Scribbled in the Margins: Capturing the Knowledge of Marginalia

Were you one of those students who, despite your teachers’ warnings, continued to write in your books? If so, you have a lot of company—some of it illustrious (no pun intended). And now, there are a number of efforts going on around the world to capture these scribbled snippets of wisdom.

The notion of “marginalia,” or making handwritten notes and drawings in the margins of book pages, dates back as far as the Middle Ages. Presumably, monks made random drawings and notes to relieve the tedium of the manuscripts they were copying. Once mechanical printing started, marginalia really took off as scholars of the day held debates with the books they were reading—not so different from comment sections on websites.

To the despair of librarians everywhere, marginalia has marched on. “Such readers feel that they aren’t really giving a book their full attention unless they’re hovering over it with a pencil, poised to underline or annotate at the slightest provocation,” writes Mark O’Connell in the New Yorker, going on to quote George Steiner’s description of an intellectual as “a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.” Writers such as Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Graham Greene, and Mark Twain were all noted for their habit of scribbling in books written by others.

These notes can still be useful to us today, say researchers. “This diverse evidence of annotation provides a considerable range of unique and largely untapped research materials, which reveal that readers—much as users of the internet today—adapted quickly to the technology of print: interacting intimately, dynamically, socially, and even virtually with texts,” writes Johns Hopkins University.

In fact, Johns Hopkins goes on to call marginalia “among the largest, least accessible, and most underutilized of original manuscript sources from the early modern period, due to the fact that they are almost entirely uncatalogued, or undercatalogued, by major research collections throughout the world.”

That’s what marginalia digitization projects hope to change. Here are some examples:

The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe, a joint venture of Johns Hopkins, Princeton and University College London, will transcribe and catalog marginal notes in 16th- and 17th-century books held in various libraries. The project will begin with a number of heavily annotated books and expand from there, eventually producing a large, fully searchable dataset available on a publicly accessible website.

Annotated Books Online enables people to add transcriptions and translations and upload annotated books of their own, access to which is then provided free of charge to researchers. Thus far, it contains about 60 volumes, including Martin Luther’s copy of the New Testament.

The Darwin Manuscripts Project, which currently offers “digital access to all of the 34,643 folios [of Darwin’s] that deal directly with the theory of evolution.” “Transcriptions are essential, as Darwin’s handwriting is often difficult to read, and having his marginalia, notes, and letters be legible can more readily support new research,” writes Allison Meier in Hyperallergenic. These include scribblings in books he studied, abstracts, book drafts, articles and their revisions, journals he read, and his notebooks on transmutation. “There are even some charming oddities like drawings by Darwin’s children on the back of leaves of The Origin of Species,” Meier notes.

Digitizing Walt Whitman’s Annotations and Marginalia is a project that has been going on at the University of Texas at Austin since 2007. “Using Walt Whitman’s manuscript marginalia—his annotations and other scribblings on other writers’ printed works—we have built prototype tools for marking up such documents as well as for displaying interactive search results for such documents using images and text,” notes the project’s website.

Hidden in Plain View: Making Visible the Robbins Library’s Marginalia Collection is a project that began this summer to digitize the marginalia at Harvard University’s Robbins Library. “Interest in readers’ marginalia ranges across disciplinary bounds,” writes Eric Johnson-DeBaufre of Robbins Library of Philosophy. “Making visible our collection of marginalia thus stands to benefit philosophers as well as historians, literary scholars, and others.”

As people progress to reading books electronically, does this mean the death of marginalia? Just the opposite, actually. Some marginalia aficionados see it as a new revolution, equivalent to that of Gutenberg. “Imagine reading, say, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and touching a virtual button so that—ping!—Ernest Hemingway’s marginalia instantly appears, or Ralph Ellison’s, or Mary McCarthy’s. Or imagine you’re reading a particularly thorny passage of Paradise Lost and suddenly—zwang!—up pops marginalia from a few centuries of poets (Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Emerson, Eliot, Pound), with their actual handwriting superimposed on the text in front of you,” writes self-confessed marginaliaist Sam Anderson in the New York Times. “This, it seems to me, would be something like a readerly utopia.”

Gitterman & Associates

Since it was founded in 1990, Gitterman & Associates Wealth Management, LLC has grown from a five-person financial firm to a dually registered firm with 25 employees handling $225M assets under management (AUM) on its RIA side and over $400M AUM on its broker-dealer (BD) side. With this growth came the need to manage more client information and business records—and, now as a dually registered RIA/BD, to meet separate compliance standards for both FINRA and the SEC.

Since implementing Laserfiche Avante earlier this year, Gitterman & Associates is not only saving the staff and storage costs of working with paper, the firm is using Laserfiche to proactively manage its information to make compliance simpler, easier and more efficient. “Laserfiche is as user-friendly as it says it is, but it has the flexibility to separate our information to meet our compliance needs as both an RIA and a broker-dealer,” says Jeffrey Gitterman, Founder and CEO. “No other company or solution we looked at did that.”

Declaring Independence from Its BD – and Its Legacy ECM

Laserfiche was not the firm’s first enterprise content management (ECM) solution—but it was its first successful one. “Two years ago, our broker-dealer at the time came to us as one of two branch offices to beta test their document management system. I jumped on it, thinking this has got to be better than having a file clerk in a room all day,” recalls Marcy Gitterman, Director of IT & HR.

Trouble was, with no folder hierarchy and searching limited only to template fields, the legacy system was creating as many problems as it was meant to solve. “It was just a really cumbersome program to use,” she says. As the firm prepared to switch broker-dealers to Fidelity, only one of 19 staff members had actually scanned their paperwork into the system. Marcy was frustrated, but optimistic. “I knew there had to be something else out there that would work,” she says.

