MauBank Ltd

One of Mauritus’s leading banks enhanced the customer experience by transforming the account opening process using Laserfiche Forms and an automated workflow.

Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group’s Digital Transformation

Laserfiche’s digital transformation model helps Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group go above and beyond by digitizing and streamlining the claims process so customers have the confidence to do more.

Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group Case Study

Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group uses Laserfiche Forms to make the customer experience as seamless as possible.

D.L. Evans Automates Compliance and Records Management

SITUATION

• Needed an electronic document repository to store scanned documents
• Paper-driven operations were becoming overly expensive and time-intensive to manage

RESULTS

• Estimated $1 million in annual savings
• Enhanced employee experience
• Foundation for an optimized omnichannel experience for customers

D.L. Evans Bank is a century-old organization with over $3.2 billion in assets and dozens of branches across Idaho and Utah. As a true community bank, D.L. Evans offers a variety of personal, business and investment services while maintaining a simple mission: Help people.

To remain responsive to customer needs while addressing the banking industry’s ever-changing compliance requirements, D.L. Evans has built a strong digital ecosystem that includes Laserfiche as a key component. Laserfiche acts as the bank’s information backbone and main processing system, integrating with its core applications to support growth and scale. 

“We’re a $3.5 billion-in-assets institution today, up from $175 million around 25 years ago — a big part of that has been possible because of Laserfiche,” said Gerardo Munoz, D.L. Evans CIO.

“Over time, our use of Laserfiche evolved from document management to a business-critical system,” said Munoz. “Every process can be refined and automated, and Laserfiche was able to help with that.”

As a part of this evolution, the bank leverages Laserfiche’s integration tools to connect Laserfiche to other core systems including its eSignature application, core banking software, CRM and loan origination program. Munoz and his team even use Laserfiche Connector as an integration tool to bridge applications for operations that do not use Laserfiche at all.

“Our Laserfiche repository has over 80 million documents in it, so it’s as critical to us as our core banking system,” Munoz said. “Laserfiche is the second-most critical application that we use in our institution.”

Beyond the time and cost efficiency gains, D.L. Evans counts Laserfiche as a trusted system due to its robust records management capabilities. As a financial institution, the can’t afford to make mistakes with its record management procedures, which are heavily regulated by FDIC rules.

Laserfiche has helped minimize FDIC violations by standardizing how records are kept and updated; for example, retention rules notify compliance officers when a policy document needs to be updated and versioning enables policy reviewers to know if they are working with the most up to date copy of a document.

Auditing has also been streamlined. Whenever the FDIC requests a records audit, D.L. Evans’ team is able to promptly retrieve and present the electronic documents and files in question. “Laserfiche has brought audit time down from four weeks to two,” explains Munoz. “This is actually a bigger improvement than it sounds because as we’ve grown, we now have twice as many loans to audit.”

Transforming the Employee Experience

In addition to making information easier to access, Laserfiche has enhanced the employee experience by standardizing and automating review and approval. Furthermore, integrations eliminate much of the manual data entry and application switching that waste employee time and cognitive energy.

“Just about every process needs some level of automation. The fact that automation can standardize procedures and processes is a major reason to do it. Using Laserfiche to do that has helped us save time and money, as well as prevent a lot of mistakes.” — Gerardo Munoz, D.L. Evans CIO

The bank recently reimagined the loan process, starting with vehicular loans, using Laserfiche. The integration between Laserfiche and Meridian — the bank’s loan origination program — allows many of the previously manual tasks associated with loans to be entirely managed through a Laserfiche form and automated business process. 

A Laserfiche form reads information directly from the loan application program and creates the loan packet, routes it through approvals and files everything in a centralized location.

This process also leverages a Laserfiche-DocuSign integration, enabling customers to submit signed documents that are automatically filed in the correct folder in Laserfiche, eliminating that task for loan officers.

“Rather than hire more loan processors, we are trying to automate the process so we can be more proactive,” Munoz said. “It also gives our loan officers better visibility and trackability into all activities.”

Similar automations are used to create new accounts, where information gathering and routing is managed by Laserfiche. As a result, bank employees can spend more time on the activities that require a human touch, such as customer service.

