Samish Indian Nation Automated Grant Approval with Laserfiche Forms

Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: JR Walters, IT Director, Samish Indian Nation

Headquartered in the Pacific Northwest, the Samish Indian Nation is governed by a seven member Tribal Council elected to oversee the tribe’s welfare and resources. Members are offered a wide variety of opportunities including housing assistance, elders’ services, healthcare and wellness, and cultural enrichment.

In order to help manage the various programs offered to the tribal members, the nation works with state and federal agencies to implement many grant funded activities. In addition to maintaining the economic welfare of the tribe, these grant deliverables help to protect the environment, and preserve natural and cultural resources.

Before Laserfiche, approving grant applications was a time-consuming, manual process. The tribe’s departments are distributed between five sites and sending paper grant application packets through interoffice mail for internal review and approval was inefficient and costly. Occasionally, grant submission deadlines were barely met because paperwork got lost between sites, sat too long for approval, or was difficult to find and assemble into the grant application packet.

Laserfiche has completely digitized the grant approval process. New grants are submitted through Laserfiche Forms and managers are able to view and approve them from their mobile devices.

With Laserfiche, the time to process a grant has been reduced from one week to just one day.

“I’m absolutely in love with Forms and process automation. I see so much potential in how other departments could utilize it,” says JR Walters, IT Director.

Grant Application Approval Requests Are Submitted Through an Electronic Form

The process starts when an employee applying for a grant, fills out the grant application approval request form in Laserfiche Forms.
Employees fill out an electronic form to start the grant approval process

Once submitted, the grant application is routed to the department supervisor for approval. If the department supervisor approves it, the application is routed to the general manager, compliance officer and controller, for simultaneous review. Once approved by everyone, the grant application is put in front of the seven member tribal council for approval. Each of the approvers is notified of grants requiring their approval through email.
Email notifications keep grant application approvers notified of pending tasks

If any of the approvers reject the grant, the process ends and the submitter is notified by email. He or she then has the option of submitting a new application form.
Laserfiche Forms makes it easy to configure email notifications for rejected applications

Throughout the process, timers are attached to each approval task. In this way, if the form isn’t approved in a timely matter, the approver receives a follow up email reminder.

Submitted grant application review forms and supplemental information are stored in folders in the Laserfiche repository specific to the grant.
Grant applications are organized by grant name in the repository

The Process Was Designed with the Help of the Business Process Library

In order to simplify designing of this process, the tribal nation took advantage of the Business Process Library (BPL). The nation downloaded the Legal Document Review Forms template and modified it to suit the specific needs of the grant approval process. Some of these modifications included:
  • Adding additional reviewer tasks.
  • Increasing the number of email notifications.
  • Adding timers and reminder emails.
  • Configuring the appropriate folders for saving the forms to the repository.

“Before starting to design a process from scratch, I look to see if it has already been done in the Business Process Library. Since it is already done once, it is easy to duplicate. The BPL is a great resource,” says Walters.

The grant application approval process design

Processing Grant Applications Now Takes One Day Instead of One Week
  • Automating the grant application approval process with Laserfiche has resulted in the following benefits for Samish Tribal Nation:
  • Grant applications are now processed in one day instead of a week or longer.
  • Managers can review from their mobile devices which leads to a faster turnaround time for grant approvals.
  • Documents can be tracked quickly throughout their lifecycle and are never lost.
  • Staff can process more grants in the same time period.

Digital Transformation Energizes County of Los Angeles Housing Agency

The Los Angeles County Development Authority (LACDA) digitally transformed its records management program, incorporating Laserfiche to digitize, centralize and manage the lifecycle of records. Since deploying Laserfiche, the agency has reclaimed significant time for its case workers while boosting its ranking with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to the designation of “high performer”—an improvement that helps secure funding and enables the LACDA to provide more services and programs to more people.

Case Managers’ One-Stop Shop

The LACDA is a public agency responsible for providing LA County residents essential programs related to subsidized housing, community development, and affordable housing development and preservation. Serving the most populous county in the United States requires the LACDA to house decades’ worth of records related to hundreds of thousands of cases. These span a wide range, from groups applying for Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) that provide resources to underserved areas, to people in need of Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers and residents of all ages applying for education and training in an effort to build better lives and better neighborhoods.