The firm’s principals, meanwhile, just wanted something people would actually use. “At one point, we were just talking about scanning everything to PDF ourselves and storing it on a hard drive, but I was really against that,” Gitterman says. “We needed something a lot more robust—the fact that PDFs can be altered wouldn’t help with security or compliance.”

Laserfiche, turns out, was one of the ECM providers on Fidelity’s short list of recommended solutions. Jeffrey Gitterman was aware of Laserfiche from local FPA chapter meetings, as well as from hearing about it from colleagues who used it. “It’s just a name we kept hearing a lot,” he says. When Zaheer Master, President of Laserfiche reseller Accelerated Information Systems, presented a Laserfiche solution tailored to the firm’s dual registry, Gitterman knew he was working with the right company—and that he’d actually use the software.

“I avoid technology like the plague, so ease of use was my number one priority. How easily can our new employees use it? How easy is it for me to use it?” Gitterman says. “Laserfiche could take our paper filing system—the one we’ve been using successfully since 1996—and transpose it to a Windows-type environment we were comfortable with.

“But what really impressed us about Laserfiche was the way our reseller presented it. The other solutions we looked at were totally reactionary—they just said, ‘This is how you get rid of paper.’ Our reseller presented Laserfiche in a way that said, ‘Okay, now that your information’s automated, here’s how you’ll need to set this up to get the most out of it and here’s how you do it,’” he adds.

Implementation took place over two months. Says Master, “We showed them how they needed to separate the RIA side of their business from the BD side for FINRA and SEC compliance. We also showed them how, using metadata, you could set up a template field search with a cut-off date or destruction date to easily enforce a retention policy. I think the important thing to realize with ECM is that just because it’s easy to keep everything, doesn’t mean you necessarily want to.”

The space saving alone, Marcy says, was a relief. “We look at the hundreds of square feet we’d been devoting to our file room—it just gets crazy. And half of those files you’ll never see, but you have to keep for compliance,” she says. “Now we get our space back and all we have to do is shoot something through the scanner so we don’t have to touch it again. It’s that simple.”

The flexibility to segregate information and customize user access to certain folders was not only effective, she says, it was easy. “In the old system, we would have to hire a support person to do that. Now we can set up permissions to assign access,” Marcy says. “We use Laserfiche for client files, HR files, benefits, payroll, you name it, so the ability to lock down some files versus other files is really helpful.”

She adds, “Laserfiche doesn’t just say it’s user friendly, it is.”

Automated Compliance – Even at 2 AM

While having more accessible information is a benefit, Gitterman & Associates has also realized that automated information is more useful information. “We do a lot of our compliance right in Laserfiche,” Marcy says. “Instead of our reps having to make copies of client correspondence, they scan them in and it’s automatically submitted to our Chief Compliance Officer in a folder only he has access to. Then we set up a stamping process so the CCO can tell the rep that it’s been approved.”

This automation has paid off in faster service for financial advisors. “One of the nice things is that if our CCO is on the road, it’s not like it has to wait a week if it’s something that needs to be pre-approved. He doesn’t have to look for a fax machine or find time to respond during business hours, he can just log into Laserfiche at 2:00 AM.”

For his part, Jeffrey agrees. “Laserfiche is a huge help from a compliance side.”

But Gitterman says it’s the little things that make using Laserfiche an effective part of everyday business. “The fact that I can redact a line in a memo, and then send it in a secure email—these are the kinds of things I like. I don’t have to ask someone how to do it, I can just do it.”

He sees the potential for Laserfiche to make audits more hassle-free. “I just went through six months of FINRA audits and I can tell you it was painful. They basically put me out of business for six months. If we had already had Laserfiche, it wouldn’t have been a tenth of the nightmare it was,” he says.

“Now that we have Laserfiche, even though an auditor can come and say he wants to see incoming correspondence from a certain date range, we can have everything for them in 30 seconds. That’s going to be huge for us.”

Marcy says now that the firm is enjoying its first taste of content management efficiency, she is eager to see what Laserfiche Workflow can do to automate business process management. “Right now our CRM integrates with our email system—I’d like to see it integrated with Laserfiche as well,” she says. “And our internal processing department will be able to automatically route documents to our principals to approve from anywhere, instead of having them wait in a folder on a desk—that’ll be nice.”

As nice, says Jeffrey, is that the firm has found an ECM system that’s finally living up to its potential—and uncovering new potential in the process. “Of all the new software we’ve gotten in the last few months, this is everyone’s favorite,” he says. “Laserfiche did what it promised to do. None of the other software did.”

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.”

How Do You Explain Records Management to Non-Records Managers?

Explaining a concept to an unfamiliar audience requires more than expert knowledge—you need to be able to adapt your message so it’s relatable and thought-provoking. Records management, with its myriad rules and regulations, can sound almost like another language to the untrained ear. But employees who don’t understand the importance of electronic records management are unlikely to follow its rules, leaving the organization at risk and the records manager constantly frustrated.

We asked a group of over 3,000 records managers on LinkedIn how they explain records management to regular employees who do not share their expertise or daily business goals. Here are eight takeaways from that discussion.

1. “Keep it simple”

Straightforward messages are easier to understand and remember, but it can be a challenge to break down the many aspects of records management. Rich Lauwers, Director of Information Governance at Merrill Corporation, shared a simple slogan that was passed on to him from a colleague:

Records management is knowing what you have, where you have it and how long you have to keep it.

By starting every client conversation with this slogan, Rich is able to ease any anxiety caused by the changing regulations, practices and legal ramifications of records management.

2. “Put your global view to good use”

Besides the CEO, the records manager is one of the few people who has a comprehensive view of the organization’s methods and operations. This knowledge is collected over the years through information audits and policy reviews, giving the records manager keen insight into the routines of regular employees.

Records managers can use this global view to address “throw it over the wall” thinking—i.e., when departments pass off responsibilities to the next department without considering the impact on organizational efficiency. A common example of this is when one department passes a paper form to the next department, which then has to enter the form data into its software system—using a consistent electronic form would save time for everyone.

