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.”

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.