Another process that sounds deceptively quick and easy, but in reality can require multiple manual steps, is that of replacing a lost or stolen credit card. To accelerate these activities, the bank built a solution on an integration between Laserfiche and its CRM, 360 View. This enables representatives to easily create a service ticket in the CRM to start the replacement process for a customer. When a customer reports a lost or stolen credit card, a representative uses Laserfiche to automatically populate the service ticket with the customer’s information and then route the ticket to the appropriate reviewers and approvers. The improvement has reduced processing time by 66% — from six weeks to two weeks.

Laserfiche has also played an important role in mergers, as the bank is able to easily bring documents and data into their systems from acquired organizations. In one merger, Munoz explained, the bank avoided a $50,000 cost and monthslong wait to have a professional services firm convert and import documents.

“It took me two hours to write a workflow and the documents were converted in a week,” he said.

A True Community Bank

While most of the bank’s Laserfiche initiatives are considered back-office solutions, D.L. Evans customers directly benefit from the increased efficiency. “Laserfiche helps us be more productive and provide faster responses to our customers,” Munoz said.

The customer experience continues to be a guiding light for the D.L. Evans team, which was all-hands-on-deck during the COVID-19 pandemic. The bank’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan process was developed over a weekend, and staff — including the entire executive team — were trained on how to process PPP loans in a matter of hours.

“We even had our CEO processing PPP loans,” Munoz said. “Everything worked seamlessly and was processed through the proper channels. Afterward, all the documentation was there, and customers were satisfied.”

Thanks to the IT team’s quick response with Laserfiche and the entire staff’s commitment, D.L. Evans was the largest PPP provider in the state of Idaho.

Today, the bank provides other forms of community service, including its scholarship program. Students can submit a Laserfiche form for D.L. Evans’s Education Pays program — a drawing which rewards high-performing students with laptops — or its Scholarship Program, which awards thousands of dollars each year to high school seniors to attend any accredited college, university or trade school in the U.S.

Looking to the future, D.L. Evans is committed to creating a more cohesive, omnichannel experience for its customers. Laserfiche initiatives on the horizon include creating a self-service customer portal of Laserfiche Forms, enabling quicker and easier, 24/7 access to various services.

“All things considered, Laserfiche saves us about $1 million every year since we’ve implemented it,” says Munoz. “Laserfiche has never been one of those products that just sits on the shelf and doesn’t get used.”

Click here to learn how your financial firm can automate records management and compliance.

Growing Bank Expedites Loan Application Processing in 20-Plus Branches

SITUATION

• A growing bank’s acquisitions led to many ways of managing documents.
• Locating missing information resulted in wasted time.

SOLUTION

• Laserfiche helped to centralize information and save time searching for documents.
• Laserfiche automated loan applications eliminated repetitive tasks and accelerated the process.
• Bank employees have immediate document access from any of the bank’s branches.

For this bank, growing from a startup with less than 10 employees to a bank with multiple acquisitions and 250 staff came with a challenge.

“The banks we bought all had different ways of managing documents — some of them used paper files, while others had software in place,” said one of the bank’s assistant vice presidents. “As a result, we spent a lot of time calling other branches to locate missing information.”

Having disparate approaches was a liability to bank operations and client service. New account applications had to be mailed or faxed from branch offices to the main office, resulting in lost documents — and wasted time.

“We wanted a centralized system to house our information,” the AVP said. “We needed something that would be fully functional across all departments and locations.”

The organization found Laserfiche document management software. “We chose Laserfiche for its flexibility. We like that the system can be used by all our employees while still being customized to fit specific departmental needs.”

Streamling Loan Application and Approval Paperwork

“Our top goal was that loan application processing or opening a new account wouldn’t take forever,” said the AVP.

Using Laserfiche, the bank automated the processing of new accounts and loans:

  • The customer fills out and submits new account paperwork, which can include signature cards, credit card applications and online banking enrollment forms.
  • A personal banker scans the documents into Laserfiche.
  • A customer data specialist enters important document metadata into Laserfiche, such as name, account number and Tax ID.
  • Laserfiche automatically routes the documents to the appropriate department for review and approval.
  • The department marks the document as approved, rejected or still in process, and the customer receives notification of the decision.