Once records managers help regular employees understand they’re all part of the same team, those employees might be more receptive to sharing the duties of records management.

3. â€œShow how records management is a means, not an end”

Records management, like IT, exists to support the infrastructure of an organization. It is crucial that employees view records management not as a resting place for unneeded documents but as a set of principles that must be followed in every department and process.

In order to communicate this idea, records managers should first understand how their users operate by asking:

  • What services are you providing?
  • Who are your customers or clients?
  • What are your pressures or pain points?
  • What consequences do you have for errors or non-compliance?

With these questions answered, records managers can explain records management and the useful role it plays in the day-to-day lives of regular employees.

4. â€œLet executives spread the message”

If the message of the records manager tends to fall on deaf ears, change the speaker. One LinkedIn member used video recorded messages from his organization’s CEO and Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer to roll out a new records management program. In his case, it was crucial to go beyond C-level approval and have executives actively advocate the records management initiative.

5. â€œUse analogies for records management”

When employees claim that records management is too complicated to handle on their own, it helps to relate organizational records management to personal records management. For instance, home life requires you to sort mail and throw out what you don’t need, keep some mail until an action is completed (such as paying a bill) and retain other pieces of mail as required (such as tax documents).

In this way, records managers prove that regular employees already practice records management to some extent, making it less alien of a concept. The main distinction is that in an organization, everyone must follow the same rules and the consequences of non-compliance affect more people.

6. â€œBring the risks of non-compliance to life”

Certain people require dramatic examples to be shaken out of apathy. I am in no way endorsing the idea of staging an emergency in the records storage facility, but it can help to go over the worst-case scenarios of non-compliance. For example, one wealth management firm experienced a six month FINRA audit that essentially put business on hold. According to one LinkedIn member, sharing these horror stories prompts action from regular employees without much effort from the records manager.

This approach should be made with caution as employees might replace arbitrary recordkeeping behavior with record hoarding, which can still put the organization at risk.

7. “Don’t associate records management with downsizing”

Electronic or automated records management can make compliance easier for records managers and regular employees, so why would anyone resist the idea? One LinkedIn member emphasized the importance of phrasing records management initiatives so that employees focus on the direct benefits, such as taking on more valuable tasks, improving service and freeing up office space. On the other hand, records managers should avoid associating an automated system with staff reduction.

8. â€œLet regular employees do the talking”

Ultimately, some people need to realize the importance of records management on their own and not because someone gave them a list of rules. With these employees, it helps to let them explain records management to themselves.

To use this method, records managers should ask several questions and engage in two-way conversations with regular employees. For example, a records manager at a university can ask an administrator, “What bothers you about the current student records system?” A possible answer might be, “I dislike it when I ask for a student record and it takes a week for the student services department to respond, then when I get it, the file’s incomplete.” This answer highlights the value of an electronic records management system with a searchable database, which the administrator identified in her own way.

The task of explaining records management to regular employees is not always easy, but it can be done. To make the job of the records manager even easier, organizations should implement a records management system that is systematic, organized and easy to use. Learn more here.

Colorado Department of Natural Resources

Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) manages a wealth of information across eight divisions, including:
  • Colorado Division of Forestry
  • Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife
  • Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining, and Safety
  • Colorado Division of Water Resources
  • Colorado Geological Survey
  • Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC)
  • Colorado State Land Board
  • Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB)

According to Susan Lesovsky, Application Support Manager for the CWCB, the DNR purchased a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system in 2005 to replace a legacy IBM system that lacked an out-of-the box web interface, optical character recognition (OCR) functionality and the ability to automate business processes. “Our old system was pretty much limited to search and retrieval,” she explains.

She notes that a top priority for implementing Laserfiche was making it easier for citizens to stay informed about government activities. “Ultimately, our customer is the public, and our success is measured on how we provide and process information for them,” Lesovsky says.

To that end, the DNR upgraded to Laserfiche Rio in 2009. According to Lesovsky, “Laserfiche Rio has allowed us to increase the transparency of information to the public, and it’s done it in such a way that we don’t have to worry about connections or cost.”

In particular, she describes the benefits of upgrading to Laserfiche Rio as:

Laserfiche Rio Enables Citizens to Cut through Red Tape

Lesovsky notes that Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper recently called for every department in state government to reduce red tape. Good government, he says, is characterized by “efficiency, effectiveness and elegance.”

“As one of only two recommended content management systems for the state, Laserfiche epitomizes all three E’s,” Lesovsky says.

She explains how easy it is for citizens to access documents such as the CWCB’s meeting documents:
  • The current year’s materials are available on the Board’s website in a table that provides direct links to PDFs stored in Laserfiche.
  • Archived materials are accessible through a custom search box (created using the WebLink Designer) on the lower right side of same page or through this link.
  • The custom search box is limited to three fields (title, date range and document type) to streamline access and reduce user confusion. (Custom search components have been included throughout the CWCB’s website to help direct the public’s search for Board-related documents.)

Colorado’s Decision Support Systems website also includes custom search boxes throughout its Website, such as the one at the top of this page that searches according to document type and a few other parameters, while a set of “Google-like” search results based on document type displays below thanks to an encoded URL string.

“We used the WebLink Designer to create custom searches because we noticed that our users would get overwhelmed when presented with a long list of templates and fields,” says Lesovsky. “Each custom search focuses on a particular program area or topic and uses a limited set of search criteria within the associated template.”

Quick, easy and efficient searches support Hickenlooper’s goal of driving the “three E’s” into government operations. Lesovsky explains, “In the past, people had to come to our offices to request information. Laserfiche WebLink provides a simple and elegant way for the public to get immediate access to the information they need whenever they need it.”

Integrations Make ECM “Mission-Critical”

By integrating Laserfiche WebLink with other software applications, the DNR has been able to make information even more accessible. For example, by integrating Laserfiche with ESRI ArcGIS, staff can click on a stream and retrieve associated court documents, while public users can quickly access information associated with flooding and flood hazards in the state.

