• Colorado Division of Forestry.
• Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife.
• Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining, and Safety.
• Colorado Division of Water Resources.
• Colorado Geological Survey.
• Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC).
• Colorado State Land Board.
• Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB).

According to Susan Lesovsky, Application Support Manager for the CWCB, the DNR purchased a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system in 2005 to replace a legacy IBM system that lacked an out-of-the box Web interface, optical character recognition (OCR) functionality and the ability to automate business processes. “Our old system was pretty much limited to search-and-retrieval,” she explains.

She notes that a top priority for implementing Laserfiche was making it easier for citizens to stay informed about government activities. “Ultimately, our customer is the public, and our success is measured on how we provide and process information for them,” Lesovsky says.

To that end, the DNR upgraded to Laserfiche Rio in 2009. According to Lesovsky, “Laserfiche Rio has allowed us to increase the transparency of information to the public, and it’s done it in such a way that we don’t have to worry about connections or cost.”

In particular, she describes the benefits of upgrading to Laserfiche Rio as:

• Greater public access to information through the WebLink Public Portal, which provides unlimited connections.
• Scalability through unlimited servers and volume discounts on user licenses to accommodate future growth.
• The bundled functionality of Web Access and Workflow.

Laserfiche Rio Enables Citizens to Cut through Red Tape

Lesovsky notes that Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper recently called for every department in state government to reduce red tape. Good government, he says, is characterized by “efficiency, effectiveness and elegance.”

“As one of only two recommended content management systems for the state, Laserfiche epitomizes all three E’s,” Lesovsky says.

She explains how easy it is for citizens to access documents such as the CWCB’s meeting documents:

• The current year’s materials are available on the Board’s Website in a table that provides direct links to PDFs stored in Laserfiche.
• Archived materials are accessible through a custom search box (created using the WebLink Designer) on the lower right side of same page or through this link.
• The custom search box is limited to three fields (title, date range and document type) to streamline access and reduce user confusion. (Custom search components have been included throughout the CWCB’s Website to help direct the public’s search for Board-related documents.)

Colorado’s Decision Support Systems Website also includes custom search boxes throughout its Website, such as the one at the top of this page that searches according to document type and a few other parameters, while a set of “Google-like” search results based on document type displays below thanks to an encoded URL string.

“We used the WebLink Designer to create custom searches because we noticed that our users would get overwhelmed when presented with a long list of templates and fields,” says Lesovsky. “Each custom search focuses on a particular program area or topic and uses a limited set of search criteria within the associated template.”

Quick, easy and efficient searches support Hickenlooper’s goal of driving the “three E’s” into government operations. Lesovsky explains, “In the past, people had to come to our offices to request information. Laserfiche WebLink provides a simple and elegant way for the public to get immediate access to the information they need whenever they need it.”

Integrations Make ECM “Mission-Critical”

By integrating Laserfiche WebLink with other software applications, the DNR has been able to make information even more accessible. For example, by integrating Laserfiche with ESRI ArcGIS, staff can click on a stream and retrieve associated court documents, while public users can quickly access information associated with flooding and flood hazards in the state.

To see the public-facing integration in action:

• Visit Colorado’s Flood Decision Support System page.
• Click on the Flood DSS Map Viewer.
• Agree to the disclaimer.
• Click the Documents tab in the top menu.
• Enter your search criteria in the pop-up window. For example, select:
  • Group: Historical Flooding.
  • Document: Historical flood photographs.
  • Type: Photographs.
• Hit the search button.
• A new window displays the results (produced on-the-fly by an encoded URL string) in a grid format.

It’s the integrations with applications like ESRI ArcGIS that make Laserfiche “mission-critical.” According to Lesovsky, “When you integrate Laserfiche with business-specific systems, you embed it into your existing workflow processes and it becomes integral to how you operate.”

ECM Enables Electronic Forms Processing

Laserfiche Rio has been a particularly effective ECM solution for the DNR because different divisions can configure it to meet their unique needs. For example, the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) uses Laserfiche to enable an eForm application that provides an interface for oil and gas operators to enter and submit permit forms and supporting documents. There are currently six active forms and three in development.

According to Ken Robertson, Application Developer for the COGCC, “Uploaded files are stored in our production Web server. Once the operators submit the form to our internal server, we export the attachments to Laserfiche.”

He explains that the public can view the files directly from the production Web server or wait until the files are imported to Laserfiche and use WebLink to access them. Furthermore, he outlines how the COGCC has used the Laserfiche SDK to create customized Laserfiche scripts and programs.

Robertson says, “For those attachments still sitting in our production Web server, we created a Windows service to check queued files in the Web server every 15 minutes and use the Laserfiche Toolkit [SDK] for .NET to import files to the Laserfiche repository server. In the meantime, we also collect the Laserfiche reference numbers in our attachment table so that system (eForm) can provide a WebLink download page for users to view the attachments.”

He notes that there is a separate application that allows oil and gas operators to upload well logs, which are imported into Laserfiche using Laserfiche Import Agent, a tool that captures and processes electronic documents. Scanning staff members use Laserfiche Quick Fields to index other types of electronic documents.

The biggest benefit of processing permits and well logs with Laserfiche is time. Robertson says, “We used to shuffle files from one person to another until they were approved, and then we scanned everything into the system. Having the operators upload their attachments to their documents saves an average of 15 minutes of scanning and indexing time for our staff, not to mention the time saved on data entry.”

He goes on to explain that having everything available electronically at the beginning of the process allows multiple people to work on the same forms simultaneously, further reducing processing time.

“Not only do we save time,” Robertson says, “but the approval process is now more transparent for the public.”

Lesovsky adds, “Laserfiche is powerful, flexible and easy to work with. Even though all our divisions use the same system, we can all use it a little differently.”

Looking Ahead

Lesovsky is particularly excited to use Laserfiche to harvest data across organizations. She explains that the CWCB has already conducted a feasibility study and has a grant in place to make it happen.

“Colorado State University has an ECM solution other than Laserfiche but a healthy collection of water information. The Colorado Water Resources Development & Power Authority and the Colorado River Water Conservation District currently use Laserfiche, with repositories of useful water documents. By hooking our systems together and using common metadata, we’ll be able to search for information across all four entities and gain a more complete picture of accessible water information in the state.”

She says that the DNR is also working on integrating Laserfiche and SharePoint. “Most of our divisions use SharePoint for their external Websites. Right now, people have to conduct separate searches if they want to find content stored in both Laserfiche and SharePoint. What we’re looking to do is enable searches that return results from both systems at the same time.”

All in all, she says, “Laserfiche Rio is a great tool. The bottleneck now is just finding the time to make it do everything we want it to do.”

Capture workflow is intended to rework and streamline an existing capture process, wholesale. Rather than just tweaking individual pieces, it looks at the whole process from start to finish in order to create a capture strategy that is more efficient, requires less oversight and forms an integral part of the content management system.

Certification topics include:

• Improving efficiency, accessibility and accountability with capture workflow.
• Re-engineering a capture environment to create a capture workflow system.
• Implementing a Laserfiche capture workflow system.

Click here to register for the Laserfiche Specialist, Capture Workflow course and to learn more about the prerequisites—or browse the CPP site to view all the certification courses Laserfiche offers.

• Note: Since this is a preview, the details and appearances of certain elements may change between now and the final release.

Workflow records errors in three different places, depending on the type of error.

Errors encountered by a running workflow

If a workflow does not run the way you expected, you can search for a specific time the workflow ran (a workflow instance) to see if it encountered any errors. In the Search Results Pane, the workflow instances with errors have a red X () in the Messages column. Double-click the workflow instance, and select the Messages tab to view the error details. In the screenshot below, an error occurred because the entry the workflow tried to rename did not exist.

Note: For advanced troubleshooting, the Activity Error Log in the Workflow Administration Console (described below) and/or the Windows Event Viewer also log these errors.

Errors encountered while building or publishing a workflow

The Error Log Pane lists the errors encountered while building or publishing a workflow. To open the Error Log Pane, click this button on the toolbar in the Workflow Designer.

The Error Log Pane displays each error’s details. You can easily e-mail errors with all their details to your administrator using the e-mail button at the top of this pane.

Workflow Server, Workflow Subscriber, Communication and Activity errors

The Error Logs node in the Workflow Administration Console lists these errors, which are mainly accessed for advanced troubleshooting. The error logs are divided between two nodes: Current error logs and All error logs.

Double-click one of these error logs to open the Error Log Viewer dialog. This dialog lists the time the errors occurred, their severity, and any message associated with them. You can also see graphs of errors by hour, type and message.

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.”

“Laserfiche is the perfect complement to our ongoing workflow improvements. It’s customized to meet FPA’s needs, is also compliance-oriented and easy to use,” said Curt Niepoth, FPA’s Associate Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer. “During our evaluation process, Laserfiche rose to the top because they provided the best solution for our organization by helping reduce administrative expenses and integrating well with our other systems.”

Chris Wacker, executive vice president at Laserfiche, said, “While other financial advisors struggle to find the time, money and staff to comply with industry requirements, advisors using Laserfiche are more efficient than ever before. The FPA shows industry-leading vision by providing their staff with the most agile content management solution on the market.”

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. Since 1987, more than 30,000 organizations—including numerous investment advisors, financial advisors and broker-dealers—have used Laserfiche solutions to streamline document, records and business process management.

By digitizing paper archives, Laserfiche enables financial services professionals to find what they need in seconds, quickly prepare for audits and make better-informed decisions. Secure Web access enables information sharing with remote offices, business partners and clients, while comprehensive security options ensure compliance with government- and industry-mandated standards.

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

About FPA
The Financial Planning Association is the largest membership organization for personal financial planning experts in the U.S. and includes professionals from all backgrounds and business models. FPA members adhere to the highest standards of professional competence, ethical conduct and clear, complete disclosure to those they serve. Based in Denver, Colo., FPA works in alliance with academic leaders, legislative and regulatory bodies, financial services firms and consumer interest organizations. For more information about FPA, visit http://www.fpanet.org/ or call 800.322.4237.

Implementing ahead of inclement weather

Meyer says the move toward ECM was a proactive one. “For us, it was the general idea that we could increase efficiency by saving time and money while continuing to improve client service that first got us interested in an ECM. Also, the disaster recovery aspect really attracted us.”

As both an advisor and the firm’s IT Manager, Meyer brought a unique perspective to the search for an ECM. “Naturally, being in the financial services industry, auditing, security and compliance were simply ‘must haves.’ After that, flexibility and scalability were important to us in an ECM—we wanted a system that could grow with us over time as our business evolved,” he says.

