The City of Monroe, North Carolina, takes pride in providing excellent quality of life for its residents. Citizens enjoy many services—such as the Monroe Aquatics and Fitness Center—that are rare in cities of similar size.

Providing top-tier amenities depends on reaching ever-higher levels of efficiency. That’s where Monroe’s document management projects come in. Below, City Clerk Jeanne Deese and Systems Administrator Bruce Bounds describe how digital agenda packets, systems integration and other initiatives are helping Monroe get ahead in the race to maintain a city where residents love to live.

A county seat with 30,000 residents, Monroe is the hub of government activity in Union County, North Carolina. As the City Clerk, Deese works at the center of much of the action, while Bounds manages a decentralized IT department that serves a city staff of more than 400 employees.

The Clerk’s Office manages the city’s records program, including responses to requests for records, from the public and other departments, as governed by the state’s Open Records Law. Deese also oversees preparation and publication of bi-weekly council meeting agendas. In her decade of service, she’s compiled hundreds of thousands of agenda packet pages, managed approvals for thousands of individual agenda items, and photocopied thousands of pages of staff reports.

Interoperability emerged as a key evaluation criterion as the city began considering document management solutions. With systems running on both Microsoft® SQL™ and Oracle® platforms, as well as AS400-based HTE® applications in many departments, ensuring a fit with existing infrastructure was a priority for Bounds. Deese, on the other hand, needed to make sure records entrusted to the system would be secure over the long term and that her staff could enjoy the benefits of agenda automation without sacrificing control over the final document.

In 2004, the administration implemented a Laserfiche® document management solution, initially in the City Clerk’s Office. The guiding principle, says Bounds, “was to make it easier for city employees to do a job and provide more services to our citizens.”

To deliver that value to citizens, Deese and Bounds designed and conducted a training program for city staff who would rely on Laserfiche for daily tasks. They found it “very easy” to get staff up to speed, says Bounds, crediting their success to a “train the trainer philosophy” and configuring Laserfiche’s folders structure to emulate their existing filing system. “It makes transition, training and everything easier,” he says.

Interoperability also promoted rapid staff acceptance of the new solution, as many departments already were accustomed to working with various HTE applications. As the solution grew beyond the Clerk’s Office, Bounds built connections between Laserfiche, HTE Utilities™ and ESRI® packages himself, linking scanned meter change-out cards, correspondence and installation drawings to land parcels using template ID and parcel numbers as unique identifiers.

Getting ahead of the busywork and expense of agenda packet preparation was the next area targeted for process improvements. “The scanning program was so good that we had complete confidence in Laserfiche products. That’s why we went with Agenda Manager,” says Deese. Laserfiche Agenda Manager™ now automatically routes submitted items to proper officials for approval, allowing her to monitor the status of the entire agenda at a glance.

The style and structure of the published agenda was vital to Deese. “The formatting process is so automated now that I only need to take about five minutes to make little adjustments before finalizing an agenda,” Deese says. “The fact that I have complete control over the final look is probably my favorite feature.” From the IT perspective on the agenda process, Bounds likes that Agenda Manager “puts everything in one spot.”

Monroe makes council meeting minutes available to the public online via Laserfiche WebLink™. With archives dating to 1877, Monroe’s citizens enjoy self-serve access, while Deese and her staff save time otherwise spent handling requests for historical minutes.

Recognizing that Monroe is “well ahead of other cities our size,” Bounds remains focused on the future and is already planning a digital solution for managing arrest and incident reports in the Police Department. Taking advantage of Laserfiche’s redaction capabilities to maintain security, the reports will be accessible to authorized users from both HTE and Laserfiche interfaces.

Bounds and Deese are committed to providing great service to Monroe’s citizens and city departments. He refers to a quote he keeps above his desk to summarize the idea: “Success is what you do for yourself,” it reads. “Significance is what you do for others.”