To see the public-facing integration in action:
  1. Visit Colorado’s Flood Decision Support System page
  2. Click on the Flood DSS Map Viewer.
  3. Agree to the disclaimer.
  4. Click the Documents tab in the top menu.
  5. Enter your search criteria in the pop-up window. For example, select:
  6. Group: Historical Flooding.
  7. Document: Historical flood photographs.
  8. Type: Photographs.
  9. Hit the search button.
  10. A new window displays the results (produced on-the-fly by an encoded URL string) in a grid format.

It’s the integrations with applications like ESRI ArcGIS that make Laserfiche “mission-critical.” According to Lesovsky, “When you integrate Laserfiche with business-specific systems, you embed it into your existing workflow processes and it becomes integral to how you operate.”

ECM Enables Electronic Forms Processing

Laserfiche Rio has been a particularly effective ECM solution for the DNR because different divisions can configure it to meet their unique needs. For example, the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) uses Laserfiche to enable an eForm application that provides an interface for oil and gas operators to enter and submit permit forms and supporting documents. There are currently six active forms and three in development.

According to Ken Robertson, Application Developer for the COGCC, “Uploaded files are stored in our production web server. Once the operators submit the form to our internal server, we export the attachments to Laserfiche.”

He explains that the public can view the files directly from the production web server or wait until the files are imported to Laserfiche and use Laserfiche WebLink to access them. Furthermore, he outlines how the COGCC has used the Laserfiche SDK to create customized Laserfiche scripts and programs.

Robertson says, “For those attachments still sitting in our production web server, we created a Windows service to check queued files in the Web server every 15 minutes and use the Laserfiche Toolkit [SDK] for .NET to import files to the Laserfiche repository server. In the meantime, we also collect the Laserfiche reference numbers in our attachment table so that system (eForm) can provide a Laserfiche WebLink download page for users to view the attachments.”

He notes that there is a separate application that allows oil and gas operators to upload well logs, which are imported into Laserfiche using Laserfiche Import Agent, a tool that captures and processes electronic documents. Scanning staff members use Laserfiche Quick Fields to index other types of electronic documents.

The biggest benefit of processing permits and well logs with Laserfiche is time. Robertson says, “We used to shuffle files from one person to another until they were approved, and then we scanned everything into the system. Having the operators upload their attachments to their documents saves an average of 15 minutes of scanning and indexing time for our staff, not to mention the time saved on data entry.”

He goes on to explain that having everything available electronically at the beginning of the process allows multiple people to work on the same forms simultaneously, further reducing processing time.

“Not only do we save time,” Robertson says, “but the approval process is now more transparent for the public.”

Lesovsky adds, “Laserfiche is powerful, flexible and easy to work with. Even though all our divisions use the same system, we can all use it a little differently.”

Looking Ahead

Lesovsky is particularly excited to use Laserfiche to harvest data across organizations. She explains that the CWCB has already conducted a feasibility study and has a grant in place to make it happen.

“Colorado State University has an ECM solution other than Laserfiche but a healthy collection of water information. The Colorado Water Resources Development & Power Authority and the Colorado River Water Conservation District currently use Laserfiche, with repositories of useful water documents. By hooking our systems together and using common metadata, we’ll be able to search for information across all four entities and gain a more complete picture of accessible water information in the state.”

She says that the DNR is also working on integrating Laserfiche and SharePoint. “Most of our divisions use SharePoint for their external websites. Right now, people have to conduct separate searches if they want to find content stored in both Laserfiche and SharePoint. What we’re looking to do is enable searches that return results from both systems at the same time.”

All in all, she says, “Laserfiche Rio is a great tool. The bottleneck now is just finding the time to make it do everything we want it to do.”

City of Lakewood, CO

Back in 2001, staff from the planning and public works department at the City of Lakewood, CO, created the Digital Archives Group (DAG) to find more efficient ways to manage 30 years’ worth of maps, plats and plans. Members from the Planning and Public Works, Community Resources, the City Clerk’s Office Central Records Division and the IT department participated in DAG.

Led by Stormwater Quality Coordinator Alan Searcy, Central Records Administrator Sharon Blackstock, and Imaging Technician Greg Buchanan, DAG evolved into an ad hoc governance committee, setting recordkeeping and retention policies for each department, as well as standardizing document indexing for interdepartmental use. “My goal in the beginning,” says Searcy, “was to get as much ‘buy-in’ as possible for our fledgling imaging program. Working together on interdepartmental projects is a proven recipe for success in Lakewood.” The Digital Archives Group is a prime example of that fact.

DAG initiated the purchase of Laserfiche in 2001 from Colorado-based reseller Phil Landreth of S. Corporation, with several departments sharing the cost. “Laserfiche was the most user-friendly solution we looked at, and we knew that was going to be very important,” Blackstock says. “Laserfiche also had a very strong presence in cities around our size (population: 145,000), so we knew that support for local government operations was in place.”

Although Laserfiche was first used only by the Engineering Division and the City Clerk’s Office, it eventually spread to other departments. As new departments joined in the project, they sent representatives to DAG meetings.

Initially, Laserfiche was used for archiving permanent records and closed case files. After a couple of years, the finance department became the first to manage active records with Laserfiche by scanning sales tax returns. More active records management followed as Laserfiche use began spreading to DAG members’ departments. Eventually most of Lakewood’s 10 departments adopted Laserfiche, each relying on DAG’s training and best practices to scan and manage their own records.

“With every new project, people really welcome our support and suggestions. We all listen to each other and are willing to hear new ideas,” Buchanan says. “At the same time, people don’t just say, ‘I’m going to do this’ and call up IT—DAG helps define the project and gives the go-ahead.” The City Clerk’s Office created Buchanan’s position as Imaging Technician in 2002 to facilitate Laserfiche projects by assisting departments in training users and developing and managing scanning projects.

