Dismantling the Dysfunction: Reinforcing Trust, Confidence, and Accuracy in Records Management
Physical documents can easily get lost or destroyed without proper storage and tracking. This exposes your organization to expensive risks from inconsistent disposition, over-retention or poor auditing practices.
Furthermore, by law, organizations like yours are often required to retain physical records and make them accessible for on-demand retrieval. Securing and granting access to these items can be a time-consuming, burdensome process. This is especially true if you’ve inherited a disjointed legacy software system, or are still tracking files with Excel spreadsheets.
To help solve these problems, you can leverage solutions that provide management of physical documents while making those records available to search and view digitally. Combining physical tracking with digital integration allows you to locate documents easily while maintaining the integrity of the original items.
Laserfiche + Gimmal have worked together to integrate our existing digital and physical systems into one seamless solution. Join us on Thursday, November 9 at 10:00 AM PT | 1:00 PM ET to see how this integration works and how your peers have benefitted from streamlining this technology in their own organizations.
During this session, you will learn how to:
Digitize and auto-classify in one single/centralized and unified system
Improve access and response times when locating vital documents and data
Simplify retention and disposition so that you can defensibly expunge unnecessary records
Replicate lessons learned from real-world examples and success stories you can take back and apply to your own records management program
In 2020, the Town of Prosper created a continuous process improvement program based on lean practices. As a part of this effort, the town aimed to eliminate paper-driven processes and manual tasks across various departments in order to meet the demands of the town’s growing population.
SOLUTION
The IT department began by replacing the paper applications for the town’s boards and commissions with a Laserfiche form. After experiencing Laserfiche’s ease of use, the department expanded with more electronic forms for the municipal court and the public works departments.
RESULTS
In addition to reduced opportunity for error and a streamlined staff experience, the time the public works department spends on the water equipment readings process has been cut by 75% or more. The department estimates it has saved more than 100 hours annually by re-engineering the process.
The Town of Prosper is a fast-growing suburb with small-town charm, located 30 miles north of Dallas at the crossroads of U.S. 380, Preston Road and the Dallas North Tollway in Collin and Denton Counties. Prosper sits on 27 square miles and is home to more than 35,430 people. A home-rule municipality, governed by a council-manager form of government, the town has full-time fire and police departments, including its own dispatch service. As the Town grows to its projected build-out population of 70,000 residents, Prosper’s vision is to remain a “Place Where Everyone Matters.”
Prosper is a town within Texas’s Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area that has experienced tremendous growth in recent years. With a projected build-out population of 70,000 — double its current population — the town’s IT department has had the foresight to prioritize increased efficiency, implementing processes and solutions that will help the town scale with growth and continue delivering high quality public services.
As a part of this effort, IT has leveraged Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) in various departments as a channel for process modernization and efficiency. The town started by replacing the paper applications for the municipality’s boards and commissions with a Laserfiche form. After experiencing Laserfiche’s ease of use, the department expanded with more electronic forms for the municipal court and the public works departments.
“We’re utilizing Laserfiche for what it’s good at, which is routing information, filing it into a system that makes it easy to search, easy to retrieve and easy to maintain with retention guidelines,” said Leigh Johnson, director of information technology at the Town of Prosper. “Anywhere that we can get a department to start using it more we’re trying to do so.”
Johnson’s vision puts digitization and centralization at the forefront, reducing opportunity for human error while providing a streamlined staff and citizen experience when interacting with the town’s information. Laserfiche supports this vision, as the town continues to explore new ways to leverage Laserfiche’s robust records management, electronic forms and integration capabilities.
Supporting Town Services Through Process Modernization
The Town of Prosper recently implemented a continuous improvement program with the ultimate goal of maintaining a high quality of service to the town’s growing population. This initiative led the IT department to explore opportunities for new efficiencies within existing technologies and processes.
“From the moment I started digging into Laserfiche, I thought ‘This is really slick,’” Johnson said. “I learned about forms and workflow, and we decided at some point that we needed to be utilizing it more and get some training on it.”