The LACDA previously stored records in filing cabinets and across various servers and systems. As the number of records grew, the agency identified the need to digitize and centralize them using a Laserfiche electronic records management solution. Laserfiche was also integrated with the LACDA’s property management software, Yardi, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, PeopleSoft, to eliminate the risk of duplicating information or work.

“Case managers don’t need to switch between applications to look up or copy information, they can view all the documents in one place,” says Rosa Chevarin, supervisor for Yardi/Laserfiche support. “They like the one-stop shop feel, and everything is streamlined in their natural workflow.”

Through this digital transformation, the agency made information more available, accessible and usable to authorized users.

“In an agency that manages more than 3,000 public and affordable housing units and assists more than 24,000 residents through a housing choice voucher program within the county, being able to pull up submitted information at a moment’s notice is vital,” says Doug Van Gelder, Manager of Information Technology at the LACDA.

This also enables the agency to:
  • Connect more people to the services they need in a more efficient manner
  • Mitigate risk of data loss or breach
  • Simplify the auditing processes

The LACDA’s new solution exceeds the basic expectations of records management and incorporates automation. Laserfiche automatically files documents with standardized naming and folder structure. Additionally, when a record’s retention period has ended, relevant employees are notified to handle disposition.

“The need for services is always going to be great, and everyone is always going to be busy doing their jobs,” Van Gelder says. “Finding and pulling documents, and making sure records are taken care of in accordance to regulations is time consuming. The new system takes that tedious work away from the case managers, so they can focus on the people they serve.”

Uncovering New Efficiencies to Serve More

Since transforming its records management, the LACDA has gained the ability to automate additional business processes. Agency staff has automated the new employee onboarding process, which previously required a new associate to spend about half of their first day on the job filling out paperwork. The new Laserfiche solution enables the agency to send the new employee a link to all the necessary forms that can be completed before their start date.

“I want to be as digital as possible,” says Van Gelder, adding that there are also plans to rebuild the LACDA’s housing portal to allow people to apply for programs online. The workflow for processing those applications would also be automated using Laserfiche to facilitate quicker response times, better transparency into the process for both the staff and applicant, and less risk for error.

The agency’s newfound efficiencies have proven essential in a time when the LACDA’s programs and services are needed more than ever. The waiting list to receive Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers has about 44,000 people on it, while the agency’s staff is down to about half of what it was a decade ago due to the economic downturn and attrition. “The only way we’ve been able to provide the same level of service with half the staffing is through technology,” Van Gelder explains.

Additionally, over 70 percent of the LACDA’s funding comes from HUD, which regularly audits housing authorities to ensure funding is going toward serving people who need these critical programs and services.

“If a housing authority does not rank well, HUD could potentially take funding back and give it to another housing authority that proves it is helping more people and running more efficiently,” Van Gelder says.

Since the LACDA deployed its Laserfiche records management initiative, it has boosted its ranking and maintained its status as a high performer.

“The need is always going to be greater than the funding, but IT is one of the units within the organization that has the ability to provide productivity enhancements while bringing cost down,” Van Gelder says. “We’ve been able to serve more people with quality services and programming with half the staffing we used to have through these technology solutions.”

Leading public sector organizations use an electronic records management solution to increase efficiency and improve citizen services. To learn more, download the free white paper: “Streamlining the Business of Government.”

The City of Rochester Powers Public Records Requests

As one of the most populous cities in New York state (after New York City and Buffalo), the City of Rochester relies on its IT department to increase efficiency between city departments and enable more effective public services. Servicing over 14 departments including Public Safety, Police and Fire, the city’s IT teams need systems that can power the city’s many interconnected processes.

After a thorough study of how to redesign and modernize multiple city processes together, the city saw Laserfiche’s strength in business process automation, workflow and document retention and management as an opportunity to use one platform to improve many functional areas.

Automating Freedom of Information Law Requests

The city’s initial improvements came from using Laserfiche to build a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) portal that enables citizens to submit public records requests online.

