Laserfiche Enables Digital Transformation in the North Carolina Division of Water Resources

The North Carolina Division of Water Resources’ mission is to protect the state’s surface water and groundwater resources, which includes ensuring safe drinking water, issuing pollution control permits, evaluating environmental water quantity and quality, and enforcing environmental regulations.

The division’s functions—from day-to-day operations to long-term initiatives—require the collaboration of multiple agencies, communication with citizens and the relaying of time-sensitive decisions and documents.

“When it comes to project-related decisions, we have a 30-day turnaround, and sometimes we need to send information across the state,” says Beverly Strickland, Laserfiche Administrator for the North Carolina Division of Water Resources. These deadlines, coupled with the growing need to operate more efficiently, led the division to examine how it was managing information.

Changing Tides

“When we used to snail-mail documents, it was really hard to meet deadlines,” Strickland says. “If the mail gets lost or delayed, you’ve just waived a project. It doesn’t matter how big it is.”

To facilitate faster review and decision-making, the division digitized documents with Laserfiche enterprise content management software. Using Laserfiche, employees can now perform quick searches for information, automatically archive records and easily share documents with other employees or the public by simply sending a link.

Even employees who work in remote areas benefit from the division’s digital transformation. “We have people in the mountains and on the coast that have small bandwidth,” Strickland says. “Laserfiche enables them to view necessary information without having to download an entire PDF.”

The Wave of the Future

The division recently began automating business processes using Laserfiche, which will unlock even more efficiencies as managers gather data on workflow and resource allocation. The Laserfiche Business Process Library, which provides downloadable templated solutions to automate hundreds of common business processes, has been a starting point for the division.

“What I love about the Business Process Library is that I’m not having to reinvent the wheel,” Strickland says. “I can sit with people involved with the process and say, ‘What do you need to see?’ and make adjustments to what Laserfiche has already created.”

Benefits include:
  • Shortened response times to requests for information from days to minutes
  • Reclaimed staff time that is now used for tasks such as writing permits and enforcing environmental regulations
  • Digitized information that enables the division to automate processes for even more efficiency

“It’s the wave of the future,” Strickland says of the division’s digital transformation. “If we want to work toward processes that are more efficient for citizens as well as staff members, we have to find those time savings.”

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department: Gaining a Competitive Edge in Hiring

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD), the largest sheriff’s department in the world and the fourth largest policing agency in the United States, provides law enforcement services to over 3 million residents.

In 2015, LASD identified the need to grow response teams, create new task forces and implement more prevention strategies like after-school programs for at-risk youth. In order to bring in new recruits, however, the department relies on meticulous background checks and a rigorous training program.

The hiring process for LASD’s deputy sheriffs had remained largely unchanged for 15-20 years, and relied on the creation of a “jacket,” a background file of, in some cases, over 1,000 individual pages. Managing jacket creation—from around 2 million pages submitted by over 8,000 eligible applicants annually—caused issues related to efficiency, security and document retention.

Applicants would take from six to 18 months just to reach the primary approval phase. This phase required LASD to create a jacket summary and send it through a two-tiered approval process. Since LASD processed an average of 5,000 jacket summaries annually, typing this summary sheet alone took 10,000 hours. In addition to creating these physical documents, LASD needed to transport and store them at an offsite third-party storage facility after year-end auditing.

In order to hire top talent, LASD needed to eliminate inefficiencies, shorten hiring turnaround and enhance engagement with candidates.

“We needed to be able to create an open level of communication with our applicants, to help them become vested in not only law enforcement, but joining the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department,” says LASD Commander Judy Gerhardt.
LASD transformed its practice of hiring deputy sheriffs in order to meet the changing needs of the county.

Increasing Efficiency in Employee Onboarding

LASD researched a variety of solutions and found Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) provided a level of flexibility for HR automation that matched the department’s specific needs.

“Laserfiche met our content management needs and easily molded to meet other objectives,” says Andres Bilbao, LASD Special Projects Deputy Sheriff. “The very robust workflow activity options showed how we could reach our current goals while accommodating for future goals that are yet to be determined.”

The current need, however, was to bring in more top-tier talent, faster, all while maintaining accuracy and complying with hiring mandates. LASD uses Laserfiche Forms and Workflow for HR automation, which electronically collects information that was previously printed on thousands of pages of paper.
Applicants receive a link to a Personal History Statement that LASD uses to collect information via metadata from 1,600 unique fields.

“Laserfiche Forms is our portal to the world. The ability to standardize a form and email or host a link to that form allows us to gather information efficiently,” Bilbao says. “Laserfiche Workflow, on the other hand, is our invisible staff member. Workflow will be increasingly more involved in our backgrounds process and department as a whole.”

As Bilbao infers, the benefits of implementing Laserfiche in LASD’s HR automation solution went beyond saving paper, allowing the department to eliminate redundant forms and unnecessary tasks. The length of time to hire was ultimately shortened—which is critical in order for the department to compete with other agencies in the race for high-quality applicants.

Additionally, all applicant information is now easily searchable via metadata, and Laserfiche sends email updates to candidates throughout the process, improving the relationship between the organization and its applicants. Laserfiche Workflow also securely archives information, making it easy to retrieve during yearly audits by the Police Officer Standards and Training Council.

