A leading manufacturer and supplier of formwork and scaffolding systems, PERI streamlined operations and enhanced the customer experience through an online portal.
Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: JR Walters, IT Director, Samish Indian Nation
Headquartered in the Pacific Northwest, the Samish Indian Nation is governed by a seven member Tribal Council elected to oversee the tribe’s welfare and resources. Members are offered a wide variety of opportunities including housing assistance, elders’ services, healthcare and wellness, and cultural enrichment.
In order to help manage the various programs offered to the tribal members, the nation works with state and federal agencies to implement many grant funded activities. In addition to maintaining the economic welfare of the tribe, these grant deliverables help to protect the environment, and preserve natural and cultural resources.
Before Laserfiche, approving grant applications was a time-consuming, manual process. The tribe’s departments are distributed between five sites and sending paper grant application packets through interoffice mail for internal review and approval was inefficient and costly. Occasionally, grant submission deadlines were barely met because paperwork got lost between sites, sat too long for approval, or was difficult to find and assemble into the grant application packet.
Laserfiche has completely digitized the grant approval process. New grants are submitted through Laserfiche Forms and managers are able to view and approve them from their mobile devices.
With Laserfiche, the time to process a grant has been reduced from one week to just one day.
“I’m absolutely in love with Forms and process automation. I see so much potential in how other departments could utilize it,” says JR Walters, IT Director.
The process starts when an employee applying for a grant, fills out the grant application approval request form in Laserfiche Forms.
Once submitted, the grant application is routed to the department supervisor for approval. If the department supervisor approves it, the application is routed to the general manager, compliance officer and controller, for simultaneous review. Once approved by everyone, the grant application is put in front of the seven member tribal council for approval. Each of the approvers is notified of grants requiring their approval through email.
If any of the approvers reject the grant, the process ends and the submitter is notified by email. He or she then has the option of submitting a new application form.
Throughout the process, timers are attached to each approval task. In this way, if the form isn’t approved in a timely matter, the approver receives a follow up email reminder.
Submitted grant application review forms and supplemental information are stored in folders in the Laserfiche repository specific to the grant.
In order to simplify designing of this process, the tribal nation took advantage of the Business Process Library (BPL). The nation downloaded the Legal Document Review Forms template and modified it to suit the specific needs of the grant approval process. Some of these modifications included:
“Before starting to design a process from scratch, I look to see if it has already been done in the Business Process Library. Since it is already done once, it is easy to duplicate. The BPL is a great resource,” says Walters.
Processing Grant Applications Now Takes One Day Instead of One Week
The Los Angeles County Development Authority (LACDA) digitally transformed its records management program, incorporating Laserfiche to digitize, centralize and manage the lifecycle of records. Since deploying Laserfiche, the agency has reclaimed significant time for its case workers while boosting its ranking with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to the designation of “high performer”—an improvement that helps secure funding and enables the LACDA to provide more services and programs to more people.
The LACDA is a public agency responsible for providing LA County residents essential programs related to subsidized housing, community development, and affordable housing development and preservation. Serving the most populous county in the United States requires the LACDA to house decades’ worth of records related to hundreds of thousands of cases. These span a wide range, from groups applying for Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) that provide resources to underserved areas, to people in need of Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers and residents of all ages applying for education and training in an effort to build better lives and better neighborhoods.
The LACDA previously stored records in filing cabinets and across various servers and systems. As the number of records grew, the agency identified the need to digitize and centralize them using a Laserfiche electronic records management solution. Laserfiche was also integrated with the LACDA’s property management software, Yardi, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, PeopleSoft, to eliminate the risk of duplicating information or work.
“Case managers don’t need to switch between applications to look up or copy information, they can view all the documents in one place,” says Rosa Chevarin, supervisor for Yardi/Laserfiche support. “They like the one-stop shop feel, and everything is streamlined in their natural workflow.”
Through this digital transformation, the agency made information more available, accessible and usable to authorized users.
“In an agency that manages more than 3,000 public and affordable housing units and assists more than 24,000 residents through a housing choice voucher program within the county, being able to pull up submitted information at a moment’s notice is vital,” says Doug Van Gelder, Manager of Information Technology at the LACDA.
