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Alexandria, Virginia, hits one out of the park with Laserfiche^®

Global Municipal Exchange, October 2007

Among city staff in Alexandria, Virginia, the Laserfiche® imaging team is the most popular crew in town. Says Applications Division Chief Judy Milligan: “Departments are standing in line to come onboard with Laserfiche. We asked Laserfiche to send us some shirts with their logo, so everyone would know we’re on the imaging team. And they sent them to us, too.”

Before installing Laserfiche, Alexandria archived its documents on paper and microfiche. With a rich history dating back to the eighteenth century, the city could ill afford to trust the aging system. Says Milligan, “We have all kinds of documentation dating back to the early 1900s.  Our paper copies and microfiche  were beginning to deteriorate. We didn’t want to update that technology—we needed an imaging system.”

With the goal of quickly responding to document requests from citizens, city councilors and staff, Milligan set out to implement an electronic document management system. She’d already heard a lot about document imaging from her colleagues, and she believed it was important to get a city-wide system in place that would enable all city  departments to share documents.

Milligan already had a good idea of what was important to her in a document management system: “Good support and easy maintenance. I also wanted to ensure we could access the system over the Web and that it could support a Microsoft® .NET™ programming environment. Because we were going to import personnel files to conform to state-mandated retention dates, I knew we had to have security as tight as we could get it—down to the file level.”

Laserfiche security features made the product stand out over the others the committee considered. The ability to redact sensitive information such as Social Security numbers was a big plus for Milligan. “I also liked it because it took different media— paper, microfiche, aperture cards—in different sizes,” she recalls. “And Workflow™ was so easy to set up because it’s so familiar—it’s just like Windows® Explorer.”

Alexandria first installed Laserfiche in the fire and code departments, and it wasn’t long before other departments wanted Laserfiche for themselves. Says Milligan, “When the staff got a taste of it, they loved it. As with anything city-wide, it took a while to get them started, but once we did, we couldn’t stop them. It sells itself.”

Currently, both the accounting and treasury divisions of the finance department, as well as the planning and zoning, police personnel, city attorney, environmental services, transportation and IT departments use Laserfiche. Getting the support of the city was easy once staff noticed the improved work environment and saved storage space. Milligan estimates that it took a few weeks to get each initial installation up and running smoothly. And the results have been dramatic.

“We get a lot of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from citizens,” Milligan continues. “Instead of making all these copies, you can hit one button and print the documents, or e-mail them to citizens.”

“FOIA requests have short turnaround times,” says Supervisory Administrative Officer Virginia Clarke.  “They usually require some action within 24 hours—at least to respond with the cost of reproduction. If we don’t meet the deadline, the city is subject to monetary penalties. When we had to go off-site to find the document, the 24 hours were gone. With Laserfiche, we can see how many documents we have and calculate the cost without leaving our desks.”

Searching through files was tough enough when things were properly filed, but misfiled documents were particularly aggravating. “Previously,” recalls Clarke, “if something was misfiled, it was a nightmare trying to find it. But Laserfiche corrected that problem. If something’s been misfiled, we can search for it in any number of ways, get the information we need and file it properly without missing a beat.”

Accounting Clerk Jan Pettey notes the boost in efficiency: “I scan all the AP and payroll documents,” she says. “We were looking for something that would make it easy to search for paid invoices —and we found it in Laserfiche. Now staff can go directly into Laserfiche instead of asking accounting to pull the originals and send copies. They have so many ways to search: by payment voucher, invoice, vendor number or document number. They really like it—we rarely get calls any more.”

Laserfiche has greatly improved efficiency for the IT fiscal analyst by eliminating backlog-related errors due to the huge volume of invoices. “We set up Workflow so that the second the invoices come in, they’re scanned and e-mailed directly to the person who has to approve them,” says Milligan. “Invoices get paid much faster, and they don’t get lost. And I can refer back to them easily to calculate how much I spent on a specific project.”

As Alexandria expands its system, Milligan is overseeing an increasing number of integrations with other applications. Alexandria has already integrated Laserfiche with the city’s real estate receivables software, and will soon do the same with its GIS and permitting programs. The city is also upgrading its treasury department’s collection  system to automatically file checks upon scanning. Milligan largely relies on Quick Fields™ to streamline operations for departments using these integrations. “Because it automatically populates the data fields, it greatly reduces errors by filing documents in the right places,” she says.

Milligan is about to roll out Laserfiche to the city clerk’s office, which has long posted past agenda packets and city council meeting minutes to the city’s Website as TIFF files. However, citizen demand to access them in PDF format led Milligan to try a couple of conversion methods, both of which were painfully slow. She was pleased to learn that a simple tweak with the Integrator’s Toolkit™ would enable Laserfiche to import TIFFs and export them out as PDFs all at once.

Alexandria currently has 387 licenses, and is gearing up to add more. Milligan is in the process of installing Laserfiche in the sheriff’s office, with plans to add the real estate asessment, housing and finance revenue departments. “We had to start with baby steps,” she says. “But soon we’ll be city-wide. I hope to get a site license soon to expand access even further. It’s just a great product.”

Milligan’s advice to other cities just starting implementation? Be prepared. “I suggest getting a technical team ready, because it could take off overnight. And when it does take off, you’re absolutely bombarded—I could keep six programmers busy right now.”

But she’s sure next year will be bigger and better, and she’ll have even more valuable advice. Meanwhile, Virginia Clarke sums up the sentiments of Alexandria’s staff: “It’s wonderful to be able to access our documents this way. It’s fantastic.”