A Streamlined, Paperless Future

“By reducing our inefficiencies, engaging our applicants and dedicating ourselves to a system that provides a competitive hiring time frame, we can continue to meet our goals of hiring the best,” Gerhardt explains.
Todd Rogers, Assistant Sheriff, accepts a Run Smarter Award at the Laserfiche Empower Conference, recognizing LASD’s innovative hiring initiative.

By automating and transforming HR onboarding with Laserfiche ECM, LASD:
  • Drove the time-to-hire down from as long as 18 months by restructuring the process, eliminating inefficiencies and establishing parallel processes
  • Used personalized email notifications to engage candidates throughout the hiring process
  • Established milestones for reporting and process baselines
  • Maintained security throughout the entire hiring process, including archiving and storing jackets for the appropriate length of time

LASD continues to increase efficiency by using HR automation to eliminate redundancies. Additionally, LASD seeks new ways to streamline back-office operation, including digitizing all employee files, which would give employees more time to focus on the services that directly affect LA residents.

“Laserfiche is allowing us to function in a more streamlined manner and also to focus on details that we never had time for or even imagined were options previously. We set out to replace an out-of-date tracker and ended up reinventing what we do,” says Bilbao.

Click here to learn more about how HR processes, such as employee onboarding and records management, can be streamlined with Laserfiche. 



Why You Need to Care About DoD 5015.2

It’s said that the wonderful thing about standards is that there’s so many of them. But when it comes to records management, one in particular stands out: Department of Defense 5015.2 (DoD 5015.2).

Formally known as Design Criteria Standard for Electronic Records Management Software Applications (you can see why most people call it 5015.2), the standard is recognized not only in government, but also in the private sector, writes David Roe in CMSwire. “By being certified, records management solutions can assist corporations to achieve compliance and reduce risk by enabling them to control how and for how long enterprise content is retained. It also ensures destruction of that content when this time has elapsed.”

DoD 5015.2 Background

DoD 5015.2 came about in the early 1990s following Congress’s investigation into the Gulf War Syndrome, a debilitating illness affecting many soldiers who fought in the war, according to the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) Records Management Application (RMA) website. This mean DoD officials had to produce millions of records from Operation Desert Storm. “Congress concluded that the Defense Department did not do a good job of managing the records and as a result, many of the needed records had been destroyed or lost,” JITC notes.

Congress ordered the Defense Department to improve its records management capabilities, so the DoD created a task force in 1993, including representatives from several military branches and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The task force published its report, specifying functional requirements and data elements for an electronic RMA, in 1995, and later developed into a testable and measurable design criteria standard by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

In 1998, NARA endorsed DoD 5015.2, which meant that federal agencies other than the DoD could adopt it as a baseline standard for records management. NARA noted, though, that this was not an exclusive endorsement—meaning it could endorse other protocols as well—and that more was required than just the standard itself. “DoD 5015.2-STD defines only a baseline set of requirements for automated records keeping,” cautioned John W. Carlin, then Archivist of the United States. “There are a number of additional questions that must be resolved in order to satisfy all the established requirements for managing federal records. Each agency must address some of these questions to fit their own environment.”

What is the purpose of DoD 5015.2?

The purpose of having DoD 5015.2 is so users have some assurance that products support records management in a standardized way as they work toward compliance with the 2012 NARA/OMB Managing Government Records Directive, OMB 12-18. That mandates that all permanent records be managed in digital format by 2019, as well as calling for management of email in electronic format by 2016.

Electronic records management software enforces organization-wide records policies and reduces the cost of regulatory compliance. Records management systems let organizations centrally, securely and electronically manage their records. This kind of software lets records managers track and store records in a variety of formats, including:
·         Imaged documents
·         Electronic documents generated by programs (e.g., Microsoft Office)
·         PDFs
·         Scanned and digital photographs
·         Audio and video files
·         Output from legacy systems
·         Physical records stored offsite

Other incentives for improving electronic records management include a 2010 requirement that U.S. agencies move to the cloud when possible, other initiatives to streamline business processes and prepare for audits, and concerns about security. Having all federal agencies supporting DoD 5015.2 makes it easier to perform such overarching tasks as populating metadata in records.

“DoD 5015.02-STD marked the beginning of the transition from paper-based systems to electronic-based systems to manage records,” writes JITC. “DoD 5015.02-STD made it possible to transfer records management responsibility from the file room to the front office, from the hands of a few, to the hands of virtually all employees.”

Now on Version 3, DoD 5015.2 includes features such as establishing requirements for managing classified records, as well as requirements to support the Freedom of Information Act, Privacy Act, and interoperability. In particular, Version 3 was endorsed by NARA as meeting the agency’s criteria for transferring permanent electronic records to it.

Vendors certify their products against DoD 5015.2 through JITC’s software testing program for the standard. After they pass, their products are put onto a list. DoD organizations can purchase only the records management products that are on this list.

Other opportunities for record management

All that said, DoD 5015.2 isn’t a panacea. It has been criticized by some as being overly complex and unwieldy (well, it is a government standard) and outdated.

“Why is it assumed that what may be required and workable for Defense will also be viable for the civilian federal government?” writes Ron Layel, a records management contractor for NASA, noting there are several examples where the 170+ functional requirements in 5015.2 are either irrelevant or over-engineered, particularly for civilian agencies.

But as we also know, the wheels of government standard development tend to grind pretty slowly, so chances are we’ll have DoD 5015.2 Version 3 with us for some time to come. And knowing a DoD-certified system has been tested against the DoD’s rigorous standards provides reassurance to records managers at thousands of organizations across a wide variety of industries.