The firm looked at several ECM solutions, including cloud-based options, before deciding on Laserfiche. “Laserfiche was the most feature-rich of the solutions we looked at in terms of the comprehensive functionality it offered,” he recalls. “Quick Fields, Bar Code Plug-In, Zone OCR, Audit Trail, Workflow—these were all appealing because they either directly or indirectly addressed our ‘must haves,’” he says. At the same time, Meyer continues, Laserfiche would improve day-to-day operations. “We wanted to reduce costs, and we found from talking to other firms using Laserfiche and reading about the software that, first, Laserfiche saves time—employees spend less time searching for documents. Second, it saves on paper and printing costs; and third, it saves on storage costs of client files and other documents.”

Last, but not least, Meyer adds, Laserfiche is a name synonymous with ECM in the financial services industry. “Having a tried-and-true, trusted name in document management was important to us as well,” he says. “The system was already approved by our broker dealer, Commonwealth Financial Network, which was also a plus.”

Laserfiche’s impact was felt not long after implementation. “The savings in time and paper realized after just one quarter was significant,” Meyer recalls. “We used to scan a copy of each quarterly report to a PDF using a multi-function copy machine (MFP). Someone would have to manually rename and file each report. At that time, we also kept a duplicate copy on file. Using Quick Fields and the Bar Code Plug-In, we were able to scan all of our reports and have them renamed and filed instantly. We also eliminated the need to keep a physical copy.”

Soon, hundreds of client files dating back to 1985 were scanned into Laserfiche, eliminating the need for several bookshelves and filing cabinets. While Meyer admits it was “a paradigm shift” for some employees to move from a paper-based system to a paperless one, after they experienced how they could literally file things automatically and then find them instantly, they embraced the concept completely. The transition brought peace of mind—and cost savings.

“There’s a reassurance in knowing that all of our important documents are stored electronically and backed up off-site, ensuring access to the data even if something were to happen to our office,” Meyer says, adding, “employees now have the option of accessing documents remotely [over Fure’s secured network], so they can work from anywhere.”

A key component to true enterprise consolidation of the firm’s information was working with reseller Cities Digital to integrate Laserfiche with CRM solution Junxure. “Before Laserfiche, we used to have some digital files in the CRM, some paper documents in a large client file and some documents in different filing cabinets; it was very disjointed,” he recalls. “Now, with the two systems integrated, we have one centralized location for statements, account paperwork, estate plans, correspondence and all relevant material related to a client.”

Automating compliance with Workflow

In addition, Laserfiche Workflow automates several business processes—chief among them logging client letters for compliance review. “We no longer need to make copies, depend on a person to manually log each letter, compile all letters into a binder for review and signatures or fax the letters every week,” Meyer says of the familiar process. “We used to create three copies of every single client letter we sent out. Now, we simply scan one copy right at our MFP, which Laserfiche Import Agent OCRs and applies metadata to before moving it into Laserfiche.”

Then, Workflow renames the document and applies the correct metadata by referencing Fure’s Junxure SQL database. The document is then routed to the correct folders automatically, which a Fure senior advisor is then able to review and sign—all electronically. “Once the workflow is completed, it even e-mails the signed document to Commonwealth’s compliance department,” Meyer adds. “Import Agent and Workflow, with some custom scripts built by Cities Digital and an electronic signature pad, have taken that process completely paperless with one touch of the button on our MFP.”

Audit preparation has likewise benefitted from the centralization and automation—utilizing functionality as simple as a robust search and as comprehensive as Audit Trail. “Laserfiche allows us to pull the necessary documents together for an auditor extremely quickly instead of going through file cabinets,” Meyer says. “The security and auditing of documents is also important as we are able to prove the integrity of our documents; any activity or change with a document is right there.”

The Laserfiche advantage: weather-proofed is ‘future-proofed’

For a family-oriented firm like Fure, the little improvements add up as well. “We can train new hires much more quickly—the system is that intuitive. We’re not having to give tours of file drawers or a bank of cabinets anymore.”

Meyer says he can recommend Laserfiche on two levels: “From an IT standpoint, the program is very easy to administer, and the flexibility of Laserfiche and the highly customizable security options allowed me to tailor the program to fit our needs as far as setting up template fields, adding users and ensuring compliance,” he says. “From a user standpoint, Laserfiche allows our financial planning team to access client documents and pinpoint what we need, when we need it, which translates into more time spent with clients and generating revenue and less time on tracking things down. That’s the real benefit—the reclaimed time and effort.”

Still, for all the operational benefits he can identify, Meyer credits the long-term value of Laserfiche to fitting so well with the firm’s holistic business philosophy. “Having a powerful ECM system like Laserfiche allows our business to adjust to the changing environment that many small businesses in any industry face,” he says.

“The more agile and flexible your technology system can be, the more ‘future-proofed’ you can become,” Meyer adds. “While it’s very hard to predict exactly where compliance, government regulations, clients’ needs and technology will be in the future, Laserfiche allows us to prepare as much as possible. Staying on course, no matter which way the wind blows, means having to adapt as conditions change without compromising on the final destination.”

Some of this information is available in Workflow 8.0.1, but the Workflow Beta provides three more categories of information: Conditions, Tasks and Token Data.

Note: Since this is a beta, the details and appearances of certain elements may change between now and the final release. If you would like to participate in the Workflow 8.2 beta, please send an e-mail to WFBeta@laserfiche.com.

To access a workflow’s instance details, search for a workflow instance with the Search Pane. Each row of search results in the Search Results Pane represents a single workflow instance.

The columns give you some information about the workflow, and you can double-click on an instance to open a pane that contains the following tabs:

Workflow Tab: A view of the workflow and what stage it is currently at. The colored borders around activities show the activities’ statuses or if they encountered errors or warnings. You can click on an activity to view its properties.

Entries Tab: Entries the workflow has interacted with. You can double-click on any entry in this list to open it in the Laserfiche Client. (Your access to this tab depends on your security settings.)

Activities Tab: Activities the workflow has performed. You can limit this list to show only running activities.

Messages Tab: Errors , warnings or informational messages  the workflow encountered. 

Tasks Tab: Tasks the workflow instance currently is performing. A task is an activity that runs an external process such as connecting to the Laserfiche Server, sending an e-mail, or retrieving data from a database. If a workflow instance encounters a locked entry, this tab shows a countdown to when the activity will try to accessing the entry again and provides an option to retry right away. (This tab only appears if tasks are currently being performed.)

Conditions Tab: Conditions that were evaluated in the workflow, what activity the conditions were associated with, what time they were evaluated, and whether the conditions were satisfied or not. (This tab only appears if you have pending or completed conditions.)

Tokens Tab: If you included a Track Tokens activity in your workflow, this tab shows the values of the tokens recorded by that activity.

Before then, IT Director Lewis Paskin recalls PBC’s paper-based processes becoming overly cumbersome as the company grew, while escalating costs were adversely affecting profitability. There were shipping costs to receive charts; clerical costs to collate charts; and labor costs to copy, sort, log and distribute charts for coding, data entry and accounts receivable. “Adding to the paper overload were insurance claims that resulted in inbound Explanation of Benefits [EOB], patient payments, receipts, checks and correspondence—all of which needed to be opened, logged, accounted for and dispensed with daily,” Paskin says. “There were also significant paper costs from producing coding sheets for charts, making multiple copies of EOBs and eventually the long term offsite storage costs, as well as the HIPAA concerns that come with having all this copied and ‘travelling’ paper.”

Paskin led an internal committee to assess PBC’s needs in an enterprise content management (ECM) solution and began to search around four key features:

• Security.
• Accessibility.
• Accountability.
• Simplicity of user interface.

“We needed to make sure that billing records were easily retrievable, that protected health information was secure and that we could account for all our documents,” Paskin explains. “But we also needed a solution that was cost-effective and scalable. Our immediate goal was to be able to store billing records electronically, but our long term goal was a completely paperless workflow.”

Finding an ECM solution that fit—and would keep on fitting

PBC’s search soon took them to Laserfiche, and specifically to Laserfiche reseller JPI Data Resource. Paskin, for one, was initially skeptical. “When they said Laserfiche could dynamically create folders and structures as well as automatically extract text from documents, I told them I’d be shocked if it could. But it did,” he laughs.

“The Laserfiche product fulfilled our requirements,” Paskin continues, “but it was how it did it—the fact that it was really simple but also very powerful in terms of processing information—that’s how we knew it made sense for us. We have some of the least technical and most technical people working with our information, sometimes in a similar capacity. So, seeing how a staff member could just drop a document in a scanner and how Quick Fields automatically pulls and files all the metadata, or how Workflow would mean our users wouldn’t have to leave their desks, this was functionality we’d see improvements with immediately.”

Working with JPI’s Joseph Gutierrez, Paskin and his PBC team designed a 20-user Laserfiche system including Audit Trail; Workflow and Quick Fields; Bar Code and Zone OCR; Scan Connect and Snapshot for capture; and set up five different scanning stations. Installation, Paskin notes, was completed in less than a day, while user training took less than three days.

Paskin credits the comprehensive capture methods with making the transition to an automated environment a smooth one. “We’ve found that working with whatever file format a hospital is using with minimal modification is our best way to retrieve data,” Paskin says. “We do a lot of scanning directly into Laserfiche from our hospital clients’ facilities, which makes for a wide differential in chart documents. Some hospitals send charts with barcodes, others use file names, some just send text, but through the various Laserfiche applications we ferret out a way to get the data into the system.”

The biggest improvement, he notes, has been in processing paper. “Staff now simply scan those documents, either separated by bar-coded index sheets or by utilizing Zone OCR, into Laserfiche. Quick Fields reads the patient’s name and ID from the bar codes and automatically indexes the scanned files and fills in all the necessary document metadata.”

The effect was as impressive as it was immediate. “We were able to migrate one of our largest volume clients to a completely paperless environment in less than a week. Then we started bringing our other client applications online,” Paskin says.

Scanning volume soon hit 50,000 pages a day. “We scanned over 200,000 documents containing over 2.5 million pages in just under one year,” he adds.

The process(es) of coding and billing, better and more efficiently

The impact on PBC’s business processes was transformative:

• Laserfiche Import Agent constantly monitors the multiple directories PBC has set up to receive files.
• Laserfiche Quick Fields then extracts and sorts data, which triggers Workflow to route files to the respective departments that need to touch the document before it moves forward and is finally archived.
• If any predefined criterion is missing, Workflow automatically reroutes the record to the appropriate department for further follow up.

Previously, PBC’s coders signed out up to three days’ worth of charts and held them at their desks until coding was completed. Charts were then passed in bulk to the insurance review department, then on to data entry for manual entry to initiate billing before eventually being archived in a file room and sent to an offsite storage facility. Now, PBC coders work and code offsite, accessing information over a secure connection to PBC’s terminal servers.

“An entire team of people no longer need to work in the office—everything’s accessed and managed centrally through Laserfiche,” adds Paskin. As the coders finish a chart, it automatically moves through the workflow to the next department, speeding up and evening out the process from inbound chart to billing.

