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Laserfiche^® helps Blue Earth County, MN, maximize the value of its IT investments

Global Municipal Exchange, March 2008

Like many organizations, Blue Earth County, MN, implemented digital document management with a number of goals in mind, from streamlining business processes to promoting greater collaboration between staff members and departments. According to IT Manager Charlie Berg and Network Administrator Denise Grossmann, the county’s success in achieving these goals is primarily due to one factor—close cooperation between the county’s IT staff and the system’s users at each stage of the implementation process.

Prior to issuing an RFP, the county’s decision makers selected four departments—corrections, finance, human services and environmental services—to participate in a pilot document imaging program. They then assembled a committee that included staff from each department. "Because everyone would eventually use the system, we involved as many people as possible in the decision-making process," Berg explains. "We wanted to approach the implementation from a county-wide perspective rather than an IT perspective."

Working with a consultant, IT staff wrote an RFP for an enterprise document management solution. After evaluating the responses, the committee invited four vendors to demo their systems. "Laserfiche^® ranked the highest," Grossmann remembers. "Staff said Laserfiche had features they could use, while the other systems were unnecessarily complicated."

Staff in the pilot departments started scanning documents into Laserfiche in 2002, and Berg and Grossmann noticed immediate results. With Laserfiche, staff can retrieve documents in seconds, without leaving their desks. In addition, the Laserfiche Workflow™ module automatically routes documents among staff members, eliminating the need to physically carry file folders between desks or departments. Laserfiche even streamlines the audit process—now, auditors simply sit at a workstation and use the system’s search tools to find what they need, while staff go about their business.

Because the county uses a variety of primary business applications, integration also played a key role in the committee’s selection of Laserfiche. "From the outset, we knew that we needed a solution that could serve as the document management ‘back-end’ for our other applications, without requiring elaborate custom programming," Grossmann says. With its open architecture and flexible API, Laserfiche fully met this need. "Our Laserfiche reseller, Crabtree Companies, did an excellent job of explaining what we could do with the system," she adds. "They helped us get started, but we completed most of the integrations ourselves."

One of the county’s most visible integrations is between Laserfiche and MUNIS^®, which the finance department uses to manage accounts payable. When the department receives an invoice, staff enter information—such as the invoice’s date, number and amount—in MUNIS. At the click of a button, they then open the Laserfiche scanning interface within MUNIS and scan the document into the Laserfiche repository. Thanks to the tight integration between the two systems, Laserfiche automatically pulls relevant document metadata from MUNIS and uses this information to index the scanned image file.  

Retrieving a scanned document is equally quick. Staff simply locate the invoice record in MUNIS, then click a button to retrieve it from Laserfiche. Because the integration is so seamless, a lot of users don’t even realize that documents are stored in another system.

For Berg, the MUNIS integration truly exemplifies how Laserfiche has helped the county improve internal work processes. "In the past, retrieving an invoice would literally take days," he says. "First, I’d log in to our financial application and look up the invoice’s number. I’d then have to call the finance department and submit my request. When staff in that department had time, they’d locate the original invoice, make a photocopy and put it in the interoffice mail."

Because this process was so slow, Berg began photocopying every invoice he received, so he’d have it for future reference. "I was storing thousands of invoices in my office, and each year the pile would grow higher and higher," he says. "Using Laserfiche, I can literally find any invoice I need in a matter of seconds, and my office is a lot less cluttered."

Reducing paper clutter also translates into additional cost savings for the county, because departments can make better use of available space. By scanning its case files into Laserfiche, the corrections department, for example, has eliminated the need for a records room altogether. The 900 square foot space previously needed to house paper now serves as an office for four staff members.    

Currently, fourteen of the county’s fifteen departments use Laserfiche, and the county’s repository holds more than six million documents. Using the Integrator’s Toolkit™, IT staff have integrated Laserfiche with several other systems, including the county’s Unisys^® mainframe and the Fidlar^® system it uses to manage property records. These integrations have proven so successful that, as part of the RFP process, the county now requires software vendors to confirm that their applications integrate with Laserfiche.

IT staff have several initiatives planned for the year ahead, including an integration between Laserfiche and the county’s GIS application. They also plan to use the WebLink™ module to provide citizens with online access to a variety of documents, from agendas and meeting minutes to property, birth and death records. They’ll also continue one of their most successful programs—hiring developmentally disabled residents to scan archived documents into the Laserfiche repository.

When asked about the lessons she and her colleagues learned during the implementation process, Grossmann emphasizes the importance of active communication between IT staff and the system’s users. "We definitely had to manage users’ expectations," she says. "Our probation officers, for example, didn’t want to give up their paper files—we literally had to take them away. But once we showed them how the new system worked, they clearly saw its benefits.

"Thanks to an integration between Laserfiche and our court services tracking system, the officers can access scanned documents with a single click. And they no longer have to carry armloads of case files around. Instead, they simply take their laptops into the field and, using VPN, they connect to the Laserfiche repository and call up any document they need."

Other users, she continues, tried to recreate their old work processes in Laserfiche, which often prevented them from making the best use of the system’s tools. "In our corrections department, for instance, the paper files were so thick that they included section dividers, and staff were in the habit of locating a particular form by looking in ‘Section Four’ or ‘Section Six.’

"As part of the process of scanning these files, users attempted to recreate this familiar filing structure in Laserfiche. We had to step in and explain that electronic section dividers or subfolders weren’t necessary, because the system’s search tools would help them quickly find what they need, without having to manually navigate through a complex folder structure.

"We even had a few users who thought that managing documents electronically would add to their workload, or that they’d have to hire additional staff to do all the scanning," Grossmann concludes. "When we heard this, we simply pointed to our pilot program and all the success we had. Far from adding to anyone’s workload, Laserfiche has provided staff with much faster access to information, leaving them with more time to help the county’s citizens."