Previously, it would take staff up to five days to start processing new records requests using paper request forms. With the new portal, citizens can now file new requests via a simple online form and inquiries are immediately sent to the relevant city department for review and approval. Throughout the process, citizens can check the status of their request at any time in the FOIL portal.

An internal Laserfiche progress dashboard also shows department managers the status of open requests and how long it takes each staff member to fulfill them, providing critical data about the city’s efficiency.

“We have gotten really positive feedback from users about the system,” says Harriet Fisher, Senior Business Analyst at the City of Rochester. “One user, in particular, said, ‘This is the best thing since sliced bread!’”

One Platform for City-wide Projects

In addition to reducing processing time for FOIL requests, the city’s police department is currently using Laserfiche for five internal processes, and the accounting department relies on Laserfiche as the backbone of invoice processing. Laserfiche’s user-friendly interface ultimately allows the city to see a quick return on its investment for automation projects and open new avenues for shared services across departments.

“It allows us to easily manage the creation of forms, the development of workflow and security in a way that you do not need to be an application developer,” says Greg Luna, Enterprise Process and Systems Manager at the City of Rochester. “It really is a nice departure from the in-house developed applications—to think out of the box about how we can re-engineer processes, and Laserfiche makes it easy for us to do that.”

Benefits:
  • The city can digitally process over 4,000 FOIL requests each year in half the time that it used to take.
  • More transparent reporting on task efficiency demonstrates the city’s commitment to public service.
  • The city can prove standardized records retention across city operations

Click here to find out how state and local governments are using Laserfiche to streamline citizen service requests.

Tompkins County Enhances Government Transparency Through Shared Services

SITUATION

• Citizens making public record requests encountered red tape and long wait times
• The county was at capacity for paper records and preparing to construct a new building to store them

RESULTS

• $5.5 million saved from not having to build a new records facility
• Transparent and easy to use records request solution increased efficiency in the process by over 100%
• Strengthened information governance, data security and disaster recovery

Tompkins County, NY, is a leader in the government shared services space, with a county-wide task force dedicated to strengthening and sharing local government practices.

“My top priorities are to establish relationships with other governments and to spread Laserfiche and our user group among them,” says Maureen Reynolds, Tompkins County Clerk. Reynolds notes that the county’s primary goal is to help constituents easily access public records without encountering red tape and long waiting times.

“Our demographic expects Amazon-type service,” she adds. “They want it right there, immediately, 24/7.”

Modernizing Records Management

Although the county was committed to improving its records management practices, it had been using an old building to store millions of archived records and was set construct a new building to the tune of $5.5 million—until it discovered Laserfiche’s records management and digital workflow capabilities.

“The Tompkins County team saw an opportunity to modernize the way it manages information while creating cost- savings and new efficiencies,” said Sandy Hess, sales operations manager at ICC Community Development Solutions, a Laserfiche solution provider. “Laserfiche’s intuitive interface and powerful compliance tools made it an ideal fit.”

The county began its Laserfiche implementation by digitizing documents in the county seat of Ithaca, and then quickly brought the county other municipalities on the system. The county created public records portals for each town, enabling citizens to submit records requests forms online, 24/7 without having to travel to their city hall or to Ithaca. Laserfiche’s workflow system automates the intake of requests and routes them to the appropriate clerk or department for processing.

“Any truly public record is there and accessible for people to find themselves,” says Reynolds, adding that having one records system that can be used as a shared service across the county is crucial for quick user adoption and building more transparent governance standards.

“The feedback has been great,” she says. “We go out to the smaller municipalities and they’ve never seen software like this. We’re not here to take over; we’re here to show them what’s possible.”

Benefits:
  • Records requests are completed in half the time, from 28-day to 12-day turnaround times for citizens.
  • The county digitized more than 9,000 boxes of archived records.
  • The county saved $2.8 million in operational costs over the first five years of Laserfiche use.
  • The $5.5 million which was intended for the new records facility was reallocated.
  • County-wide information governance structures were created to organize public records according to federal and state compliance standards.
  • The county improved data security and set disaster recovery controls.

Laserfiche’s flexible automation platform makes it a valuable long-term solution for Tompkins County and other governments that need to respond quickly to changing public demands.