The IT department tapped the town’s Laserfiche solution provider, MCCi, for support and training on the platform, which inspired new ideas and opened doors to more advanced solutions.
One of the first Laserfiche-driven process improvements was done in collaboration with the town secretary, who wanted to modernize the way people applied to be on one of the town’s boards or commissions. Like in many municipalities, Prosper’s application was previously done on paper and the process was entirely manual.
“Any place we can eliminate inefficient processes, whether they are paper or otherwise, is going to benefit us,” Johnson explained.
The new process allows applicants to fill out a digital Laserfiche form on the town’s website. Applicants attach their resumes; information is filed in Laserfiche and assigned a retention schedule, lessening the burden of managing paper records hidden in a filing cabinet.
When COVID-19 arrived, the IT department saw an increased need for digital forms to help decrease foot traffic to Town Hall. Building on their knowledge of Laserfiche forms, the team built several new forms, including:
Hearing requests
Attorney document submittals
Jury summons response
“Laserfiche became our go-to, because it was existing platform and we knew how easy it was to build a form with minimal training,” Johnson added.
Expanding Digital Transformation Across Town Departments
After their experience with creating some helpful Laserfiche forms for the town secretary and municipal courts, the IT department was ready to take on a more complex challenge. The team identified a legacy process that the public works department used daily to collect readings from equipment (such as water meters) at public works facilities throughout the town.
Previously done using a stack of paper comprising a sheet for each facility, the process involves field workers who drive out to each site to take readings from the equipment and note the relevant numbers by hand.
“Employees would then go back to the office and transcribe the information into what I called a ‘dirty log,’ which is basically another piece of paper where numbers could be erased and redone, mustard or coffee could be spilled on it,” Johnson said. Numbers were then transferred into a “clean log,” which could be kept as record and shown to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) during audits. “There were so many opportunities for numbers to be input incorrectly, and it was very time consuming.”
With support from MCCi, the Town of Prosper IT team reimagined the process using Laserfiche, which made the readings available to supervisors back in the office in real time. The new process involves equipping field workers with tablets and enabling them to enter readings digitally into a Laserfiche form. The forms presented a list of facilities and, depending on which facility the field worker selected, the form would dynamically change fields for different types of readings. Field workers electronically sign the form, which would also automatically be geotagged with the location of the facility.
“The public works department wanted another way to verify that a person was at the facility, so that if there was ever any question about it, we would have that signature and geotag,” Johnson said.
Field workers then move onto the next facility and repeat the process. If a supervisor in the office notices an anomaly with any of the information entered, they can immediately notify the field worker to take another reading.
“Before, they have even gotten back to the office before a supervisor could notify them that something looked off, so we’re saving more time and fuel as well,” Johnson added. “As they submit the numbers, they are written to an SQL database. We also file the forms in Laserfiche by month. When TCEQ comes out to do the audit now, instead of having to look through a file folder, we’ve got all the forms filled out, timestamped, geo-tagged, signed, and we know we went out there and did readings as we’re required to do. It’s much more efficient, and it’s updated in real-time.”
In addition to supporting the auditing process, the new equipment readings form has reduced the opportunity for error by eliminating 75% of the legacy process’s manual data entry. Johnson also estimates that the new process saves at least two hours per week in manual transcription, all of which results in huge efficiency gains for the public works department.
Today, the IT department is working on integrations to create even more connectivity and efficiencies. An integration between Laserfiche and the town’s enterprise permitting and licensing system, for example, will enable the planning department to streamline records management by auto-filing paperwork related to permitting and licensing into Laserfiche. The human resources department, too, has embraced a digital approach to managing content and exploring new solutions.
“We went from having just one form for the boards and commissions application to creating dozens,” Johnson said. “We are growing so fast — we have lots of new employees starting, which has been the trend in recent years. So we’re not slowing down; we can’t slow down. There’s so much growth. Residents are very engaged and they demand a lot. Laserfiche is an example of one of the ways we can use technology to scale our services.”
