How a $375 million credit union uses Laserfiche to automate the input of documents, including loan applications, new member cards, internal documents and loan documents.
SITUATION
• Needed more consistency in workflows across geographically dispersed offices
• Addressing compliance requirements involved many manual, time-intensive steps
RESULTS
• Streamlined the new account opening process
• Opened 600 new accounts and brought in $400 million in new assets in 2023
• Modernized records management and workflows reduced the burden of compliance and audits on associates
Rehmann’s wealth management practice must coordinate a lot of moving parts across its offices in Michigan, Ohio and Florida. In addition to advisory services, the firm operates as a broker-dealer, a role which greatly expands its compliance obligations. Coordinating workflows across those services to ensure advisors across branches follow rules around conflicts of interest and suitability is only half the battle. Having documentation readily available to prove compliance adds another layer of complexity.
In Laserfiche Forms, the firm has found a flexible tool capable of streamlining data collection and reporting, as well as shaping the design of workflows in ways that make them less prone to human error and easier to audit. “Our biggest challenge with Laserfiche Forms tends to be keeping up with demand for new ones,” said Amy Flourry, Rehmann Wealth director of operations.
The ability to connect information across different parts of the client life cycle has enormous potential to improve processes throughout the business. Digital onboarding became an area of intense focus during the pandemic, when the ability to meet clients face to face became limited. For Marla Masters, strategic business analyst for the Wealth Management team, digitization was just the first step in a journey toward a more streamlined process.
Integrating customer relationship management (CRM) software with other back-end tools has long been the elephant in the room for making onboarding more efficient. The ability to move information from Rehmann’s CRM to its Laserfiche repository was a deciding factor in its recent transition to Salesforce.
“With the old system, our associates had to enter the same information multiple times to get it from the CRM and into Laserfiche,” Masters recalled. “Now, we’re able to use the same data, so when our associates enter information about a lead or a prospect, it’s still available as they transition to a client.”
The ability to automatically populate onboarding forms makes the process faster and easier for associates and clients alike. That streamlining means the firm can make the best impression possible on new clients right away, while giving support staff more time to put toward higher-value tasks. The firm can also use the information it collects to automatically file compliance documents, such as those identifying the beneficial owners of entity clients, yielding further back-office efficiency gains. With these integrations in place, Rehmann opened 600 new accounts and brought in $400 million in new assets in 2023 alone.
In addition to new account opening and onboarding, Rehmann has automated several other processes across the organization, including:
Compliance is a major concern for broker-dealers. Conducting audits used to be a resource-intensive process that involved harmonizing physical files in multiple locations. If the firm identified a compliance concern, it would then have to go back and fix things after the fact, which could be a complicated process.
Now, using Laserfiche Forms, Rehmann can put guardrails around processes that help the firm identify and fix problems while processes are still ongoing. As a result, many issues can be corrected on the fly, as opposed to having to go back and redo a process from scratch.
The firm has also leaned on the expertise of the consultants at CDI, a Laserfiche solution provider that offers training and technical resources to help implement large-scale system changes like the Salesforce transition. This ensures that organizations have the best available tools for their current needs. As a result, Rehmann’s success in building more efficient processes continues to build momentum. The low-code tools and solution templates available for Laserfiche Forms have made it possible for Masters to continue to refine the firm’s tools and processes further to make them more dynamic and user friendly. These solutions have reduced implementation time for new, automated processes from six months to approximately 30 days, freeing up IT resources to focus on strategy, rather than implementation.
In one recent example, Masters reconfigured the firm’s Excel-based trade ticket process to work via Laserfiche Forms. Rather than having to send emails to the right people and collaborate on a spreadsheet, associates can manage trade requests through a form-based system that requests information dynamically, driving an automatic escalation process to ensure trades are compliant and routing forms to the appropriate people for confirmation. At the end, trade tickets are saved automatically to client files.
“Our work technology must keep up with the apps we use every day on our phones. The way we interact with technology in all aspects of our lives has changed, so it’s critical for our office environment to keep up,” said Flourry. “Laserfiche makes it easy to design processes that our people really want to use.”
SITUATION
• Dependence on proprietary software was costly to maintain and lacked scalability
• Needed a flexible solution that would streamline multiple logistics management processes
RESULTS
• Automated processes that enable the company to better track inventory, accelerate delivery and capture damage liability documentation
• Enabled processes to scale with the company’s growth, from handling 10,000 packages per month to 30,000 per month without adding significant numbers of warehouse employees
• Enhanced customer experience
Sometimes freight doesn’t fit neatly into a box or packages need to be placed carefully inside a home or commercial space. Enter white glove delivery services, which require a close partnership with clients to get product to where it needs to go in a safe, efficient and cost-effective manner.
“One of the challenges with white glove delivery service is that it is a lot of big product,” said Kent Werner, president director, business development at Kore Logistics, one of Canada’s leading specialized providers of final mile fulfillment and home deliveries. “If you get a big box one day for your sofa sectional and two other boxes come on different days, you’re not happy — people are back in your home and your living room is being upended again. So we prioritize efficiency, and being able to locate, identify and pick all the pieces for an order in a way that allows us to provide the level of service our clients and the end consumers expect.”