This also enables the agency to:
The LACDA’s new solution exceeds the basic expectations of records management and incorporates automation. Laserfiche automatically files documents with standardized naming and folder structure. Additionally, when a record’s retention period has ended, relevant employees are notified to handle disposition.
“The need for services is always going to be great, and everyone is always going to be busy doing their jobs,” Van Gelder says. “Finding and pulling documents, and making sure records are taken care of in accordance to regulations is time consuming. The new system takes that tedious work away from the case managers, so they can focus on the people they serve.”
Since transforming its records management, the LACDA has gained the ability to automate additional business processes. Agency staff has automated the new employee onboarding process, which previously required a new associate to spend about half of their first day on the job filling out paperwork. The new Laserfiche solution enables the agency to send the new employee a link to all the necessary forms that can be completed before their start date.
“I want to be as digital as possible,” says Van Gelder, adding that there are also plans to rebuild the LACDA’s housing portal to allow people to apply for programs online. The workflow for processing those applications would also be automated using Laserfiche to facilitate quicker response times, better transparency into the process for both the staff and applicant, and less risk for error.
The agency’s newfound efficiencies have proven essential in a time when the LACDA’s programs and services are needed more than ever. The waiting list to receive Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers has about 44,000 people on it, while the agency’s staff is down to about half of what it was a decade ago due to the economic downturn and attrition. “The only way we’ve been able to provide the same level of service with half the staffing is through technology,” Van Gelder explains.
Additionally, over 70 percent of the LACDA’s funding comes from HUD, which regularly audits housing authorities to ensure funding is going toward serving people who need these critical programs and services.
“If a housing authority does not rank well, HUD could potentially take funding back and give it to another housing authority that proves it is helping more people and running more efficiently,” Van Gelder says.
Since the LACDA deployed its Laserfiche records management initiative, it has boosted its ranking and maintained its status as a high performer.
“The need is always going to be greater than the funding, but IT is one of the units within the organization that has the ability to provide productivity enhancements while bringing cost down,” Van Gelder says. “We’ve been able to serve more people with quality services and programming with half the staffing we used to have through these technology solutions.”
Leading public sector organizations use an electronic records management solution to increase efficiency and improve citizen services. To learn more, download the free white paper: “Streamlining the Business of Government.”
As one of the most populous cities in New York state (after New York City and Buffalo), the City of Rochester relies on its IT department to increase efficiency between city departments and enable more effective public services. Servicing over 14 departments including Public Safety, Police and Fire, the city’s IT teams need systems that can power the city’s many interconnected processes.
After a thorough study of how to redesign and modernize multiple city processes together, the city saw Laserfiche’s strength in business process automation, workflow and document retention and management as an opportunity to use one platform to improve many functional areas.
The city’s initial improvements came from using Laserfiche to build a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) portal that enables citizens to submit public records requests online.
Previously, it would take staff up to five days to start processing new records requests using paper request forms. With the new portal, citizens can now file new requests via a simple online form and inquiries are immediately sent to the relevant city department for review and approval. Throughout the process, citizens can check the status of their request at any time in the FOIL portal.
An internal Laserfiche progress dashboard also shows department managers the status of open requests and how long it takes each staff member to fulfill them, providing critical data about the city’s efficiency.
“We have gotten really positive feedback from users about the system,” says Harriet Fisher, Senior Business Analyst at the City of Rochester. “One user, in particular, said, ‘This is the best thing since sliced bread!’”
In addition to reducing processing time for FOIL requests, the city’s police department is currently using Laserfiche for five internal processes, and the accounting department relies on Laserfiche as the backbone of invoice processing. Laserfiche’s user-friendly interface ultimately allows the city to see a quick return on its investment for automation projects and open new avenues for shared services across departments.
“It allows us to easily manage the creation of forms, the development of workflow and security in a way that you do not need to be an application developer,” says Greg Luna, Enterprise Process and Systems Manager at the City of Rochester. “It really is a nice departure from the in-house developed applications—to think out of the box about how we can re-engineer processes, and Laserfiche makes it easy for us to do that.”