Growing Bank Expedites Loan

“This process saves time on administrative tasks and provides immediate document access from any of the bank’s branches. For example, if a customer questions a check, the signature card can quickly be found in Laserfiche and a copy of the signature can be instantly retrieved for verification.

“Every department wants Laserfiche,” the AVP added. “They all have different ideas about what they want to do with Laserfiche.”

How Laserfiche ECM Helps Financial Advisors Compete with Robo-Advisors

Today, financial advisors operate in a far more competitive landscape than in years past. Robo-advisors and other technology-driven changes are impacting the traditional practices of advisors, creating urgency to adopt the latest industry innovations.

Here are three factors that are contributing to the industry’s shifting landscape and how enterprise content management (ECM) systems helps financial advisors adapt to them.

Robo-advisors

The term, “robo-advisor” refers to algorithmic technology that is helping investors—particularly beginning investors with smaller portfolios—cost-effectively make more informed financial decisions.

One of the ways traditional advisors can compete with robo-advisors is through software integration. When they integrate primary applications like a customer relationship management (CRM) and ECM system, advisors can quickly collect business-critical data and gain insight into their organization’s processes.

As robo-advisors enter the wealth management space, advisors must re-think their approach to technology in order to increase productivity and remain competitive.

RIA Growth Curve

The number of registered investment advisors (RIAs) has grown steadily in recent years and is expected to reach 28% of market share by 2018. This figure has grown from just 11.9% in 2013. In fact, research group Cerulli Associates recently identified RIAs as the fastest growing segment of the financial advisor market.

With many new practices entering the industry, it is crucial for advisors to focus on establishing competitive differentiators. ECM systems gives advisors a comparative advantage by streamlining business processes that can take their competitors longer to complete. For example, some ECM systems can:

  • Auto-populate electronic forms, reducing the processing time and errors of manual data entry
  • Automate compliance review and approval processes, allowing advisors to quickly book new trades
  • Email electronic forms to account holders for e-signatures, saving significant document turnaround time

Compliance

With a renewed focus on compliance from regulators, advisors can expect more frequent and in-depth audits than ever before. Top advisors are using ECM systems to prepare their firms for strict compliance regulations.

When advisors automate business processes like new account opening, blotter submissions and trade approvals, some ECM systems record an audit history of every action that takes place. This allows RIAs to easily discover documents requested during an audit.

Advisors can also use ECM systems to manage client records by automatically assigning retention and destruction dates based on their records management requirements. Girard Securities—a San Diego-based RIA—uses Laserfiche ECM to improve productivity and compliance around its blotter process:

 

The combination of robo-advisors, new competitors and stricter compliance makes for a tipping point in the wealth management industry. The advisors that come out on top will be defined by how they streamline their operations with technology.

Apps Advisers Need to Use

In this 4-minute Wall Street Journal video, Joel Bruckenstein, founder of Technology Tools for Today, outlines a few mobile apps that he recommends for financial advisors, including Laserfiche.

Watch the video now!

Avis Fleet Services

Named Southern Africa’s leading fleet management company five years in a row by PMR Africa, Avis Fleet Services prides itself on the strength of its customer relationships and its ability to rapidly evolve to meet both client needs and marketplace trends.

For Avis Fleet Services (AFS), backing its customer service with a strong technology platform is the key to responding quickly and efficiently to client needs.

Recently, the company rolled out new products such as Interactive Voice Reporting capabilities and a traffic fines management service to improve customer service and eliminate the bottlenecks of paper-based documents.

AFS’ business processes had been generating massive volumes of paper documents—about 85,000 per month just in accounting—and staff spent countless hours sorting paper. A lack of offsite document accessibility and bandwidth challenges in remote service areas of neighboring countries had increased the company’s operational costs while decreasing staff efficiency and customer satisfaction.

“Doing business across a large geographical area means we have certain challenges. The road systems, the postal service and data communication infrastructure are below par in some places,” says Vijay Jugnarian, Development and Solutions Architect. “With paper, finding information was a challenge. Resolving queries was time consuming and costly.”