“We have over 10 different client applications that reside in Laserfiche—five of which are hospital-related, and three that are used by our Accounts Receivable (AR) department to look up claim denials, track work batches and store EOBs. We’re using it in more than five distinct departments including coding, claims processing, AR, finance and Human Resources; it’s our document management back-end for all our lines of business,” Paskin says.

This centralized control has improved oversight to monitor productivity as well as to ensure HIPAA compliance. Using Audit Trail, a document ID number can trace the file’s history. “We can see who changed what—and when—for every document,” says Paskin.

Another benefit, Paskin adds, is the ability to use SAP Crystal Reports tools to help monitor PBC’s workflow. “We have about 15–20 reports that go out daily—one of which is referred to as our ‘bucket report.’ When we receive a medical chart, getting it coded and billed quickly is key to cash flow. The bucket reports tell us how many charts are sitting in a user’s folder. Because all this data is in a single, centralized repository, it’s easy to create reports,” says Paskin. “I credit Joe and JPI with understanding our business well enough to show us how we should have our information structured.”

Automating the billing process itself, Paskin notes, “works essentially the same way it does in the Laserfiche brochure that JPI showed us initially. Again, everything’s in a single and straightforward database. We simply wrote Java and Web-related scripts to pull the account number, CPT and diagnosis codes to automate the actual billing process. Of course, there was controlled testing for about two weeks before we went live, but that was it.”

Now, PBC’s business processes are synonymous with Laserfiche—and significantly improved. Paskin points to processing the hundreds of charts sent to PBC on any given day. “That used to take three employees a full day to process manually; now it takes one person about 15 minutes.

“Our original vision was a paperless workflow, and we’ve pretty much achieved that. We have over 800,000 documents representing 10 million pages, and that all happened within the past 2 ½ years,” he adds. “We have redeployed 60% of our FTE’s required to produce a claim, and no longer need a night shift to keep up with the workload. Considering how far we’ve come, it’s pretty amazing.”

For more information, read Laserfiche’s ECM for Third Party Medical Billing brochure.

Read more about PBC.

• Municipio de Monterrey: Expert Data expanded the city’s 15-user Avante system by implementing Quick Fields, Workflow, Audit Trail and Web Access to automate check and invoice processing in its Accounting Department.
• Grupo Materias Primas: This leading manufacturer of ceramic minerals chose Laserfiche over a competing Docuware solution because of Quick Fields Real Time Look-up’s ability to access a third-party database to meet compliance and functionality requirements.
• Grupo Agora: Expert Data closed a 15-user Avante deal with this prominent construction firm by developing an integration with its contract management software, and is now utilizing Web Access to deploy the system remotely.

According to Gasi Fayad, CEO of Expert Data, this recent pattern of success has been the result of embracing a consultative sales strategy that emphasized solutions, not products. “By focusing extensively on discovery and needs assessment, we’ve been able to tailor our demos in such a way to show that Laserfiche is a comprehensive answer to the problems a prospective client is facing,” he says.

“At the same time, we’ve been able to create a lot of opportunity, both with new and existing clients, to determine where Laserfiche can be more actively deployed to enhance and streamline business processes, and that’s also proven quite successful,” Fayad adds.

The integration takes advantage of a variety of Laserfiche 8.2’s new features, including:

• Enhanced PDF support, including native page and text generation.
• Dynamic fields and metadata.

It also adds support for the Laserfiche Web Access thin client and Laserfiche WebLink public portal.

The integration was developed under the Laserfiche Professional Developer Partnership™ (PDP) program, which provides customers access to a variety of third-party integrations, configurations, plug-ins and Web tools. LincWare has been a member of the program since 2008.

“LincDoc delivers tremendous value for Laserfiche customers that are looking at enhancing their systems through document automation and electronic forms,” said Alex Wilson, director of the Laserfiche PDP program. “We appreciate having partners like LincWare who give Laserfiche customers excellent options for extending and expanding their Laserfiche systems.”

With LincDoc, users can automate common documents and forms and connect them instantly to Laserfiche. Documents can then be routed using Laserfiche Workflow business process management and managed using Laserfiche’s fully integrated Department of Defense 5015.2-certified records management functionality. LincDoc also has a native iPad application that allows users to capture forms and data, which are transmitted automatically to Laserfiche.

“LincWare is proud to offer a premiere solution that combines our flexible eForm and document automation tools with Laserfiche’s industry-leading enterprise content management capabilities,” said Darren Mathes, CEO of LincWare. “Since both Laserfiche and LincWare are dedicated to improving enterprise efficiency, our partnership is a natural fit.”

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.

Laserfiche launched the Professional Developer Partnership (PDP) program in 2007 to democratize content management by allowing customers to benefit from the customizations, configurations and integrations designed by more than 75 PDP partners. Leveraging the experience and creativity of PDP partners helps customers create ECM solutions that are best suited to their unique needs.

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

About LincWare:
LincDoc’s eForm creation and document automation tools empowers businesses and organizations to better serve their customers and constituents, reduce costs and better leverage bottom line critical information. LincDoc is available in the cloud, and on-premise, and on devices like the Apple iPad. For more information visit www.lincware.com.

By 2007, CapitalCare’s decade of growth had the side effect of generating more paperwork than the group’s 14 offices could efficiently manage—at least not the way they had been. “We were on our fourth expansion in our central office building in Albany; our offices were running out of storage and our CBO had rooms of files and boxes everywhere. So we asked ourselves, ‘Why all this space for storage? Why all this time to find things?’” says Charles Hagstrand, CIO of CapitalCare. “After 10 years, we needed a solution to move us forward.”

Hagstrand envisioned a true enterprise content management (ECM) solution from the start, one that could manage CapitalCare’s spectrum of information needs, including 700,000 patient encounters a year being stored remotely to over 280,000 EOB documents generated annually, as well as other documents and business records associated with its various practices. Eventually shared back-office business processes would be automated, beginning with AP processing.

“Initially we looked at a lot of vendors who had products that handled specific document types, but we were looking for something that wouldn’t pigeonhole us,” recalls Hagstrand. “You see a lot of departmental applications in larger organizations. We wanted a single system that could fit a variety of needs in different departments, and that ultimately could grow with us.”Hagstrand found what CapitalCare was looking for when his evaluation team discovered Laserfiche through reseller JPI Data Resource. “It was the product’s versatility that really won us over,” he says. “We liked that Workflow was a push technology that could keep things moving more effectively.”

Adds Jason Wicks, business analyst, “Laserfiche was like one-stop shopping as far as addressing the range of projects we were looking at, from HR files to Accounting and through-processing contracts and invoices. It’s very flexible.”

Wicks worked with JPI and CapitalCare department heads to design and deploy a pilot 20-user Laserfiche system with Records Management Edition (RME) and Workflow. They mapped out a multi-phase implementation that would eventually include using RME to automate retention and compliance, as well as Workflow to route invoices from CapitalCare’s central business offices in Albany to the group’s various remote locations for AP processing.

The first order of business was addressing Hagstrand’s storage and access concerns. “We took the approach that we should start by working with the items that didn’t involve Workflow first,” Wicks says.

Implementation began with backlog conversion of a decade’s worth of historical files in the HR and Medical Management departments, “just taking paper and getting it in Laserfiche to get people used to archiving,” as Wicks puts it.

The impact was immediate. “Our first touch is our site managers who are working with our patient encounters—that totals over 700,000 documents a year,” Wicks explains. “We used to have to process those in our central business office, then send them back out to the sites to store for seven years. Now they’re all inputted when received from the site and accessed as needed through Laserfiche.”

Standardizing to streamline AP processing

The next phase of implementation deployed Workflow to help automate AP processing for CapitalCare’s accounting department—which has seen the number of sites it supports grow from 14 to 27 in the four years since Laserfiche was acquired in 2007.

“Before Laserfiche, AP processing wasn’t very efficient, nor was there a common practice for approving invoices,” Wicks explains. “Some bills were received at the site, approved and forwarded; others came to the CBO and were distributed for approval and return. Laserfiche allowed us to standardize the process, and that’s been a big time saver.”

Thanks to Laserfiche, turnaround time for AP processing was reduced from 7–10 days to 2–3:

• Invoices are now captured and sorted centrally using Quick Fields in CapitalCare’s Albany office.
• Workflow then automatically routes the invoices to the appropriate site managers, who are notified through email that they have a document to approve with a shortcut link to retrieve the document.
• Working in conjunction with a custom file export tool developed by JPI, approved documents are then automatically pushed from Laserfiche to CapitalCare’s Great Plains accounting system via QuickLinks and PaperSave.

“Accounting now knows what documents need approval and which documents are in a queue once the site has approved the document,” Wicks says. A backup copy of the exported document is created using Workflow, which, after 30 days, is automatically deleted by a Workflow activity.

The next phase, Wicks adds, will be to establish a centralized shared service center, where invoices will be processed directly from the central business office. “Workflow will set up queues for each of our sites’ accounting departments to process invoices,” he says.

An overall benefit, Wicks says, has come from the time saved making action items more available to site staff. “Although we have a separate solution to store patient medical information for continuity, middle management at each site—typically one or two employees—utilizes Laserfiche to access past patient encounters, approving invoices and coding corrections, and this has eliminated a lot of lag time.”

The future of the future: Workflow

Future projects are already slated—including implementing RME. “The functionality of Records Management Edition will assist with purging documents once they have reached their shelf life, while Audit Trail will help keep us in compliance,” Wicks says.

Hagstrand says even the IS Department has its own ideas for how to utilize the system. “We’re actually hoping to use Laserfiche to manage our service agreements, so we’ll be able to run queries and see what’s going to expire in the next year.”

“The system keeps evolving as we bring on more documents and processes,” add Wicks, pointing out that Workflow will play a more leading role in future deployment. “I’d say we’re at the grassroots of pushing information between sites and departments. Right now, I’m looking at any situation where we have an opportunity to push documents and how we can utilize Laserfiche to automate additional functions between our practices and our central business office,” he continues, noting a recent meeting with a business unit to discuss improving billing and coding through automation. “Workflow has really worked out for us because we can take the visual process of scanning documents and apply that to designing workflows—it’s very intuitive.”

This versatility, says Wicks, is why Laserfiche use continues to evolve. That, and Wicks makes sure CapitalCare’s 50 named users know just what’s possible using the system that solved their initial storage problems.

Says Wicks, “We need to do more education within the company to say ‘This is a lot more than just a scanning solution’ and hold a ‘Did you know?’ session.”

The current schedule is as follows, though more regional training sessions will be added:

• Long Beach, CA: April 12–15
• Seattle, WA: May 17–20
• Richmond, VA: June 7–10
• New Orleans, LA: July 12–15
• Minneapolis, MN: September 13–16
• Denver, CO: October 4–7

Day One – User Workshop: Each workshop kicks off with a free, one-day workshop that includes the most popular presentations and demos from January’s Laserfiche Institute Conference, as well as case study success stories from local Laserfiche Users.