Unless you work for the State Government of Victoria, Australia, or the United States Department of Defense or one of its components, you are not required to select a records management system that meets the specifications of either standard. However, the downside of not complying with recordkeeping requirements on organizational reputation and value highlights the importance of investing in a records management system that helps ensure an organization’s information assets are safe and well-managed.
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Community Action Partnership’s Automated Case Management for Low-Income Energy Assistance

Automating Case Management Paperwork Processing

Each winter, thousands of residents in Minnesota’s Ramsey and Washington Counties struggle to access basic heating and utilities. When a household finds itself in need, it turns to the Community Action Partnership of Ramsey and Washington Counties, which runs one of the state’s largest low-income home energy assistance program.

“We receive thousands of calls from clients anxious to know if we can help,” says Catherine Fair, Director of Energy Assistance Programs. “These kinds of calls were hard for our staff to field since we had over 25,000 active applications stored in filing cabinets. We knew that automating our application approval process would make us more efficient and accelerate our ability to help households in need.”

To automate the case management process, the agency began scanning applications and related documentation into a Laserfiche document repository connected to automated document filing, routing and approval workflows.

Case workers can now quickly determine grant amounts and deliver assistance faster:
  • Workflows automatically create case folders for new scanned applications, including eligibility worksheets and case note logs, and route them to case workers for review.
  • Urgent cases can be automatically sent to an expedited processing queue.
  • Staff members can re-direct files to other groups for review and action. If a case worker chooses “yes” under Furnace Problem metadata field, Laserfiche will auto-route the file to the furnace repair group for attention.

“We have significantly improved crisis response time,” says Fair. “Urgent calls for assistance are much more productive. We can find a client’s application immediately by looking in Laserfiche and can then let the client know exactly what he needs to do to complete his application.”

Standardizing Record Archival, Auditing and Security

In addition to expediting service delivery for low-income residents, the new case management process also streamlined the program’s twice-yearly audits. By law, the agency is required to keep archived case files for three years.

Fair explains, “Files are randomly selected by the auditors, and it was a daunting task to find the ones they requested among 25,000 others!”

Being able to store all records in TIFF format was another reason the agency choose document management software. The open file format ensures that the files stored in Laserfiche will still be supported in 25, 50 or even 100 years.

“Vendor lock-in is a big concern for the IT department. If you choose a file format that’s controlled by a single vendor, you invite a lot of unnecessary risk from both an IT and an information governance perspective.”

Laserfiche’s TIFF archival format means that the agency can continually adopt advances in hardware, software and communication technologies without limiting access to their records.

Built-in Windows authentication and named-user access to the repository also enabled the agency to better protect sensitive client information, like social security numbers.

“Laserfiche protects sensitive information while making our business processes more efficient, “ says Fair. “It has helped us tremendously and we hope that other non-profit agencies that deliver federal programs can learn from our success!”

Looking to digitize the case management process at your agency? Get a free demo of Laserfiche software for case management today.

Tompkins County, NY, Saved $5.5 Million with Electronic Records Management

Taking Government Records Management Digital
Tompkins County avoided building a $5.5 million records warehouse by using Laserfiche software to digitize records.

Two centuries’ worth of county records packed into 9,000 boxes take up a lot of space, enough to (almost) justify building a $3.5 million storage warehouse.

Before moving forward with the new warehouse, the Tompkins County Clerk’s Office was tasked with cataloging the millions of archived documents and examine storage alternatives. Records management software quickly entered the conversation for its ability to track records in a digital database.

“Our original plan had been to put barcodes on the boxes of records to keep better track of them and then to either build a new records center or renovate the existing one,” says Maureen Reynolds, Deputy County Clerk.

However, driven by an office culture that prizes sustainability and workplace flexibility, Tompkins County’s plan shifted. “We quickly realized that we could extend the value of the system by scanning all 9,000 boxes of files into a Laserfiche system.”

“Our analysis showed that with an investment of $400,000 to $500,000 for scanning, software upgrades and IT infrastructure updates, using Laserfiche could save us as much as $5.5 million dollars,” says Deputy IT Director Loren Cottrell.

Kicking the Paper Habit to Transition into an Electronic Records System
Thousands of legacy county records were transitioned into a digital file management system.

With a new records repository, the Clerk’s Office envisioned a digital records system that would dramatically reduce the need for paper records. “We wanted to bring greater efficiency and cost savings to the county by implementing, maintaining and instructing all county departments on the best practices of using a digital records management system,” says Reynolds.

Unfortunately, this vision hit an impasse as the county staff reverted to old paper habits.

“We looked around the county and realized everyone was still making paper,” says Reynolds. “They’re creating records on the computer, printing them, storing them in boxes and then three or four years later would bring the records to us and ask us to put them away and track them.”

Reynolds and her team went from department to department to prove the ease and value of digital records. Her team:
  • Examined departmental files and records.
  • Interviewed department staff to understand the use and flow of documents.
  • Scanned documents into Laserfiche.
  • Destroyed the physical documents.
  • Created a digital folder structure within Laserfiche that mimicked the organization of physical folders.
  • Integrated Laserfiche into other systems used by the department.

Improving Records Indexing, Retrieval and Retention

The Laserfiche repository provides a more sophisticated indexing and retrieval system that improves how the departments process their information. More importantly, the repository is integrated with the applications employees are already using.
Records templates in Laserfiche standardize how incoming documents are classified and routed.