Strengthening Avis’ IT Infrastructure with Integrative Middleware

To solve these efficiency challenges and build a stronger IT backbone for its new customer service offerings, Avis turned to Laserfiche Rio 8.3, an enterprise content management (ECM) solution with a flexible, open architecture. By deploying Laserfiche as integrative middleware, AFS’ IT department could build new solutions on top of existing software applications and Websites, centralize data storage and streamline the company’s accounting, claims and traffic fine processing.

“We chose Laserfiche because of its suitability to a medium-sized company and the availability of local as well as regional support,” says Vincent Kelly, Analyst Programmer.

Kelly and his team started with a foundational integration between Laserfiche and the company’s AS400 Fleet Management System (FMS), the database that stores the company’s customer and vendor data.

“You don’t have to have a user key in twenty different fields from a document to make the document useable and searchable in the system,” says Kelly. “Based on just an order number, we can retrieve all of the related documents using this back-end integration.”

Streamlining Customer Service

Laserfiche’s integration flexibility allowed the company to build front-end solutions on top of this back-end FMS-Laserfiche process, a critical step to streamlining customer service.

Traffic Fine Payments: The first solution has accelerated the processing of traffic fines that customers receive while driving an AFS vehicle. Using a custom integration between Laserfiche, AFS’ new traffic fine management system and the company’s customer Web portal, AFS has greatly accelerated the generation of infringement notices and enabled customers to easily search, review and redirect the fine to appropriate drivers.

Accident Management: For customers who file an accident report with AFS, the company uses Laserfiche to manage insurance claims, quotes and supplier invoices related to the incident. Staff once put these documents in separate bins with folders based on incident numbers which was a time-consuming, inefficient management and storage procedure. Now, Laserfiche automatically routes documents through each stage in the claims process, giving clerks the transparency to see how many incidents a customer has incurred and what other steps need to be taken without switching between applications.

“In the past, it was difficult to immediately know the status of any incident when a customer called,” says Kelly. “With Laserfiche, our staff can easily see where a claim is in the process. Laserfiche has given our clerks many more reporting options that make their jobs easier.”

Powering Accelerated Accounting

The most robust integration, however, has created new accounts payable and receivable processes that save significant resource time. By integrating Laserfiche with the company’s FMS, Oracle Financial Database, PlanetPress Production Suite and online customer and staff portals, the company has enabled a document routing and approval process for customer invoices and payments that is transparent and controlled at every step.

Accounts Payable: When vehicles require maintenance, AFS bills the customer to cover the vendor’s service cost. The basic FMS-Laserfiche integration authorizes supplier invoices and attaches proof of service forms to the invoice. Clerks in the costing department can then retrieve documents from Laserfiche based on an order number search directly in the FMS system.

“Clerks used to run around to different departments to verify the invoice amounts. Now, we’ve linked all those documents up in the background, and they can just click on a link and open it all up,” says Kelly.

Accounts Receivable: Once these invoices are approved, an extensive custom workflow activity using PlanetPress, the FMS, Oracle and a customer Web portal allows the accounts receivable department to generate invoice statements and send them to customers online.

Enterprise Benefits

About 20% of AFS’ customers have opted to receive their billing statements online, leading to a huge reduction in overall operational printing and storage costs. More importantly, by using Laserfiche for data transfer and document routing, clerks can service those customers on the phone much faster. Over 183 staff across seven departments use Laserfiche both onsite and remotely over the Web to process more daily transactions, enjoying clutter-free workspaces and easy electronic file sorting.

“In most departments, productivity has increased and we’re completing more transactions without any additional staff. Laserfiche has absolutely made our business run more efficiently,” says Kelly. Kelly emphasizes that this productivity boost all derives from Laserfiche’s open architecture.

“Laserfiche’s integration capability is what helped us build business processes that ensure user efficiency,” he says. “We can create a process that suits each department’s unique business needs, but the high level overview of all the processes remains the same.”

For AFS, the ability to build these custom solutions helps the company maintain its reputation among customers, exceed industry standards and continue to pave the way for more innovative business practices.

“Our goal is to have Laserfiche implemented throughout the whole organization and to use it in as many of the business processes as possible to have our operations as paperless as possible,” Kelly concludes. “Laserfiche has worked beautifully for us so far.”

