This year Laserfiche hosted its first Empower Summit in Edinburgh, UK. We sat down with one of the conference’s attendees, our very own Senior Director of Marketing, Channing Fleetwood, to talk about the event. You can read our questions and his answers below.

Where and when did the conference take place?

The first Laserfiche Empower Summit took place on June 11-13^th, 2019 in Edinburgh, Scotland’s beautiful, historic capital city that’s second only to London as one of the largest financial centers in the UK.                           

Who is the audience for the Empower Summit? Why should they go?

Our audience includes customers and resellers already within the Laserfiche community, as well as business leaders that may be new to Laserfiche, but interested in using process automation and intelligent content management software.

The inspirational stories and actionable advice one can get from attending a Laserfiche Empower Summit event is useful for anyone who wants to drive employee efficiency, digitize their interactions and experiences with customers and grow their businesses with the newest advances in technology.

Also, if you have your own great story to tell and want to speak at an Empower summit, please contact our director of events.

What kinds of experiences were available to attendees? How many sessions were there?

We had over 60 sessions this year, with experiences that catered to a wide variety of attendees:

First we had our keynotes, where business executives and industry professionals spoke about their own unique experiences with Laserfiche, and how they’ve used it to improve their business. You can find in-depth case studies covering some of these experiences here by checking our website.

In addition to our inspiring keynotes sessions, we sorted our other offerings into tracks, where attendees were able to choose the path that best suited their needs.

Our first track featured product knowledge and thought leadership sessions. These attendees got to hear even more customer success stories, while also receiving top-notch product training from Laserfiche staff, with plenty of tips and tricks they could use to get the most out of their Laserfiche solution.

The second and third tracks featured technical training sessions for beginner, intermediate, and advanced level Laserfiche users. These attendees were able to learn helpful techniques for using, and even some records management and administration features.

Lastly, we offered an exclusive solution design track for our outstanding community of solution providers. These sessions not only covered our latest and greatest product updates, but also featured hands-on labs. It’s in these labs where Laserfiche engineers discussed best practices at each step in the Laserfiche installation and setup process, so solution providers could bring this knowledge back with them when working with customers.

To unwind after breakout sessions, we also hosted a networking cocktail event (complete with some local Scottish faire) where attendees could share their own stories, strategies, and best practices in a fun and casual setting.

Can you tell us more about the customer speaker series? What are some of the inspiring stories you heard from them?

We had a group of nine outstanding customer speakers that came out to the event to tell their success stories. Each of our presenters was fantastic and a pleasure to have talk at the Summit.

One of these inspiring stories came from Glasgow Credit Union. Managing financial products for a variety of customers in Scotland’s most populous city, they had their work cut out for them. They wanted to appeal to a new audience of customers, who seemed to be moving away from the traditional style of credit unions towards what looked like more modernized experiences offered by commercial banks.

However, with Laserfiche, Glasgow Credit Union was able to revolutionize how they did business. They used Laserfiche to automate their loan underwriting process, connecting with credit rating agencies directly using a combination of Laserfiche Forms and Workflow.

In doing so, they were able to exponentially increase their capacity for loan approvals, and position themselves as a “digital first lender.” Not only were they able to go from £30m in new loan accounts to £70m in under a year, they were also able to capture a lucrative segment of the market they were previously unable to with their newfound technological advances.

Another great success story comes from Jabal Omar Construction, a Saudi Arabian company that’s using Laserfiche to manage all documents and processes related to one of the largest and most important commercial construction projects in the world. This is significant for Laserfiche, as even with a project of this scale, Jabal Omar says Laserfiche’s document management and automation features were able to deliver an improved experience to its large number of stakeholders, and that their Laserfiche solution has never experienced downtime since their first implementation in 2014.

A colossal project taking up over 170,000 sqm of commercial space, Jabal Omar’s work will bring 16 major hotel brands along with a variety of entertainment venues, retail shops, and restaurants to the Holy City of Mecca, and the millions of visitors it sees yearly.

There was also a particularly interesting story that came from The Isle of Man. They’re using Laserfiche to digitize the property records for the entire island that go back hundreds and hundreds of years. Because this process was originally paper based, these records were hard for the public to access, even though they were technically available to view. Additionally, present-day deeds and transfers were a hassle due to the pace of manual and paper processes.

Still, once Laserfiche came in, the situation changed. The island’s government was able to improve its citizen services with more easily manageable documents. The public was able to access these fascinating historical records in a digital format, while present-day processing of deeds, transfers, and more was digitized and made more convenient. With Laserfiche, The Isle of Man was able to renovate its processes for the modern era, while preserving its wonderful, cherished history with records that are now easily accessible to the public.

What does the future hold for the Empower Summit? Will there be more?

While Edinburgh is the first city we’ve visited, we plan for it to be far from the last. Over the next year, we’re slating to bring the Empower Summit to other major cities across the globe.

Currently our list of host city candidates includes Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Beirut. Each of these summits will feature its own selection of events, classes and speakers unique to the host region and surrounding markets.

At each summit, we’ll be taking a closer look at the solutions organizations in those regions are using today to show tangible business results, improve experiences for customers, drive revenues and grow their businesses.