This level of tracking requires a lot of moving pieces, data and centralized documentation — and at Kore Logistics, all of this is now managed through Laserfiche and an integration with the company’s dispatching software. Using Laserfiche Forms, automated workflows and a centralized repository, Kore Logistics created processes that supported a threefold increase in capacity; the company grew from handling about 10,000 packages per month to 30,000 packages per month over the course of about a year and was acquired by Canada Cartage in 2021.
Much of the complex journey of non-conveyable freight at Kore Logistics was initially managed by proprietary software that the company had built when it was a much smaller organization.
“We had stretched our proprietary application to its limit,” Werner explained.
The team decided to search for off-the-shelf technology rather than follow the traditional path of building a new custom enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, to prevent another period of stagnation as the organization grew, as well as to avoid ballooning developer costs.
Critical elements that the right technology solution needed to manage included:
“Most off-the-shelf solutions would require us to cobble together two or three different solutions in order to get what we needed,” Werner said. “They also required significant investment in specialized hardware. We knew we had to get away from another custom solution because we needed the flexibility to grow, to scale, to add modules — things that are just not possible with an in-house application.”
The company worked with Laserfiche solution provider Inspiris to implement a Laserfiche system that would address initial needs. This would quickly grow into a more comprehensive solution as Werner and his team uncovered the power of the Laserfiche product suite.
“For us, the rapid development enabled by Laserfiche supported a quick deployment,” said Jeremy Regehr, owner of Inspiris. “We took a phased direct-to-testing approach and, from there, made continual improvements that continue to this day.”
The first project consisted of enabling Kore Logistics to scan packages into and out of bins when they arrived at a warehouse. Shipping manifests are captured in Laserfiche and employees scan barcodes on items using a barcode scanner or cellphones, so everything can be easily tracked with a simple search in Laserfiche.
The new process has been a game changer for the organization, significantly reducing dock searches, a typically disruptive process that occurs when goods are missing, misplaced or incorrectly labeled. Dock searches require warehouse staff to inspect various areas to find the requested item, as well as checking manifests and other documentation to verify the location of the item and confirming that it is ready for further handling.
“Before Laserfiche, in a busy season, it wasn’t uncommon to have 60-plus dock searches,” said Werner. “Today, during a busy season, the maximum number of dock searches we’d have at any time is probably seven — and that’s with three times the volume.”
“Before Laserfiche, in a busy season, it wasn’t uncommon to have 60-plus dock searches,” said Werner. “Today, during a busy season, the maximum number of dock searches we’d have at any time is probably seven — and that’s with three times the volume.”
Next came the integration between Laserfiche and Kore Logistics’ dispatch software, DispatchTrack, to improve the process of generating pick lists, which include data such as order details, item information, quantities and location. Employees select packages within Laserfiche that need to be delivered, and that information is sent to DispatchTrack. DispatchTrack then sends truck routing information to Laserfiche, and warehouse employees are able to generate pick lists through a Laserfiche Form.
Pick lists are more efficient than with the legacy process, since employees can generate pick lists based on where items are located in the warehouse, saving hours of time each day.
More recently, Kore Logistics added the ability to import proof of delivery (POD) documents and generate them alongside pick lists, since PODs need to be made available to delivery drivers and vendors. Additionally, warehouse employees can use Laserfiche to take pictures of packages as they are received, in case they are damaged, for instance. These photos are routed to the same location as all of the other package information so that documentation is easy to find in case there are claims or other issues.
“Damaged freight is a big challenge in white glove delivery work,” said Werner. “So us being able to identify it in advance and have it documented helps us to provide better service to our clients.”
These processes have supported Kore Logistics’ growth while also positioning the company for continuous improvement as team members uncover more opportunities for efficiency. “Our team is at a point where now they’ll ask, ‘Can we change this? Can we automate this?’” said Werner. “Everyone appreciates that we have that flexibility now. We can add something or change a process when we need to.”
Fostering a culture of innovation will be critical for the company into the future, as inflation and supply chain issues put pressure on the logistics industry. “When we started this project pre-COVID, people’s buying habits were very different,” Werner said. “COVID changed everything — different value-adds that allowed for profit disappeared. If we didn’t have tools like Laserfiche to help with efficiencies, we wouldn’t be able to stay competitive. The industry is evolving quickly, and today there’s a magnifying glass on things like freight claims. We’re able to meet those increased needs. Laserfiche allows us to stay current with our customers, and allows us to look into issues and provide them with the visibility and documentation they need to feel supported.”
Physical documents can easily get lost or destroyed without proper storage and tracking. This exposes your organization to expensive risks from inconsistent disposition, over-retention or poor auditing practices.
Furthermore, by law, organizations like yours are often required to retain physical records and make them accessible for on-demand retrieval. Securing and granting access to these items can be a time-consuming, burdensome process. This is especially true if you’ve inherited a disjointed legacy software system, or are still tracking files with Excel spreadsheets.
To help solve these problems, you can leverage solutions that provide management of physical documents while making those records available to search and view digitally. Combining physical tracking with digital integration allows you to locate documents easily while maintaining the integrity of the original items.
Laserfiche + Gimmal have worked together to integrate our existing digital and physical systems into one seamless solution. Join us on Thursday, November 9 at 10:00 AM PT | 1:00 PM ET to see how this integration works and how your peers have benefitted from streamlining this technology in their own organizations.
