When manufacturing medical devices such as spinal fusion cages, knee replacements, hip replacements, bone screws and the like, precision is essential. Deviating from product specifications by even a miniscule amount can cause serious problems when a physician attempts to implant the device in a patient.

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

“A lot of people think if you have an office in a metropolitan city that the highest cost to a business is rent, it’s not. It’s the people we employ. So I’d rather have them doing mission-critical, profitable work.”
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Transamerica Financial Advisors, Inc. (TFA), an indirect subsidiary of AEGON N.V., provides investments and financial planning to clients nationwide. With a network of more than 700 registered representatives, 42 offices of supervisory jurisdiction (OSJ) branches and 51 home office staff, TFA is a rapidly growing enterprise whose independent representatives faced the growing cost of paper-based processes: misplaced documents, time-consuming manual workflows, express-mail costs and file storage expenses.
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In this tech tip, we will explore the differences between Laserfiche Workflow 8’s Routing Decision activity and its Conditional Parallel activity. The scenarios explain how to determine when to use one versus the other.

Routing Decision

The Routing Decision activity specifies two or more possible routes for a document. When a workflow is performed, the activity decides which route is the most appropriate for the entry in question. This decision is made based on conditions you define.

For example, a workflow routes a document to Tim for approval. After he reviews it, Tim tags the document Approved or Denied. A Routing Decision activity uses this metadata to determine what should happen to the document. If the document was approved, the workflow sends an e-mail to another employee; if it was denied, the workflow archives the document.

Though a Routing Decision activity contains multiple branches, only one will become active each time the activity is performed. Branches are evaluated from left to right and the first branch whose condition is satisfied will become active. If no branch conditions can be satisfied, the workflow will skip the Routing Decision activity and proceed to the next step in the workflow.

Conditional Parallel

At first glance, the Conditional Parallel activity looks very similar to the Routing Decision activity: both contain branches that you assign conditions to and both activities’ branches represent different potential routes for a document.

For example, a workflow uses a Conditional Parallel activity to route a document to one, two, or three different users, depending on metadata assigned to the document.

In this scenario, one, two, or three branches may become active each time the workflow is performed.

The Difference – When to Use Each Activity

The difference between the two has to do with the number of branches that can become active each time a workflow is performed.

• The Routing Decision activity attempts to select a single branch to be executed. Once it finds a branch whose condition it can satisfy, it ignores all other branches.
• The Conditional Parallel activity attempts to satisfy as many branches as possible. Once it finds a branch it can satisfy, it executes that branch but does not forget about the additional branches. Each additional branch will also be evaluated and, if its condition can be satisfied, executed.

It is important to understand the fundamental difference between these activities in order for your workflows to function properly.

At the 2009 Laserfiche Institute Conference, we introduced Laserfiche Avante, a new way to get powerful document and business process management that fits the way you work—at a price that makes sense.
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After routing an entry to a user or group, Workflow 8 can notify the trustee that a document was routed to their working folder. If the user/group does not take the appropriate action on the entry (e.g., approve/deny or process the entry) within a specified amount of time, the workflow can send a series of reminder e-mails based on a recurring e-mail schedule that observes weekends and holidays.
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During this tech tip, we will explore some general tips and tricks to using the Workflow Designer.
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After routing a document to a user or group, Workflow 8 enables you to configure an e-mail notification schedule that will remind the trustee to process the document. For example, a workflow routes an employee’s vacation request to an HR representative, then sends the HR employee e-mail reminders to approve/deny the request. The reminders are sent according to a custom notification schedule defined in the Workflow Designer. This feature ensures that trustees don’t delay a workflow indefinitely by failing to process a document.

You can configure the notification schedule in the following ways.

• Initial wait. How long the workflow should wait after routing the document before sending the first notification e-mail.
• Wait time. The amount of time to wait between each e-mail.
• Count. Total number of e-mails that should be sent.
• Exclude weekends and holidays. Whether the above settings should take into account holidays and weekends.

How do I use this feature?

The following Workflow 8 activities can take advantage of this feature: Route Entry to Folder, Route Entry to Group, and Route Entry to User. After adding one of these activities to your workflow, select the activity in the Workflow Designer and click the E-mail button in the Properties Pane:  . In the Routing Activity Options dialog box, select the E-mail tab. Configure the options shown in the screenshot below.

Custom Weekends and Holidays

By default, non-workdays include Saturday and Sunday. You can define different and/or additional non-work days by opening the Workflow Administration Console and expanding the Holidays node.

Click the Weekend Days node to configure the days of the week that should be considered part of the weekend.
Click the Official Holidays node to configure annual holidays that should be observed. For convenience, the following holidays have been created for you, but note that they are not active until you configure them.

On Friday, 8/8/08, we announced Laserfiche Rio, our new ECM solution, to the general public with our Rio press release.

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Long Beach, CA – Laserfiche^®, a leading provider of digital document and records management systems, announces the release of Laserfiche Rio™ (www.laserfiche.com/rio), the flexible, scalable and streamlined solution to the enterprise content management (ECM) challenge.

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Our implementation of Laserfiche 7 is very stable and mature, and great care must be taken as we migrate up to version 8.

My current plan is to stand up new hardware as a Laserfiche 8 server. I am not sure that our size warrants a separate server for Weblink and Web Access, but it might. If WebAccess 8 truly is a client replacement I may end up with most of my Client users switching to WebAccess. SQL and file storage on separate boxes, of course.

Having a new LF8 server will allow our migration to occur over a much longer period of time than an in-place upgrade. (I’m not sure if in-place upgrades are even POSSIBLE from 7 to 8.)

This will also allow us to work (with our VAR) on rewriting our custom code and rewriting our Workflows. The new possibilities of Workflow are very exciting, but it will take some work to re-create our old workflows. Of course, this gives us an opportunity to remake them better - faster - stronger! (smarter?)

In the end we should have a nicely tuned and updated Laserfiche 8 implementation.

What are your plans, and what timeline are you thinking about?

Note: Watch the interactive Laserfiche Guided Help video that shows this workflow in action.

The Routing Decision activity routes a Laserfiche entry based on specified conditions. Full story »

As the winner of a 2007 InfoWorld 100 Award for IT innovation, Gaston County, NC, is a shining example of the way technology can help move government forward. So when it came time to implement a digital document management solution, it’s no surprise that CIO Brandon Jackson sought the system that could best promote broader-ranging citizen services. As part of the award-winning initiative, a rapidly-growing Laserfiche® system now provides solid technological support for Gaston County’s service mission. Full story »

In 1954, Frank Bloss and Earle Dillard founded a small insurance agency, working alone out of a one-room office. Since then, Bloss & Dillard, Inc., (BDI) has grown into a successful managing general agency (MGA) with 1,500 agents and thousands of clients in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

But success has its price, and for BDI, it came in the form of proliferating paperwork. As an MGA, BDI provides a broad range of insurance products to independent insurance agents. A staff of underwriters supports these agents by quoting and binding both commercial and personal insurance coverage, from simple property policies to highly sophisticated excess and umbrella coverage. Full story »