“Records are available through a web browser either on the desktop or via a mobile device,” says Cottrell. “The mobile feature makes key documents and records available to engineers, inspectors and other employees working in the field.”

For example, the sheriff’s department previously used an archaic index-card system to track arrest reports crammed into a records room that overflowed into a garage. After scanning the arrest reports, the department was able to reclaim office and parking space.

Court officials have also adopted digital processes. The county court handles approximately 1,400 civil cases and 4,500 criminal cases a year. Before Laserfiche, it could take hours for law clerks and legal secretaries to find and retrieve pertinent records. The court now can now:
  • Automatically route and process court case files between departments.
  • Enable judges and employees to use iPads to easily access case files while in court.
  • Improve efficiency and lower printing costs.

Expanding Records Management as a Shared Service Across County Departments

Laserfiche has been so successful for the county’s records program that Reynolds decided to onboard the county’s municipalities onto the same system.

Using $450,000 in state archiving grant money, the county formed the Tompkins Shared Services Electronic Records Repository (TSSERR), a Laserfiche-powered digital archive that is hosted by the county and serves 20 partnered government agencies including the City of Ithaca.  Each member municipality is given its own dedicated repository and has complete control over its content with various levels of security. This also means the Laserfiche system can continue to grow and accommodate every new TSSERR member.

This shared service records capability has reduced support maintenance costs and created a public portal that allows citizens to search for public records. In addition to saving taxpayer money at all levels of government, TSSERR ensures that records across the county are compatible and easily accessible.

“We wanted to be transparent for years and years,” says Reynolds. “People always say the government is hiding information. It wasn’t that we were hiding anything—before Laserfiche, we just couldn’t find it!”

Want to implement electronic records management at your county or municipality? Download our free guide to getting started with digitizing and automating records management.

Managing New Social Work Caseloads

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) sent many government and county social service agencies scrambling to process the sudden increase in welfare assistance applications. For Olmstead County, Minnesota, the new law catalyzed the need for a more responsive case management paperwork process in the County’s Community Services (OCCS) unit. “The ACA scared us to death, because we didn’t have a document management product at the time. The State of Minnesota has a very complex eligibility system for assistance benefits. There’s a lot of variance in the paperwork,” said Olmsted County Community Services Director Paul Fleissner. Without a technology solution, the county anticipated needing to hire 12 full-time employees to handle the expected caseload increase. “We already handled hundreds of thousands, even millions, of pages per year. We had piles of paper everywhere and would occasionally lose a page or file. We needed to find a way to operate more efficiently.”
Paul Fleissner, Olmsted County’s Community Services (OCCS) Director
Rob Ronnenberg, Olmsted County’s Continuous Improvement Manager

OCCS’ need to improve its efficiency was supported by Olmsted County’s LEAP (Lean Efforts and Automated Processes) Initiative. The LEAP Initiative uses the Lean methodology—creating greater value with fewer resources—in combination with Laserfiche software to create efficient and sustainable operations throughout the county. “With ACA, the staff and funding we needed just weren’t going to be there,” said Rob Ronnenberg, Continuous Improvement Manager. “We needed a better way to do things. To provide the same level of services, we had to be 5% more productive with 5% less funding.”

Implementing Digital Case Management

Before Laserfiche software could be implemented in OCCS with the LEAP Initiative, the LEAP team had to show county administrators and commissioners that it fully understood OCCS’ needs and that document management software was the appropriate solution. “Right from the start, it wasn’t the IT director saying, ‘I have a new toy I want to play with,’” said David Nault, ITS manager. “All 12 county departments and the state district courts signed a service-level agreement and came to the IT department saying, ‘We need your help to implement this.’” With everyone highly motivated to do away with paper processes before ACA came into effect, the department implemented Laserfiche quickly. OCCS scanned 15,000 paper case files and converted paper information to electronic data, and the results were immediate. The new ECM-powered process allowed OCCS to:
  • Increase case worker productivity by 20%
  • Hire only three additional case workers instead of the estimated 12
  • Eliminate nearly 125 filing cabinets

“The number one result was improved staff productivity. Everyone felt Laserfiche made their jobs easier,” Fleissner said. “Time spent filing papers, shuffling papers, sorting and distributing mail or scanning files for telecommuters, was replaced with the task of scanning each document once and never touching paper again.”

Ronnenberg added, “Telling social workers that they don’t have to skip their lunch — that they can take a 15-minute breather and still ensure that their clients are taken care of — that’s powerful.” Overall, Olmsted County believes that investing in technology is a sound strategy for the future. “We as government can be more efficient. There are tools out there to do it, and it’s worth the investment,” says Fleissner. “I think there’s a great return on investment story to be told when you automate the right way, for the right reasons and in the right business areas.” Want to improve case management in your office? Schedule a demo of Laserfiche software for case management today!

City of O’Fallon

O’Fallon implemented a Laserfiche WebLink public portal to provide citizens with around-the-clock access to public information.

“Our municipal website is like having City Hall open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” says Deputy Clerk Maryanne Fair. “My office is only open from 8:00 A.M. until 5:00 P.M., but even after hours, people can still find what they need.”

The city customized Laserfiche with a file tree structure broken down into nine main entries covering different departments in City Hall. Each of those was then broken down again into folders for each department. According to IT Director John Presley, this file structure makes information easier to find for casual searchers, as curious residents searching city documents account for a lot of the traffic on the site.