During this session, you will learn how to:
SITUATION
• The university needed to retire a legacy document management system
• Content needed to be migrated to a system that offered information management and process automation
SOLUTION
• Improved information retrieval time and efficiency
• Automated processes accelerated response times and increased transparency
• Enhanced student, staff and faculty experience
The American University in Cairo (AUC) is a leading English-language, U.S.-accredited institution of higher education. With a diverse community of students, faculty, alumni, trustees and supporters representing more than 60 countries, the university prides itself on being a crossroads for the world’s cultures and a vibrant forum for reasoned argument and spirited debate.
While the university is over 100 years old, it has prioritized offering a modern student experience. Its New Cairo campus features a state-of-the-art facility for advanced research, innovative teaching, lifelong learning and civic engagement. Recently, the university’s technology solutions team set out to modernize technology systems and processes to better align with its students, faculty and staff’s needs and expectations.
“Before Laserfiche, we were facing many challenges in managing a legacy content management system,” said Soumaia Al Ayyat, Ph.D., lead applications development analyst at AUC. “We had an overflow of paper-based documents and student records stored in our warehouse.”
The technology solutions team worked with BMB, a Laserfiche solution provider with locations across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, to implement Laserfiche as a modern way to manage information and automate processes campuswide.
AUC outlined its requirements for a new system for managing content. The technology solutions team had the vision to go beyond traditional document management and implement a full content services platform.
“We were looking for a centralized content management system for improving process automation and enforcing governance rules on the content,” Al Ayyat said. The technology solution team selected Laserfiche for its ease-of-use, flexibility and integration capabilities.
The plan was to migrate content from the legacy system to Laserfiche with documents’ respective template fields, and implement access controls and forms-based audit reports of the legacy system’s actions. The team also embraced Laserfiche’s records management capabilities by applying retention polices on the migrated content as well as new content.
“All departments reported a noticeable improvement in retrieval time and efficiency due to the accompanied metadata and proper access rights,” Al Ayyat said, adding that documents for over 25,000 students were successfully migrated. “We’ve saved a great amount of paper, time and budget with Laserfiche records management.”
Once the team had brought content over from the legacy system, they turned their focus to automation for four different user personas: for students, staff, faculty and external users (such as visitors). One of the most pressing needs was streamlining the admissions process.
“Just before COVID-19, the university was transforming into a paperless and cashless campus,” said Mohamed El Fadly, technology solutions director at AUC. “One of its main goals was to enhance and automate the admissions process, so that students could submit their files online and track their documents at any time.”
Before using Laserfiche, students were required to submit around 10 types of documents — including grades, birth certificates, national IDs, photos, etc. — in physical form.
“The Enrollment and Admissions Office was our early adopter of Laserfiche Forms to automate the admissions checklist process,” El Fadly added. The office launched a Laserfiche form that enabled students to submit documents online and routed the information automatically to admissions and related departments for review, approval and follow-up. Students can track the progress of their applications at any time in the process.
Students can also opt to visit AUC’s Student Service Center to submit documents. For in-person submission, students sign a signature pad, whose system is integrated with the Laserfiche form so that it may be stored in the repository for future reference.
An API integration between Laserfiche and AUC’s student information system, Ellucian Banner, streamlines information sharing and the creation of students’ Laserfiche accounts once accepted.
Since the success of the admissions checklist, AUC has also used Laserfiche Forms for a number of other student-facing processes including:
“Any of these automated processes enable students to submit academic and administrative documents online, receive approval quickly and track their status,” said El Fadly. “We’re able to offer these responsive student services because we’re using Laserfiche as a campus-wide solution.”
“Laserfiche’s ease of use and integration capabilities with our core systems like Banner and SAP enable the university to quickly extend its workflow and online forms solution capabilities to other campus departments, including the Registrar office, the Provost office, the security office and the Controller office,” said El Fadly.
For faculty and staff, AUC has automated processes that previously required many manual, repetitive tasks and physical copies, including:
Visitors to the campus, too, use Laserfiche as part of the visitor request process. Once a request is submitted, Laserfiche generates a QR code with dynamic information extracted from the request form, which is presented at the entrance gates. An integration with the CodeREADr app enables security guards to scan the codes with the app and record check-in and check-out.
“These modern, automated processes have enabled AUC to manage increased information flow without additional burden on students, faculty and staff. Adopting Laserfiche in the Enrollment and Admissions office has led to the migration of over 1 million admissions records and the processing of over 320,000 records in two years, while AUC has also managed over 350 School of Continuing Education petition submission, 1,000 visitor requests and nearly 200 clearance requests in the same amount of time. Additionally, the use of Laserfiche aligns well with AUC’s sustainability goals. “We’ve eliminated the use of millions of paper documents,” Al Ayyat said. “Laserfiche has helped us to achieve our paperless goal and go green.”
Today, the technology solutions team continues to optimize operations and digitize more departments’ content. The team has more than 20 business processes in their queue for automation.
“The smart process automation in Laserfiche and its capabilities to design very complex processes facilitated the improvement of AUC’s internal processes and enhanced the student experience,” said Al Ayyat. “Laserfiche provides efficiency via intelligent forms with the proper workflow and the proper repository access rights. The smart reporting and analytics of Laserfiche empower the stakeholders in monitoring and identifying process bottlenecks. Overall, Laserfiche enables us to offer our services more quickly and with greater accessibility.”