Day Two – Using Laserfiche: Designed for beginning and intermediate users, this course ($350) teaches attendees how to effectively index, file and retrieve documents; use the scanning interface and image clean-up tools; design templates; and use Laserfiche Snapshot.

Day Three – Administering Laserfiche: Designed for intermediate to advanced users and administrators, this course ($450) covers all of the topics tested in the Laserfiche Administrator I Certification Exam, including: designing and managing metadata; administering Laserfiche Volumes; designing a security policy; implementing a backup plan; and troubleshooting the system.

Training sessions also include an optional fourth day of workshops for those interested in more advanced training in areas such as Implementing Laserfiche Workflow 8 and Implementing Laserfiche Quick Fields 8.

Check the Laserfiche community Website for additional offerings, including certification options through the Laserfiche Certified Professional Program. Attendees may register for any and/or all days of the training workshops.

Register today!

A committee was promptly formed to review content management solutions. Ralph Stephens, Executive Director of Strategic Sourcing & General Services at TAMUK, knew that some of TAMUK’s sister schools had turned to Laserfiche with similar content management challenges.

In fact, nearly 1,200 staff in 10 different departments and divisions within The Texas A&M University System’s members were already benefitting from Laserfiche, including:

• Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi, to comply with records management retention schedules, improve document security and decrease the cost of handling paper.
• Texas A&M Health Sciences Center, to digitize all internal documents, reduce overnight shipping, eliminate office storage and improve document access and security.
• Texas A&M’s Department of Entomology, to securely store digitized documents, automate business processes and eliminate the need for file cabinets.

Stephens spoke with colleagues about the benefits of using Laserfiche and learned that Texas A&M AgriLife had also recently implemented Laserfiche to eliminate the need to print records and to automate document matching across 86 locations. The TAMUK committee contacted Laserfiche reseller SMARTfiles, which had worked with several TAMUS accounts, and arranged several demos to see how Laserfiche could fit their needs.

“So many records and copies were being created that security became an issue, especially for upper administration,” explains Vicki Bienski of SMARTfiles. “Sensitive information such as social security numbers and travel vouchers were being manually transported between offices.” Implementing Laserfiche would allow multiple departments to access and share information from a single, secured repository, rectifying confidentiality issues surrounding certain records while also allowing multiple departments to instantly access the information they needed.

The committee decided that Laserfiche was the right choice for TAMUK, with users across the board agreeing that the system was not only user-friendly, but also scalable enough to grow as needs changed. “Although we needed Laserfiche to solve our document storage issues, its breadth of capabilities also played a large part in our selection process,” explains Stephens.

Updating by Automating

Implementation began late that June and by the end of the summer, 15 employees in six departments were using the system, paving the way for campus-wide deployment that fall. Initially, the school chose administrative offices to serve as beta sites for developing procedures, testing processes and eventually training other departments to use the system. The beta sites included:

• Accounting.
• Accounts Payable.
• Budgets.
• Human Resources.
• Physical Plant.
• Procurement.

Once the beta sites proved successful, campus-wide deployment began. A significant part of this expanded deployment was to change the scope of Laserfiche use from archival storage to day-forward capture of active business documents, the idea being to input, organize and access old and new files across multiple departments, all from Laserfiche. “We liked that Laserfiche could be a repository for any document—image files, Word documents, PDFs, e-mails— not only scanned images,” Stephens says.

To automate such a high volume of document capture and processing, TAMUK turned to Laserfiche Quick Fields, which pulls data from incoming electronic documents, to automatically create, sort and file records in the Laserfiche repository. Managing certain business documents like purchase orders or payment vouchers, however, required a more elaborate solution.

Utilizing FabSoft Integration to Optimize Functionality

While Quick Fields could easily scan documents and file them appropriately from the university’s legacy system, those records were then sent to the University College Station remote mainframe, where information is electronically housed, before they were sent back to TAMUK and printed—up to a staggering 4,000 pages of vouchers and purchase orders a day. In order to eliminate both the need to print such a large volume of paper, as well as to eliminate the extra steps it took to input this paperwork and deliver it to the departments requesting it, TAMUK worked with Laserfiche engineers to integrate FabSoft with Quick Fields to create detailed electronic forms unique to the information at hand.

FabSoft places the print data from the mainframe system onto a new form, and that key information is extracted by Quick Fields, then organized and stored in the Laserfiche repository. From there, TAMUK departments selectively print only the purchase orders or vouchers they need, bypassing the remote mainframe. Response time to inquiries—both internal and external—has been greatly reduced. Multiple departments are able to access information simultaneously.

“We can quickly look up images of the purchase order or payment voucher and provide either copies or specific data elements in seconds rather than hours,” says Tina Livingston, Director of Budgets. “Previously, we had to go to file cabinets (sometimes in different offices), pull folders and make copies. Now, we look them up in Laserfiche and e-mail them to the customer.”

With such a successful integration of systems, Stephens says, “Several of the other A&M schools have expressed interested in following suit and implementing their own Laserfiche-FabSoft integration.”

Enterprise-Wide Results

Today, 200 users have access to Laserfiche, with approximately 45 users accessing the system on a daily basis—which is only 25% of TAMUK’s projected use. While TAMUK is saving on paper, labor, mailing and storage costs, the real benefit of using Laserfiche, Stephens says, has been in changing the mindset of TAMUK’s staff and administrators, inspiring the adoption of new ways of working.

“Laserfiche can do so much more than we first envisioned,” he says. “We’ve been able to expand it from a simple storage repository to a system that controls the workflow of our documents and maximizes efficiency.”

Though Laserfiche is now primarily used within Administrative Services and offices within departments, Stephens says that collaborative content management is the next phase—and TAMUK is looking to Laserfiche Workflow to drive it. “Workflow is going to be the real tool for efficiently managing documents between departments. It’s going to deliver huge benefits,” Stephens says. He predicts that TAMUK will see exponential growth in process change.

As for his take on the Laserfiche Run Smarter® Philosophy, Stephens offers this advice to new users: “For TAMUK, Laserfiche has been a business-process change agent—it showed us solutions to problems we hadn’t even considered before. Think of Laserfiche as an initiative, not just an application.”

MC Imaging began the quarter with several deals expanding existing customers’ installations and finished the quarter by placing an order for a 1000-user Rio ECM system for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB).

In comparison to Q4 ’09, MC Imaging:

• Increased total sales orders by more than 200%.
• Boosted sales orders for new customers by more than 200%.
• Enhanced sales to existing customers by 20%.

According to Frank MacDonald, President of MC Imaging, the reseller won the OCDSB bid after an eight-month sales cycle, beating out Open Text. “Our success is the result of a team effort between MC Imaging and Laserfiche. We offered a number of references from our base of very satisfied Laserfiche users—and we received excellent technical support from Laserfiche to make this sale happen,” MacDonald says.

“In addition to the strength Laserfiche’s support, I also have to credit the strength of the software,” he adds. “Workflow used to be something we added to a digital file cabinet—now it’s what we lead with.”

MacDonald notes that MC Imaging’s Q4 ’10 success is yielding even bigger results this year. “One of our clients that purchased more licenses for a pilot project last quarter is now looking at upgrading to Rio this quarter,” he says.

The awards were presented on January 14 during the company’s Winners Circle retreat on Coronado Island, CA. In total, 53 top-selling Winners Circle Achievers were recognized during the event, representing a 26% increase over the previous year.

“Laserfiche sales were up in 2010, reflecting the hard work of our entire VAR community,” said Chris Wacker, Executive Vice President at Laserfiche. “We’re particularly proud of One Source Document Solutions for making a concerted effort to get in front of new prospects and show them the value of Laserfiche enterprise content management.”

Based in Greensboro, NC, One Source Document Solutions supports more than 250 Laserfiche clients with continued recognition for high-quality service and support. It has been a Winners Circle Achiever for the past 11 years.

“In 2010, embracing Laserfiche’s agile ECM messaging allowed us to offer tightly-integrated, complete solutions emphasizing the value of Workflow,” said Kevin Smith, President and CEO of One Source. “Laserfiche’s proven ability to integrate easily with other primary applications has been a big selling point with new clients.”

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 is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions.

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 is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

At Empower 2011, it was clear that the Laserfiche community understands the strength inherent in numbers. It was our largest conference ever, attracting 1,400 attendees in the form of VARs, customers, prospects, analysts, reporters and Laserfiche employees.

“In 2010, the members of the Laserfiche community showed real ingenuity and creativity in their use of agile ECM. We’re delighted by their achievements and honored they made the effort to attend the conference to share the secrets of their success with their peers,” said Nien-Ling during her keynote speech.

Reflecting on the Community’s Success in 2010

During the conference, many Laserfiche customers shared the amazing results agile ECM has helped them achieve. Here are just a few of the highlights:

• Using WebLink, the Long Beach Police Department has strengthened its gang injunction program. In 2010, gang-related murders in Long Beach were down 53.8% and gang shootings decreased by 13.5%. Jonathan Stafford, Administrator of LBPD’s Records & Technology Division, said, “Laserfiche allows us to deliver information to officers in the field in as few clicks as possible. The impact on gang activity has been huge.”
• Using Laserfiche, Durham County, NC, will reduce Workers’ Comp claims by millions of dollars over the next few years. “Because staff no longer has to transport heavy files to court or move heavy boxes to retrieve closed files, the risk for injuries, particularly back injuries, has been greatly reduced. Laserfiche will potentially mitigate Workers’ Compensation claims by millions in the next few years,” explained Nina Bullock, Administrative Assistant to the County Attorney.
• Pulte Mortgage, meanwhile, enables business continuity during harsh Colorado winters by giving its loan processors anywhere access to information using Web Access. “In the past, if we heard a snowstorm was coming, we’d move all the paper loan files that were due to close to a hotel and house our processors there until the storm had passed,” said CIO Gary Ives. “Giving them access to the information they need from home saves money and energy.”

In addition to individual organizations’ successes, the community as a whole had a productive year. The number of Laserfiche Luminaries expanded by 25%, the number of customer-led user groups multiplied to 30, and more than 15,500 people attended 385 Webinars over the course of the year. Nearly 50% of the top digital cities and counties in America are Laserfiche users, and hundreds of people have already certified their content management expertise through the Laserfiche Certified Professional Program.

Laserfiche itself had a busy year, supporting the launch of Laserfiche Strategic Services Canada, expanding its offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai, releasing Laserfiche 8.2 and a new integration with Salesforce.com, and becoming the first (and, so far, only) ECM provider to achieve DoD 5015.2 certification for its integration with SharePoint 2010.