Today, DAG’s goals are being met—long-term records are being archived and protected, concurrent retrieval of imaged records is possible, and storage space for maps, plats and plans has been reduced. What’s more, interdepartmental cooperation has resulted in a citywide sense of pride and ownership of Laserfiche.

Breaking Down Silos to Build an Agile Enterprise

IT Software Services Manager Tom Charkut credits DAG with addressing the training element in the early days “in a way IT just couldn’t.” But by 2005, Charkut says, “There were so many departments using Laserfiche that it just made sense to centralize the software maintenance and support.” IT took over Laserfiche system administration in 2006, as well as the software maintenance costs.

The City of Lakewood’s IT staff of 27 supports more than 1,000 city employees. “We’re a small team with big shoes to fill,” Charkut admits. Filling big shoes with different sizes and styles, he says, requires an agile development philosophy.

According to Charkut, one key component to solving the diverse but often overlapping information needs of Lakewood’s business units was using the Laserfiche SDK and its Microsoft-standard .NET API to integrate with legacy business applications. “Since Laserfiche was an enterprise-wide system,” he says, “we needed to figure out how to integrate it with our other line-of-business systems.”

A recent example is an integration between Laserfiche and Planning and Public Works’ new building permit system. “The user will be in the permit system, and using the permit number, he’ll click on a ‘documents’ button we developed that shows him the documents in Laserfiche,” he explains. “If he needs to email those documents, then we send URLs linking to those documents using Laserfiche Web Access. Laserfiche gives us the ability to arrange the information so it’s at the user’s fingertips.”

The user, Charkut notes, never leaves the permitting application. What’s more, the additional content is referenced from its single, centralized Laserfiche repository. Similarly, integration with the city’s GeoSmart GIS application geo-enables searches for employees across various systems whether it’s for code enforcement cases or service requests from residents, as well as for any documents—including plats, plans and forms—already in Laserfiche.

“For us, Laserfiche integration has helped break down silos,” Charkut says. “It’s all about decentralized capture, centralized storage and an enterprise library.”

What a Transparent Web We Weave

Now, as the city maps out an overhaul of Lakewood’s web strategy, Laserfiche is one of the ingredients. “Our web strategy in the past has been a patchwork of stuff. Just last year we said, ‘We have to do something about this—we’re getting 5,000 hits a day,’” says Charkut. “Part of our plan is to promote government transparency through the use of web self-service, including access to records contained in the Laserfiche system.”

Lakewood also finds itself in the middle of an electronic records management inventory and assessment, where consultants are actually suggesting new and future uses of Laserfiche. Building on DAG’s solid support foundation and Lakewood IT’s agile, integrated web strategies, the city is now assessing whether and when to upgrade to Laserfiche Rio, with its scalable, flexible user and module licensing—as well as its unlimited servers—to meet the needs of more and more departments, business processes and users, both internally and externally, from a single enterprise application.

“We are evaluating the ROI of Laserfiche Rio,” jokes Charkut. “We will assess that model on a 7- to 10-year timeframe.”

Upcoming Laserfiche Projects
  1. Employee Relations for employee benefits and claim management.
  2. Finance for sales and use tax applications management.
  3. Planning and Public Works to manage planning case documents from submittal to archival.
  4. Municipal Court for case file management.
  5. Utility crews and inspectors of right-of-way and buildings to access plans, records and other information stored in Laserfiche from the field.

County of Essex

“What started as a niche application in the County Clerk’s Office has now become an enterprise infrastructure investment,” says Wendy St. Amour, Essex County’s IT Manager.

The county implemented Laserfiche back in 2000 because “managing paper records in an organization of our size was an arduous, time-consuming and expensive task. Complying with a myriad of new government regulations and increasingly less physical space made it even more difficult,” explains St. Amour, adding that manual workflow processes were inefficient and time consuming.

She notes that the county “makes a point of making the right decision upfront,” and that based on a combination of good references from other municipalities, user-friendly technology and an affordable price, Laserfiche won the RFP process.

Initially implemented in the County Clerk’s Office, Laserfiche immediately began providing benefits.

Mary Brennan, the county’s Director of Council Services/Clerk, explains, “As the county clerk, it’s my job to respond to requests for information. With Laserfiche, I never have to venture down into the dreaded basement vault to search for and retrieve records. By giving me a way to find documents quickly, Laserfiche has saved a tremendous amount of time over the years.”

Evolution of a Shared Service

What started as a solution for the County Clerk’s Office soon spread—not just to additional departments such as Engineering and Finance, but to seven municipalities within the County as well.

“Since we purchased Laserfiche in 2000, all seven of the municipalities in Essex County have implemented the software,” says Brennan. “The Municipality of Leamington was actually included in our RFP. The others saw the success we were having, heard similar success stories from other municipalities and decided that Laserfiche would be beneficial for them, too.”

At first, the municipalities maintained and administered their own Laserfiche systems. Over time, however, they began to understand the advantages of sharing, including the ability to leverage economies of scale, take advantage of a wider knowledge base and gain access to additional ECM functionality.

Brennan explains that Essex County dipped its toe into the shared service pool by jointly purchasing and using Laserfiche WebLink as a public information portal together with all seven of its lower-tier municipalities. The online portal provides residents with access to government material such as:
  • Agendas
  • Bylaws
  • Meeting minutes
  • Historical documents
  • Studies requiring public consultation

“Laserfiche WebLink is great because all interested stakeholders can easily view public documents with the click of a mouse,” Brennan explains. “Plus, it saves our staff the work of converting documents to PDFs and manually posting them on our website.”

St. Amour notes that, with eight organizations using Laserfiche, the knowledge base staff amassed was substantial. “The ability to share knowledge and expertise with each other has proven to be very beneficial. That, coupled with the cost savings of sharing one enterprise system, gave us the confidence to upgrade to Laserfiche Rio.”