“You get a customizable solution with off-the-shelf software, which is very unique in the software world,” says Alan Karasin, Senior Network Administrator. “We can design exactly what we need, but we have full supportability and are not redesigning the wheel every time we want to do something. We can change our processes up and change them over time as we find what our results are.”

Click here to learn more about how state and local governments leverage document management systems for greater efficiency.

The Town of Okotoks Centralizes Enterprise Data Across 20 Locations

The Town of Okotoks is the largest town in Alberta, Canada, and provides services to over 30,000 residents. The city operates 20 different business centers that are each responsible for their own document filing. Prior to using a document management system, the city battled isolated information gathering and collaboration, leading to delays in public service delivery and data entry errors.

“The town was looking for a more streamlined solution with a central filing location, easier searching capabilities for the employees and everybody on a broad spectrum,” says Sheila Andrew, HR/Corporate and Strategic Administrator for the Town of Okotoks.

Using Laserfiche’s combined electronic forms, workflow and records management capabilities, the city jump-started an enterprise-wide digital records initiative. One central document repository provided a single point of access for information across the city and standardized each department’s disparate document filing and archiving methods.

The system quickly evolved from just a document storage system. It’s now the town’s primary tool for improving future and ongoing operations. Using Laserfiche Forms, the municipality implemented over 150 forms-based processes for numerous activities, including:
  • Waste management
  • HR applications
  • Permitting and inspection submission, review and approval
  • Expense report submissions
  • Records management for land transactions
  • Digital records archiving

Using metadata, federated search and digital document access, employees across city departments can instantly find and collaborate on the information they need to deliver faster public services.

“We’ve gotten great feedback about how quickly approvals are happening now and the ease of access to forms,” says Andrew. “We only have one location to find forms, instead of lots of different places where people were saving PDFs or filing them.”

Benefits:
  • The permitting department has saved, on average, two months of administrative staff work a year.
  • Fire Department and Inspection teams can complete inspections and deliver permits in six to eight months instead of a full year.
  • The city has increased transparency throughout the document life cycle.
  • The city processes over 21,000 digital forms in one system.

Staff collaborates more quickly and in a more transparent manner on documents and requests.

Click here to learn more about how document management technology can enable faster, better quality public services.

DESAF Supports Social Programs with Digital Documentation

As part of Costa Rica’s Ministry of Labor and Social Security, DESAF finances and oversees a broad range of social services across the nation. The agency is responsible for administering the Fund for Social Development and Family Allowances, which allocates budget to 28 different institutions for education, poverty, housing and other programs.

In 2010, new federal regulations required DESAF to modernize its internal processes, and make its legal operations and administrative processes more accessible to its citizens and clients. DESAF, which relied on large physical facilities to store documents and cumbersome manual document searches, implemented Laserfiche to streamline operations and improve client response time.

Beyond Digitization

The agency began using the Laserfiche system to digitize over 32,000 employer files within its Department of Collection Management. With direct access to client files, staff can streamline funding allocation and track employment needs across each agency.

“Initially, the only expectation that we had was digitalizing all of the documents,” says Robert Delgado Castro, Debt Control Analyst for DESAF. “When we began to use the application and all the tools, we found out that we could obtain a lot of complementary usage of the platform.”

By eliminating physical paperwork and manual processes across the agency, staff members can conduct more productive meetings with employers or clients without worrying about missing documents or delaying service.

“In the past, meetings lasted hours and required the review of physical documents,” Castro says. “Now, a meeting is conducted in a digital way without any risk of losing information. What took hours before, now takes just 10 minutes using Laserfiche.”

Benefits:
  • The new system digitized over 32,000 employer files and provided on-demand access to employment files.
  • DESAF reduced its reliance on off-site scanning and paper storage.
  • The debt prescription process was simplified, and wait times were reduced by 50 percent.
  • The organization streamlined monthly log reports with better data transparency.

Streamlining document access ultimately allows the agency to more quickly allocate the right amount of funding to the right organizations, respond to inquiries from each agency and analyze the efficiency of its social programs across the board.

“I’m sure the relationship between DESAF and Laserfiche will last for many years in the future in order to accomplish our objective, to fight against poverty in a very efficient way,” says Castro.