Looking Ahead

For Laserfiche, 2011 will be another year of growth. We’ll soon be opening a new domestic office, as well as sharpening our focus on Latin America and continuing to empower LFI’s success in the Pacific Rim.

In terms of the product roadmap, our developers are currently working on:

• Ensuring that Laserfiche provides a seamless mobile experience with innovations like the Laserfiche iPhone app.
• Expanding the number of pre-built activities included with Workflow.
• Making Laserfiche 8.3 compliant with Australia’s VERS certification requirements.

As she came to the end of her keynote speech, Nien-Ling quoted Winston Churchill: “We now find ourselves in a position where I say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer.”

Chuck Beard, president of DynaSource, credits a year-long sales strategy leveraging the high-visibility success of its Spindletop Mental Health and Retardation Services account (which uses Laserfiche and SharePoint to support its Anasazi EMR system) with closing the deal.

“We put our efforts into making the Spindletop account the best it could be—for the client and for us,” says Beard. This meant spending early 2010 expanding Spindletop’s use of Laserfiche to several non-clinical departments (HR, Accounting, Admissions, etc.) using Quick Fields, Workflow and Web Access.

Beard points out that a major catalyst for the sale to ETBHN was a presentation given by Spindletop CIO Jerry Carnley to a statewide group of 40 CIOs in June. “He had the enthusiasm and tenacity to say ‘Here’s what we’ve done, we need to get this out to everybody,’” Beard explains.

ETBHN spent the summer assessing solutions before choosing to adopt Rio—and the Laserfiche/SharePoint integration—for all its agencies in late December. “ETBHN wanted a standardized application for each department that would offer standardized deployment across locations,” Beard explains. “Out of multiple competitors, Laserfiche was the only one with a single point of contact to access patient records through SharePoint.”

Beard is confident DynaSource can continue to build on this exponential success in 2011. “We used to focus on implementing cookie-cutter solutions; this is more like whole bakeries,” he says. “Spindletop represented not only a county-wide opportunity, but one that’s now regional, statewide and, ultimately, national in scope.”

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.

“We saw Laserfiche as a way to bring visibility, time-bound execution and accountability to our accounting business processes,” says Mandeep Singh, Head of Finance Shared Services at Essar.

Working with Laserfiche reseller Sigma-Tech India Pvt. Ltd, Essar Group initially purchased a 100-user Rio solution. What started as simply a way to centralize all finance-related information evolved into a full-scale ECM/BPM implementation.

According to Singh, “We started using Laserfiche primarily as a scanning and document management solution, but after experiencing the way Workflow and its integration capabilities could be used for our scanning operations, we scaled up use dramatically.”

Chandresh Sharma, Vice President at Sigma-Tech, worked with Essar business analysts to map out the end-to-end processes for finance and accounting functions. These processes were mapped in Laserfiche Workflow to validate vendor, customer, company and invoice information from the SAP masters, and ultimately route and approve invoices and contracts processed between Essar’s global business units and the Shared Service Center at its Mumbai headquarters.

Balancing Centralized and Decentralized Processes

“Laserfiche operates as part of a ‘hub and spoke’ model with the Shared Service Center as the hub and business geographies as the spokes, which connect to the central hub for document processing,” Singh explains.

A major operational benefit has been the ability to seamlessly balance centralized and decentralized processes using Laserfiche as both the hub and the spoke. “Financial Shared Services uses both models to fulfil transactions,” explains Singh.

• The centralized process approach is enabled by a central hub that accesses Laserfiche to process documents. Work allocation is assigned using Workflow, which detects exceptions to mapped data validation rules during the scanning process and provides notifications to responsible parties to resolve discrepancies. “This ensures that clean data is passed into the downstream operations of the financial services,” Singh says. A mail room solution is also in place to track and deliver transactions to Laserfiche, further accelerating the process and increasing productivity.
• The decentralized process approach uses Laserfiche deployed locally to establish remote common collection hubs at various offices across India (and eventually globally) through which vendors working with ESSAR can submit hard copies of transactions. “Laserfiche is run in a dedicated center and further downstream processes like scanning, indexing and quality assurance are carried out before being published to the SAP-DMS,” he adds.

International offices use an FTP route offline. “Here the SPOCs [single point of contact] submit their invoices to the FTP folder. From there it’s scheduled for automatic entry into the Laserfiche server using Laserfiche Import Agent. This enables further processing,” explains Singh.

In addition to streamlining accounting processes, Laserfiche has standardized work allocation enterprise-wide. “Operationally, work allocation is now defined based on certain parameters mapped in Laserfiche. For example, ‘Process Type,’ ‘Document Type,’ ‘Location Code,’ ‘Country Code,’ ‘Business Vertical,’ ‘Priority’ and others,” says Singh.

Shared Services, Enterprise Benefits

The benefits of using Laserfiche as part of the Shared Service Center have been both immediate and long-term:

1. Better throughput in terms of number of transactions per process associate.
2. Accelerated invoice turnaround times of less than an hour for urgent invoices across geographies and less than a day for normal invoices.
3. Increased visibility of daily transactions across 63 group companies. Laserfiche publishes a daily report to the business intelligence layer for companywide unified reporting.
4. Increased visibility of pending transactions in a categorized manner. Laserfiche Workflow notifies business process owners of necessary actions by way of mail alerts. “Moreover, we also unify these numbers with the Business intelligence Platform to provide better visibility,” says Singh.
5. Enhanced control environment through automatic system-end integrated validations with SAP-DMS using Vendor, Customer and Company Code checks for duplications or mismatches at the source stage itself. Laserfiche also does a validation for the key fields entered and runs a duplicate check across its database for any potential duplicates—which are then provided as reporting numbers and integrated with the BI platform.

The most ostensible benefit is obviously reducing invoice processing times from, on average, a matter of weeks into days and sometimes hours. But combined with increased transparency of business processes, Laserfiche has brought a new level of accountability to staff. With Laserfiche Audit Trail giving a step-by-step history of each action and user in the process, there are significant quality control and productivity benefits. Says Singh, “People think twice before performing a transaction.”

Though formal impact analysis will not be conducted until 2012, Singh estimates that Essar Group has realized a 40% return on its Laserfiche investment already, but foresees ongoing and expanding operational improvements. “Major ROI will come by de-skilling profiles deployed across companies for financial processes,” he explains.

Following the success of integration with SAP-DMS, Essar is now working with Sigma-Tech India to integrate Laserfiche (and SAP) with ARIBA financial software, as well as related procurement and e-invoicing modules to develop straight-through processing for accounts receivable, fixed assets, business expense reimbursements and income tax declaration. “We’re also now contemplating using [PDP partner] LincDoc for form-based workflow requirements,” Singh concludes.

With so many specialties—and specialists—IMC’s Board of Directors wanted to use electronic medical records (EMR) software to improve operational processes, encouraged by the promise of ARRA stimulus money to help fund it. But IMC’s Practice Administrator, Christine L. Holliman, CMPE, took a more pragmatic view of the situation.

“All vendors talk about the efficiencies of an EMR and the increase in the levels of coding that can be achieved from full implementation,” she says. “As my physicians are many different ages, the idea of transitioning to a full-blown EMR was daunting, to say the least.”

And expensive, especially in light of what Holliman perceived as a fundamental lack of functionality. “The document management portions of the leading EMR systems we looked at, including Greenway, Centricity and Allscripts, didn’t utilize OCR [optical character recognition] technology or any other shortcuts for actually scanning and filing documents,” Hillman notes. “Most EMR systems require manually sorting and dragging and dropping individual documents either back to an order or back to a patient record—very cost prohibitive in my opinion.”

Holliman focused on finding an enterprise content management system to establish electronic patient charts (e-charts) first. “Looking for a way to handle the paper felt like the most logical step in streamlining our practice in preparation for an EMR,” she says.

“As most of our physicians are still primary care, the sheer amount of paperwork we receive is just incredible,” Holliman adds. “We’d receive 2 ½ feet of paper a day in faxes, print-outs and mail—and that’s just from one of the two hospitals we work with.” At the same time, she notes, “as a multi-specialty practice with 20 providers, having a system that could allow access to patient records by multiple departments and personnel was critical.”

The 2 ½ Feet of Paper Stops Here

Holliman was introduced to Laserfiche by Jim Bergeron of reseller JPI Data Resource at the 2009 MGMA conference in Denver. She then met Bergeron again at a local HIMSS meeting. Encouraged by Laseriche’s ease of use and its flexible business process management (BPM) automation tools, IMC purchased a 44-user Laserfiche Avante system with Workflow business process management and Quick Fields capture tools to establish electronic patient charts.

“As anyone who has implemented new systems knows, the end users are the biggest variable. If they’re on board, the implementation will be a success,” Holliman says. “With 140 employees with varying computer experience, it was very nice to implement a product that anyone could be taught to use in just a few minutes.”

Key to establishing IMC’s e-charting was automating the way the clinic received patient information from the two hospitals it works with. Using Laserfiche in conjunction with the MD Network, an electronic patient information distribution platform, incoming documentation from hospital visits is processed by Quick Fields’ high-volume capture and processing tools, then automatically filed in Laserfiche according to patient name and date of birth, where it becomes part of patients’ e-charts.

A significant amount of this data is test results, which need to be reviewed by physicians; this review often prompts follow-up instructions and further review. “One of the worries of both physicians and practice managers is if test results have been reviewed and relayed back to the physicians,” says Holliman.

Prior to using Laserfiche, staff had to sort through faxes or independently request each report from the hospital while nurses manually pulled the paper charts. “We always worried that something got filed in a patient’s chart before it was ever reviewed by the physician,” Holliman adds. “We’d see 24 people a day and run tests on 22, and there’d always be that concern that there’s one ultrasound report no one ever saw.”

Flexible Control: Reviewing Test Results as a Condition of Filing Them

To automate the test review process, IMC created separate “inbox” folders in the Laserfiche repository for each physician. Quick Fields recognizes “test results” as a document type and the physician’s name associated with it, which Workflow then uses to route the results to the appropriate doctor and nurse’s folder. Workflow then alerts them they have items in Laserfiche for review. If a review deadline is not met, Holliman herself is notified.

“One of the things we really liked about Laserfiche was that all of our doctors can set their own parameters as far as what they need to see in their inboxes to review,” she says. A GI specialist who ordered a patient test, for instance, wouldn’t need to see an incoming discharge summary, but the patient’s primary care doctor would. The GI specialist would, however, need to review the results of a test he ordered, so only after he has reviewed it do the test and follow-up notes go to the primary care doctor’s inbox for review, and eventually to the patient’s file.

“Just using their inbox, each doctor can ask his or her nurse to follow up on their instructions. Whether it’s an abnormal lab or an abnormal chest X-ray, they can adjust medications or order further testing,” Holliman adds. The whole process is prompted, routed and tracked using Workflow.

