How Gunnison County Automates Agenda Management
Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Mike Lee, IT Director, Gunnison County, CO
Like any local government, Gunnison County, CO, regularly compiles meeting agendas. Here is how Laserfiche Forms and Laserfiche Workflow shortened a cumbersome, paper-based agenda management process from one week to three working days.
Watch: How Gunnison County Automated Agenda Management with Laserfiche
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Legacy process
- An agenda item, which is basically a stack of paper, was delivered to the administration department to be logged into a spreadsheet.
- This stack of paper would be transferred to the finance department, which recorded it in another spreadsheet and reviewed the item to ensure it was within budget.
- If necessary, the paper stack was then transferred to the attorney’s office for additional review.
- Finally, the agenda item and all of its supporting documentation would arrive at the administration department for scanning and distribution.
This process was inefficient, and the stacks of paper would often get lost. Since it was difficult to track who had the agenda item at what time, there was no accountability, resulting in missed deadlines.
Laserfiche Forms
All proposed agenda items, along with any supplemental documents, are now submitted through Laserfiche Forms.
Once the form is submitted, Laserfiche Workflow does the following:
- Creates a shortcut to the agenda item in the department head’s Laserfiche folder.
- Sends an email to the head of the department who is responsible for the agenda item for review.
- If the item is denied, it is moved to the Denied Submissions folder and the submitter is notified by email.
- If the item is approved, Laserfiche Workflow invokes a second workflow that will take the agenda item through the rest of the review process.
Here is what this workflow looks like:
The second workflow then:
- Creates a shortcut to the agenda item in the county administrator’s folder and notifies the county administrator by email of a new agenda item for review.
- If the county administrator thinks the agenda item is incomplete, the submitter is notified by email to provide more information.
- Once the submitter provides the required information, the county administrator must approve the agenda item and specify if the agenda item should also be reviewed by the finance department and/or the attorney’s office.
- Notifies the finance department and/or the attorney’s office of pending items to review and creates shortcuts to the agenda item in their folders.
- If both the attorney’s office and finance department must review the item, the review process happens in parallel.
- During this review, either department may request more information from the submitter.
- Routes the finalized agenda item to the county manager’s folder for review.
- The county manager can approve the item directly or request more information before approving.
- Moves approved items to the county administrator’s folder. The submitter is notified of the approved agenda item.
- Automatically fills out a formatted PDF agenda with the agenda item information.
- Moves the finalized agenda item to the Approved Agenda Submissions folder, where it is filed by date and renamed to a standardized naming convention.
Here is what the county manager approval branch of the workflow looks like:
Throughout the process, the action history of each agenda item is tracked in the business process details.
Each party is also reminded of what to do during their particular step with email notifications.
Benefits of Laserfiche
Automating the agenda management process with Laserfiche has resulted in the following benefits for Gunnison County:
- The time between the submission of the agenda item and when it appears on the agenda has been reduced from one week to three working days.
- Agenda items are no longer lost on the way to someone’s desk.
- The requesting department head can log into Laserfiche and see the status of the item as well as any remarks or additional information the reviewers have made at any point in the process.