Mike Re, Chief Information Officer, says, “The Laserfiche DMS implementation has not only significantly enhanced the AFS business processes but it has also changed the way we at AFS do business, resulting in enhanced productivity and cost reductions including substantial contributions to the AFS sustainability initiatives through reductions in our carbon footprint.”

He adds that the DMS implementation has added immense value to both external and internal customers, saying, “Although the DMS process has done wonders for AFS thus far, it is far from reaching its potential opportunity threshold in the business.”

Gitterman & Associates

Since it was founded in 1990, Gitterman & Associates Wealth Management, LLC has grown from a five-person financial firm to a dually registered firm with 25 employees handling $225M assets under management (AUM) on its RIA side and over $400M AUM on its broker-dealer (BD) side. With this growth came the need to manage more client information and business records—and, now as a dually registered RIA/BD, to meet separate compliance standards for both FINRA and the SEC.

Since implementing Laserfiche Avante earlier this year, Gitterman & Associates is not only saving the staff and storage costs of working with paper, the firm is using Laserfiche to proactively manage its information to make compliance simpler, easier and more efficient. “Laserfiche is as user-friendly as it says it is, but it has the flexibility to separate our information to meet our compliance needs as both an RIA and a broker-dealer,” says Jeffrey Gitterman, Founder and CEO. “No other company or solution we looked at did that.”

Declaring Independence from Its BD – and Its Legacy ECM

Laserfiche was not the firm’s first enterprise content management (ECM) solution—but it was its first successful one. “Two years ago, our broker-dealer at the time came to us as one of two branch offices to beta test their document management system. I jumped on it, thinking this has got to be better than having a file clerk in a room all day,” recalls Marcy Gitterman, Director of IT & HR.

Trouble was, with no folder hierarchy and searching limited only to template fields, the legacy system was creating as many problems as it was meant to solve. “It was just a really cumbersome program to use,” she says. As the firm prepared to switch broker-dealers to Fidelity, only one of 19 staff members had actually scanned their paperwork into the system. Marcy was frustrated, but optimistic. “I knew there had to be something else out there that would work,” she says.

The firm’s principals, meanwhile, just wanted something people would actually use. “At one point, we were just talking about scanning everything to PDF ourselves and storing it on a hard drive, but I was really against that,” Gitterman says. “We needed something a lot more robust—the fact that PDFs can be altered wouldn’t help with security or compliance.”

Laserfiche, turns out, was one of the ECM providers on Fidelity’s short list of recommended solutions. Jeffrey Gitterman was aware of Laserfiche from local FPA chapter meetings, as well as from hearing about it from colleagues who used it. “It’s just a name we kept hearing a lot,” he says. When Zaheer Master, President of Laserfiche reseller Accelerated Information Systems, presented a Laserfiche solution tailored to the firm’s dual registry, Gitterman knew he was working with the right company—and that he’d actually use the software.

“I avoid technology like the plague, so ease of use was my number one priority. How easily can our new employees use it? How easy is it for me to use it?” Gitterman says. “Laserfiche could take our paper filing system—the one we’ve been using successfully since 1996—and transpose it to a Windows-type environment we were comfortable with.

“But what really impressed us about Laserfiche was the way our reseller presented it. The other solutions we looked at were totally reactionary—they just said, ‘This is how you get rid of paper.’ Our reseller presented Laserfiche in a way that said, ‘Okay, now that your information’s automated, here’s how you’ll need to set this up to get the most out of it and here’s how you do it,’” he adds.

Implementation took place over two months. Says Master, “We showed them how they needed to separate the RIA side of their business from the BD side for FINRA and SEC compliance. We also showed them how, using metadata, you could set up a template field search with a cut-off date or destruction date to easily enforce a retention policy. I think the important thing to realize with ECM is that just because it’s easy to keep everything, doesn’t mean you necessarily want to.”

The space saving alone, Marcy says, was a relief. “We look at the hundreds of square feet we’d been devoting to our file room—it just gets crazy. And half of those files you’ll never see, but you have to keep for compliance,” she says. “Now we get our space back and all we have to do is shoot something through the scanner so we don’t have to touch it again. It’s that simple.”