Click here to learn more about streamlining records management using Laserfiche.

Simplifying Government Services at Hurunui District Council 

New Zealand’s Hurunui District has a population of more than 13,000 spread across 864,640 hectares just north of Christchurch. Serving a largely rural area, the Hurunui District Council excels at developing a sense of community, partnership and well-being. 

“Our services are extremely broad,” said Stewart Tayles, digital transformation and IT team leader at Hurunui and Kaikoura District Councils. “From dog registrations to consents, or running youth programming to providing social housing — we really do everything essential for our community.”  

This wide-ranging scope requires a flexible technology infrastructure where systems can be integrated and adapted to the territory’s growing needs.  

“Our CEO wants the council to be a 24/7 operation — we need to be engaged with the community and enable them to engage with us,” Tayles added. “We need forms. We need to make information available. We need to be able to provide access to these services when people need them.”  

Replacing Legacy Document Management with Robust Content Services 

The council initially procured Laserfiche to replace a legacy document management system (DMS) when the growing amount of information generated proved too much for the legacy system to efficiently handle, control and retain.  

The Hurunui team worked with Ricoh New Zealand to find an ideal solution in Laserfiche, which would meet the council’s changing needs. Today, Laserfiche serves the council as a versatile, enterprise-wide solution. “Being New Zealand’s eighth-largest district by land size, we needed a system with the capability to connect our multiple offices,” said Scott Linton, IT and GIS manager for Hurunui District Council. “We were really impressed at how easy it was to implement Laserfiche and connect our main office with five satellite locations. It was up and running in no time.” 

Building Consents Made Simple with Laserfiche Forms 

Beyond basic document management, the district manages vital processes — including resource consents — using Laserfiche’s forms, integration and workflow capabilities, supporting the development and economic growth of the territory.  

Building consent applications typically come in through Simpli, which provides a standard form for building control authorities — however, the council found the vetting of these submissions to be laborious and prone to human error. “Before we can process an application, we need to check that all the information is there, it’s valid and it’s suitable,” Tayles said. To address this manual review bottleneck, the team created a Building Consent Vetting Checklist in Laserfiche, which checks and validates the information before it’s officially submitted and reviewed by the district council. “It checks what we call the ‘Hurunui-isms,’ or the requirements that are very specific to our district.”  

With 500-600 applications per year, the checklist process has solved a long-standing headache for the building department and simplified consent review.   

On the back end, Laserfiche enables the council to keep records in a standardized way that is easy to navigate. 

“Each property has its own folder that contains an average of 40-50 pages on the details,” Linton said. “We have tens of thousands of documents that need to be identified and placed with the correct property. We applied a Laserfiche template with metadata information such as the building type, number, property ID, evaluation number and address. Laserfiche Workflow then automatically identifies, filters and files the documents in their correct folders.” 

Enhanced Contract Management with a Centralized Contract Register 

Also an integral part of the council’s infrastructure responsibilities is its ability to work with contractors to provide various services such as road construction, maintenance, waste management or cleaning services. A recent audit uncovered the need for more robust processes surrounding these contract approvals and service procurement — another area that Tayles understood Laserfiche could help. 

“We had a short time to implement a more robust, multi-step process,” Tayles said. “We sat down and said, ‘We can build this in Laserfiche Forms.’”  

The council now has a Contract Register in Laserfiche, which helps to centralize and organize the many projects, subcontracts under those projects and associated documentation that the council must manage. 

“Database lookups query the Laserfiche database directly to pick contract numbers and project numbers, so that we get a standardized naming format,” Tayles explained. “All those records automatically go into that contract or project folder, and we know they are correctly named and easily found later.”  

The biggest benefit to the council has been the transparency of the process. “By recording the decision-making, we can show why we went with a particular supplier, and show stewardship of the funds we receive from the central government,” Tayles said. After the new Contract Register was implemented, the council received glowing feedback from the central government on the new process. “We went from one end of the spectrum to the other.”

Building Trust: Improving Accountability and Transparency 

As part of its expansive range of services, Hurunui District Council prioritizes community engagement to build a strong community as well as ensure the mutual respect between government and constituents. Laserfiche’s ability to put information at the fingertips of those who need it provides a strong foundation on which to build that engagement.  