City Clerk Phil Goodwin says, “Basic research questions have gone down by as much as two-thirds because people are already finding the info they need on their own.”

Freedom from FOIA Requests

Freedom of Information Act requests used to be an unpleasant subject around the offices of O’Fallon City Hall. FOIA requests, as they are better known, can be vexing for the city clerks who must respond to them. When submitted by laypersons in the community, they can be poorly worded and difficult to understand and respond to. When professionals file FOIA requests, they can be tedious and complex tasks requiring dozens—even hundreds—of hours to fulfill.

So, when a couple of attorneys filed a FOIA request for documents related to an O’Fallon construction project last year, the request looked like it would take two staffers a month each to fulfill. Then one of those staffers suggested sending the attorneys to the city’s Laserfiche WebLink public portal instead.

That was the last staff heard of that FOIA request.

“We sent them an email about Laserfiche WebLink and they did the rest,” Presley says. “They found everything they needed right there. It turned out to be a tremendous time saver for us—and for them.”

Presley points out the cost-effectiveness of having documents available through the Laserfiche WebLink public portal. “That FOIA request would have taken two staffers a full month to fill without Laserfiche WebLink,” he says. “With Laserfiche WebLink, the attorneys could search our documents themselves, which saved us thousands of dollars for just that one request.”

FOIA requests have dropped by at least 50 percent since the Laserfiche WebLink portal has been available, and a lot of the traffic comes from contractors doing business with the city, Presley says. They can submit RFPs much more quickly using Laserfiche WebLink because they can call up old contracts and cut and paste much of the perquisite text.

An Eye to the Future

The public is clearly responding to the increased access to government records. City Hall staffers are getting emails from potential FOIA filers saying they already found what they needed on Laserfiche WebLink, Presley says.

It’s not just O’Fallon residents and businesses benefitting.

“With the volume of usage we’re seeing, Laserfiche WebLink has paid for itself tenfold in staff time savings,” he says. “Now staff can concentrate on their primary role of running the city instead of running around and pulling documents for FOIA requests. FOIA used to be a real unpleasant word around City Hall. Now the subject doesn’t even come up.”

The site’s popularity has prompted O’Fallon to start planning to integrate the city’s GIS application with Laserfiche, opening public access to a vast store of government maps.

Ministry of Human Resources & Emiratisation (formerly known as the Ministry of Labour)

Headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Human Resources & Emiratisation aims to create a work environment characterized by efficiency, high quality and social integrity.

Established in 1971, the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Human Resources & Emiratisation (formerly the Ministry of Labour) has over 1,200 employees to serve and manage the UAE labour force. The ministry’s office used massive file cabinets to store all staff-related documentation, resulting in long document search and retrieval times.

These issues prompted the ministry to look for a digital solution to help organize its documents, maintain security and reduce retrieval times. In addition, the ministry wanted a system that would meet its archiving needs while allowing it to provide optimal customer service.

Ease of Use Contributes to Staff Buy-In

The Ministry of Human Resources & Emiratisation had relatively simple selection criteria; it wanted a solution that could meet its requirements and was easy to use. That is exactly what it found with Laserfiche.

Ahmad Al Nasser, IT Director at the ministry, explains, “We started the pilot, did it for 2-3 months, found it suitable, well defined and easy to use, and then purchased the solution.”

When there is change, resistance from staff is often expected. However, according to Al Nasser, “Our staff were very happy and satisfied with Laserfiche from the start.”

From an IT perspective, Al Nasser says, “The beauty of Laserfiche is the ease of implementation and configuration. We expected requests and changes, but surprisingly there was little need for modifications. Once things were set up in the beginning, it suited the users’ requirements and only minor questions came up. Those were accommodated quickly.”

Tackling HR, “the Heart of the Organization”

The HR department is responsible for managing all employee files in the HR archive room. Before implementing Laserfiche, new documents had to be physically inserted into existing employee files. There were complaints of lost documents and long retrieval times, which formed barriers for effective internal processes.

One of the first tasks was to capture and index documents for the 1,200 ministry employees, and electronically archive all the employee files. The original plan was to outsource the process of scanning the documents, then manually entering up to 14 index fields.

However, the ministry’s value-added reseller (VAR), Mazroui and Partners, recommended using Laserfiche to automate document capture and indexing. After documents are scanned in, Laserfiche reads document barcodes to automatically retrieve and add necessary metadata from the in-house HR database.

Laserfiche also simplified the ministry’s records management practices by automating the process of purging pertinent portions of files after a specific interval. When the expiration date for a document approaches, the HR office is notified through email, alerting it of the task to delete the relevant documents. Upon approval, the system then purges said document.

Immediate Benefits
Laserfiche makes it easy to manage employee records.

Using Laserfiche has allowed the Ministry of Labour to digitize the entire employee registry in-house instead of outsourcing the work. This will result in estimated savings of AED 700,000 over three years.

In addition, there has been an increase in the security of the organization’s physical files as well as strengthened disaster recovery procedures.

With servers based in Abu Dhabi and physical records in Dubai, the ministry’s data is not all in one location. Employees now have access to both hard and soft copies of documents. In the event of any data loss, documents are easily recovered due to regular backups of the ministry’s Laserfiche repositories.

Finally, the biggest savings can be seen in document search and retrieval times. Employee documents are found with one click and folders are quickly updated, reducing access times from half an hour to seconds.

