How the Indio Water Authority Manages Capital Improvement Projects and Work Orders with Laserfiche
Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Jason Jaurigue, Network Systems Engineer, Indio Water Authority
The Indio Water Authority’s engineering department spends a great deal of time on improvement projects around the city. This can range from residential leak inspections to capital improvement projects like repaving roads. Here is how Laserfiche helps with processing work orders and managing capital improvement project inspections.
Work orders
Customer service work orders are generated in the Work Order system. Before Laserfiche, they were printed out and filed in a designated filing area by work order type. Staff spent an estimated 20% of their time filing and searching for these documents.
Now, once a work order is generated, it is automatically scanned into Laserfiche. From there, it is processed with Laserfiche Quick Fields, which uses the Zone OCR process to retrieve key pieces of information, such as the Work Order Number, to populate metadata.
The Pattern Matching process is used to make sure that the right Work Order Number is pulled from the document.
Here is what the whole Laserfiche Quick Fields session looks like:
A Work Order Number is added to the file name of the work order, which allows it to be routed to the appropriate folder by month and year.
Capital improvement project inspections
Another process that has been improved with Laserfiche is the capital improvement project (CIP) inspections process. CIPs include road, bridge, traffic signal and drainage improvements, all of which must be inspected frequently to make sure that the contractor does everything correctly and according to plan. Photos are taken during inspections and saved for reference and as evidence in the future. In the past, an inspector had to go through the following procedure to take and store the photos:
- Take pictures out in the field with his iPhone.
- Email the pictures to himself.
- Wait to get back in the office before placing the pictures on the network shared drive.
- Rename each picture to include information such as project name, permit number and address in the file name.
This process took at least 10 minutes (not counting the time it took to get back to the office). Laserfiche Mobile has reduced that time to 15 seconds. Here is what the new process looks like:
- The inspector takes pictures using the Laserfiche Mobile app.
- The inspector selects the correct document template to add to the pictures and uses the iPhone’s speech-to-text feature to enter the correct metadata.
- The picture is automatically saved in Laserfiche with the correct file naming convention.
Benefits of Laserfiche
Implementing Laserfiche at the Indio Water Authority’s engineering department has resulted in the following benefits:
- Inspectors save approximately 10 minutes of time when they save CIP inspection photos because they can now upload these photos directly from the field instead of returning to the office to transfer everything over to the shared drive. This makes the images available to everyone faster.
- Work orders can be accessed immediately with a simple search. Employees no longer spend 20% of their time filing and searching for them.
Your organization’s business processes can’t come to a standstill just because key employees are on the road. Learn how Laserfiche Mobile can streamline your organizations business processes in this free eBook: Quicker Better Safer: Laserfiche Mobile.
