How Avis Fleet Services Manages Its Fleet with Laserfiche
Contributed by: Vincent Kelly, Analyst Programmer, Avis Fleet Services
Our vision here at Avis Fleet Services is to be a leading provider of fleet management and product support. We do that by providing an integrated motor vehicle usage solution to fulfill our customers’ specific needs. Here is how we use Laserfiche integrated with our multiple systems to manage the various traffic fines and accidents accrued by drivers of our 200,000-vehicle fleet.
Capture
Traffic fines and accident reports are captured in Laserfiche using one of two methods:
- Laserfiche Snapshot.
- Scanner Vision integrated with Laserfiche using Lf -Link.
Once these documents are captured, Laserfiche Workflow automatically routes them to the relevant employee’s working folder in the repository.
- The employee opens a document in Laserfiche and creates a new incident by entering certain information, such as the Traffic Fine Number, the Vehicle Registration and the Document Type into the Fleet Management System (FMS). The FMS is where all our customer and supplier data is kept. Since the traffic fines are not in a uniform document format, we haven’t been able to automate this part of the process yet.
- Once the employee updates the Fines Result field in the document’s template, a workflow that validates the data between Laserfiche and the FMS is invoked.
- From there, the document will be routed to the “Unresolved” folder, where it waits for further processing.
- At this time an e-mail is sent to the customer notifying him of a new traffic fine in our database. In addition to the Traffic Fine Number and Registration Number, the e-mail includes a copy of the actual traffic fine as an attachment for the customer to view and verify. We also provide him with a link to our online customer portal.
- Once logged into the portal, the customer can go to the “Traffic Fine Management” option and perform a search by the Registration Number provided in the e-mail. Clicking on any of the documents that have been returned in the search extracts the document from the Laserfiche repository and converts it to a PDF using a custom plug-in.
- Once the customer views the fine and is satisfied that the information is correct, he can either notify us to pay his fine or ask that the fine be redirected to another driver.
Fleet Accident Management
In addition to managing the process of traffic fines and citations, we also deal with the insurance companies if a customer is involved in an accident. Laserfiche Workflow routes the claim documents through each of the various stages in the fleet accident management process until the claim is resolved. At each stage in the workflow, the claim moves to a different folder in the Laserfiche repository.
- Awaiting Assessor Report.
- Awaiting General Documents.
- Awaiting Invoice.
- Awaiting Quotes.
- Staging.
While in each folder, the claim awaits any supplemental documents, such as the invoice while in the “Awaiting Invoice” folder and the quotes while in the “Awaiting Quotes” folder. The Clerk monitors each folder, and once each supplemental piece of information is received, he selects the next step in the claim’s template field. Workflow then routes this claim and supplemental documents to the next folder in the repository.
Custom Activities
In order to facilitate our business processes, we have created a large number of custom Workflow activities. Of those activities, the most important is AvisGeneric, which updates the information in Laserfiche from the FMS:
We basically call a Web Service by a specific path and pass the parameters into the FMS via the Web Service:
- Order Number
- Vehicle Registration
- Invoice Number
- Invoice Date
The data is then validated based on information contained in the FMS system and the relevant information is passed back via the Web Service to populate the document’s template fields. Here is how this activity fits into a workflow:
Resulting Benefits
Implementing Laserfiche in our Traffic Fine and Accident Management processes resulted in the following benefits:
- Improved disaster recovery and business continuity. When our warehouse burned down we couldn’t recover from loss of all the paper documents that were stored there. Now we have backup servers offsite and can easily recover from any disaster.
- With Laserfiche Audit Trail, we can easily trace any problem with a document to a specific time and user. This helps us resolve issues quickly.