The Pennyrile Area Development District is a public planning and development organization in Kentucky that collaborates with local leaders and agencies to develop and promote programs that improve the overall quality of life for Pennyrile region residents. As a part of its mission, the Pennyrile ADD also provides critical rapid response such as hazard mitigation, care and meal services to seniors, as well as grant distribution for community projects including playgrounds and senior centers.
After COVID-19 work-from-home mandates ended, the organization continued with a hybrid work model. “In order to keep our staff and to gain new valuable employees, we have to continue to offer remote work; it’s a new culture now,” said Pennyrile ADD Chief Financial Officer Alisha Sutton. “We are hybrid, so we typically work two days a week remotely and do three days in the office.”
To enable staff to continue to serve the community at a high level, however, the organization needed to transform its business processes. “We decided that if we were going to have remote staff, a lot had to be automated,” Sutton added. “If employees were at home, they needed access to their work and processes as well.”
Beginning with purchase orders and invoice processing, Pennyrile ADD implemented Laserfiche Cloud to digitize and automate workflows that give staff what they need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. The organization continues to automate more administrative processes, and has since reduced the time it spends on some processes by up to 50%, saving some staff a week’s worth of time per month.
Accelerating Purchase Orders and Invoices in the Cloud
When Pennyrile ADD began seeking better ways to improve collaboration and efficiency with its new hybrid work model, staff created their own proprietary system for purchase orders to eliminate the previously paper-driven, manual process.
“We found very quickly that it wasn’t working well for everyone — we couldn’t see where information was supposed to be as it was moved from one folder to another,” Sutton said. “It was going to be too difficult to create this digital system on our own.”
The team reached out to Laserfiche solution provider Modified Logic seeking a platform to support their digitization efforts and decided to implement a Laserfiche Cloud solution. “There wasn’t much discussion on whether to use a cloud or on-premises system,” Sutton explained. “We knew we wanted to use Laserfiche Cloud because of the access to capabilities, and to be able to use it anywhere that we were located without the added maintenance and security considerations.”
In collaboration with Modified Logic, Pennyrile ADD built a Laserfiche workflow to digitally capture purchase orders and automate their approvals. This eliminated manual routing that was previously done by an administrative assistant, who is now able to work on other administrative projects allowing the accounting staff to focus more on compliance with federal and state grant regulations.
Following their success with the purchase order process, the staff moved on to invoices, which follow a similar workflow. Many of Pennyrile ADD’s invoices represent goods and services for veterans and Medicaid beneficiaries, meaning they include personally identifiable information (PII) that requires Pennyrile ADD to adhere to HIPAA data protection standards.
“A big reason why we chose Laserfiche was that we do collect and store data that falls under HIPAA. Using Laserfiche, with its access controls and credentials, we don’t have to email the information or worry about it moving around our network.”
After automating the purchase order and invoice processes, Pennyrile ADD continued to seek out other areas for increased efficiency. This led the staff to take on automating travel and leave requests, a previously manual process that has been made into a more intuitive and transparent digital workflow.
“We have several staff across different locations, and a lot of times they were routing forms through the mail,” Sutton said. “From the employee perspective, Laserfiche makes these requests a lot easier.”
Next, the organization tackled credit card tracking, a process that was previously managed by Pennyrile ADD’s accounting clerk who used to wait until the end of each month to gather everyone’s receipts and reconcile expenses. Using a Laserfiche Form, staff can input credit card usage as it happens, eliminating the burden for everyone involved and cutting the process time by 50%. Additionally, the Laserfiche workflow cross-checks reports from Pennyrile ADD’s accounting software and notifies staff if any amounts don’t balance out.
In addition to reclaiming staff time by eliminating manual work, Pennyrile ADD has sped up approvals on these administrative processes by giving managers access to Laserfiche on laptops and mobile devices when they are traveling. “They can access Laserfiche on an iPad or on their phone, which is a time saver for us because we’re not waiting on documentation,” Sutton said. “We’re getting things approved and moving processes along on a daily basis; before, sometimes we’d have to wait weeks.”