SITUATION
• Capturing, routing and storing member information was manual and lacked consistency
• Operations needed to scale at a pace that aligned with the credit union’s growth trajectory
• The credit union sought a platform for automation that would integrate with existing tech stack
RESULTS
• All staff now use Laserfiche regularly in a variety of key processes
• Saved hundreds of hours each month
• Alleviated the burden of mergers as the credit union grows
“We address people’s needs and solve problems — it’s what credit unions do,” said Matthew Tingey, senior applications specialist at American United Federal Credit Union (FCU).
The philosophy has powered American United FCU since 1952, driving the organization’s growth to serve more than 26,000 people today. And along with that growth has come transformation, to create a single source of truth for records, integrate core technology systems and enable easier self-service for members.
“I was originally asking questions like, ‘Can I automate this? Can I batch process these things? Where can I take the annoying parts out of this process?’” said Tingey. “But it’s never good enough to solve my own problem. I need to solve problems for everyone in the organization. That’s where Laserfiche came in.”
The credit union now uses Laserfiche as its repository for member information, and the main workflow engine for automated processes across the organization, including finance, member relations, money movement and more, saving hundreds of hours each month and alleviating the burden of mergers as the organization continues to grow.
Like many growing organizations, American United FCU had information — including member documents, HR employee records, financial records and more — incoming from a multitude of channels, being handled in a variety of ways. Tingey, a dedicated credit union professional who has worked in every department across the organization, recognized a need to standardize archival of documents. At the same time, he saw an opportunity to automate information capture.
The credit union began using Laserfiche process automation to automate records management activities, routing documents to where they needed to be stored within the repository, with the needed metadata, no matter the source.
“We’ve processed multiple millions of documents through there,” said Tingey. “Employees just need to click, and it gets to where it needs to go.”
American United FCU, supported by Laserfiche solution provider Millennial Vision (MVi), has built out a Laserfiche program that also supports the organization’s total quality management initiative, which aims to improve processes with an eye toward growth and profitability.
“These tools help us do things more efficiently, bridge the gap between some of our other software tools, and let our teams work in better collaboration. They really solve a lot of problems.”
With the initial solution in place, it was time to connect other systems to eliminate human error and make the repetitive tasks around document capture and storage even easier.
“From there, I wanted Laserfiche to talk back to our core [account system] to verify the information being captured,” Tingey said. “Now, it’s not just member documents that we’re processing through the system but applications, loan documents, and other daily work. The process has expanded and grown. It’s the single source of truth, and really the backbone of our process automation.”
In addition to having Laserfiche verify information from the organization’s core, CUProdigy, the credit union has a number of integrations that support a more seamless everyday work experience for employees.
“We’ve also built a large database of information that we want to track and report on in Microsoft Power BI, and Laserfiche plays a big role in that,” Tingey said, adding that he keeps track of data issues — caused by activities like an employee leaving the organization, for example — through daily reports. “Laserfiche is a big part of managing the data that is used to create those Power BI reports.”
Similarly, Tingey has transformed the way that the organization validates data, identifying potential issues through Forms processes (started by Laserfiche Workflow) that trigger when an issue occurs. These items were previously actively tracked by an employee on a continual basis; today, no one needs to remember to review the reports since processes are triggered in Forms when issues occur — plus, instructions are integrated into the form so that less training and individual knowledge is required to address them.
“More recently, we’ve added some API integrations with the core to this process,” Tingey explained. “We pull information out of CUProdigy to use in Laserfiche Workflow and Forms via database queries. Notes can be pushed back to accounts with a click of a button in a form. A couple of the items that instructed the user to fix an issue can now be resolved automatically via the API without human intervention. These data validations and the automation around them have allowed our QA to be more efficient, effective and consistent.”
One game-changing integration for the credit union was between Laserfiche and DocuSign, which allowed Tingey to automate a common activity for credit unions: member information changes. The legacy process was manually driven and admittedly not very employee- or member-friendly.
The organization has enhanced the overall experience for employees and members by embedding the entire process into Laserfiche Forms:
Similarly, the credit union’s wire transfer process has benefited from Laserfiche Forms and an integration with DocuSign.
“In terms of solutions, I borrow from myself,” Tingey said, explaining that he’s often able to build on successes by taking a process and repurposing it by making tweaks to forms or steps.
The legacy wire transfer process, which involved many manual activities performed by employees, left members and auditors with little visibility into the required steps. The new Laserfiche process, however, gives the credit union the ability to provide helpful context to the member about what they are signing and the wire disclosure via the DocuSign integration.
“Once complete, employees only need to click a button to attach it to the form, and processing of the wire in our core is done via API, with minimal tasks required by the employee,” Tingey said. The form is automatically routed to the necessary employees for review and processing, and all supporting documentation is archived in the Laserfiche repository with standard naming conventions and metadata.
The new wire transfer process saves up to 25 hours of staff processing time per month, while also reducing opportunities for human error and increasing staff satisfaction.
“We’ve taken all the annoying little parts out of the process, like downloading a PDF, uploading it to DocuSign, marking fields on it, manually sending it to the member, downloading it again, etc.” said Tingey. “Another benefit is that when the member is prompted for signature, information will pop up to tell them exactly what they’re doing. It will let them know we’re doing a change of information process and here’s that we’re changing, or a wire transfer and here’s our wire disclosure. So instead of just signing something because they’re being asked to sign something, members feel more informed and taken care of.”