SITUATION
• Citizens making public record requests encountered red tape and long wait times
• The county was at capacity for paper records and preparing to construct a new building to store them
RESULTS
• $5.5 million saved from not having to build a new records facility
• Transparent and easy to use records request solution increased efficiency in the process by over 100%
• Strengthened information governance, data security and disaster recovery
Tompkins County, NY, is a leader in the government shared services space, with a county-wide task force dedicated to strengthening and sharing local government practices.
“My top priorities are to establish relationships with other governments and to spread Laserfiche and our user group among them,” says Maureen Reynolds, Tompkins County Clerk. Reynolds notes that the county’s primary goal is to help constituents easily access public records without encountering red tape and long waiting times.
“Our demographic expects Amazon-type service,” she adds. “They want it right there, immediately, 24/7.”
Although the county was committed to improving its records management practices, it had been using an old building to store millions of archived records and was set construct a new building to the tune of $5.5 million—until it discovered Laserfiche’s records management and digital workflow capabilities.
“The Tompkins County team saw an opportunity to modernize the way it manages information while creating cost- savings and new efficiencies,” said Sandy Hess, sales operations manager at ICC Community Development Solutions, a Laserfiche solution provider. “Laserfiche’s intuitive interface and powerful compliance tools made it an ideal fit.”
The county began its Laserfiche implementation by digitizing documents in the county seat of Ithaca, and then quickly brought the county other municipalities on the system. The county created public records portals for each town, enabling citizens to submit records requests forms online, 24/7 without having to travel to their city hall or to Ithaca. Laserfiche’s workflow system automates the intake of requests and routes them to the appropriate clerk or department for processing.
“Any truly public record is there and accessible for people to find themselves,” says Reynolds, adding that having one records system that can be used as a shared service across the county is crucial for quick user adoption and building more transparent governance standards.
“The feedback has been great,” she says. “We go out to the smaller municipalities and they’ve never seen software like this. We’re not here to take over; we’re here to show them what’s possible.”
Benefits:
Laserfiche’s flexible automation platform makes it a valuable long-term solution for Tompkins County and other governments that need to respond quickly to changing public demands.
“You get a customizable solution with off-the-shelf software, which is very unique in the software world,” says Alan Karasin, Senior Network Administrator. “We can design exactly what we need, but we have full supportability and are not redesigning the wheel every time we want to do something. We can change our processes up and change them over time as we find what our results are.”
The Town of Okotoks is the largest town in Alberta, Canada, and provides services to over 30,000 residents. The city operates 20 different business centers that are each responsible for their own document filing. Prior to using a document management system, the city battled isolated information gathering and collaboration, leading to delays in public service delivery and data entry errors.
“The town was looking for a more streamlined solution with a central filing location, easier searching capabilities for the employees and everybody on a broad spectrum,” says Sheila Andrew, HR/Corporate and Strategic Administrator for the Town of Okotoks.
Using Laserfiche’s combined electronic forms, workflow and records management capabilities, the city jump-started an enterprise-wide digital records initiative. One central document repository provided a single point of access for information across the city and standardized each department’s disparate document filing and archiving methods.
The system quickly evolved from just a document storage system. It’s now the town’s primary tool for improving future and ongoing operations. Using Laserfiche Forms, the municipality implemented over 150 forms-based processes for numerous activities, including:
Using metadata, federated search and digital document access, employees across city departments can instantly find and collaborate on the information they need to deliver faster public services.
“We’ve gotten great feedback about how quickly approvals are happening now and the ease of access to forms,” says Andrew. “We only have one location to find forms, instead of lots of different places where people were saving PDFs or filing them.”
Staff collaborates more quickly and in a more transparent manner on documents and requests.
PERI Formwork Scaffolding Engineering Ltd, based in South Africa, is a global manufacturer of formwork and scaffolding and provides consultant, project and engineering services for the construction industry. With wide-reaching operations across 60 global subsidiaries, the firm manages complex payment streams that require efficient processes and quick response times.
“As technology changes, there’s a need to communicate and distribute to customers more efficiently,” says Jacques Lotriet, Business Analyst for PERI’s Financial Efficiency Projects.
The organization previously relied on paper mail to sort, distribute and pay invoices. Collecting payments from customers often took up to two weeks with no guarantees that documents and payments would be returned on time.
