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Barranquilla Chamber of Commerce Supports Economic Growth Through Online Services

Barranquilla is a cosmopolitan city and one of the largest ports in the northern Caribbean Coast region of Colombia. Rapid urban growth and economic development has transformed the region into a tourism hub and an active business community.

The Barranquilla Chamber of Commerce provides its services to over 72,000 companies that operate in northern Colombia and is tasked with fielding thousands of registry-related requests annually. To help support the area’s dynamic development, the chamber used Laserfiche to digitally transform its operations by giving affiliates the ability to access key services online. The initiative met government requirements and initially eliminated approximately $50,000 in annual costs related to document scanning. Additionally, the chamber’s use of Laserfiche created new opportunities to offer affiliates more convenient, faster online services by automating other core processes.

Changing With the Times

While the Barranquilla Chamber of Commerce prides itself on promoting the competitiveness and economic prosperity of the region, in 2015, the chamber’s processes were not keeping pace with the area’s accelerated growth. That year, the Colombian government mandated that chamber services must be made accessible online in order to meet modern business expectations and enable the country to compete in today’s global economy.

“One of our biggest customer service challenges was to take our traditional services on-site and make them available over the internet,” said Jorge Andon, public registry lawyer for the chamber. “We needed a platform that could satisfy the registry related requests of our more than 70,000 affiliates in a fast and safe way.”

The chamber’s services include enabling citizens to make requests related to the legal creation of businesses, modifying and renewing company information, and dissolving companies.

Previously, to access these services, citizens were required to travel or mail in the necessary documents to the chamber’s office in Barranquilla. For example, to create a company, citizens need to file documents—such as statutes of incorporation and standardized forms—which are received and reviewed by a lawyer who ensures they meet legal requirements. If they do, the documents are registered and the company is created. If information was incomplete or did not meet legal requirements, the process was delayed—documents had to be returned to requesting party, revised as needed and re-submitted to the chamber.

“Document returns constituted around 20% of our operation, which added up to many working hours,” Andon said.

In addition to streamlining these requests, the chamber also needed to make certain documents available online as part of the government’s initiative to increase access to public information.

After assessing a number of solutions, the chamber selected Laserfiche, which would enable the organization to digitally transform how it provides services while offering a centralized place to manage documents and make them available to the public. “Laserfiche met our expectations in regards to information security and integration with other core applications,” Andon added. “We also found that Laserfiche is characterized by innovative solutions in the field of document management software. Having a certified Laserfiche Solution Provider located in Barranquilla was another strong determinant.”

“As a Colombian-based business with many customers, we understand the challenges the Barranquilla Chamber of Commerce faced,” said Jaime Barrios Perez, CEO of Gestech, the Laserfiche Solution Provider that supports the chamber’s implementation. “Laserfiche is a great platform for the chamber since it meets the organization’s current digital transformation needs, while also enabling them to create new solutions and maintain scalability for future growth.

Streamlining Services for Affiliates and Employees

The chamber brought its paper-based registration process online by building a Laserfiche public portal, where affiliates can submit electronic forms to register for business licenses, update operational information and submit other requests.

Rather than having to fill out pages of paperwork and produce physical copies of documents for chamber employees to scan, affiliates can now log into the chamber’s online portal and complete a Laserfiche Form to request the desired service. There, affiliates can also upload documents related to their business’s public registry—such as articles of incorporation and bylaws; appointments of directors and administrators; or bankruptcy or liquidation documentation.

To streamline the process for chamber employees, the chamber used Laserfiche to design an automated workflow which routes information to a public registry lawyer for review. If documents meet legal requirements, the lawyer will approve them and Laserfiche will send the affiliate a tax and service bill, which can be paid online or on-site.

“The ability to request services online has brought an array of benefits for users, such as reduction in travel expenses, and reduced service response times,” Andon says.

Once payment is made, documents are inscribed in the public registry (performed by an application that is integrated with Laserfiche) and available to the public online through a Laserfiche portal. As part of the workflow, Laserfiche sends a notification letter to the affiliate once documents are inscribed. If documents don’t meet legal requirements, however, Laserfiche will notify the affiliate, and the system allows the affiliate to then upload corrected documents using the same filing number within one month.

“By reducing document returns, we also reduce reprocessing requests. As a lawyer, if I have a filing and I return it, then the chamber has to receive it again, and review it again, and scan it again,” Andon says. “Being able to reduce the percentage of documents returned is saving us time, effort and money.”

The automated process has dramatically accelerated the chamber’s response time, enabling better customer service.

“Some chambers of commerce take up to 10 to 15 days to process some registration requests and we take less than 24 hours to process them. Other chambers are now starting to look at us to see what we’re doing to solve these problems and deliver such fast service.”