After consulting with MC Imaging Technologies, Essex County’s Laserfiche reseller, the county and its lower-tier municipalities all agreed that purchasing and deploying Laserfiche Rio as a shared service was the best way to empower employees and capitalize on everything the software has to offer.

“The ability to use unlimited servers is what made our expansion to Laserfiche Rio possible, because each lower-tier municipality uses its own server while taking advantage of the additional functionality Laserfiche Rio offers, such as Laserfiche Workflow,” says St. Amour.

“By taking a shared-service approach, we can develop a process once, and with a few small changes, eight different organizations can benefit from it,” she adds.

Enterprise Efficiency in Action

St. Amour notes that the county and its municipalities benefit from integration between Laserfiche, ESRI ArcGIS and Geocortex, an interactive mapping tool. Cathy Paduch, GIS Technician for Essex County, explains, “The integration allows staff to access documents associated with any spatial asset simply by clicking on a point on a map. This saves time and eliminates the need to store documents in multiple locations.”

Imagery supplied by the county is leveraged by many departments in local municipalities and is also available for public consumption over the web. Residents can take advantage of an interactive map to locate schools, recreational buildings, municipal institutions, hospitals, churches and police and fire stations—along with associated documents available via Laserfiche WebLink. Paduch notes that protected information such as property tax information is only available to staff.

Mike Sherwood, GIS Technician, adds that the custom script the county created dynamically searches Laserfiche and returns a list of the number and type of documents associated with any given location. “We don’t have to do any maintenance on the GIS side to keep the integration working,” he says.

Although designed and administered by county employees, staff across all seven of Essex’s municipalities benefit from the integration. “It allows all levels of staff from administration, emergency services and engineering departments to easily locate documents,” Paduch explains.

St. Amour adds, “The ease and efficiency of being able to track down and locate multiple documents associated to spatial data within the map interface is a great time saver.”

Looking Ahead

Although Essex County has only recently implemented Laserfiche Rio, St. Amour says that the county’s priority is automating business processes using Laserfiche Workflow. “Our first priority will be to automate our agendas; then we’ll take a hard look at how we can make our accounts payable and HR processes more efficient.”

Overall, implementing Laserfiche ECM as a shared service across the county and its lower-tier municipalities has enabled Essex to leverage economies of scale, gain access to additional ECM functionality and decrease the amount of time staff spends on manual tasks such as filing and finding paper documents.

“We’ve already realized a significant ROI from using Laserfiche,” says St. Amour. “Now that we have Laserfiche Rio, we can’t wait to start reaping the benefits of business process automation!”

Technology Making an HR Impact

With space at a premium, a room full of paper was a luxury the City of Denton could not afford. The city’s HR department had 15 five-drawer file cabinets crammed into 300 square feet of space. “One of the major issues was searching for documents. So many times a file had been pulled and we couldn’t find it,” says Technology Services Manager Mary Collins. To solve the problem, Denton staff began searching for a digital document management system.

“We had a directive from our city manager to look at document imaging,” says Collins. “We looked at a number of products over a long period of time, and the technology changed during that period.”

Denton tested Laserfiche in the city manager’s and attorney’s offices. In addition to the success experienced in those departments, the support Denton got from its reseller, DocuNav, made Laserfiche the city’s choice.

HR Implementation

Implementing Laserfiche has had a dramatic impact on Denton’s HR department. Staff now finds information in a fraction of the time it once took. Sarah Mabel, HR assistant for records management, notices major differences in handling open-records requests:

“We used to have someone do that as a full-time job. Now I’ve taken it over and I estimate that filling open records requests takes somewhere between eight and 13 percent of my time.”

Employee Records Management

When it comes to managing employee records, Denton’s integration of Laserfiche with its JD Edwards®(JDE) Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) has proven crucial. With nearly 8,000 applications received each year, the paperwork used to pile up.

“HR doesn’t have to type in all the index information,” says HR Operations and Training Specialist Sally Cavness. “Laserfiche pulls it in from JDE, we assign the documents a specific number and the program uses this number as a guide to fill in the blanks by retrieving it from JDE.”

In addition, HR integrated Laserfiche with its online application process. “The City of Denton has developed a user-friendly process that dramatically increased the HR department’s effectiveness and efficiency. We now have an online job application process that includes the civil service exam registration,” notes Cavness.

Automating the Hiring Process

Jesse Perez, HR technician for selection and placement, explains, “Whenever there’s a vacancy, we enter the employee requisition into the HRIS system. We then set up an appropriate folder in Laserfiche, which is where all the images and the application are scanned. Each supervisor is assigned a unique login and password for access to the intranet.”

With Laserfiche, applicants can update their information as needed over the web. In addition, the system can pull candidate information from what’s already stored in the system.

The selection process is automated from the initial application submission to the creation of a new personnel file:
  • HR receives applications electronically via the web.
  • The system populates the HRIS with pertinent information and sends the applications to Laserfiche.
  • Supervisors can view applications remotely via Laserfiche WebLink.

“By eliminating the need to shuffle paperwork back and forth between the supervisor and the HR department,” says Cavness, “we’ve eliminated the risk of losing applications.”

Saving Staff Time

Because Laserfiche is integrated with the city’s payroll software, HR employees can now search for documents by name or employee ID. In addition, redaction capabilities have eliminated the cumbersome process of manually blacking out files.

Laserfiche has saved time and effort for city staff.  â€œAs a city,” says Cavness, “we have buildings that are very, very widely spaced. Previously, supervisors might have to come all the way across town to look at paper applications. Being able to view applications from their desks is a tremendous time saver.”

Cavness continues, “Previously, it could take up to two weeks for a new application to get filed. Now that process is normally completed within a day.”