“We have a policy where we must archive every email, so another big project we’ve done is create our email archive in Laserfiche,” Tayles said. This archive provides referenceable information for legal compliance, auditing and accountability, as well as historical record and disaster recovery. “Now, all emails go into Office 365, and we use Laserfiche Connector to archive them in Laserfiche.”  

Tayles explained that Laserfiche was the right choice for the project not only for its archiving capabilities but also for its security tools. “Hurunui grows by 25,000 emails a week, and we are heavy on security,” he said. “We only want people to see their own emails. But we’re also subject to LGOIMA — the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act — where people can request all the information about a subject, so we’re able to give some people delegated access to the whole repository for searches.”  

Prior to using Laserfiche for the archive, the council was spending $50,000 per year on Mimecast, which they were able to retire and redirect funds toward additional security measures and other IT projects.  

A Flexible Solution to Any Problem 

Today, Hurunui District Council has over 220 active Laserfiche Forms, which span the organization’s full operations. “Forms are the backbone for multiple departments in the council,” Tayles said. “Other councils just can’t believe what we do with Laserfiche and how we make it work for our users. Laserfiche is an essential technology at Hurunui.”  

In addition to the processes that are ubiquitous in the government space, niche operations that are more common for district councils — from toilet cleaning and mowing to youth programming — also benefit from Laserfiche. One such process that illustrates Laserfiche’s flexibility: connecting lost dogs to their owners.  

“Because we manage the IT for [neighboring district council] Kaikoura, we built a solution to help them with lost dogs,” Tayles said. “They can get a call any time during the day or night about a dog, so they’ve implemented a solution called Doggone. Owners can consent to being texted so that they can be reunited with their dog quicker. Naturally, we had to get all the owner information into that system, but we also had to track whether people had given consent, because we are sharing contact information with a third party — there is a Laserfiche form for that.”  

Tayles and his team also used the Laserfiche API to connect Doggone to Kairkoura’s ERP system that houses the owner information. “We’re using Laserfiche workflow to get the owner information from the ERP and push it to Doggone,” Tayles said. “It also handles any requests for changes in the database, so that as dogs move or change owners, all systems remain up to date.” 

As Hurunui District Council works toward the CEO’s vision for 24/7 service, Laserfiche remains a core technology that will support its growing and changing needs.  

“What I enjoy about Laserfiche the most is the creative flexibility it gives,” Tayles added. “It gives me a lot of different tools to solve problems. There’s nothing prescribed about it — we can build our forms how we want, and we can set the metadata up the way we need it. There really hasn’t been a problem that I haven’t been able to solve using Laserfiche.”  

How Oakland County Drives Innovation for Better Citizen Service

Located just north of Detroit, Oakland County, MI, has more than 60 cities, villages and townships with over 1.2 million people living within its borders.

The county’s ongoing commitment to innovation—led by CIO Phil Bertolini, who was inducted to the CIO Hall of Fame in 2017—has resulted in award-winning initiatives such as the G2G Marketplace (an online resource for governments to research, purchase and implement technology solutions and professional services), and Automation Alley, the state’s nonprofit technology and manufacturing business association.

“At the end of the day, my job is about working with a team that provides innovation and collaboration for Oakland County to improve customer service,” Bertolini says.

Oakland County’s IT team recently assessed its document management system, which was becoming time- and cost-intensive to maintain and update in order to keep up with the county’s constant state of digital transformation.

Increasing Information Access and Automating Processes

After evaluating a number of options, the county selected a Laserfiche enterprise content management solution to replace its legacy system. “The Laserfiche team was able to prototype and show us exactly how we would be able to use the software in our organization,” says Kevin Bertram, IT Applications Services Leader. “That was a key factor for us.”

Oakland County is now implementing Laserfiche across departments and business units including the county courts, to provide better access to information and automate key government functions.

“We want to make those processes more efficient, more automatic and better for the public,” says Bill Jobes, Program Manager at Oakland County. “In order to grow, we have to innovate.”

Empowering Employees and Citizens

By using Laserfiche to digitize information and automate processes, Oakland County aims to empower government employees to streamline operations and improve citizen services.