The flexibility to segregate information and customize user access to certain folders was not only effective, she says, it was easy. “In the old system, we would have to hire a support person to do that. Now we can set up permissions to assign access,” Marcy says. “We use Laserfiche for client files, HR files, benefits, payroll, you name it, so the ability to lock down some files versus other files is really helpful.”

She adds, “Laserfiche doesn’t just say it’s user friendly, it is.”

Automated Compliance – Even at 2 AM

While having more accessible information is a benefit, Gitterman & Associates has also realized that automated information is more useful information. “We do a lot of our compliance right in Laserfiche,” Marcy says. “Instead of our reps having to make copies of client correspondence, they scan them in and it’s automatically submitted to our Chief Compliance Officer in a folder only he has access to. Then we set up a stamping process so the CCO can tell the rep that it’s been approved.”

This automation has paid off in faster service for financial advisors. “One of the nice things is that if our CCO is on the road, it’s not like it has to wait a week if it’s something that needs to be pre-approved. He doesn’t have to look for a fax machine or find time to respond during business hours, he can just log into Laserfiche at 2:00 AM.”

For his part, Jeffrey agrees. “Laserfiche is a huge help from a compliance side.”

But Gitterman says it’s the little things that make using Laserfiche an effective part of everyday business. “The fact that I can redact a line in a memo, and then send it in a secure email—these are the kinds of things I like. I don’t have to ask someone how to do it, I can just do it.”

He sees the potential for Laserfiche to make audits more hassle-free. “I just went through six months of FINRA audits and I can tell you it was painful. They basically put me out of business for six months. If we had already had Laserfiche, it wouldn’t have been a tenth of the nightmare it was,” he says.

“Now that we have Laserfiche, even though an auditor can come and say he wants to see incoming correspondence from a certain date range, we can have everything for them in 30 seconds. That’s going to be huge for us.”

Marcy says now that the firm is enjoying its first taste of content management efficiency, she is eager to see what Laserfiche Workflow can do to automate business process management. “Right now our CRM integrates with our email system—I’d like to see it integrated with Laserfiche as well,” she says. “And our internal processing department will be able to automatically route documents to our principals to approve from anywhere, instead of having them wait in a folder on a desk—that’ll be nice.”

As nice, says Jeffrey, is that the firm has found an ECM system that’s finally living up to its potential—and uncovering new potential in the process. “Of all the new software we’ve gotten in the last few months, this is everyone’s favorite,” he says. “Laserfiche did what it promised to do. None of the other software did.”

Essar Group

With construction and mineral operations in more than 20 countries across five continents, the Essar Group employs 60,000 people in 63 companies, with annual revenues of $15 billion. In 2009, the Mumbai-based conglomerate initiated a plan to establish an enterprise-wide Shared Service Center to consolidate and automate finance and accounting processes across India. It looked to Laserfiche to serve as a foundational component of its agile ECM framework through an integration with its SAP–DMS system to support it.

“We saw Laserfiche as a way to bring visibility, time-bound execution and accountability to our accounting business processes,” says Mandeep Singh, Head of Finance Shared Services at Essar.

Working with Laserfiche reseller Sigma-Tech India Pvt. Ltd, Essar Group initially purchased a 100-user Laserfiche Rio solution. What started as simply a way to centralize all finance-related information evolved into a full-scale ECM/BPM implementation.

According to Singh, “We started using Laserfiche primarily as a scanning and document management solution, but after experiencing the way Laserfiche Workflow and its integration capabilities could be used for our scanning operations, we scaled up use dramatically.”

Chandresh Sharma, Vice President at Sigma-Tech, worked with Essar business analysts to map out the end-to-end processes for finance and accounting functions. These processes were mapped in Laserfiche Workflow to validate vendor, customer, company and invoice information from the SAP masters, and ultimately route and approve invoices and contracts processed between Essar’s global business units and the Shared Service Center at its Mumbai headquarters.

Balancing Centralized and Decentralized Processes

“Laserfiche operates as part of a ‘hub and spoke’ model with the Shared Service Center as the hub and business geographies as the spokes, which connect to the central hub for document processing,” Singh explains.