With the processes that the organization has automated using Laserfiche, Pennyrile ADD has saved an estimated week’s worth of time for two full-time employees per month.
Pennyrile ADD continues to ride the momentum of its automation initiatives, next looking at an integration with its accounting system, new processes for conference room reservation and board travel requests, as well as potentially using Laserfiche for fiscal agents to collect information and make disbursements.
There is no shortage of work for Pennyrile ADD, which has now taken on the responsibility of moving the Pennyrile region beyond the pandemic by providing essential community and economic development, senior and independent living and workforce services.
“In our meetings, we will talk about different problems, and usually I will say, ‘Hey, Laserfiche can help with this.’ Digitization and automation is part of our culture now.”
Located in south central British Columbia, Westbank First Nation (WFN) is one of eight Okanagan Nation communities representing a portion of the Syilx traditional territories that have inhabited the valley for thousands of years. Today, the First Nation government comprises about 200 staff members who serve a population of 10,000 residents spread across four reserves. In an effort to address silos between departments and reorganize physical documentation in storage, WFN sought to digitize and inventory its existing paper records. After exploring options with its digital workplace solutions provider Ricoh Canada, WFN selected Laserfiche as its electronic records management (ECM) system. Since implementing Laserfiche more than a decade ago, WFN has expanded its digital transformation efforts, introducing Laserfiche Workflow and Forms to automate business processes, and utilizing metadata to improve reporting and turnaround times.
“We grew so fast as an organization, identifying many processes that we could streamline along the way,” said Chad Rota, Records and Information Management Supervisor at Westbank First Nation. “Laserfiche has provided us with an opportunity to assess our processes and improve the organization holistically.”
Laserfiche is now used for numerous internal processes across departments, streamlining approvals and records management through automated document routing. In addition to time savings, benefits have also included investigating the ability to support COVID-19 contact tracing efforts, and the flexibility to continue addressing community health and safety through incident reporting.
Establishing a Digital Foundation
WFN manages over 4,400 properties, which requires intensive property tax documentation processes. From early on, WFN recognized the need for a more efficient records management system. A majority of its vital records management and property tax documents relied on off-site filing, resulting in substantial fuel surcharges to store and retrieve boxes. Seeing an opportunity to improve compliance, transparency and efficiency, WFN explored ways to digitally transform the way the organization managed these documents.
Today, the organization uses Laserfiche to process all documents related to each property tax folio digitally, and automatically store them in a centralized location, eliminating lost files. The system enables metadata to be attached to each document, making them easily searchable. The process now requires less paper, which originally required five floor-to-ceiling shelves containing over 4,000 folders to store. Now, there are only a few small folders for processing documents that either need to be scanned weekly or mailed out to residents, helping to improve responsiveness to members. As the organization grew, file storage rooms were converted into functional workspace.
“The repository grew from managing meeting minutes and policies into managing working documents and case files. We really experienced an organization-wide transformation — department by department.”
— Chad Rota, Records and Information Management Supervisor at Westbank First Nation
Increasing Administrative Efficiency and Elevating the Employee Experience
Following the success digitizing its document management process, the organization recognized that internal requests — such as employee change notifications and staff reports — could also be digitized and automated to reclaim time for employees who were manually managing files being passed between departments.
“We really needed a way to improve monitoring and transparency to streamline these submissions,” said Rota.
WFN implemented Laserfiche Forms, which can be edited digitally without being passed between departments for amendment and approval. This system has been fully adopted and integrated across the organization, including the finance department, legal department and HR. Notably, finalized employee change notification requests are automatically filed in Laserfiche via an automated Laserfiche Workflow, with a notification sent to the payroll team for review and approval. This fully digital process has increased efficiency, as well as boosted employee satisfaction as requests are resolved more rapidly.
