Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Traves McCabe, Information Records Administrator, Westminster, CO

Each month, the Westminster City Clerk’s Office receives between 60 and 70 business and liquor license applications. Each business license has as many as 10 separate pages while each liquor license package contains up to 200 pages. Processing all of this paperwork took hours. Here is how the city used Laserfiche to reduce the time spent processing licenses by more than half.

Applicants for a business or liquor license have to fill out an application and submit it to the clerk’s office along with all required documentation. Once everything is finalized, the complete application packet is scanned into Laserfiche with Laserfiche Quick Fields. There are two different Laserfiche Quick Fields sessions: one for the business licenses and one for the liquor licenses.

Laserfiche Quick Fields splits up the large packet of documents into separate files. The First Page Identification process looks for the application form to determine the start of a new file. Here is what this session looks like:

Laserfiche Quick Fields uses the Zone OCR process to grab the unique identifier from the page (Account Number in the case of business licenses and State Liquor Number in the case of liquor licenses) and populates the corresponding template fields. Here is how this process is set up:

If the form is filled out by hand and the unique identifier is not readable by Laserfiche Quick Fields, the scanning operator completes that field manually and presses F5 on the keyboard. Laserfiche Quick Fields then performs a lookup in the Wintergate licensing database to populate the remaining metadata. Here is how this lookup is configured:

Laserfiche Workflow moves the application packet to the Quality Control folder in Laserfiche. Westminster requires that a second person look over each application in Laserfiche to make sure it is scanned in correctly before the original paper documents are destroyed.

The Quality Control folder is monitored by the phone operator who makes sure that all images and metadata are correct. The operator can either mark the packet as Good or as Needs Correction by changing the value of a template field. Laserfiche Workflow routes packets that need correction to the Corrections folder and notifies the scanning operator. The scanning operator corrects the errors and Laserfiche Workflow sends the packet back for quality control.

Laserfiche Workflow then checks to see if the license has a cancellation date. If there is a cancellation date, it means that the business is going to close. If the cancellation date has passed, Laserfiche Workflow routes this packet to the Inactive folder in the Records Management section of the repository and files it based on year. Here is what the Records Management section of the repository looks like:

If there is no cancellation date, the packet is routed to the Active folder in the Records Management section of the repository where it stays until it is marked for cancellation. Here is how the records retention is configured:

Shortcuts to the application packet are created in regular staff folders for easy access by all non-records manager employees. Here is what this section of the repository looks like:

Laserfiche Workflow also checks to make sure the scanned document is not a duplicate of an existing file. If a duplicate is found, the recently scanned document is moved to the Quality ControlDuplicate folder and the scanning operator is notified. Here is what this branch of the workflow looks like:

If a license is up for renewal, the renewal application is simply scanned into the existing record in Laserfiche. It then goes through the same process as new applications.

Here is what the whole workflow looks like:

In the future, Westminster plans to make the license applications available in Laserfiche Forms. This will make the process completely paperless from start to finish.

Implementing Laserfiche at the City of Westminster has resulted in the following benefits:

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