Since the initial implementation of Laserfiche for process automation, American United FCU has had a lot of success automating back-office activities as well as some member processes that employees handle. Going beyond the back office to positively impact the member experience has always been the ultimate goal, however.
“These automated processes are all increasing member satisfaction,” Tingey said. “Whether our members are in-branch or doing things remotely, they are saving time and don’t have to wait for a teller to manually find all the documents they need to get things done.”
Today, Tingey is focused on transforming the member experience with the launch of a new website, which will feature enhanced self-service features powered by Laserfiche Forms. One such feature is the rewards claim request, which enables members to claim an end-of-year dividend that the credit union offers as a perk for members based on the products and services they’ve used throughout the year. The claim form lists all of the possible products and services that qualify for a reward amount, and the member enters a few details to verify themselves. The form verifies this information against the database to qualify the submission, and a Laserfiche workflow sends an email confirmation, recording all activities into a database so that rewards can be paid out at the end of the year.
Laserfiche digitization and automation projects have supported increased focus on the member experience, even through significant periods of growth for the credit union. Since 2007, the organization has completed 10 mergers, enabling asset growth from about $39 million to just over $370 million (as of April 27, 2023).
While mergers are always a huge undertaking, the process was made less painful with standardized and automated processes in place. “Mergers are very, very large projects — everything gets dumped into a central location, and there’s cleanup and moving things around,” said Tingey. “If it weren’t for the structure from Laserfiche and the tools like Workflows, they would be nearly impossible.”
Laserfiche has become such a vital part of American United FCU’s infrastructure that many employees aren’t able to imagine life without it today.
“Laserfiche is a cornerstone of our environment. The automation functionalities alone save us thousands of hours annually, but on top of that it helps us in so many ways to gather, process, and document nearly every piece of information that passes through our organization. There isn’t a single member of our team that doesn’t interact with Laserfiche, and most of them are working with the system throughout the day, every day.”
SITUATION
• Complex processes surrounding procurement, service requests and other business needs lacked consistency and oversight.
• The organization sought a solution to automate business processes and streamline them for staff.
RESULTS
• Automated solutions accelerated key workflows including the timesheet process, which was reduced from one week to less than a minute.
• Digitization and automation initiatives supported staff satisfaction, new hybrid work models, interoperability and compliance across the organization.
SIU Medicine is a publicly assisted medical school and clinical practice with more than 2,000 providers, researchers and staff members across the state of Illinois. Additionally, SIU is home to a world-class scientific research facility. The facility’s more than 100 active projects complement the institution’s mission of optimizing the health of the people of central and southern Illinois through education, patient care, research and community service.
SIU’s multi-pronged approach requires complex business processes for procurement, service requests and other everyday activities. The organization has been using Laserfiche for digitizing records for the past 10 years, partnering with Laserfiche solution provider TKB Associates. Recently, SIU found a need to modernize processes and expand use of Laserfiche to include Laserfiche Forms and workflow.
“[We saw] an opportunity to get executive buy-in and automate processes like online timesheets,” said Jennifer Washburn, IT manager at SIU Medicine. “And since then, we’ve had people lining up and really wanting us to tackle their projects.”
Today, the organization has embraced process automation across departments, leveraging Laserfiche as a capture, decision-making and workflow engine. With streamlined processes and automated records management that reclaims time for employees to focus on more value-added work, Laserfiche supports the organization’s goals, enabling SIU to sustain high employee and patient satisfaction.
Like healthcare IT teams across the country, SIU Medicine’s Process Automation Team has navigated three significant challenges in recent years:
The Process Automation Team’s commitment to continuous improvement has been a boon to the organization’s ability to respond in innovative ways.
“Laserfiche allowed us to tackle problems and solve them in ways that I don’t think would have been possible otherwise,” said Jennifer Washburn, IT manager at SIU Medicine.
To support hybrid and remote staff, the organization started by automating the timesheet process with Laserfiche Forms.
“Laserfiche Forms allowed us to help our staff continue to do their jobs from wherever they were,” said Washburn. The team created electronic forms and associated workflows for different types of timesheets in various employee categories.
“SIU’s timesheet process was reduced from 1 week to less than a minute.” align=”left”>The difference in the automated process was significant. “Previously, the manual processes could take a week or longer,” Washburn said. “Today, it takes less than a minute.”
This initial automation project also sparked a shift in which many departments began to see real value in digital transformation.
The selection of timesheets for a pilot was also strategically successful for the Process Automation Team. “Not only was it a huge efficiency gain for us, but it also introduced every single member of our workforce to Laserfiche Forms,” Washburn explained.
The Process Automation Team has continued to take on new projects with the goal of enhancing the employee experience and empowering users to do the work and research that supports the organization’s mission. Meanwhile, Laserfiche tools like electronic forms, automated workflows and electronic records management also support compliance with internal and external requirements, as well as users’ ability to access data across different systems.
SIU Medicine has automated both simple processes such as animal requests — enabling researchers to request animals for research projects, with streamlined approvals and documentation— and more complex workflows that are used organization-wide.
For example, purchase orders are now on Laserfiche Forms. What was once a manual process that involved PDFs being emailed or paper forms being passed from desk to desk is now completely digital and automated.