Al Nasser recalls, “In the past, it would take HR two to three days to find a document, but within minutes I received a call telling me that the document was in my email.”

From an HR officer’s point of view, the auto indexing and exporting of files to the HR repository “is just magic.”

Ministry-Wide Rollout
Ahmad Al Nasser accepts a Laserfiche Run Smarter Award from CEO Chris Wacker at the Laserfiche Empower 2015 Conference.

What began as a pilot program in the human resources department has now expanded into the IT, administration, finance and legal departments, contributing to improvements in contract management and client services. Plans are in place to roll out Laserfiche across the entire Ministry of Labour in the coming year.

Aside from digitizing its documents, the ministry hopes to automate many of its current business processes, including the procurement process, which is currently one of the more paper intensive operations.

Al Nasser explains, “Laserfiche can help a lot with business process re-engineering. It’s a very easy and straightforward solution, which can make a big change in the organization.”

London Borough of Tower Hamlets: Optimising Operations to Deliver Flexible Government Services

SITUATION

• The London Borough of Tower Hamlets embarked on a Digitisation Programme that prioritised digital information over paper, and automated workflows over manual activities. The goal was to use technology to stay ahead of residents’ needs, and deliver services with great efficiency at low cost.

SOLUTION

• Tower Hamlets Council began capturing information digitally in the Land Charges Service using Laserfiche, with metadata attached that enabled the borough to develop an automated way to process and keep new records.

RESULTS

• The digital-first approach streamlined content capture and archival in Land Charges, Planning and Building Control services, enabling faster decision making that was key in preparing for the 2012 Olympic Games, and creating significant cost savings in these services.

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets is one of the U.K.’s most culturally vibrant and diverse areas. Formed in 1965, the borough also includes a number of London’s famous attractions including the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Columbia Road Flower Market and Billingsgate Fish Market. The attractions of Bangla Town bring in thousands of tourists every year, and the area has won praise and recognition for its parks and open spaces. For centuries, the borough has welcomed and been home to many immigrants in Britain. Today, some 49% of residents are from black and minority ethnic (BME) communities; 33% are of Bangladeshi heritage, and there are also sizable Somali, Caribbean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian and Pakistani communities.

For centuries, the Tower Hamlets area was a key location within Britain’s port industry. Today, it has been transformed into one of London’s fastest growing and most densely populated boroughs. The population in the borough has doubled in the past 30 years, and is predicted to rise by almost 100,000 by 2031. Tower Hamlets Council is responsible for managing the area’s growth and development while continuing to provide residents with high quality services.

In 2007, the council embarked on a comprehensive Digitisation Programme, which began with a vision to bring Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) functionality to the council’s functions and processes.

Initially, many of the council’s services were heavily paper-based and inundated with on-site and archived documents. Searching for the correct documents became increasingly difficult and indexing all documents seemed impossible. The Land Charges Service was managing 15,000 paper files by hand — using a typewriter to register Land Charge entries on index cards. Information requests would routinely take the target turnaround time of 10 days. The Building Control Service had 1,500 boxes of 50,000 unscanned files — 3 million pages and 100,000 drawings. And the Town Planning Service was housing 400,000 paper files dating back to 1948.

“We had a ton of information held with a storage company,” says John Pulman, ICT client officer at the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. “Plus we had racks of storage internally, just filled with folders.”

In addition to needing a way to digitise this information, the council also required a solution that could easily integrate with a land management system that was already in place.

“Laserfiche really did meet all of our requirements and more,” explains Louis Du Preez, the IT project manager for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets when the project began. “It’s simple and flexible, and the integrations are extremely easy to do.”

The team worked with Laserfiche solution provider Global ECM Solutions to implement a digitalisation program in Land Charges. The previously paper-based departments were able to successfully capture information digitally using Laserfiche, with metadata attached that enabled the borough to develop an automated way to process and keep new records.

“With the council, Laserfiche was a bit of a pioneer,” says Pulman. “It opened the door to more flexible, paperless work, and the device agnostic/location agnostic setup that really fit into a digital workflow.”

Improving productivity with geo-spatial searches

Going beyond information storage, the borough launched an initiative to automate a number of business processes, including Building Control applications registration, monitoring of works and construction completions — which helped to eliminate time-consuming administrative tasks.

“It was great to have the peace of mind of knowing that with Laserfiche, you can start with a very small system and upgrade it to an enterprise-wide solution — and can still integrate with all the state-of-the-art software solutions at any time,” says Du Preez.

The Land Charges Service had a goal of automating geospatial searches which, before Laserfiche, felt impossible. All geospatial indexing was still being performed manually with a typewriter. Searches for information regarding a property often surpassed the turnaround time of 10 days since paper requests had to be manually sent to relevant departments.

In order to automate the search process, 15,000 files, each representing an area with a polygon drawn using ESRI GIS, were captured into the borough’s land management system, and scanned and indexed into Laserfiche. The automation shortened the search time from days to hours.

“Laserfiche is able to do what our other document management systems couldn’t,” Du Preez adds. “Large files can now be broken down electronically into smaller files that cover smaller geographic areas. The capturing became easier to do and information is now easily accessible to the users.”

Being able to perform automated and accurate geo-spatial searches helped Land Charges become more efficient, saving staff time and frustration. This same efficiency was applied to the Planning Service as well. All planning decisions from 1948 onward were captured by Laserfiche, which made for quicker access to planning decision histories and in turn, helped the borough streamline proposal review for the 2012 Olympic Games.