The benefit, besides the economy of effort, is peace of mind, she says. “Our doctors can access the same, single inbox and know when they leave at the end of the day that they’ve seen every test result that needed to be dealt with on that day.”

Nurses who used to have to keep a manual log of all tests reviewed and what follow-up was ordered appreciate it as well, because logs can be generated automatically using simple search parameters. Plus, Holliman adds, “Being able to precisely track patient follow-up is a tremendous tool for mitigating medical legal liability costs, as we have an exact record of the doctor’s orders.”

IMC is also utilizing the Laserfiche/MD Network interface to automate other processes, such as recalling the dictation from an office visit. “After a report has been electronically signed, it’s printed in our medical records and stored automatically in Laserfiche. If, for some reason, a nurse on the floor needs that information before it’s been made a part of the patient’s record, she can still retrieve dictation from the last visit.” Likewise, when IMC’s triage nurses type up their notes from a phone conversation, they are automatically uploaded into Laserfiche.

Holliman credits Laserfiche’s ease-of-use as well as the overall efficiency of the system with the success of IMC’s e-charting adoption thus far. “The transition to a new system for people who’ve been utilizing a paper chart is very intimidating, but once they begin to use Laserfiche and see how truly easy it is to find and retrieve documents, they’re actually excited to get started,” adds Holliman.

A Natural Bridge to EMR—That Also Leads to Back Office Efficiency

Now that Laserfiche has made its impact on how doctors receive and act on incoming patient information, the clinic is rolling out Laserfiche for use in its business office, where Workflow will automate A/P processing and HR files updates.

“One thing that’s nice about Laserfiche is that it gives us a set of tools that can be applied to business management as well as practice management, so we’re really able to maximize our investment,” Holliman says.

At the same time, she adds, IMC is an important step closer to EMR adoption. “Laserfiche has definitely acted as an important bridge between where we were and where we want to be, and it’s done so in a way that’s been very natural.”

One Source began the quarter by landing a deal to expand Durham County’s Rio system by integrating it with its Public Health Department’s EMR. This was followed by the sale of a 41-user Avante system to the Person County DSS and a 12-user Avante system to the Craven County Health Department that included an integration with the county’s state-run EMR.

In comparison to Q3 ’09, One Source:

• Increased total sales by 250%.
• Boosted sales to new customers by 500%.
• Enhanced existing customer sales by 400%.

According to Kevin Smith, president and CEO of One Source, this success is the result of positioning Laserfiche agile ECM as integrative middleware in enterprise sales. In fact, 40% of One Source’s new sales were Rio implementations. “Embracing agile ECM messaging allowed us to offer tightly-integrated complete solutions emphasizing the value of Workflow,” says Smith. “Each of these clients is implementing some type of BPM solution where Laserfiche’s proven ability to integrate easily with other primary applications has been a big selling point.”

Smith notes that One Source leveraged strategic partnerships with PDP partners Northwoods and United Microdata, which played significant roles in landing the Person and Craven County deals. “These partnerships mean there are as many people as possible looking for new prospects on our behalf,” he adds.

Finally, Smith credits One Source’s investment in a year-long advanced sales training program from Sandler Solutions with the company’s success, as well as an expansion of its administrative and technical staff to accommodate the significant growth in sales.

Last month, Mississauga-based Ricoh Canada landed a deal for a 100-user Rio system for the University of Toronto, the largest university in North America. The deal calls for implementation of Laserfiche RME and a WebLink public portal in the Faculty of Medicine, with more licenses to be added as more of the university’s 24 departments buy into the system.

According to Jason Frost, solutions consultant at Ricoh Canada, the sales cycle took six months, the result of what he calls a “beachhead strategy.”

“Besides being very large, the University of Toronto is also decentralized, so we spoke to as many departments as possible to create an awareness of the need for ECM,” Frost explains. “Once we established the initial Rio installation, we used the internal reference to generate more interest and establish confidence in the solution. Next, we’ll leverage Rio’s scalability to expand to the whole enterprise.”

Of the five departments Ricoh Canada spoke with, the Faculty of Medicine initiated the Rio purchase to automate its academic promotions process, which tracks and approves staff tenure.

“The academic promotions process illustrated the need for Rio’s core strengths: straightforward ECM coupled with agile BPM,” Frost adds. “There was a clear need to standardize and manage information on unorganized network drives, implement version control along with a records retention policy and automate the actual process with Workflow.”

Frost is confident that Ricoh will be able to expand the installation to the university’s other 24 departments, which are spread out over three campuses. “The academic promotions process touches every department, and we’ll be able to leverage the existing Rio license to deliver it as a shared service.”

He adds, “The initial Rio investment gave us a central platform, and we can now append additional repositories for various other departments. We’ll be able to focus on adding licenses, Quick Fields and professional services as we look to expand Laserfiche enterprise-wide.”

Laserfiche first obtained DoD 5015.2 certification for its software in 2003. With the joint certification, Laserfiche now works with SharePoint 2010 to provide a unified business collaboration platform with comprehensive enterprise content management (ECM) functionality.

“In today’s competitive global market, public and private organizations around the world use the DoD 5015.2 standard to help them identify records management solutions that facilitate compliance with strict recordkeeping requirements,” said Sean Tang, director of international business at Laserfiche. “Our integration with SharePoint 2010 gives customers a proven, agile way to quickly improve information governance.”

The joint certification with SharePoint 2010 reflects a commitment from Laserfiche to develop agile ECM solutions designed to support customers who need:

• Transparent records management.
• Turnkey transactional content management.
• Complete document capture and imaging functionality.

At GITEX, Laserfiche will also demonstrate how Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management (BPM) tool included in the Laserfiche ECM suite, enables organizations to create custom workflows that automatically perform specific tasks based on activity occurring in Laserfiche as well as other applications such as GIS, ERP, CRM and more.

“Technology leaders across the Middle East have improved operational efficiency by including Laserfiche Workflow in their overall ECM strategy,” said Nizar Ghannam, COO of BMB Group, a business technology advisor and Laserfiche distributor based in Lebanon. “With its support for the Arabic language, Laserfiche ECM is the top choice for Middle Eastern companies of all sizes.”

GITEX attracts more than 130,000 visitors from more than 60 countries. Laserfiche will be exhibiting in Hall 7 (booth #E7-10) with BMB sal (Lebanon); a number of Laserfiche VARs will also be present in the booth, including ISB (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), ITQAN (Qatar), Kuwait United Company for Copies & Computer Services (Kuwait), Mazroui and Partners (UAE), PIXEL Digital (UAE) and TAFEEL IT Co (KSA).

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 28,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to react quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built on top of Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

As the global distributor, Laserfiche International (LFI) distributes Laserfiche software through an international network of distributors and value-added resellers (VARs) who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs.

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

Copying and Pasting Activities

You can copy and paste activities within the same workflow or from one workflow to another. The activity’s configuration settings are duplicated along with the activity.

• For example, Jim’s workflow needs three separate Route Entry to User activities, each of which will route the document to a different person, add a tag and send an e-mail.

The most efficient way to build this workflow is to configure the first Route Entry to User activity from scratch, copy/paste the activity twice and tweak the settings associated with the pasted activities. This method is significantly faster than configuring three separate but similar activities from scratch.

Workflow Templates

Workflow templates can be used as shortcuts to building workflow definitions, saving you from having to create new definitions from scratch for similar processes. For more information, see “Building a Workflow Template” in the Workflow 8 help files.

Exporting Workflows

Workflows can be exported, allowing you to move them from one system to another. For example, Jennifer can create a workflow definition on her machine and transfer it to Jim’s machine.

1. Select Export Workflow under Workflow in the menu bar.
2. In the Export Workflow dialog, select one or more workflows you want to export.
3. Click Export and save the exported workflow(s).

Tip: To export multiple workflows into the same Workflow Import File (.wfi), hold down CTRL and select two or more workflows. When you import the .wfi, each will be imported as a separate workflow.

• Cardiology
• Dermatology
• Gastroenterology
• General Medicine
• Neonatology
• Obstetrics and Gynecology
• Orthopedics
• Psychiatry

Prior to implementing Laserfiche in 2007, PPS’s manual cash posting process was paper-driven. But from an operational and cost perspective, paper wasn’t a particularly efficient medium for PPS; even assigning the daily distribution of work was time consuming because someone had to manually review that day’s lock box payments and portion them out to the processors.

“At first, we tried implementing a different system to improve the efficiency of our operation,” said Stacy Devine, IT director at PPS. “But we had some security concerns with that system, and it also had a higher cost.”

Soon after, Russ Surette, director of billing operations, mentioned the situation to Mike McDonough at Duplitron, a hardware vendor and Laserfiche VAR that had long provided PPS with printers, scanners, copiers and other electronic devices. “Mike suggested that we take a look at Laserfiche, because it’s so easy to use.”

After doing its due diligence by talking to a number of Laserfiche users, PPS purchased a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system to streamline operational processes and eliminate the need to store paper office documents and training materials.

Leveraging Laserfiche

According to Surette, the use of Laserfiche—in conjunction with a few other initiatives—has helped PPS increase productivity by 20% over the past year, while at the same time increasing gross billings approximately 20%. When one employee left the company, the increased efficiency meant that PPS did not need to fill that position.

Here are a few of the benefits Laserfiche provides:

• Better security of information. “When you’re using paper or a file server, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of changes or restrict people from removing content,” says Devine. “Laserfiche’s security controls allow us to restrict access to folders in the repository by department and user, so that, for example, a claims processor will only see his or her assigned claims. This helps us better protect patient information and more easily comply with HIPAA.”
• Automatic data capture. Laserfiche Quick Fields automates information processing by capturing data from various formats and sorting documents according to custom criteria. For PPS, Quick Fields has simplified payment processing by automatically extracting data such as check number, transaction number and insurance carrier from bank image files and tagging it as metadata in the Laserfiche repository, where the images are stored by date. Surette says, “Before implementing Quick Fields, we had a full-time employee who did nothing but scanning and data entry all day long. Today, we have one part-time employee who scans for about 10 hours a week.”
• Smoother payment processing. After payment information is stored in the repository, Laserfiche Workflow routes it to specific claims processors based on the bank account number/insurance company associated with the payment. After the payment has been processed, Workflow automatically sends the information back to its original folder. When a claims processor is out of the office, Workflow automatically delegates his or her work to an alternate processor. “The distribution of daily work is much easier with Laserfiche,” says Surette. “Nobody has to sort through files to figure out what should go where.”
• Faster follow up. “The optical character recognition (OCR) process available through Laserfiche has made searching so much easier,” says Surette. “In the past, processors would have to look through 200-page documents to find the one paragraph that was relevant to an insurance follow up. OCR makes searching for specific words and phrases within a document easy, and it’s dramatically cut down on the amount of time our processors spend following up on claims.”
• Increased visibility and oversight. Laserfiche Audit Trail monitors, records and reports on system activity, providing the management team at PPS with a comprehensive overview of how quickly payments are processed and the value of the payments processed on any given day. “Laserfiche reporting eliminates the need to check spreadsheets,” says Surette.
• Easy integration with GE Centricity. By serving as integrative middleware that links into GE Centricity, PPS’ practice management system, Laserfiche allows staff members to access information stored in Laserfiche through the click of a button. With the integration, processors can access information in the manner and environment with which they are most comfortable, without toggling back and forth between applications.