“We created a Laserfiche form that pulls budget purpose numbers and auto-populates the necessary information from another system, which then brings in the fiscal officer that’s responsible for that budget number,” said Mike Overmeyer, data architect at SIU Medicine. The automated system also helps employees by auto-routing POs that may need to go to multiple officers, or that are rejected by one or more officers. “We also give purchasing the ability to run POs by IT or an administrator, if they need to. It’s conditional, and we’re not putting the onus on the employee to make those decisions or execute those manual tasks that can end up causing delays.”
Washburn said that budget purpose numbers are housed in a separate, legacy accounting system that can be leveraged via lookups from Laserfiche Forms. “Users enter a number and it all pre-populates. They click submit and it’s near instantaneous getting to the next person. The end users are amazed that they can do all of this in one place.”
Feedback has been so positive that the project was expanded to include purchases that are made through state procurement cards. “The intent is now to use it for everything that gets purchased for the school, from paper towels and office supplies to computer or laboratory equipment,” Washburn added.
SIU also used Laserfiche to expedite the collection of patient information when a local healthcare provider retired. “There was a local practice where the provider retired, and all of their patients were transitioned into our practice,” Washburn explained. “We had to collect release of information notices, so we quickly deployed a Laserfiche form to streamline that process. Our clinical staff just had to enter the patient’s health record number. Our system integrates with our practice management system to pull everything automatically, which significantly reduced the time it would have taken manually.”
SIU Medicine’s IT department also stood up its own Laserfiche-powered system for entering requests. Employees fill out an electronic form to request a variety of IT services, including reports, software installation, or even new processes through Laserfiche Forms. “Prior to using the forms, we would get requests that were very unstructured, and there might be a lot of follow-up questions to find out, for instance, what reports someone needed, or what we could to do provide support,” said Jeff Wilson, IT director at SIU Medicine.
Other processes that the organization has transformed using Laserfiche include:
SIU leverages Laserfiche’s robust records management capabilities on a daily basis for compliance with industry and state requirements. All forms and information generated from Laserfiche processes are saved and managed in the Laserfiche repository, supporting information governance practices at SIU.
“We have well over 2 million documents in our repository,” said Washburn. “If there’s not an existing folder structure for the area that we’re working in, Laserfiche Forms can create it dynamically. We make sure that everything lands in Laserfiche at the end of the day.”
Finally, the organization’s digital efforts have extended beyond process, productivity and compliance improvements, into staff resilience and satisfaction — which has been invaluable in the current healthcare climate. “Working in healthcare, there’s a lot of pressure and demand, so we are constantly thinking about how our staff is doing and what we can do to make the experience better,” Washburn said. “SIU’s executive leadership has emphasized that staff are more contented in their roles when they feel supported and know what they can expect from their leaders. In the most recent employee satisfaction survey, we were rated highest in staff understanding of their roles and responsibilities, and we ranked steady in satisfaction.”
SITUATION
• Company expansion led to a need to optimize paper-based accounts payable processes.
• NWFM sought a means to manage invoices digitally and increase transparency between back office and field operations.
RESULTS
• Achieved hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings
• Increased accuracy in invoice processing
• Over 300% increase in invoice capacity
• Increased investor confidence in the company
NWFM is a locally owned, full-service farm investment and property management company based in Yakima, Washington. Established in 2018, the company had initially processed all its vendor invoices manually. However, as NWFM expanded, the amount of paper invoices increased proportionally with its growing operations and client base.
“Originally, we manually processed about 250 invoices a month,” recalled Tim Hull, administrative manager at NWFM. “As a few hundred acres of new land came under our management, I could see a paperwork tsunami coming.”
Recognizing an opportunity to optimize paper-based accounts payable processes and improve back office and field operations, NWFM searched for a digital capture and workflow solution. Due to its reputation as a robust cloud content services platform, Laserfiche was chosen, and NWFM worked with solution provider FreeDoc of Lynnwood, Washington, to design a dedicated, customized accounts payable workflow.
Since implementing Laserfiche to keep up with a rapid growth trajectory, NWFM has achieved substantial cost and operational savings, as well as gained the ability to leverage data and metrics built into Laserfiche to improve transparency and accuracy throughout its operations.
Managing hundreds of acres of farmland across Central Washington, NWFM recognizes the value of automation and technology in its operations for the sake of efficiency and accuracy. Assessing its original invoice processing system, the company identified significant challenges:
“As we took on more farmland to manage, I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle such a big influx of invoices every month,” said Hull. “Laserfiche helped us to create a solution to connect our employees located almost 100 miles away to our central office and resolve many of our major challenges.”
The digital accounts payable system at NWFM routes all electronically imported invoices into a dedicated folder within the company’s Laserfiche repository. Each invoice can be reviewed for accuracy before sending it for final approval and payment processing. Throughout the process, the administrative team can make changes to expense category codes and make notes to the bookkeeper.
NWFM’s Laserfiche system is integrated with FastField purchase order software, which allows area managers to upload pictures of invoices directly to Laserfiche from remote locations. The integration extracts vendor names, ranch names, individual blocks, numerical codes and other relevant information needed for processing and approvals; facilitating the management of clear, categorized information while processing invoices.
This has significantly increased the efficiency of invoice review and finalization. NWFM has gone from processing 250 invoices a month to more than 1,000, with the potential to scale up as the company continues to grow.
“Laserfiche has really proven to be the backbone of many of our processes,” said Hull. “Its cloud-hosted infrastructure and the ability to search for specific words within documents has helped us to form a solid connection between our central office and the ranches we manage — we are able to understand each other more clearly in terms of orders and financial documents.”