Integrating Laserfiche and Land Management

In the Building Control Service, 3 million pages in 38,000 files were scanned and indexed — some dating as far back as 1895 — eliminating 1,500 boxes taking up 40 square metres of office space. At the same time, Building Control decisions from as far back as 1986 were made available digitally.

In 2008, Laserfiche was integrated with the borough’s land management system, enabling all of the critical documents generated from the land management system to be directly stored into Laserfiche. The seamless integration meant that documents no longer had to be manually transferred, and town planning case files can now be viewed outside of internal servers through Public Registers or by external viewing folders, making service delivery to the public much more efficient and effective.

Internally, security rights are granted to appropriate staff allowing access to information such as drawings, emails and Microsoft Office format files directly from Laserfiche. Data accessibility has been improved and information can flow seamlessly across the service.

The Building Control team also used Laserfiche Workflow to automate administrative tasks, such as metadata entry and updates. Eliminating these small manual activities prevented errors, saved staff time and allowed for greater productivity.

By streamlining business processes, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets is now more transparent, and accessibility to information about local land charges has greatly improved. Automation of business processes has elevated staff morale through more efficient ways of working and collaboration. According to Philip J. Price, the project manager and business process consultant for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets at the time, “standardisation of actions that came from the business process analysis facilitated culture change in the workplace and our staff really feel more empowered.”

A Smarter Working Strategy

Like many other local governments, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets has seen a squeeze on budgets in recent years, however, over the past decade, Laserfiche-driven digitisation and automation initiatives have saved the borough a significant amount of money. The organisation had been working to adopt a more paperless, remote working environment, including an ability to work from home, before COVID-19 hit the country, but the pandemic kicked that initiative into high gear.”

“Even before COVID, we were reducing our office space enormously, and that’s continued to be the trend,” Pulman says. “Having this more paperless environment with more digital workflows in Laserfiche supports more flexible working. In the new working environment, offices are not where paper files are stored. You can just connect to work from whatever computer you are on. Modern workplaces have a device agnostic/location agnostic setup — Laserfiche workflow really enables that vision.”

With government cut-backs and councils looking for ways to do more with less, digitising Land Charges, Planning and Building Control services has helped the borough cut down on costs, become more efficient and provide better public services.

“Laserfiche has really played a fundamental part in our smarter working strategy. Across the board, all of our information is now easily accessible, which allows information to be viewed through various internal and external means and they are now only constricted by rights and no longer by technology limitations. Laserfiche helped overcome this,” says Price. “The Laserfiche ECM solution allowed us to raise efficiency while lowering costs. … I strongly feel that Laserfiche has had a profound impact on the organisation and it can continue to adapt with our Council’s evolving ECM strategy. It is truly a complete solution.”

City of Eugene

In the decade since the City of Eugene, OR, first implemented Laserfiche, the system has been deployed to the City Manager’s Office, City Attorney’s Office and Public Works Administration, Planning and Development, Police, Wastewater, City Prosecutor and Municipal Court. As Department Application Team Manager Loring G. Hummel explains, this resulted in four separate Laserfiche services, one of which included multiple workgroups that shared concurrent licenses between the City Manager’s Office, Planning and Public Works Administration.

“Everything exposed to the Internet was on this server, so we had problems with licenses being used up,” Hummel says. “About two years ago, a member of my team pointed out that our Laserfiche licensing was actually pretty inefficient—overall the number of concurrent users was inadequate to maintain and grow.”

Hummel saw that a consolidation to an enterprise solution made sense to streamline administration, and would allow him to better leverage his own staff to handle future integrations and deployments. Eugene’s long-time reseller VPCI, of course, had an app for that: Laserfiche Rio enterprise content management.

In April 2009, Hummel submitted a memorandum to Eugene’s Central Services Advisory Board outlining a plan to consolidate Eugene’s four Laserfiche systems by moving to Laserfiche Rio. Besides recapping the “high return on investment” Eugene had already enjoyed in the areas of sustainability, efficiency and “new capabilities”—GIS and SharePoint integration among them—as well as asset protection over the last ten years, he outlined the potential benefits of moving to Laserfiche Rio:
  • Unlimited servers and repositories: With the unlimited servers included in the Laserfiche Rio system, Hummel’s team could easily establish environments for testing and pilot projects.
  • Named user licenses: Instead of limiting mission-critical users like judges and 911 operators with first-come, first-serve concurrent licensing, licenses assigned to individual users would provide constant access.
  • Enterprise-wide features: Because Laserfiche Rio licenses come fully loaded with a complete suite of applications, features previously used only by certain departments—including Laserfiche Workflow, Laserfiche Records Management Edition and the Laserfiche-SharePoint Integration—would now be available city-wide.
  • Unlimited read-only public connections: Laserfiche Rio’s Public Portal provides unlimited read-only connections through Laserfiche WebLink, which would enable the city to meet surges in public demand for information.

Hummel points out that a 100% credit offered by Laserfiche, as well as pooling support costs, not only made the upgrade affordable, but it also allowed the city to centralize administration and IT staffing for further deployment and customization.

Leveraging a city-wide telecom tax set up to support three-year IT projects, Hummel was able to secure a funding boost to launch the project, while giving departments a temporary break from their own support costs until 2013.