With Laserfiche, the company built a web portal that provides customers and staff with web-based access to monthly statements and invoices. The accounting portal significantly decreased the time it takes staff to process invoices, improved the customer experience and helped the company provide more transparent operations for regulatory compliance.
“Feedback from our customers and our staff internally has been extremely positive, especially with the way to quickly and easily access and distribute documents,” says Lotriet.
The ability to quickly model and execute digital business processes helps PERI Scaffolding continually improve its customer experience and remain competitive in its industry.
“It is very versatile,” says Lotriet. “I like to describe it also as a blank canvas. If you can think it up, you can build it. The electronic flow and distribution is also very efficient, and saves a lot of time and money.”
Click here to learn more about using Laserfiche to streamline the accounts payable process.
New Zealand’s Hurunui District, with a population of approximately 11,000 spread across 18 towns, offers a rural lifestyle filled with rich culture. Its local government authority excels at developing a sense of community, partnership and well-being.
Hurunui District Council knew that building a strong IT infrastructure was essential to providing the best customer service. The Council began searching for a new solution to replace its legacy document management system (DMS) when the requirements for records management at government organisations changed. The growing amount of information generated proved too much to efficiently handle, control and retain.
According to Scott Linton, the Council’s Information and Technology Services Manager, the Council focused on finding a system with:
Laserfiche provided a versatile enterprise-wide solution. “Being New Zealand’s seventh-largest district by land size, we needed a system with the capability to connect our multiple offices,” explains Linton. “We were really impressed at how easy it was to implement Laserfiche and connect our main office with five satellite locations. It was up and running in no time!”
Three months before the Hurunui District Council put Laserfiche in place, its legacy DMS broke down. “We were worried about what to do with all of our information, but Laserfiche Quick Fields allowed us to quickly migrate the contents of the legacy system into Laserfiche,” says Linton.
The Council used Laserfiche Quick Fields to back scan its records. More than half a million documents were imported directly into Laserfiche from their legacy system using Laserfiche Import Agent and Laserfiche Workflow. “Laserfiche Quick Fields helped to accelerate the process, prevent manual errors, save staff time and produce greater productivity,” Linton says. “In fact, we wouldn’t have been able to do the conversion manually. It would have overwhelmed us.”
The Council is now preparing to transfer approximately 800,000 files from its group drives to the Laserfiche repository.
Laserfiche’s versioning functionality was an important selection criterion for the Council. “We use versioning to improve service delivery and regulate our information management,” explains Linton. “We use versioning with our Consents documents and it prevents information from getting lost, tracks changes and maintains different versions for different purposes.”
The Council actively uses versioning to manage Resource Consents documents, adding, revising and replacing throughout the year. “It was difficult to organise when we didn’t have a centralised storage location. We didn’t know which document was the newest one, staff members constantly worked on wrong versions and the name of the documents kept changing. It’s been really useful to our staff so we will move forward and implement it with Building Consents documents as well,” Linton says.
The Laserfiche check in/check out process has helped to ensure that:
The Building Consents Department issues permits to ensure that any building work within the district is lawful, safe and sustainable. Documents about each property, including applications and details, need to be well-maintained and organised so that staff can provide excellent customer service.
“We are currently automating 120,000 Building Consents, Resource Consents and License’s documents using Laserfiche Workflow, which is pulling metadata from the old database and transferring it into the Laserfiche database,” says Linton. “Doing a manual transfer would have been a nightmare.”
Using Laserfiche’s abilities, the Council organised its metadata information as fields and then determined which fields to apply to the documents to enable the most efficient search for users. Laserfiche Workflow then assigns a template of predetermined fields to the documents, automatically pulls the information from the old database and fills out the metadata for each document.
“Each property has its own folder that contains an average of 40-50 pages on the details. Overall, we have around 10,000 folders, so we have tens of thousands of documents that need to be identified and placed with the correct property,” Linton explains. “We applied a Laserfiche template with metadata information such as the building type, number, property ID, evaluation number and address. Laserfiche Workflow then automatically identifies, filters and files the documents in their correct folders.”