Sarah Mabel sums up the feelings of her HR coworkers. “When Laserfiche first came to the department, as with any new program, we were a little scared of it—we had that kind of mentality. Now, not a single person in our department can live without it. I love it.”

Enterprise-wide Applications

The city’s success with Laserfiche goes beyond HR:
  • The library uses it to track memorial donations.
  • The fire department uses it to access scanned map books and building footprints from their trucks.
  • The city secretary’s office has scanned thousands of documents, including city council minutes, ordinances and resolutions dating back to the 1900s.
  • The engineering department manages easements, ordinances, contracts and a variety of other documents with Laserfiche.

In addition to these processes, the city looks forward to expanding Laserfiche to the building inspection and police departments.

Saving $1.5 Million with Laserfiche

SEPT is one of the largest and highest-performing national healthcare organizations in the United Kingdom. Providing services for people with mental health problems and learning disabilities, SEPT serves a population of 1.5 million across three counties, with over 3,500 employees and an operating a budget of more than $300 million.

Mergers and acquisitions account for much of SEPT’s growth, but innovation, says Dominic Malvern, Head of Information Systems Development, accounts for much of its ongoing success. “It’s never been a stereotypical government ‘Mental Health Organization,” Malvern says.

In fact, when SEPT transitioned from a purely state-funded trust to a more privatized “Foundation Trust,” one of its primary initiatives was to partner with Adobe to develop an EMR system using Adobe LiveCycle products supported by a Laserfiche ECM system from Laserfiche reseller Fortrus. Malvern saw the chance to hit the ground running with a pilot project in the trust’s Forensic Services Department, which was moving to a new building as part of a modernization program.

“It was the ideal opportunity for us to modernize how our live patient records were accessed, as it was apparent that continuing with a manual process was not in keeping with the state of the art service we provide to our patients,” he says. That process, he adds, had remained manual by default because the legacy imaging system in Forensics didn’t meet the Trust requirement for working with live patient records.

“A single patient record could run for several years, sometimes through a person’s entire adult life, so it would extend into several volumes,” he explains. “Constant patient monitoring meant frequent updates to records for many reasons such as observation or treatment plans, sometimes every 15 minutes.”

A Pilot That Needed To Fly 24-7

When choosing a department to establish proof-of-concept before deploying a full-scale EMR system, SEPT couldn’t have chosen a more challenging one than Forensics Services—or one in which the impact of a successful ECM implementation would be so pronounced.

Malvern worked with Fortrus’ Steve Livermore to implement a Laserfiche pilot system for active patient records management system using:
  • Laserfiche Quick Fields advanced capture to input, sort and file the steady stream of patient information.
  • Laserfiche Workflow to automatically route information for reviews, approval and distribution.
  • Laserfiche Web Access to allow both remote deployment and access to the system over SEPT’s broad geographic service area and affiliated agencies.

SEPT implemented a clinical pilot project in 2009 and, over the course of a year, the new system kept up with the staff’s round-the-clock demands, amassing over 500,000 documents in the Laserfiche repository in the process.

Malvern says the real operational breakthrough was having a system aligned with the increasing need for information sharing between regional service offices. “Increasingly we have to work on a multi-disciplinary and multi-agency basis, so having shared but secure access to patient records and notes is vital,” he says.

From an IT perspective, Laserfiche Web Access gave the organization one more tool to centrally control system administration while capitalizing on Laserfiche’s flexibility to configure various access levels remotely.

“Being able to deploy the system through our server or using web browser options allowed us to control the type of access we wanted to make available,” says Malvern. “Web-based deployment is key because of the ease of maintenance when working with such a large group of users. Updates and upgrades would be unwieldy to deploy with a large number of single desktop clients.”

Going from EMR to ECM Saves $1.5M

The vision to extend Laserfiche from its supporting role in SEPT’s EMR project to a full-scale ECM deployment came with the support of Fortrus’ Livermore, who helped Malvern make the case to SEPT’s directors to implement Laserfiche for the trust’s non-clinical side.

“Once I heard the directors were looking at other solutions, and knowing what Laserfiche was capable of, it seemed a waste to restrict its application to purely clinical processes,” says Malvern. “Of course, it seemed an even bigger waste to spend further public money on more software that would be superfluous when we had a perfectly good system that would likely be better than anything else on the market.”

Now moving ahead with full-scale deployment of its Laserfiche Rio system to what will eventually be 3,000+ users, SEPT is effectively standardizing its information management on Laserfiche, eliminating the need for multiple departmental systems—and their corresponding service agreements and upgrades.

“Initially Laserfiche was envisaged solely as a clinical and medical records solution, but we have now realized that it can be a complete multi-functional document management system for the whole organization,” he says.

“We’ve begun implementation in non-clinical areas such Human Resources and Finance, as well as Vehicle Service Management, where we’re using Laserfiche Quick Fields and Laserfiche Workflow to automate our lease applications.” Additionally, another major project is underway to use Laserfiche to meet retention regulations for information governance of corporate records.

“From a roll-out prospective, it makes life much easier to have one multi-tasking system that all employees are trained on no matter what their function. It makes live support a far more streamlined and efficient activity,” he explains.

Malvern says the efficiency—and cost-savings—are starting to add up. “Within 18 months to two years we’ll be able to replace all our legacy imaging systems with Laserfiche. Implementing Laserfiche and its enterprise licensing enables SEPT to discontinue several annual contracts and service agreements. It also delivers savings on labor and print costs for information requests, as well as paper document archive and retrieval services. Realistically, this will save us US$1.5 million over the next three fiscal years,” he says.

SEPT’s Run Smarter Philosophy

Malvern’s advice for successful implementation and adoption from his experience with SEPT’s jump from departmental EMR to organization-wide ECM is simple. “Be open-minded in your approach. Don’t just try to replicate what you already have; Laserfiche can do so much more! Even a year down the road we’re still discovering new things it can do for us. It has great functionality combined with enormous flexibility that’s capable of revolutionizing your whole approach to records and document management—both live and archival,” he says. “We wish we’d discovered it sooner!”