The Rio Reality

According to Hummel, “Laserfiche Rio not only solves our licensing problem, but it also lays the framework for Laserfiche as a common content management platform for everyone across the enterprise,” Hummel adds. “Beyond that, it has the potential to become a real information sharing and collaboration tool.”

The biggest improvement, Hummel says, is centralizing Laserfiche administration and service. “I think we’ve made a more professional IT environment for Laserfiche—which is part of laying the groundwork for future deployment,” he says. “We’re proactive in that we’re able to apply patches and fixes all at once. Where we had functions within departments before, we’re able to cultivate expertise in the right place as far as realigning departmental staff into central server administration.”

At the same time, he adds, this centralization has afforded Eugene greater control and oversight of its information assets. “A big benefit is that the whole system is auditable. Because Laserfiche authorization is now controlled by a central administrator, in respect to security roles, we’re able to lock down repositories and folders according to different administrative needs,” Hummel says. “Now, we’re treating Laserfiche like one of our larger information systems such as ERP and database servers that also encompass risk management and compliance.”

And, he says, having a single, standardized ECM system allows staff to be more self-sufficient. “We have a lot of applications with embedded Laserfiche components, so we use the Laserfiche SDK a lot. We’re a .NET shop, so that’s the kind of flexibility that’s important to us,” Hummel says. “Laserfiche offers flexibility and programmability in terms of .NET integration that allows a full-featured IT shop like ours to use the tools we already have to fully customize it for our own applications.”

He points to a recent example: “We built an ASP.net web application for building inspectors in our planning and development department that has GIS maps, their routes, etc. All supporting documents are stored in Laserfiche, but the inspectors use the application in their cars, and click on a button and the supporting documents come up in Laserfiche WebLink—without them knowing where it came from. All the searching and metadata is behind the scenes. We basically wrote our own client.”

Standardizing Enterprise-Wide

For Hummel, standardization is its own combination of reality and potential. “In government, everything seems to grow in silos, by workgroup and department,” Hummel says. “The ability to easily and seamlessly automate information across organizational boundaries—it’s kind of the holy grail of IT.

“Just having Laserfiche isn’t going to get us there, but our Laserfiche Rio-based architecture—and by that I mean both the placement of servers on our network as well as the way we positioned our repositories to simplify the creation of shared processes—gives us the technical framework that will allow departments to create business processes to cut through silos. That’s a good start,” he adds.

He also points to the promise of Laserfiche Workflow, which will enable his department to easily develop and implement standardized, repeatable processes. “For city-wide applications, we’ll write our own custom user interfaces. We want to use the workflow engine, but we’ll build in interactivity using the SDK API and .NET,” he says.

One of these new business processes is city-wide contract management. “Right now, every department keeps its own copies of contracts and its own retention policies, even though everything’s in the City Recorder’s archives. They may not know what’s being kept centrally and if they do, they think it’s a big process to access them,” Hummel says. “One of the things that attracted us to Laserfiche Rio was the idea of transparent records management, so we could make the actual storage transparent and be able to assign access to certain folders according to who needs to get them. That way, we can really increase the transparency of information back to the organization, which will translate into efficiency.”

Hummel points to this efficiency in the evolution—and simplification—of how the Eugene Police Department (EPD) shares reports with the Eugene Municipal Court (MuniCourt).
  • In the past, the EPD used shortcuts to a special distribution folder in Laserfiche, then a custom integration that briefcased police reports to move them into the MuniCourt repository—which still created multiple copies.
  • Now with Laserfiche Rio, EPD staff use a simple “yes/no” MuniCourt template field to give the court read-only access to designated reports in the EPD folder, which are searchable by case number.

“We actually had a customization written for the prosecutor [to briefcase reports for MuniCourt]. But since going to Laserfiche Rio, now that they’re sharing common services, we’ve eliminated a ton of custom code and complexity,” Hummel says.

Reaching ROI

Hummel is confident this self-sufficiency will translate into enterprise efficiency, especially on the staffing side. “We’re not talking about using automation to eliminate positions, but we’re looking at using technology to cope with positions we have already lost during the economic downturn, as well as any future staff reductions,” Hummel says. “We want to make sure the level of service doesn’t deteriorate. We want to cope with the reduced footprint using automation tools. Laserfiche is one way to do that.”

Besides increase efficiency, he says, Laserfiche Rio has allowed his staff the freedom and focus to excel as well. “The information services department is 40-plus people, where all six city departments have two to three analysts to determine their application needs,” Hummel explains. “Every department is really its own business. One of the challenges is to serve very specialized departmental needs with a fairly modest staff. Each member of my team is assigned directly to a department for application support, so professional collaboration among IT staff has always been a challenge.

“Laserfiche has been a unifier,” he adds. “We have a team of Laserfiche IT folks so we can make the most of where the expertise lies to serve all the different departments. It’s made the upgrade possible. We have this collaborative environment that’s made the lines between assignments more fuzzy, so hopefully that will be a catalyst for other [IT-driven] endeavors.”

Hummel notes that functionality his staff once had to develop themselves is now available out of the box. That, and the collaborative, catalyzing environment standardizing on the Laserfiche Rio ECM system inspires, is encouraging, he says, both for the success of the Laserfiche consolidation, but in terms of the reality and potential of his own department.

“If you look at companies like Microsoft or Apple, they owe a lot of their success to the way developers are able to build innovative solutions in it,” Hummel says. “It’s not locked down. Like Laserfiche, it’s a broader base of development that encourages more innovation, because users are not just customers, they’re partners.”