In addition to the need to establish a revamped AP system, the NWFM team wanted to give investors located out-of-state the ability to review invoices and financial documents digitally. Rather than continue with the legacy process of storing invoices in filing cabinets, NWFM now has a standardized digital repository and has been able to increase its financial transparency when working with investors, giving them access to invoices in real-time. Built with email import functionality, purchase order integrations and granular access rights, the new AP management system has supported NWFM’s efforts to modernize its operations and position the company for growth.
Hull explains that NWFM initially tracked cost savings from the AP automation initiative for the first several months after implementation.
“We happily stopped counting savings after it exceeded $1,000 per month,” he said. “The savings was used to hire a chemical inventory specialist who now tracks inventory movement and returns unused stock. This allowed us to already return $72,000 in unused chemicals this year alone.”
NWFM’s new AP system also enables employees to process invoices while checking the price of products against bid sheets. In addition to the time savings from managing invoices, this process has additionally saved NWFM thousands of additional dollars by enabling the company to catch vendor billing errors, identifying $14,000 in billing errors per year. Leveraging data extracted from its invoice repository, the company is now making more accurate and productive purchasing decisions, and identifying savings opportunities.
Following the success of its AP system, NWFM has plans to establish satellite offices to further localize invoice processing in a more distributed strategy. This puts invoice processing closer to the ranch managers who make the purchases and generate the purchase orders. As the company continues to expand, Laserfiche has proven its effectiveness as a scalable solution.
“Organizing invoice and purchase order information by project or by ranch and block for review would have taken me weeks,” stated Hull. “Now I have it all at my fingertips.”
In the modern workplace, employees jump from application to application to complete daily tasks. Sometimes, if apps aren’t integrated properly, employees are left with an extra step of transferring information manually between applications to keep processes moving.
While integrations like APIs and pre-built solutions have been around for quite some time, they come in many forms, and are not always standardized. These integrations combined can create a digital ecosystem that is functional, but possibly not the most efficient or organized. This is where an iPaaS, or integration Platform as a Service, steps in. It coalesces ad-hoc webs of individual integrations — pre-built solutions, APIs, and other connections an organization utilizes — into a centralized hub that brings everything together.
As part of our mission to enable digital transformation for organizations the world over, Laserfiche is now bringing the robust set of ECM, process automation and records management features it is known for to iPaaS platforms through a strategic partnership with Boomi.
We all know how difficult airline travel can be with just one or two connections. Navigating unfamiliar airports and locating the right gate, not to mention the possibility of delays and cancellations can be stressful, exhausting and at its worst leave us so lost that we miss our connection completely.
Now consider your average enterprise organization, with its employees making dozens if not hundreds of connections between applications daily, far more than your average flight. Establishing and maintaining this many connections can be a formidable business challenge, especially for organizations that are short on IT resources.
iPaaS is designed to lessen these pressures on IT by standardizing how applications are integrated into an organization, and subsequently making it easier to automate business processes and share data across multiple applications with increased transparency and consistency.
As a true enterprise content management system, Laserfiche excels at managing the entire lifecycle of an organization’s content, including documents, spreadsheets, contracts, and scanned images. Consequently, Laserfiche can serve as a backbone for mission-critical line-of-business applications across your organization. In addition, its process automation capabilities can kickoff everyday processes from invoice matching to employee onboarding.
Through a strategic partnerships with Boomi, organizations can now easily connect Laserfiche’s leading enterprise content management system and process automation feature set with all the other applications they run on, creating more seamless business processes for employees and saving them time from having to manually re-enter information as they move it between systems.
For organizations looking to integrate Laserfiche further into their digital ecosystem, these partnerships mean reduced complexity, faster ROI, opportunities to do things they couldn’t do before, and quickly connect Laserfiche with mission-critical systems such as Workday, Epic, Netsuite, ESRI, ServiceNow, and many more.
Customers looking to start their journey with iPaaS and other integrations can explore over 140 Laserfiche connectors, including an integration with Boomi, on the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace.
Questions about our partnership with Boomi? Email boomi@laserfiche.com.
Not a Laserfiche customer yet? Check out our homepage for information on product benefits, solutions and more.
SITUATION
In 2020, the Town of Prosper created a continuous process improvement program based on lean practices. As a part of this effort, the town aimed to eliminate paper-driven processes and manual tasks across various departments in order to meet the demands of the town’s growing population.
SOLUTION
The IT department began by replacing the paper applications for the town’s boards and commissions with a Laserfiche form. After experiencing Laserfiche’s ease of use, the department expanded with more electronic forms for the municipal court and the public works departments.
RESULTS
In addition to reduced opportunity for error and a streamlined staff experience, the time the public works department spends on the water equipment readings process has been cut by 75% or more. The department estimates it has saved more than 100 hours annually by re-engineering the process.
The Town of Prosper is a fast-growing suburb with small-town charm, located 30 miles north of Dallas at the crossroads of U.S. 380, Preston Road and the Dallas North Tollway in Collin and Denton Counties. Prosper sits on 27 square miles and is home to more than 35,430 people. A home-rule municipality, governed by a council-manager form of government, the town has full-time fire and police departments, including its own dispatch service. As the Town grows to its projected build-out population of 70,000 residents, Prosper’s vision is to remain a “Place Where Everyone Matters.”