Results

“Over the past year, even though one of our employees left and hasn’t been replaced, we’ve increased business by about 20%,” says Surette. “Implementing Workflow has been a huge part of that.”

PPS is, in fact, so satisfied with Workflow that Devine, Surette and Duplitron’s McDonough are planning to do a demo of Workflow at a regional training session for GE Centricity users this fall. “We recommend Laserfiche to other billing companies all the time,” says Surette. “When you’ve got something this good, you can’t just keep it to yourself.”

Setting a Default Connection Profile

All workflows are required to have a connection profile that defines the Laserfiche Server, repository and user that the workflow will use. If you want all new workflows to automatically use the same connection profile, specify that profile as the default.

1. Select Options under Tools in the menu bar.
2. Select the Laserfiche Connection node.
3. Next to Default connection profile, select a profile from the drop-down list. If no profiles appear in the list, click the Manage button and create a new profile. 

Quickly Adding Activities to Workflows

Instead of dragging an activity from the Toolbox Pane onto the Designer Pane, double-click the activity in the Toolbox Pane, and it will be added to the Designer Pane.

Note: Where the activity is added depends on what is selected in the Designer Pane.

In fact, One Source has had such success with the agile ECM message that it has increased its Laserfiche revenue by 52%. The North Carolina reseller has also raised new customer revenue by 170%.

These numbers reflect three significant recent sales:

• Durham County, which is expanding its Rio deployment. The county’s DSS agency will use Rio to manage active records, and its Public Health Department has integrated Rio with a new EMR system. The Health Department estimates that it will save $4 million as a result of moving to a new paperless facility.
• Person County DSS, which has purchased a 41-user Avante system and is integrating it with the department’s Northwoods case management system (a PDP partner).
• Craven County Health Department, which is integrating its new 12-user Avante system with a state-run EMR that will use Workflow to automatically create and populate patient charts.

According to Smith, these sales have all resulted from focusing on agile ECM messaging, specifically the value of Workflow. “Each of these clients is implementing some type of BPM solution where Laserfiche’s proven ability to integrate easily with other primary applications has been a big selling point,” he observes.

Smith notes that One Source has leveraged strategic partnerships with a number of complementary solutions providers. “We have tight partnerships with both PDP partners and other companies so there are as many people as possible looking for new prospects on our behalf.”

Finally, Smith says, One Source credits its recent success to investing in a year-long advanced sales training program while expanding administrative and technical staff. “The training allowed our whole team to focus on properly qualified prospects and reduced the amount of ‘free’ consulting we provide,” he says.

“The entire One Source team deserves credit for our success, especially David Swan, my senior sales consultant, whose efforts afforded me the time to develop our Laserfiche agile ECM strategy, which is giving us strong results.”

Laserfiche conducted a global survey in cooperation with the Economist  Intelligence Unit and found that during challenging economic times, it is easy for leadership to justify strict controls. However, leadership teams also need to understand where employees need flexibility to ensure good business decisions and productivity. If you are interested in seeing a copy of the completed survey and white paper, please go to http://www.laserfiche.com/landing/economist.html?from=lfhome.

According to McDonough, PPS’ IT Director became interested in Workflow after Duplitron created electronic lockboxes to batch claims documents using Quick Fields last year. “That brought us one step closer to automating the whole process,” he explains.

Actual Workflow implementation took place earlier this year as part of an upgrade to Laserfiche 8. “There were a lot of what I’d call ‘curveballs,’” says McDonough. “For instance, when we created the lockboxes, we split up the documents to be processed in Quick Fields based on their FSC coding, but that one lockbox had to remain intact—the documents could move but the folder couldn’t.”

Working with Laserfiche Presales Engineer Jonathon Kim as well as VAR Desk’s Lisa Durham and Jessica Smith, Duplitron configured Quick Fields and Workflow to fit the intricacies of PPS’s claims process—with significant results. “It use to take a day or two to process a claim; now it’s processed back in the batch folder within an hour,” McDonough says.

As a result, McDonough is confident Duplitron will be able to repeat this success with its other billing and coding clients. “We’ve already got four other clients using the electronic lockboxes to capture everything on the front end, so we can show them what PPS is doing and use that as a template.”

Meanwhile, PPS’s IT Director is impressed. “She’s worked in healthcare industry many years and never had a product that’s been able to do everything it says it can do.” Now, he adds, she’s asking how Workflow can be used as an accounting tool. “They want to use an exceptions report to reconcile claims, almost like a balance sheet,” McDonough says.

“This project has evolved has from a document management solution to a business process management solution—it’s true ECM from a claims perspective and BPM from a CFO/accounting point of view,” he concludes.

CHMB, a medical billing company in California, has realized the benefits of automating business processes with Workflow. Using Workflow has decreased CHMB’s couriering costs by 50%, and allowed the company to add 150 employees without relocating or acquiring additional office space, but it’s the efficiency gains that have been even more impressive. “Laserfiche has enabled us to streamline, manage and audit our workflows,” Director of Business Development Ron Anderson explains. “Productivity has increased by 20%.”

This quarter, we’re featuring a special promotion eliminating the minimum software purchase for customers upgrading to Avante. You must have current LSAP to upgrade, and you don’t want to wait—this special promotion ends June 30.

Learn more about how you can benefit from Avante at these informative Webinars:

• Document Management 101 for Local Government shows how government agencies can use business process management to easily automate collaborative, multi-departmental business processes.
• Document Management 101 for Practice Managers, specially tailored to the needs of medical group practice managers, shows how standardized content management streamlines multiple processes—cutting overhead expenses and improving employee morale.
• Supporting the Adoption of Meaningful Use Technologies with Agile ECM discusses how an agile ECM solution with business process management tools allows healthcare organizations to satisfy the “meaningful use” standard at the center of the health IT discussion.
• The New Banking Reality: Compliance and Risk Reduction shows how community banks can use workflow technology to streamline and automate loan processing operations—reducing errors, lowering costs and achieving a substantial ROI.
• Laserfiche International Webinar – Introduction to Agile ECM explains the benefits of Agile ECM, including workflow automation, for enterprise standardization.
• Introduction to the Laserfiche Solution – Canada Focus, specially tailored to address the unique challenges of operating in Canada, explains how Laserfiche optimizes business processes—while minimizing installation, support and training costs.

While you might not have the budget for additional modules for your existing system, with this new promotion, you can trade in your existing system to take advantage of Avante’s fully integrated Workflow functionality. It’s the best way to save money and work more efficiently in today’s difficult economy.

If you’re interested in an upgrade, please get in touch with your reseller or call us at (800) 985-8533. We’re ready to help you learn how to power forward with Avante.

Attaching a shortcut to the entry will attach a .lfe file; when the .lfe file is opened, it will launch the Client, prompt the user to log in, and then take the user directly to the specified entry. If the person you are sending the attachment to has the Laserfiche Client installed and has access to your repository, we recommend using the .lfe shortcut. The .lfe shortcut is a smaller file, since it’s simply a pointer to the document. It also respects the repository’s security settings and auditing, and allows the user to see all the relevant metadata.

However, if a user does not have the Client installed or access to your repository, you should attach a copy of the entry instead. This creates a copy of the document (or of all the documents in the folder, if the entry is a folder), and allows you to specify the format in which you want to export it. For instance, you could include a copy of the contents of a folder, with imaged documents included in PDF format and electronic documents in their native format.

Workflow 8.0.1 offers many options for including attachments with e-mails. You can specify which document types will be included, how images will be exported, whether the entries will be compiled in a zip file, what the maximum attachment size should be, and more. For further information, see the E-mail activity section of the Workflow 8.0.1 help file.

“In today’s economic climate, efficiency is essential,” said Andy Wang, director of ECM strategy at Laserfiche. “Agile ECM combines content management with BPM to deliver a comprehensive and flexible foundation for increasing organizational efficiency by eliminating data silos, automating core business processes and minimizing ongoing IT maintenance demands.”

Laserfiche Workflow, a foundational component of the Laserfiche ECM suite, enables organizations to create custom workflows that offer localized flexibility in streamlining business processes while enhancing centralized control over content standards. These workflows automatically perform specific tasks based on activity occurring in Laserfiche as well as other applications such as GIS, ERP, CRM and more.

Organizations around the world have improved operational efficiency by including Laserfiche Workflow in their overall ECM strategy. For example:

• Transamerica Financial Advisors, a full-service independent Broker/Dealer and Registered Investment Advisor, uses Laserfiche Workflow to automate new account processing, routing applications between representatives, office of supervisory jurisdiction managers and the home office. This results in faster approvals.
• Texas A&M University Health Sciences Center, which oversees seven college campuses across the state, uses Laserfiche Workflow to process contracts and grants, identifying bottlenecks and decreasing processing time per item from three weeks to 30 minutes.

“Workflow technology has practical applications for organizations of all sizes across all industries,” said Wang. “To be truly agile, your ECM strategy must include BPM.”

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche® creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 28,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built upon Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

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

Note: The End Workflow activity builds on the functionality of the Terminate Workflow activity. Both can be used to end workflows, but Terminate Workflow can only end the current workflow and the status will always be listed as Terminated. As a best practice, we recommend using End Workflow, but for existing workflows, as well as instances where you don’t need anything other than the workflow stopped with a status of Terminated, you can still use Terminate Workflow.

Real-World Scenario: The Problem

The Smith Corporation needs to automate the approval process for employee expense reports.

• For reports equal to or less than $1,000, Workflow should route the document through an approval process that includes various people in human resources.
• For reports over $1,000, Workflow should still route the document through the HR approval process, but it should also route the document through various people in accounting.
• If accounting rejects a report, both approval processes should end.

The Solution

As a best practice, the company should isolate the two approval processes into separate workflows (HR Workflow and Accounting Workflow), as this will make them easier to maintain and reuse.

• If a report is greater than $1,000, the HR Workflow should invoke the Accounting Workflow.Note: When a workflow invokes another workflow, the first workflow is referred to as the parent.
• If accounting rejects a report, the Accounting Workflow should use the End Workflow activity to end both itself and its parent workflow.