—Jorge Andon, Barranquilla Chamber of Commerce Public Registry Lawyer

Growing Opportunity for Colombian Business

As a result of the Laserfiche solution, organization-wide savings include a reduction in employee time spent receiving, scanning and returning documents. The chamber has also enabled users to correct large documents without returning them by using Laserfiche’s version control function—which allows the organization to modify documents while keeping a record of changes as well as the intact originals. Improved process management has reduced the risk of complaints and consequential fines imposed by the regulatory commission.

Since the chamber’s success with affiliate service requests, it has implemented Laserfiche in almost every department, including accounting/finance, human resources, legal, operations, sales, executive, information technology, marketing and records management.

“The chamber saves approximately $50,000 per year as a direct result of our online services,” Andon says. “We have also seen increasing ROI at the organization-wide level that is yet to be determined.”

The automated processes have also enabled the chamber to become more data-driven. Using reporting and analytics features in Laserfiche, the chamber creates real-time reports on process health that have led to faster decision making, and improved customer service even further. This has led to reputational improvement of the organization at the national level.

“We implemented Laserfiche in the chamber for two particular reasons: to offer registration services online and to publish our public documents online so people could access them,” Andon explains. “But the benefits we received were much more than just that. Problems we’ve had in the chamber for years—we could solve them in just a couple of weeks. Designing and implementing processes in Laserfiche is so easy. If you can imagine it, you can do it.”

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AFP Crecer, El Salvador

My name is Carlos Ramos. I work for AFP Crecer as the digitalization manager. AFP Crecer is one of El Salvador’s largest fund management firms. We manage the pension funds for about 1.7 million affiliates. Our mission is to guide our clients as they save for an important life change: retirement. We’re working on growing their savings, so that when they retire, they’ll be able to continue providing for their family and themselves.

From a technological standpoint, the biggest challenges that we faced was having a document management system that would be flexible, that would allow us to have quality control for our stored information, and also streamline the digital capture processes to serve our customers in a more efficient manner through our channels. We evaluated several tools and Laserfiche was the one we liked the best.

Somehow, we discovered that document management goes beyond just digital archiving. We’re giving the opportunity to all of our client representatives to access information in a timely manner. Thanks to Laserfiche, as a tool, we’ve been able to change our processes. We were able to shorten processes that took five days to three days. We reduced processes that took 15 days to just five days.

Using the product has opened up additional improvement opportunities. It is not only about archiving digital documents, but also having the necessary documents throughout our key business processes. In addition, the use of electronic forms allowed us to reduce our use of paper. We were using around 650 packs of paper, which equals about 350,000 sheets of paper per year.

We’ve been working with Laserfiche for about 10 months and the experience has been fabulous. Now we have more visibility and we can do more complex searches and reports. Throughout our journey, we learned that things that we imagined and believed couldn’t be done with a software can be done with Laserfiche.

Time savings, reduction in costs, and an easier capture and digitization process. A client file took close to 100 days from its creation until it was ready for record archiving. Now it only takes two days for the client file to be archived. We get notifications if we made an error or notifications if image capture was successful.

With Laserfiche, and where I see future opportunities, such as analyzing our processes to identify those we can automate, what documents are required for those processes, and not only opportunities to automate them, but also to completely redesign them, and see how we’re doing things now and how we can do them tomorrow.

We must remember that we work and are dedicated to serve our clients’ needs. Financial needs with regards to pensions, and for them it’s very important to get speedy service, and that’s why Laserfiche has been a fundamental part of that.

City University, Hong Kong

City University of Hong Kong created a shared services platform for human resources and finance using Laserfiche.

Kensington Mortgages Automates Core Business Processes to Elevate Customer Experience

Kensington Mortgage Company implemented Laserfiche organization-wide and integrated it with multiple line-of-business applications.

My name is Farid Amin. I am a Solutions Architect at Kensington Mortgages. In my role I design, develop and implement to automate business processes across the operational areas using enterprise-level robotic and business process automation software tools.

Now in our 25th year, Kensington Mortgages is UK’s leading non-bank specialist mortgage provider and We manage over 11 billion pounds in assets. We have over 500 employees throughout the country, predominantly at our head office in Maidenhead.

In 2012, we needed to replace our aging document management system. It was becoming slow and unreliable. The core weakness of the system was that the historical documents were stored in a huge jukebox of some 250 optical discs run by a robotic arm and a subset of DVD drives.

As we grew, we had more documents to manage. We also had changing regulations, which meant we Needed access to those documents very, very quickly while we had customers on the phone. Therefore, we had to replace our system that would cater for our business needs.

Laserfiche fulfilled these requirements and we had foresight that its rich functionality of its various components could be utilized in other use cases and could be expanded across the business in later years. Today, we have over 56 million documents spanning over 7 terabytes of network storage.

We have 300 users that utilize Laserfiche day-in-day-out to serve and manage our accounts. The users’ feedback has been very positive. Laserfiche just runs in the background, unassumingly, and therefore as far as they’re concerned, it’s a system available all the time for them to carry out their work.