Prosper is a town within Texas’s Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area that has experienced tremendous growth in recent years. With a projected build-out population of 70,000 — double its current population — the town’s IT department has had the foresight to prioritize increased efficiency, implementing processes and solutions that will help the town scale with growth and continue delivering high quality public services.
As a part of this effort, IT has leveraged Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) in various departments as a channel for process modernization and efficiency. The town started by replacing the paper applications for the municipality’s boards and commissions with a Laserfiche form. After experiencing Laserfiche’s ease of use, the department expanded with more electronic forms for the municipal court and the public works departments.
“We’re utilizing Laserfiche for what it’s good at, which is routing information, filing it into a system that makes it easy to search, easy to retrieve and easy to maintain with retention guidelines,” said Leigh Johnson, director of information technology at the Town of Prosper. “Anywhere that we can get a department to start using it more we’re trying to do so.”
Johnson’s vision puts digitization and centralization at the forefront, reducing opportunity for human error while providing a streamlined staff and citizen experience when interacting with the town’s information. Laserfiche supports this vision, as the town continues to explore new ways to leverage Laserfiche’s robust records management, electronic forms and integration capabilities.
The Town of Prosper recently implemented a continuous improvement program with the ultimate goal of maintaining a high quality of service to the town’s growing population. This initiative led the IT department to explore opportunities for new efficiencies within existing technologies and processes.
“From the moment I started digging into Laserfiche, I thought ‘This is really slick,’” Johnson said. “I learned about forms and workflow, and we decided at some point that we needed to be utilizing it more and get some training on it.”
The IT department tapped the town’s Laserfiche solution provider, MCCi, for support and training on the platform, which inspired new ideas and opened doors to more advanced solutions.
One of the first Laserfiche-driven process improvements was done in collaboration with the town secretary, who wanted to modernize the way people applied to be on one of the town’s boards or commissions. Like in many municipalities, Prosper’s application was previously done on paper and the process was entirely manual.
“Any place we can eliminate inefficient processes, whether they are paper or otherwise, is going to benefit us,” Johnson explained.
The new process allows applicants to fill out a digital Laserfiche form on the town’s website. Applicants attach their resumes; information is filed in Laserfiche and assigned a retention schedule, lessening the burden of managing paper records hidden in a filing cabinet.
When COVID-19 arrived, the IT department saw an increased need for digital forms to help decrease foot traffic to Town Hall. Building on their knowledge of Laserfiche forms, the team built several new forms, including:
“Laserfiche became our go-to, because it was existing platform and we knew how easy it was to build a form with minimal training,” Johnson added.
After their experience with creating some helpful Laserfiche forms for the town secretary and municipal courts, the IT department was ready to take on a more complex challenge. The team identified a legacy process that the public works department used daily to collect readings from equipment (such as water meters) at public works facilities throughout the town.
Previously done using a stack of paper comprising a sheet for each facility, the process involves field workers who drive out to each site to take readings from the equipment and note the relevant numbers by hand.
“Employees would then go back to the office and transcribe the information into what I called a ‘dirty log,’ which is basically another piece of paper where numbers could be erased and redone, mustard or coffee could be spilled on it,” Johnson said. Numbers were then transferred into a “clean log,” which could be kept as record and shown to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) during audits. “There were so many opportunities for numbers to be input incorrectly, and it was very time consuming.”
With support from MCCi, the Town of Prosper IT team reimagined the process using Laserfiche, which made the readings available to supervisors back in the office in real time. The new process involves equipping field workers with tablets and enabling them to enter readings digitally into a Laserfiche form. The forms presented a list of facilities and, depending on which facility the field worker selected, the form would dynamically change fields for different types of readings. Field workers electronically sign the form, which would also automatically be geotagged with the location of the facility.
“The public works department wanted another way to verify that a person was at the facility, so that if there was ever any question about it, we would have that signature and geotag,” Johnson said.
Field workers then move onto the next facility and repeat the process. If a supervisor in the office notices an anomaly with any of the information entered, they can immediately notify the field worker to take another reading.
“Before, they have even gotten back to the office before a supervisor could notify them that something looked off, so we’re saving more time and fuel as well,” Johnson added. “As they submit the numbers, they are written to an SQL database. We also file the forms in Laserfiche by month. When TCEQ comes out to do the audit now, instead of having to look through a file folder, we’ve got all the forms filled out, timestamped, geo-tagged, signed, and we know we went out there and did readings as we’re required to do. It’s much more efficient, and it’s updated in real-time.”
In addition to supporting the auditing process, the new equipment readings form has reduced the opportunity for error by eliminating 75% of the legacy process’s manual data entry. Johnson also estimates that the new process saves at least two hours per week in manual transcription, all of which results in huge efficiency gains for the public works department.
Today, the IT department is working on integrations to create even more connectivity and efficiencies. An integration between Laserfiche and the town’s enterprise permitting and licensing system, for example, will enable the planning department to streamline records management by auto-filing paperwork related to permitting and licensing into Laserfiche. The human resources department, too, has embraced a digital approach to managing content and exploring new solutions.
“We went from having just one form for the boards and commissions application to creating dozens,” Johnson said. “We are growing so fast — we have lots of new employees starting, which has been the trend in recent years. So we’re not slowing down; we can’t slow down. There’s so much growth. Residents are very engaged and they demand a lot. Laserfiche is an example of one of the ways we can use technology to scale our services.”