According to Linton, “We want to continue expanding Laserfiche as an enterprise-wide, back-end control centre. We want our staff to experience a faster and easier search for documents — it shouldn’t be time-consuming to gather information about a property. With Laserfiche, they will be able to search for a property name or the ID and get the results in seconds.”
The Hurunui District Council is looking forward to expanding and extending its Laserfiche implementation. “We are looking to bring in Laserfiche Mobile for building inspectors and compliance officers when they are at on-site visits. We’re also considering implementing Laserfiche Forms to further streamline workflows,” Linton says. “The capabilities of Laserfiche are endless. We haven’t found anything we can’t do with Laserfiche!”
A paperless office, also called a paper-free office, is a work environment which uses minimal physical paper and instead uses primarily digital documents. A paperless employee is a worker who has eliminated or greatly reduced the use of paper in the workplace. The process of converting paper files into electronic files is known as digitization.
The idea of an entirely paperless office has existed since personal computers became the basis of the modern workplace. Despite the prevalence of electronic documents and email, most organizations still rely on paper documents. There are many benefits to going paperless, from saving resources to boosting security. Yet from handouts at meetings and HR onboarding documents to receipts, many business processes still revolve around paper.
Saves Time
Time spent filing, organizing, and searching for paper documents is time that could be spent on more productive tasks. Digitized documents are stored in a central repository, which is basically a well-organized digital filing cabinet where all of your documents live.
Using a digital document management system, you’ll get to harness the same powerful search abilities that you’re used to using on Google. This means employees can find files at the click of a button, much more quickly than the laborious, manual process of searching for a specific file in a buried folder. Employees are able to use this extra time on revenue-generating projects.
Saves Space
Paper takes up a lot of space – as do filing cabinets and space to store those filing cabinets. Books and bookshelves are bulky, too. What’s worse, paper keeps piling up, oftentimes accumulating more quickly than it can be sorted and organized. This is particularly true of industries that have long mandatory retention periods for paperwork like the financial industry.
Digitizing files allows you to store all documents either on an on-premises server or in the cloud. Digital file folders in a repository require much less space than a physical records archive.
Saves Money
Going digital improves process efficiency, saving you money. Paperless offices can process a much larger volume of paperwork compared to traditional offices in the same amount of time.
Further, digitization reduces money spent on paper, printers, ink, postage, office space for files and employee time to manage paperwork. The savings on employee time become especially valuable in regards to regulatory audits and repetitive, high-volume tasks like expense reimbursements.
Eases Transfer of Information
Document management software offers a simple process for saving documents. The software easily compiles digital documents using scanners, mobile capture using a camera on a phone or tablet or importing any file type (.docx, .pdf, image files). Many commonly used applications, like Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, integrate with document management systems and have native plugins which allow you to file your document into your content management system with just one click.
Promotes the Environment
Manufacturing paper products produce greenhouse gases, causing deforestation and global warming. Recycling can offset some of the environmental impact, but not by much. Most paper eventually ends up in a landfill. Further, ink and toners contain volatile compounds and non-renewable substances which are damaging to the environment. It is much more sustainable to simply reduce paper use altogether by switching to a paperless office.
Boosts Security
Physical documents are hard to track – reams of paper can get lost, misfiled or destroyed without anyone noticing. It can also be difficult to monitor the access, printing and copying of sensitive files. Document management software has advanced security capabilities that can tackle these challenges. System administrators can set-up granular access rights, which assign permissions at the document level (e.g. settings based on the type of document), user level (e.g. settings based on person’s job function), or system level (e.g. overarching security for all data in the system).
The security benefits of a paperless workplace go beyond access rights. Implementing document management software also allows organizations to leverage electronic signatures, redact confidential information, create audit trails and more.
Technology has so seamlessly replaced paper processes that it’s difficult to remember how things used to be done. In nearly all cases, the evolution from paper-based items to their electronic counterparts is profoundly more efficient.
| Then | Now |
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Paper Documents
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Digital Documents
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Mail & Faxes
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Encyclopedias & Dictionaries
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Internet
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| Newspapers, Books & Magazines
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Media Websites & eBooks
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Printed Maps
| Waze, Google Maps & Navigation Devices
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| Business Cards & Rolodexes
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Contacts Synced
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Deciding to make the move from paper to paperless is part of a larger process called digital transformation.