Essar Group

With construction and mineral operations in more than 20 countries across five continents, the Essar Group employs 60,000 people in 63 companies, with annual revenues of $15 billion. In 2009, the Mumbai-based conglomerate initiated a plan to establish an enterprise-wide Shared Service Center to consolidate and automate finance and accounting processes across India. It looked to Laserfiche to serve as a foundational component of its agile ECM framework through an integration with its SAP–DMS system to support it.

“We saw Laserfiche as a way to bring visibility, time-bound execution and accountability to our accounting business processes,” says Mandeep Singh, Head of Finance Shared Services at Essar.

Working with Laserfiche reseller Sigma-Tech India Pvt. Ltd, Essar Group initially purchased a 100-user Laserfiche Rio solution. What started as simply a way to centralize all finance-related information evolved into a full-scale ECM/BPM implementation.

According to Singh, “We started using Laserfiche primarily as a scanning and document management solution, but after experiencing the way Laserfiche Workflow and its integration capabilities could be used for our scanning operations, we scaled up use dramatically.”

Chandresh Sharma, Vice President at Sigma-Tech, worked with Essar business analysts to map out the end-to-end processes for finance and accounting functions. These processes were mapped in Laserfiche Workflow to validate vendor, customer, company and invoice information from the SAP masters, and ultimately route and approve invoices and contracts processed between Essar’s global business units and the Shared Service Center at its Mumbai headquarters.

Balancing Centralized and Decentralized Processes

“Laserfiche operates as part of a ‘hub and spoke’ model with the Shared Service Center as the hub and business geographies as the spokes, which connect to the central hub for document processing,” Singh explains.

A major operational benefit has been the ability to seamlessly balance centralized and decentralized processes using Laserfiche as both the hub and the spoke. “Financial Shared Services uses both models to fulfil transactions,” explains Singh.
  • The centralized process approach is enabled by a central hub that accesses Laserfiche to process documents. Work allocation is assigned using Laserfiche Workflow, which detects exceptions to mapped data validation rules during the scanning process and provides notifications to responsible parties to resolve discrepancies. “This ensures that clean data is passed into the downstream operations of the financial services,” Singh says. A mail room solution is also in place to track and deliver transactions to Laserfiche, further accelerating the process and increasing productivity.
  • The decentralized process approach uses Laserfiche deployed locally to establish remote common collection hubs at various offices across India (and eventually globally) through which vendors working with ESSAR can submit hard copies of transactions. “Laserfiche is run in a dedicated center and further downstream processes like scanning, indexing and quality assurance are carried out before being published to the SAP-DMS,” he adds.

International offices use an FTP route offline. “Here the SPOCs [single point of contact] submit their invoices to the FTP folder. From there the invoices are scheduled for automatic entry into the Laserfiche server using Laserfiche Import Agent. This enables further processing,” explains Singh.

In addition to streamlining accounting processes, Laserfiche has standardized work allocation enterprise-wide. “Operationally, work allocation is now defined based on certain parameters mapped in Laserfiche. For example, ‘Process Type,’ ‘Document Type,’ ‘Location Code,’ ‘Country Code,’ ‘Business Vertical,’ ‘Priority’ and others,” says Singh.

Shared Services, Enterprise Benefits

The benefits of using Laserfiche as part of the Shared Service Center have been both immediate and long-term:
  • Better throughput in terms of number of transactions per process associate.
  • Accelerated invoice turnaround times of less than an hour for urgent invoices across geographies and less than a day for normal invoices.
  • Increased visibility of daily transactions across 63 group companies. Laserfiche publishes a daily report to the business intelligence layer for companywide unified reporting.
  • Increased visibility of pending transactions in a categorized manner. Laserfiche Workflow notifies business process owners of necessary actions by way of mail alerts. “Moreover, we also unify these numbers with the business intelligence (BI) platform to provide better visibility,” says Singh.
  • Enhanced control environment through automatic system-end integrated validations with SAP-DMS using Vendor, Customer and Company Code checks for duplications or mismatches at the source stage itself. Laserfiche also does a validation for the key fields entered and runs a duplicate check across its database for any potential duplicates—which are then provided as reporting numbers and integrated with the BI platform.

The most ostensible benefit is obviously reducing invoice processing times from, on average, a matter of weeks into days and sometimes hours. But combined with increased transparency of business processes, Laserfiche has brought a new level of accountability to staff. With Laserfiche Audit Trail giving a step-by-step history of each action and user in the process, there are significant quality control and productivity benefits. Says Singh, “People think twice before performing a transaction.”

Though formal impact analysis has not been conducted, Singh estimates that Essar Group has realized a 40% return on its Laserfiche investment already, but foresees ongoing and expanding operational improvements. “Major ROI will come by de-skilling profiles deployed across companies for financial processes,” he explains.

Following the success of integration with SAP-DMS, Essar is now working with Sigma-Tech India to integrate Laserfiche (and SAP) with ARIBA financial software, as well as related procurement and e-invoicing modules to develop straight-through processing for accounts receivable, fixed assets, business expense reimbursements and income tax declaration. “We’re also now contemplating using [PDP partner] LincDoc for form-based workflow requirements,” Singh concludes.

Mandeep Singh on Putting the Laserfiche Run SmarterÂŽ Philosophy into Practice

Understand the content and information requirements across your organization and you’ll see the value of using Laserfiche for more than search and retrieval. As our ongoing success has shown, Laserfiche is agile enough as an enterprise solution to manage document-based workflows and accelerate turnaround time. At the same time, implementing these workflows yields a fresh perspective on how processes can be most effectively managed. In that sense, Laserfiche has been a tremendous tool for change management and developing new, more comprehensive business processes that have given Essar Group fresh perspective and improved our overall investment perspective as a company.