In 2016, we expanded the use of Laserfiche to business process automation and it has been a resounding success. Today we have business processes automated not just in servicing, but in finance and sales.

In 2019, we implemented our document online project. This has allowed our customers to view their documents online. We developed, in-house, a microservice using the Laserfiche SDK, which allows those customers to view their documents directly from the repository.

So here’s a system that has a use, but has got a whole lot of other tools that could benefit any organization. So Laserfiche has been in production for over 7 years and has provided service to us with stability and integrity.

Michael Hill Jeweler

By automating import and export documentation processes with Laserfiche, the jeweler more efficiently manages compliance with customs requirements.

My name is Joseph Colville. I work at Michael Hill International. We’re a middle market jeweler so we sell anything between nine-dollar studs and half a million-dollar pieces. The department I work for is the I.T. Department we deliver the Solutions for the whole business. My particular focus is on the distribution center and import export of all of our goods.

It was about two years ago that we decided that we needed to go down the automation route the bottlenecks and challenges that we had were especially around the mass handling of paper. There’s massive customs requirements and we needed a way to manage those in a more efficient manner. The process before Laserfiche was very manual. It involved building up files on your desk so goods come in. They would have the documents you’d have e-mails coming in you would print out those documents you would stick them in a file you would wait to that file has the correct amount of documents and then that would be archived and then the recall process of those documents , you would have to go to the right box find the right month, the right supplier and then pull out those documents and flick.

The expectations and goals that we had for Laserfiche was basically process automation, clear audit trail and fast document recall. So, these were absolutely essential dealing with. There’s very strict legislation to how we have to keep the documents. It varies between Jurisdictions and we needed to make sure we followed those to the letter. Now we’re not printing out every email that comes in. So, we’ve gone from printing two reams of paper a day to one ream a fortnight. We’ve also dropped the amount of time it takes to recall documents for customs. We have to recall a certain amount of lines go and find the physical documents and do checks. That process could take five minutes to find a doc. Now we can just do a simple search on it. So, there’s massive time saving there and we re-put that time saving into doing more checks to greater increase our compliance.

The most useful piece of advice I could give to future Laserfiche users would be lining up all the pieces, making sure right people are involved at the right time to ensure the project runs smoothly making sure they have access to get into your systems. And also ensuring that the business is heavily involved. So, you have your SMEs coming up and actually using the software. Well before you go live and feeding back the entire time. I’ve attended Laserfiche conferences, I’ve shared my story at those Laserfiche conferences and I’ve also heard stories of other people and being involved in training sessions and continuous improvement of the product. So that’s been really important and really key to our business.

Sky Telecommunications Digitally Manages Employee Files and HR Processes

Serving 25,000 employees across the UK and Ireland, the telecommunications company’s HR department has sped up its processes and easily maintains its employee files.

My name is Nicola Doherty. I am the head of HR Administration at SKY. SKY are a media organization based in the UK and Ireland that provide direct home TV services for our customers. We have in the region of twenty-five thousand employees across the UK and Ireland and over 10 million customers. So, the HR admin function is responsible for, what it says on the tin really, HR administration for all of SKY’s employees.

We were taking back in-house some HR administration work that was previously delivered by a third party. For us to be able to do that. we had to look at, you know, how efficient we are in terms of our resources and our ability to deliver the service. So, it was at that point that we made the decision that we were going to upgrade the Laserfiche product that we had in place to Laserfiche Rio. We had a long-standing relationship with them with Laserfiche and through the conversations that we’d had with our sort-of partners we knew that there was more that we could get to enhance the product and its kind of ticked the boxes off of what we needed at that point in time of what we will need in the future. So, all of our employee files at Sky are held on the Laserfiche Rio product We use it to maintain, update employee files and to apply any rules that we need to arrange deletion for example.

We are a large organization that’s sort of diverse in terms of our structure and so that the Laserfiche product helps us to keep our sales organized. We use it for things like subject access requests that we get from employees. So, the new product has actually helped us with that process as well. For me, from an HR operations perspective, we never stand still so we’re always looking at better ways to do things. Whether that’s through automation or whether it’s just be more efficient at what we do. And, so I think Laserfiche as an organization it fits in with that.

The return that I see that we get from the Laserfiche product, the enhanced product, is that we are able to deliver our processes and quicker than we could before and that’s in relation to things such as subject access requests through new processes such as bar coding and in naming convention of files. There’s less human intervention in our processes so that the HR admin teams are able to file more and do it quickly and which is better than what we could do before.

The advice I would give to future Laserfiche users is and to keep things simple to give yourself enough time and to use the expertise that’s on offer. I think that the place it would end I was as always you know looking towards the future to see what other enhancements there might be further down the road. But we’ve got a really robust product in place now which is great.