A major operational benefit has been the ability to seamlessly balance centralized and decentralized processes using Laserfiche as both the hub and the spoke. “Financial Shared Services uses both models to fulfil transactions,” explains Singh.

  • The centralized process approach is enabled by a central hub that accesses Laserfiche to process documents. Work allocation is assigned using Laserfiche Workflow, which detects exceptions to mapped data validation rules during the scanning process and provides notifications to responsible parties to resolve discrepancies. “This ensures that clean data is passed into the downstream operations of the financial services,” Singh says. A mail room solution is also in place to track and deliver transactions to Laserfiche, further accelerating the process and increasing productivity.
  • The decentralized process approach uses Laserfiche deployed locally to establish remote common collection hubs at various offices across India (and eventually globally) through which vendors working with ESSAR can submit hard copies of transactions. “Laserfiche is run in a dedicated center and further downstream processes like scanning, indexing and quality assurance are carried out before being published to the SAP-DMS,” he adds.

International offices use an FTP route offline. “Here the SPOCs [single point of contact] submit their invoices to the FTP folder. From there the invoices are scheduled for automatic entry into the Laserfiche server using Laserfiche Import Agent. This enables further processing,” explains Singh.

In addition to streamlining accounting processes, Laserfiche has standardized work allocation enterprise-wide. “Operationally, work allocation is now defined based on certain parameters mapped in Laserfiche. For example, ‘Process Type,’ ‘Document Type,’ ‘Location Code,’ ‘Country Code,’ ‘Business Vertical,’ ‘Priority’ and others,” says Singh.

Shared Services, Enterprise Benefits

The benefits of using Laserfiche as part of the Shared Service Center have been both immediate and long-term:

  • Better throughput in terms of number of transactions per process associate.
  • Accelerated invoice turnaround times of less than an hour for urgent invoices across geographies and less than a day for normal invoices.
  • Increased visibility of daily transactions across 63 group companies. Laserfiche publishes a daily report to the business intelligence layer for companywide unified reporting.
  • Increased visibility of pending transactions in a categorized manner. Laserfiche Workflow notifies business process owners of necessary actions by way of mail alerts. “Moreover, we also unify these numbers with the business intelligence (BI) platform to provide better visibility,” says Singh.
  • Enhanced control environment through automatic system-end integrated validations with SAP-DMS using Vendor, Customer and Company Code checks for duplications or mismatches at the source stage itself. Laserfiche also does a validation for the key fields entered and runs a duplicate check across its database for any potential duplicates—which are then provided as reporting numbers and integrated with the BI platform.

The most ostensible benefit is obviously reducing invoice processing times from, on average, a matter of weeks into days and sometimes hours. But combined with increased transparency of business processes, Laserfiche has brought a new level of accountability to staff. With Laserfiche Audit Trail giving a step-by-step history of each action and user in the process, there are significant quality control and productivity benefits. Says Singh, “People think twice before performing a transaction.”

Though formal impact analysis has not been conducted, Singh estimates that Essar Group has realized a 40% return on its Laserfiche investment already, but foresees ongoing and expanding operational improvements. “Major ROI will come by de-skilling profiles deployed across companies for financial processes,” he explains.

Following the success of integration with SAP-DMS, Essar is now working with Sigma-Tech India to integrate Laserfiche (and SAP) with ARIBA financial software, as well as related procurement and e-invoicing modules to develop straight-through processing for accounts receivable, fixed assets, business expense reimbursements and income tax declaration. “We’re also now contemplating using [PDP partner] LincDoc for form-based workflow requirements,” Singh concludes.

Mandeep Singh on Putting the Laserfiche Run Smarter® Philosophy into Practice

Understand the content and information requirements across your organization and you’ll see the value of using Laserfiche for more than search and retrieval. As our ongoing success has shown, Laserfiche is agile enough as an enterprise solution to manage document-based workflows and accelerate turnaround time. At the same time, implementing these workflows yields a fresh perspective on how processes can be most effectively managed. In that sense, Laserfiche has been a tremendous tool for change management and developing new, more comprehensive business processes that have given Essar Group fresh perspective and improved our overall investment perspective as a company.