Configuring End Workflow for This Scenario

1. Add End Workflow to the Accounting Workflow. Ensure the activity will only run if one or more users in the accounting department reject the document.
2. In the activity’s Properties Pane, specify that End Workflow should end both the current workflow and the parent.

   

3. For workflows ended by this activity, specify what the status should be. This is the status that will be listed when a user searches for a workflow.

   

4. For workflows ended by this activity, specify what the reason should be. Just like status, this information will be listed when a user searches for a workflow.

Real-world Scenario: The Problem

The Big Money Corporation uses Laserfiche to process and archive claim documents. When a claim is scanned into the repository, Workflow should route it to multiple people. Due to the nature of the approval process, however, the list and number of approvers are different for each claim. How can For Each Value solve this problem?

The Solution

After evaluating different options, the company built the following workflow:

1. When someone scans or imports a claim into the repository, he/she populates a multi-value field named Route To. The names added to this field represent who Workflow should route the document to.
2. Using a Retrieve Field Value activity, Workflow retrieves the list of names from the Route To field as a multi-value token. Note: Since this is a multi-value field, the company configures Retrieve Field Value to retrieve ALL field values (this is not the default option).
3. The multi-value field is passed to For Each Value, which creates a loop that is performed once for each value in the token.
4. A Route Entry to User activity, which is inside of For Each Value, routes a shortcut to each person in the list, one at a time. In this scenario, Route Entry to User is configured to route based on the value of the %(ForEachValue_Current Value) token. Note: In order for all users to receive the shortcut at virtually the same time, no wait condition is set on Route Entry to User.
5. Each approver uses the shortcut to access the claim and make their decision. In this scenario, a separate workflow handles the steps involved after approval/rejection decisions are submitted.

Using For Each Value with a Custom Script

If you place a scripting activity inside of For Each Value, your custom script will be performed once for each value in multi-value token, or once for each separate token passed to the activity. For example, this workflow retrieves a list of stamp names from a multi-value field, and then adds each stamp to the document, one at a time.

You can attach either the entry that triggered the workflow, or any entry returned by an activity within the workflow. Workflow supports attaching either documents or folders; shortcuts will be attached as the type of entry they point to. You can choose to either attach a shortcut to the entry or a copy of the entry.

Attaching a shortcut to the entry will attach a .lfe file; when the .lfe file is opened, it will launch the Client, prompt the user to log in, and then take the user directly to the specified entry. If the person you are sending the attachment to has the Laserfiche Client installed and has access to your repository, we recommend using the .lfe shortcut. The .lfe shortcut is a smaller file, since it’s simply a pointer to the document. It also respects the repository’s security settings and auditing, and allows the user to see all the relevant metadata.

However, if a user does not have the Client installed or access to your repository, you should attach a copy of the entry instead. This creates a copy of the document (or of all the documents in the folder, if the entry is a folder), and allows you to specify the format in which you want to export it. For instance, you could include a copy of the contents of a folder, with imaged documents included in PDF format and electronic documents in their native format.

Workflow 8.0.1 offers many options for including attachments with e-mails. You can specify which document types will be included, how images will be exported, whether the entries will be compiled in a zip file, what the maximum attachment size should be, and more. For further information, see the E-mail activity section of the Workflow 8.0.1 help file.

• A new Find Activity pane that allows you to locate activities in your open workflows by name, description or whether the activity has produced any errors.
• A new End Workflow activity that provides more options for terminating workflows.
• A new For Each Value activity that allows you to perform actions based on values in a multi-value field.
• The ability to add attachments to the E-mail activity, including many options for attachment handling.
• New tokens and token support.

Workflow Suite 8.0.1 may be installed new or applied as an update over your existing Workflow installation. It is fully compatible with Laserfiche Rio and Avante.

The Road to Rio

According to Chandresh Sharma, vice president of solutions sales at Sigma-Tech, Essar became interested in Laserfiche Rio after seeing how capably the system would complement Microsoft SharePoint. Specifically, Essar wanted to integrate Rio with SharePoint to establish a shared service center for processing invoices.

A key selling point, Sharma says, was being able to show video examples of how Laserfiche integrates with SharePoint. “The videos really ‘broke the ice’ with the Essar CIOs,” Sharma says. “We were able to show how Laserfiche functionality could complement SharePoint, not overlap it.”

Sharma says he then showed how Laserfiche’s imaging functionality was an obvious fit for SharePoint’s capabilities. This led to more detailed demonstrations of Workflow and Quick Fields to address specific issues regarding Essar’s invoicing processes, namely how to avoid duplicating invoices.

The Workflow Designer, Sharma says, was instrumental to this part of the presentation. “One of the CIOs asked a really good question about how a third value could be added to a Workflow, and using the Workflow Designer I was able to set it up and publish it in less than ten minutes,” he says.

In the end, Essar was sold. The first phase of the implementation began last November with 100 users in the financial departments of 12 Essar companies. That number will grow to 500 by the time the implementation is complete early next year, and there are plans to eventually expand Rio into all 55 Essar companies in the future.

Achieving Success with Shared Services

Sharma says Sigma-Tech—and all Laserfiche resellers—can leverage the success of the Essar Rio implementation: “There is a remarkable shift in the market towards big corporations looking for shared service centers to centralize business processes. We see ‘Agile ECM Engineered with Laserfiche and SharePoint’ as a great enabler of that.”

In particular, Sharma believes that Workflow 8 and the SDK offer IT departments the flexibility and confidence “to establish shared services across their enterprise.” He also believes that Rio’s promise of unlimited servers bolsters confidence in Laserfiche. “The ability to create test environments is very important—and it allows us to be more competitive,” he concludes.

Note: Since this is a preview, note that the details and appearances of certain elements may change between now and the final release.

• E-mail attachments. When Workflow e-mails someone regarding a specific document or folder, give them easier access to the entry via an attachment. You can attach a Windows shortcut (.lfe) to the entry (which launches the desktop client), or send an image-based copy (e.g., attach a PDF, which can include redactions and other Laserfiche annotations). You can send specific documents or all the documents in a single folder. Multiple attachments can be zipped up, and you can define a maximum size limit.
• For Each Value activity. If you need to perform a series of actions once for every value in a multi-value field, you can use For Each Value. This new activity creates a loop that is performed once for each value in a multi-value token, or once for each separate token. It works similarly to For Each Entry, using tokens instead of Laserfiche entries.
• End Workflow activity. Similar to Workflow 8.0’s Terminate Workflow activity, End Workflow automatically terminates a workflow if certain situations arise. Unlike Terminate Workflow, however, this new activity can list the termination reason as Completed, instead of Error. In addition, it can end the current workflow, or any workflow that originally invoked the current workflow, or both.
• Upgraded Deadline and Delay activities. In Workflow 8.0, these activities allowed you to enforce a deadline and to delay a workflow, respectively. In Workflow 8.0.1, you can use tokens to dynamically set the time period, instead of entering a static number. In addition, you can now set a hard time/date for the deadline/delay actions to take effect (e.g., on 1/25/10 at 8:00 AM).

After the initial 8.0.1 release, separate releases under the same version number will include support for Oracle and a Spanish beta. For information on the projected release date, see the Product Roadmap.

“Everyone contributed, everyone rose to their assignments and when someone asked the rest of the group for feedback, they got it and the end product ended up being even better,” says Laserfiche Luminary Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue for Charlottesville, VA, who helped organize the event. “I’ve never been in a group that had all those ingredients plus excellent communication, a singular focus of outcome and FUN all together!”

The enthusiasm with which attendees learned and participated in Q&A sessions showed both how much effort they had put into learning and practicing on their own, but also the power of being able to exchange the experience in a state with four major user groups. Sessions like “The Art of Searching,” presented by both Collins and 2009 Run Smarter winner the City of Norfolk’s Alondo McClees, “What’s New In 8.1?” presented by Laserfiche reseller and event sponsor Unity Business Systems’ John Lane (a natural compliment to Collins’ “Migration from 7 to 8” session) as well as “Online Forms,” in a joint presentation by e-Forms provider LincWare and Unity Business Systems, showed how far Laserfiche use and efficiency has come in Virginia.

Alondo McClees teaching a class during the statewide Virginia User Group meeting

Laserfiche Presales Engineer Steve Hackney’s workshops on “Laserfiche Administration and Security” and “Workflow” gave already-educated users that next level of insight and support to make present use and see future deployments as a necessary way of doing business, not just a luxury add-on. As part of the “Laserfiche RME” session, for instance, Debbie Wolff, Hampton Roads Records Manager, demonstrated how RME can be used effectively within a repository hosting multiple departments. “We had a good mix of users, most on 7.2, and some who have migrated to 8,” she says. “But I was personally approached by about six people afterwards who said they wanted to contact me to ask more questions.”

The fact that all this could be so much fun spoke to the open, inclusive atmosphere of the day, which itself culminated a year that saw the founding of the Hampton Roads User Group, which joined the Central Virginia, Richmond and Northern Virginia (NOVA) groups to regularly bring Laserfiche users together to listen, learn, lecture and, perhaps best of all, laugh.

The laughter this day came from creative team-building games infused throughout the day, encouraging attendees to interact and participate. Ad hoc teams shared bingo cards based on collective group experiences (“uses Workflow;” “bikes to work”) that were then eligible for prizes. For another game, users received playing cards for attending sessions; the more they asked questions and suggested topics, the more cards they received to make poker hands out of. The best—and worst—hands won prizes contributed by event sponsors Esker and Fujitsu.

Attendees thinking up creative uses for Laserfiche during lunchtime activities

The lunchtime activity was perhaps the most creative – and most effective. Teams imagined possible home-use scenarios for Laserfiche. One group favorite was using Laserfiche to keep track of underwear drawers, by first using PhotoDocs to input the image, then using template fields to keep track of which drawers held which underwear colors. The scenario also included retention schedules to keep track of when underwear wore out and even white-out redaction tools to cover stains.

“The activities were a way to facilitate that networking and get people talking with each other. We wanted to do something that provided value for our Laserfiche peers by providing opportunities to network across the state. And boy, it looks like we sure accomplished what we set out to do,” Collins adds. “I think I can speak for all who worked on putting this together in saying we imagine this community continuing to grow and going on long into our happy retirements!”

McClees concurs. “At the end of the event, we got an emphatic ‘Yes’ to the 3 questions we asked everyone: Did you have fun? Did you learn something new? Did you meet new people and build new relationships? Each time we receive this type of overwhelming feedback to our Laserfiche user group efforts, it continues to re-energize us and make us that much more excited about what we can do next. I never imagined this user group movement becoming so big so quickly, and I am eager to see it continue to blossom and grow.”

McClees, a Run Smarter Winner and Laserfiche Luminary, will be teaching a class at this year’s conference, “Growing Your Own User Group Network” (IS224). If you haven’t reserved your seat yet, or if you haven’t registered for the conference, register today here.