Additionally, the request portal is hosted using Laserfiche Forms, which can be easily modified and updated with newly available resources. This has supported the dissemination of information throughout WFN, creating a self-service portal for employees, who now have the independence to navigate forms, pending requests and their associated documents.
“Being able to access everything in one central location has empowered staff to become more independent Laserfiche users.”
— Chad Rota, Records and Information Management Supervisor at Westbank First Nation
Prioritizing Employee Health and Safety
In addition to creating a long-term digital culture, Laserfiche has provided WFN with a high-level view of working conditions for its employees, improving health and safety when it matters most. If an incident occurs on-site, employees can complete a dedicated Laserfiche form which is automatically forwarded to WFN’s occupational health and safety advisor, while notifying the director of the submission. The system generates a corrective action task, prompting a discussion about the cause of the individual incident and preventative measures. In addition to metadata based on the location and department of the incident, WFN can leverage advanced reporting tools to identify health and safety trends and make more informed, data-driven decisions to improve conditions for specific locations.
This system also helps support compliance requirements — in terms of policy development, WFN submits annual reports to regional and national governing entities in Canada. Now, staff can extract relevant information from incident responses and complete these forms more quickly and accurately. Additionally, during the early stages of the pandemic, WFN also used Laserfiche to support contact tracing efforts, developing a dedicated form for staff entering the premises in order to comply with British Columbia’s health reporting requirements, eliminating the need for Health and Safety specific software.
Understanding Organizational Priorities
By using Laserfiche to establish replicable solutions that can be applied to a variety of processes, WFN has optimized its resources while enabling employees to be more independent and less reliant on paper files. Documents can be retrieved in seconds, allowing staff to work far more efficiently and take more ownership over core processes. Achieving such substantial savings in time and resources has translated to reduced operational costs and headcount allocations, allowing the organization to run more efficiently.
In terms of future digital transformation plans, WFN is working to digitize and streamline accounts payable using Laserfiche Forms and process automation. The organization is also exploring Laserfiche Cloud as a storage solution moving forward.
“We are able to go from the troubleshooting and testing phase to launching new processes so rapidly because we have so much at our fingertips with Laserfiche. It’s easy for us to mobilize efforts and prioritize our workload the right way.”
— Chad Rota, Records and Information Management Supervisor at Westbank First Nation
The City of Santa Monica, California, leverages Laserfiche to provide better services at a lower cost and with lower friction to constituents.
Transcript
Santa Monica is a city of 8.3 square miles. 93,000 residents and about 1800 staff members. We’re a full service city. We have our own utilities, our police, fire traffic, even our federal airport. First, we got a great beach and we have a lot of technology, a very complex environment with probably over 300 applications that we utilize. So I came to the city about five years ago.
Laserfiche was already in our environment. I saw an Opportunity to leverage tools like Laserfiche more extensively to help digitize our environment. And the game changer for us was when Laserfiche came to us and talks about an integration with DocuSign. And so we implemented that. One of the big benefits is that it’s in sustainability.
We no longer use as much paper as it. And in the past three and a half years, we estimated you’d saved over 180000 hours staff time. That integration when the pandemic hit, we had to quickly and become a virtual workplace. We had made the city workforce completely mobile with technology. We had created a user experience that was the same whether you were virtually working or face to face on site.
And we had done all this not because we were anticipating a pandemic We did it because we wanted to enable flexibility and Work-Life Balance for our staff. What we were able to do very quickly was to pivot and have 80% of our staff teleworking with all the tools they needed in 36 hours. Part of that was we had workflows already in place which utilized these Most people don’t think of government as being frictionless.
This matter of fact, most people consider the government a main source of friction But why does it have to be that way? Can we see a way to provide better services at a lower friction, at a lower cost to our constituents? If we can use the same tools that any other organization uses, it’s just thinking about things different.
I see Laserfiche as one of our key platforms that we can leverage and simplify our environment, but also give us greater capability within one system to do more. I’m Joseph Cevetello, and I’m using Laserfiche to empower the people of Santa Monica.
