at a premium.”

Westwater describes the days before implementing Laserfiche, when inefficiency plagued staff and consumed valuable time and resources: “We would search for documents, only to discover that on occasion they were filed incorrectly—or not at all.”

After considering several ways to make critical information accessible to staff, Arthur McKay chose a Laserfiche document management solution, placing special importance on support from Capital Solutions, their local Laserfiche reseller. “A key reason for choosing Laserfiche,” says Westwater, “was our confidence that our reseller would provide the correct solution to meet our needs.”

Not all staff members shared that confidence in the new system, however. This initial scepticism revealed the importance of communicating clearly during implementation. “Initially, some users did not have a full understanding of the system and the reasons for implementing it. However, with some further training, staff were quick to acknowledge how straightforward and user-friendly the system is.”

It wasn’t long after the additional training that staff began scanning documents into Laserfiche—and realising the benefits of having information at their fingertips. An average of 3,000 new documents, consisting of 10,000 pages, enter the Laserfiche repository every week.

For the staff who process these documents, Laserfiche has made a dramatic difference in the amount of time it takes to make them available across the firm. From engineering reports and time sheets to compliance certificates and risk assessments, each construction project generates a number of common documents. Thanks to the Quick Fields™ module’s automated forms-processing capabilities, staff now capture and index these documents in a matter of minutes, rather than the hours it took before Laserfiche.

“Staff scan documents into Laserfiche at all stages of an individual project as soon as possible,” Westwater explains. “Once a document becomes ‘live,’ staff can access it instantly, which greatly simplifies communication.”

The improved time-to-availability has proven critical to successfully completing projects on time. With branch offices located in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, and with work sites all over the U.K., it’s essential for staff to have fast access to project files, so they can communicate and collaborate quickly and effectively.

“Using the Laserfiche search tool to locate documents has greatly improved efficiency,” Westwater says, “not to mention the reduced stress and frustration.”

But staff aren’t the only ones taking advantage of instant information access. Westwater reports that clients themselves appreciate the convenience of quickly and securely viewing project files—which, thanks to the Web Access™ module, they can do from the work site, at their home or at the office. Web Access offers user-specific, password-protected remote access to the Laserfiche repository, so customers can check the status of their projects from anywhere with an Internet connection. “Being able to retrieve documents from Laserfiche gives our customers confidence that projects are proceeding according to plan,” he says.

Likewise, he notes, Laserfiche helps to give auditors confidence that Arthur McKay is operating in compliance with industry and government regulations. “The building services sector generates a large number of documents related to compliance and legislation, which are audited both by internal and external parties,” Westwater says. “Storing these files in Laserfiche allows auditors freedom of access to their requested information, along with an assurance that they are viewing authentic documents.”

In addition, Laserfiche helps Arthur McKay manage documents related to its numerous accreditations, including ISO 9001 (quality management) and 14001 (environmental management) standards. Through Laserfiche, certification parties can easily monitor live and archived documents to ensure that Arthur McKay employs consistent business processes and quality control measures. And with regards to environmentally-sound business practices, it certainly doesn’t hurt that Laserfiche has promoted a significant reduction in paper consumption.

Of course, the most important benefit of implementing Laserfiche has been the improved level of client service. “The ease with which stakeholders can view documents, and the confidence they have in the authenticity of the documents,” Westwater says, “have been the most positive results of implementing Laserfiche.”

Laserfiche has also improved staff’s ability to deliver more flexible, more responsive service. “We carry out a standard procedure for all projects,” Westwater explains. “However, some procedures must be adapted depending on the clients’ requests. By enabling clients to view project files in Laserfiche, we’ve simplified communication regarding these special requests.”

As more and more prospective customers get word of Arthur McKay’s quality of service, the company will only continue to grow. Along with the firm’s recent opening of their London office, staff at the Glasgow branch are preparing to move into a bigger office building, at which point the firm’s Laserfiche installation is set to expand. Until then, Arthur McKay will continue to enjoy the increased efficiency that Laserfiche has brought—and continue passing it on to clients in the form of better service.