Benefits include:
  • Reclaimed IT staff time previously spent maintaining and supporting the legacy system
  • Increased access to information for authorized government employees
  • Around-the-clock access to public information and services for citizens through online portals
  • Better reporting and analytics for department leaders, leading to more informed decisions about resource allocation
  • Enhanced transparency of processes for citizens who want to be kept informed of how their service requests are progressing

“We’re always looking for opportunities to be more effective and really bring that cost for service or cost per unit down,” Bertram says. “Not for a bottom-line profit like in the private sector, but to try to reduce the cost of service to our constituents, and use their tax dollars appropriately and as wisely as possible.”

North County Transit District Improves Public Records Access and Retention

The North County Transit District manages public transportation operations in the North San Diego County area, including light rail and community rail systems, buses and disability transportation.

“We move approximately 12 million people a year,” says Sonya Finley, Document Control Coordinator. “We’re small in size, but we do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to transit.”

Maintaining proper access to public records is critical to compliance with regulatory requirements. As a transportation organization, the transit district’s key processes—such as confirming staff members are following standard operating procedures—also ensure the safety of the operation’s millions of passengers.

Moving Away from Shared Drives

In the past, the transit district stored documents on shared drives without a standard organization method, making it difficult for staff to find the right versions for public information requests and new projects. “If you can’t find the documents, you can’t really do business,” Finley says.

To improve staff efficiency, the transit district needed to create a more centralized structure for document management and an organized repository for records retention.

Streamlining Records Retention

Using Laserfiche, the transit district created an organized shared repository for public records as well as department-specific document structures. “If they’re in one centralized place, then my job is a lot easier when it’s time to do a records destruction,” Finley says.

The transit district also used Laserfiche to add in workflows and digital forms to automate processes such as time off requests and new employee onboarding. “The document flows through, and boom, the person gets it. They fill it out and it moves to the next step,” Finley says. “Nothing gets lost on somebody’s desk.”

Benefits include:
  • Reduced staff time spent finding and retrieving documents for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests
  • Quicker submission, review and approvals for contracts, time off requests, staff reports, project approvals and more
  • A more organized, compliant records retention and destruction process

“When staff comes in the morning, they’re opening Laserfiche; it has become part of our daily routine,” Finley adds. “When we have that approval process, those things get cleared and reviewed in a timelier manner. That ensures that all of our staff and even our contractors are following standard operating procedures, so that we can ensure the safety of our passengers.”

Digitization Empowers the Arkansas Department of Labor to Better Serve Constituents

The Arkansas Department of Labor works to ensure workplace safety for more than 3 million citizens each year, overseeing inspections for everything from elevator operations and amusement park rides to child labor, minimum wage and overtime practices.

Structured information access is critical for the departments’ inspectors to review claims quickly and improve workplace safety standards.

Identifying Inefficiencies

“The biggest challenge that we face is making it easy for the people that we service,” says Ken Anderson, Senior Software Analyst for the department. “We want to be able to efficiently serve them and respond to them quickly.”

With claim documents spread across hundreds of filing cabinets, employees previously spent days trying to find the documents they needed during the inspection process. Wage claims could take up to three months to complete.

The department turned to Laserfiche enterprise content management software to reduce the length of inspections by digitizing the wage claim process and provide instant search and retrieval.

Going Digital for Faster Constituent Service

With Laserfiche, the department created an electronic form which enables anyone to submit a wage claim online. The claim is automatically assigned to an investigator for review and stored in the Laserfiche digital repository. Inspectors in the field access Laserfiche on iPads, enabling them to instantly update the claim with new documentation in real-time. Throughout the process, Laserfiche automatically notifies the submitter of the status of their wage claim.

The new process has expedited the department’s public service and produced significant ROI for the use of taxpayer dollars.

Benefits include:
  • The department can complete wage claims in 36 days instead of 120 days
  • The department saves $60,000 annually on building and storage space for records
  • Investigators receive reports from inspectors in field instantly

“Not only is Laserfiche effective within the agency, but it means so much to the person waiting on that check,” Anderson says. “To be able to get it 70 or 90 days sooner is so important to them.”