Located in Alberta, Canada, the County of Newell is known for its central location and dynamic and diverse economy. Recent years have brought growth to the region, including Amazon’s first renewable energy investment in the country — a 80MW solar project expected to produce enough energy to power more than 18,000 Canadian homes for a year. The Newell County government is committed to the area’s progress, continuously improving processes with an eye toward its vision statement: “to encourage and support sustainable growth and quality of life.”
This commitment recently drove a number of transformative efforts at the county, including the digitization and automation of business processes that employees and residents use on a daily basis. The county, a Laserfiche customer since 2004, has been going through processes strategically, optimizing steps using a lean project management methodology.
“We strategically approach everything that we do,” said Roberta Fernell, director of information technology at the County of Newell. “Every process or system we introduce, we want to understand how it fits, and where we may need to adjust to make some improvements. That’s why we did an organization-wide implementation of Laserfiche.”
Reimagining Records Management
Working with Laserfiche solution provider Inspiris, the County of Newell achieved a strategic priority by digitizing and centralizing information in Laserfiche. The Laserfiche platform became the foundation on which departments could build automated processes and integrate with other systems to streamline information flow throughout the organization.
“Digital transformation is a journey, an evolution in how our organization works, operates and moves forward to better serve the public,” said Joanne Wells, records management technician at the county. Departments that now use Laserfiche include:
Administration
Agricultural Services
Corporate Safety
Enforcement
Engineering Services
Finance
Fire Services
Fleet Services
Human Resources
Information Technology
Municipal Services
Planning and Development
The centralization and digitization of records has also supported the county’s commitment to open government, and compliance with Alberta’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIP), as well as the federal Access to Information Act and Privacy Act. The county website’s public portal removes the burden from county staff who previously had to manually pull records, which could cause delays.
“I receive a lot of internal requests for information,” said Ariana Nielsen, executive assistant at the county. “And the search capabilities of Laserfiche allow the public to find information on their own without having to wait for a response.”
Plus, Fernell added, the visibility into what documents are being downloaded enable county staff to gage what the public is interested in: “This information gives us insights into the hot topics — we might find, for instance, that we should do an educational campaign on social media because we see high interest on something particular. We’re leveraging our information in a connected way that can inform other areas of the organization.”
Reclaiming Time in Accounts Payable
As the county assessed the potential for further improvements, accounts payable came up as one process that touched multiple departments but heavily relied on manual tasks. The county re-engineered the AP process, capturing invoices digitally in the Laserfiche repository and using a Laserfiche workflow to automate the routing of information to various departments for reviews and approvals.
This transformation increased visibility of invoices across the organization, enabling the county to accelerate payments and more accurately determine cash flow. Laserfiche integrates with the county’s financial management software, Diamond, as well as its CentralSquare asset management system to create a seamless experience for employees who interact with the AP process.
“The AP process in Laserfiche is efficient and great time saver,” said Emerson Pankratz, the county’s accounting clerk. “It is very easy to enter new invoices into the system and get them to the appropriate person for coding and approvals quickly. Also, Laserfiche’s ability to recognize duplicate invoices helps stop duplicate payments and duplication of efforts.”
“We not only reduced our inaccuracy and our opportunity time — or the time that should be reduced to improve process performance — but we increased our value-added time, or the tasks we do that actually add value to the process, by 27%.”
— Roberta Fernell, director of information technology at the County of Newell
Simplifying the COR Audit Process and Enhancing Employee Experience
As the county’s success with digitization and automation projects spread, the county’s IT team began leveraging a lean methodology to prioritize projects that would have the highest impact.
The organization undergoes a Certificate of Recognition (COR) audit each year to maintain its recognition for developing health and safety programs that meet the standards established by the Alberta government. A previously arduous audit process led the county to reassess its health and safety training documentation, a critical process for the county, which requires all employees to be educated on occupational hazards, preventative measures and best practices.
“For the COR audit, we have to be able to deliver on-demand what they need,” Fernell said. “They need to know that people have received the training required to be competent in their roles, and that we as a county government are keeping them safe by providing that training.”