Laserfiche has identified five key steps to completely digitize your workplace:
Document management software is a crucial tool to this road to digital transformation. Beyond the immediate benefits of going paperless, digitizing is the first step to transforming your workplace and ultimately driving business forward.
If you choose to deploy a Laserfiche solution as part of your paperless transformation, be sure to check out the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace, with pre-built workflows for processing contracts, permits and more!
Whether you are implementing a content management system for the first time or changing from one system to another, you will be making many decisions about which documents and files to move.
As part of the overall document management system implementation project, keep in mind the project’s goals and records retention requirements when deciding what to move and what not to move. Be sure that you and your project team understand the project’s desired outcome before deciding what content to move.
Why is the new system for content management being implemented? What problems will this new system solve within your organization?
Possible goals may include things like:
Decisions about how the new system is implemented should support these project goals.
Most organizations want to do things in smarter, more efficient ways. But, people and organizations are resistant to change, therefore unlikely to make the effort without some kind of catalyst. Implementing a new content management system is a golden opportunity to take a long, hard look at how things are being done, question the value of doing things the same way and investigate how business processes can be improved.
Most people within your organization probably have ideas about ways to improve your processes. The need to roll out a new system is a perfect time to ask for their input. Offer employees a structured arena, such as a facilitated team brainstorming session, in which to share ideas. Take the best ideas and develop them further.
Reviewing business processes, and deciding how a new system can support those changes, will make your project more meaningful, useful and – in the long run – successful. Your organization is devoting a lot of resources – time, work hours, budgets – to this project. After all, if you simply copy over your existing way of doing business into your new system, all of those resources will not be providing good value.
For example, in many organizations, there are no requirements for wet-ink signatures. Electronic signature technology is fully developed and can be easily incorporated into new system requirements. Use of electronic signatures enables the use of automated workflows, which can automate business processes, significantly reducing cycle time and making staff more efficient.
Why focus effort and resources on old ways of doing things? When you know how you want to operate, you should incorporate those goals into the system requirements, and build the new system to enable what you want to do from now on.
Evaluating what to do with existing files and documents should not begin until your desired way of operating has been defined and set up in the new system.
Before making decisions about what to move, make sure you have identified where the existing files and documents are located.
Typical locations may include:
It is also important to understand where new content will come from in the future, and set up your system to appropriately deal with these. This may include evaluating which system should hold a document and how other systems that need access to it can link to that single document.
You may be tempted to simply move everything over to the new system and defer evaluating the information until later.
Why isn’t that a good approach?
First, because if you don’t do it now, it probably won’t happen.
More importantly, all documents do not have equal value. Systems – and documents – consume an organization’s resources, including:
Low-value information interferes with the efficiency of business activities because it can quickly accumulate into a mass of excess data. That irrelevant information must be combed to find pertinent information, which bogs down routine processes. Additionally, keeping documents that have already met their retention requirements can create additional risks. Your goal should be to make it easier to find the right information when it is needed.
Who should make decisions about what is high-value information and what should move to the new system? It should be a team decision. Assigning this decision solely to the department that owns the documents risks an inadequate review. Despite the fact that the department probably has the best understanding of what is in those documents, they are not fully informed on other factors such as risk and impact to resources or the enterprise as a whole.
The review team typically consists of representatives from:
Factors to consider during the review and evaluation should include:
Some decisions will be easy, such as eliminating file types that should not be retained. Other decisions will need deeper analysis. The expertise to do this analysis may only be there during the short time that this new system project is going on, so make good use of it while it’s available.
Holding on to documents, files and information whose useful life has passed can become a liability to the organization. Once you have determined that a document isn’t useful or needed in the new system, steps should be taken to properly dispose of it.
Building a document management solution that meets the organization’s current and future needs is a difficult but worthwhile endeavor. Ensuring that the documents and files moved to that system are of value will help to streamline operations and meet the goals of the organization. Put in the time to do it right the first time!
To learn more about how a content management system can help you automate key processes, save time spent locating documents and be better prepared to meet compliance requirements, check out our enterprise content management software buyer’s guide.
