Run Smarter Winners – Where Are They Now? Featuring Brown Metals Company
The annual Run Smarter awards program recognizes organizations for demonstrating the most innovative uses of Laserfiche. Winners are selected based on the positive impact Laserfiche has had on their organizations, departments and business processes. In 2019, we celebrate the 15th anniversary of the awards. In honor of this milestone, we interviewed some former winners to find out how their Laserfiche implementation has improved since they received the award.
Justin Lasley, MCSA, MCP is the Chief Information Officer at Brown Metals Company, located in the greater Los Angeles, CA area. Brown Metals Company specializes in supplying custom-slit and coiled thin gauge stainless steel and high temperature alloys. Lasley has worked for Browns Metals Company since 1994 – the organization won the Run Smarter Award in 2007.
What impact has the Run Smarter Awards had on the organization?
We have been using Laserfiche for almost 14 years. We originally installed Laserfiche just to be able to scan our sales orders (internal document containing order and tracking info). We accomplished that by using Quick Fields barcode scanning with real-time lookup. This is the solution for which we originally received the Run Smarter award, but that was just the beginning of our Laserfiche journey. The Run Smarter award provides a reminder that innovating solutions with Laserfiche is only limited by one’s imagination.
How is Laserfiche being used at the organization currently?
Since then, we’ve also automated the delivery of our invoices to our customers. Invoices are generated in PDF format from our legacy system. We use Quick Fields to import those PDF invoices, use a real-time database look up to assign metadata, and then email the invoice to the customer.
For customers who wish to pay their invoices by credit card, we’ve created a website where they can enter which invoices they want to pay. The customer completes a Laserfiche form with their customer number, email address and invoice number(s). Once submitted, Laserfiche Forms initiates a Workflow that finds the invoices in Laserfiche, sums them up, sends the data to PayPal, and creates a PayPal invoice the customer can pay using a credit card or their PayPal account. It’s a self-service payment option that allows the customer to request/submit credit card payment at any time without the need to rely on an internal customer service rep.
One of our most recent projects was the creation of a system for automating customer order acknowledgements. When a customer order is entered into our legacy system, the system generates a PDF acknowledgement of the order, which is imported into Laserfiche using Import Agent. Once in Laserfiche, the acknowledgement is emailed to the sales person who entered it so they may review it for accuracy and forward it to the customer right away if desired. At the end of the day, a data export process initiates from our legacy system creating metadata for all of the acknowledgements from that day. The acknowledgements are merged with the metadata using Workflow and then emailed to the customer and filed in Laserfiche. Customers can then review their order and report any discrepancies.
What are the benefits that the organization is seeing with Laserfiche?
Documents are easier to find. Automation is making internal processes more efficient and helping us maintain a high level of customer service.
How does the organization plan on using Laserfiche in the future?
We plan to further automate internal processes so that our employees can focus on growing our business and interacting with our customers.
Do you have any advice to new Laserfiche users?
Take advantage of any training opportunity that comes your way. Whether it’s attending the Laserfiche Empower conference, taking the online CPP Courses, or attending free workshops offered by your VAR. Once you learn the Laserfiche suite of products, you have a lot of opportunities to make your organization more efficient.