The IT team built a Laserfiche Form and set up document templates that enable employees to get certificates into the Laserfiche records repository with minimal data entry. The transformation resulted in a reduction of information inaccuracy — from a 58% inaccuracy rate down to below 10%. The county also built notifications into the workflow so that HR employees had visibility into the process — and Laserfiche reporting tools enable managers to view the time it takes to complete the progress, opening up further opportunity for optimization.
While the county used to see about 100 documents related to health and safety training recorded in Laserfiche per year, it now sees about 100 per quarter, thanks to the team’s optimization efforts. The end-to-end process time was also reduced from 135 days to 5.2.
“Staff members want to be recognized for the training they’ve taken,” Fernell said. “And managers need to know what training their staff has taken, or what training they need to take — to help support health and safety in the workplace, and to resource plan.”
County-wide Digital Transformation Continues
The County of Newell continues to strategically optimize processes and integrate systems with Laserfiche with the aim of providing the best possible employee and citizen experience. Major business processes that have already been automated include:
Accounts payable approvals
Corporate safety
Training documentation
County of Newell Water Project registration
Pre/post trip process
Performance reviews
IT change requests
Gravel haul cards
Inspections
Fire permits
The IT team also has significant Laserfiche projects on the horizon, including HR onboarding and offboarding, equipment rentals, expense claims and development permits.
“What impresses the County of Newell is the versatility of Laserfiche. Not only does it effectively manage county documents, applying records management, but it also offers efficiencies in the processing of documents, ways to transfer/share data between systems and methods to electronically capture data to be used for reporting and analytics.”
—Roberta Fernell, director of information technology at the County of Newell
“Laserfiche has totally changed how we operate, and how we think about operating,” said Matt Fenske, chief administrative officer at the county.
To learn more about how Laserfiche drives public sector digital transformation, schedule a demo today.
By simplifying its processes and making better, data-driven decisions, the group of insurance carriers elevates the experience it provides for employees and customers alike.
In recent years, the Isle of Man has undertaken modernisation efforts to the benefit of citizens, bringing more services online and increasing efficiency using Laserfiche for digital records management, electronic forms and workflow automation. The Laserfiche initiatives have created a foundation upon which to build a digital-first government, enhancing the experience for anyone seeking services, whether they are private citizens or businesses.
The Isle of Man Central Registry’s digital transformation efforts unexpectedly became a key factor in its ability to keep business moving during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Having Laserfiche installed, and integrated with government’s online service, was a godsend for the Land and Deeds Registries and all of our customers as it enabled us to continue to provide a full service throughout the lockdown period,” said Registrar General Ed Clague. “In conjunction with government online services, we operated successfully throughout the lockdowns.”
Building a Foundation with Digital Records Management
The Isle of Man sits at the heart of the British Isles with a population of 86,000. As a self-governing British Crown Dependency, the Isle of Man’s parliament is the world’s oldest, dating back more than 1,000 years. The Island’s Central Registry is responsible for maintaining and administering services related to a family of registries including the Civil Registry, Companies Registry, Deeds Registry, Land Registry, and Public Record Office.
Prior to implementing Laserfiche, the land and deeds registries had a mixed way of managing records, which comprised manual search and retrieval, and a bespoke legacy system that was not internet-enabled and approaching end-of-life.
“The biggest motivation for us to move to Laserfiche was its off-the-shelf capabilities, which reduces the risk of having to retire another legacy system in the future, and provides us with a demonstrable upgrade path,” Clague said. “Most importantly, Laserfiche gives us a platform for further digital services. It’s a perfect system for our requirements.”
By transitioning from the registry’s legacy records system to Laserfiche digital records management, the organisation safeguards and centralizes historic records and ultimately provides better customer service via improved efficiency and easier access to information by the people who need it. The ability to provide documents to people who have requested them online and on-demand also reinforces the Isle of Man’s commitment to open government; the organisation aims to make more of its records available online within the coming years.
The digitalisation initiative also supports the Isle of Man’s compliance practices, which have become increasingly important with the introduction of GDPR in 2018. The Isle of Man aims to maintain its reputation for meeting high international standards in its compliance practices, making sure that data is as accurate, reliable and up to date as possible.
“We want to be early adopters of international guidelines; we want to make sure that IT systems can keep up as well,” Clague said. “Our goal is to enable the organisation to evolve with international standards, and we want our practices to be demonstrable, while keeping compliance overhead low.”
While the registry’s initial phase of Laserfiche implementation included digitalisation and data migration, the organisation began seeing even more benefit when Laserfiche was integrated with the Isle of Man’s GIS platform based on Esri’s ArcGIS, as well as the government’s payment gateway in order to streamline land and deeds processes and to create a public search portal for land and deeds. The registry has worked with Laserfiche Solution Provider Manx Business Solutions for implementation, selecting the company for its expertise and experience after evaluating a number of partners.
“People make the project. We have worked with MBS and they have been a fantastic team to work with: a solution-orientated team which listens carefully to our needs and suggesting options,” Clague explained. “MBS is knowledgeable, personable, professional, and flexible at all times. To varying degrees, almost my entire team has worked with MBS at some point of the project — and I’m pleased to say this view is universally shared. I take this opportunity to thank the MBS team, for the work it has done and work it continues to provide — keep up the good work.”
The Isle of Man’s public portal now allows people to access a Laserfiche online 24/7 to purchase deeds. Through the Laserfiche integration with ESRI, the Land Registry also enables customers to search an online map for properties, and view all available documents related to those properties.
“The Isle of Man’s new Land Registry solution based on our ArcGIS technology required a document management element,” said Nart Tamash, solution architect at ESRI UK. “This is where the team at MBS and Laserfiche came into play which enabled us to deliver an end-to-end solution to the Isle of Man’s Central Registry by integrating our off-the-shelf web-based products. The most exciting thing is that this pattern is repeatable, and customisable thanks to our APIs, across many organisations and use cases that require a world class mapping and document management system.”
Quinn Legal, a leading law firm on the Isle of Man, has saved significant time utilising the Laserfiche driven Land and Deeds Registry process. Historically, the firm’s staff would have had to visit the registry on a daily basis whereas now, most of their business can be undertaken online.
“This came into its own when COVID struck, with the Island of Man going into lockdown,” said Neil Quilliam, senior conveyancer at Quinn Legal. “Quinn Legal staff were able to seamlessly continue with their daily interaction with the Land and Deeds Registry online.”
Continuous Innovation to Enhance the Employee and Citizen Experience
When lockdowns took effect, the Central Registry had to close its office to visitors in person, however, it was able to provide a digital alternative for all its services.
“Our implementation of Laserfiche was very timely,” Clague said. “This is the new normal now — we still have customers who visit the office — they may not be able to access digital forms at home for various reasons — but for the most part people now prefer to access our services online. The number of people visiting the office has dropped by 90% if not more. It’s been a massive benefit.”
Along with the rest of the world during COVID-19 surges and mandates, the Central Registry has experienced a growing demand for access to information in real-time online and digital services. By providing those digital services, the Isle of Man has been able to reduce physical foot traffic and simultaneously increase efficiency in its processes, reclaiming time that staff has used to improve the experience for both government employees and the people they serve.
“Governments can get caught in a vicious cycle when trying to do more with less, but we’ve created a virtuous circle. We’ve freed up time by digitalising, and the more that we digitalise, the more we can serve our customers. It’s allowed us to maintain and improve our services at no additional cost, even during lockdowns.”
—Ed Clague, Registrar General, Isle of Man Central Registry
“We are not resting on our laurels,” Clague added. “We want the ability to innovate and move forward. We will be using Laserfiche as a fundamental component in transforming our business. We will be moving more of our services online. We will be protecting our critical business records. And we will be improving our working environment and improving our efficiency.”
