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Tecnoglass Powers Collaboration to Deliver Industry Leading Products and Services

Tecnoglass is a leading glass and window manufacturer, and the first Colombian company to be listed on the NASDAQ. Since its beginnings in 1984, the company has gained recognition for delivering high-quality products, competitive prices and timely delivery. In more recent years, Tecnoglass experienced tremendous growth, doubling revenue since 2014 thanks to the company’s vertically integrated business and strong, innovative product offerings.

To remain on the forefront of the industry and continue to meet customer expectations, Tecnoglass introduced automation to its operations. This transfomation has affected not only the fabrication of products, but also core business processes across the enterprise.

At the heart of Tecnoglass’s digitization and business process automation initiatives is Laserfiche, which the company uses to store critical documents, manage records and enable collaboration between employees and with external suppliers. This Laserfiche-enabled digital transformation has benefited the entire organization, increasing accountability, improving compliance and accelerating business across all units. Today, Tecnoglass continues on its growth trajectory using Laserfiche to eliminate repetitive, time-intensive manual tasks, and enable employees to maintain focus on fulfilling customers’ quality and service expectations and remaining competitive in the marketplace.

Positioned for Growth

In December 2013, Tecnoglass debuted on NASDAQ. Shortly after, the organization sought a better way to manage documents, since the company’s legacy system was no longer robust enough to meet the demands of a rapidly growing business and could not be integrated with other core technologies.

“Records were disorganized, and stored in warehouses making them difficult to find,” said Plinio Florez, document management coordinator at Tecnoglass. “This led to high storage costs and labor costs associated with searching for documents. It was almost impossible to consult files for decision-making, which delayed critical processes.”

Tecnoglass also faced challenges collaborating with suppliers. The legacy supplier registration process was manually driven and paper-based, which led to lost documents, and difficulties with authorizing suppliers and making payments.

The Tecnoglass team found that Laserfiche could meet the company’s document management needs as well as enable the automation of key business processes such as supplier registration and accounts payable. The Laserfiche platform was also easily integrated with Tecnoglass’s ERP system, helping to centralize data and operations.

Tecnoglass also enlisted the help of Colombia-based Laserfiche Solution Provider, Gestech, for the implementation. “Having local support was another important part of our decision making process,” said Florez.

“Laserfiche was the perfect choice to take Tecnoglass into the next phase of growth and expansion,” said Jaime Barrios Perez, CEO of Gestech. “By using Laserfiche to centralize information, and digitize and automate processes, Tecnoglass created a more seamless experience for employees and suppliers that is closely aligned with the company’s modern, global vision.”

Getting Ahead by Going Digital-First

The most immediate change Tecnoglass made was to digitize documents and store the electronic files in a Laserfiche repository, making information easier to process and share with outside parties when needed.

“We had to change the mentality of employees, which was that documents are only safe if they’re ‘physically available,’” said Florez. “To the contrary, by digitizing paperwork, we have enhanced controls and mitigated risk of information loss.”

Digitization made an impact across the company, especially in the foreign trade department, which manages significant amounts of Tecnoglass’s transactions and activities. The company was able to save nearly $73,000,000 Colombian pesos in costs related to shipping and processing paperwork alone. Today, the company’s Laserfiche repository houses more than 10 million files, all easily searchable by authorized employees.

Moving toward a digital-first environment also made collaboration with outside parties easier. The paper-driven legacy supplier registration process was replaced with a Laserfiche electronic form and automated workflow. By digitizing and automating the process, the company eliminated lost paperwork and accelerated registration, improving the experience for both Tecnoglass employees and the company’s suppliers.

Using Laserfiche, Tecnoglass employees can now easily search and retrieve documents without having to step foot in a warehouse. This has resulted in faster decision making, as well as a faster response times to internal and external audits — such as those related to Sarbanes-Oxley Act, ISO standards and the company’s Authorized Economic Operator certification, for which Tecnoglass has committed to both physical and IT security and safety standards throughout its supply chain by meeting requirements set forth by the Colombian Tax and Customs National Authority (DIAN).

“Laserfiche has helped tremendously with the company’s compliance with legal and industry requirements. Having the search functions at our fingertips has eliminated headaches for many of our employees, and automating processes has eliminated repetitive, error-prone manual tasks like data entry, allowing employees to focus on more productive work.”

—Tecnoglass General Counsel Andrea Zambrano

Accelerating Across the Enterprise

The company’s success with Laserfiche continues to spread throughout the organization since initial implementation. Additional departments have automated key processes including accounts payable, supplier updates, correspondence management, user profile confirmation and document loan control.

“Departments that have benefited from the implementation of Laserfiche include: purchases, treasury, accounting, document management, foreign trade, warehouse and internal control, all of which mainly needed a solution that allowed them to optimize time, space and the fulfillment of obligations to third-parties,” said Zambrano. “We have created and opened up new channels of communication with third parties, such as our suppliers. We’re now able to notify suppliers when we have an issue with a document or bill — prevent billing errors and delays — and we give our suppliers more convenient methods for updating data online.”

Tecnoglass’s Laserfiche implementation has created a more integrated work environment, where processes are standardized and transparent, enabling the company’s management team to more easily optimize resources and personnel. Employees and departments are accountable, which has led to better collaboration and better communication, even with third parties.

“Adopting Laserfiche technology opened up new possibilities for our organization that were previously dismissed,” said Zambrano. “It turns out we just did not have the foundation and practices in place that would enable more innovation. Once we started implementing automated workflows, we eliminated silos and our operations became more connected. We continue to work on integrating workflows and centralizing data and processes. Laserfiche is an extremely powerful tool for our organization.”

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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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New Caney Independent School District’s District-Wide Digital Transformation of Student and Employee Records

New Caney Independent School District, located in the Houston metropolitan area, manages over 15,000 students across 18 schools and facilities. With a growth rate of 7% per year, the district’s enrollment and hiring began rapidly expanding—along with its student records archives, and process and compliance challenges.

When Superintendent Kenn Franklin joined the district, his vision for paperless processes began a five-year plan to completely digitize the district’s records and operations. After receiving a Laserfiche demonstration, New Caney ISD was convinced it could realize this vision through the solution’s robust search, electronic forms and workflow automation.

“Laserfiche is one system with endless capabilities,” said Tammy Yarbrough, records management officer at New Caney Independent School District. “The solution’s user-friendly implementation enabled our small records team to create a searchable, secure database quickly—without investing significant time and resources into learning and training on the system.”

Creating More Efficient Employee Contracts

The district’s initial goal for using Laserfiche centered around updating its HR contract processes. Using Laserfiche Forms, Yarbrough’s team digitized the creation, review and approval of employee contracts, as well as other HR documents like incident reporting, performance evaluations and salary placements. The initiative was a quick win that solidified Laserfiche’s position as a core software system for the district’s administrative operations.

“The deputy superintendent was amazed at the system’s capabilities,” Yarbrough says. “At a meeting about a district issue, he looked at my boss and said, ‘I don’t know what you need to do, but you need to make this ‘Fiche-y.’ We then created a process to help analyze and review the data.”

Digitizing Student Folders Simplifies Compliance

Before Laserfiche, the district lacked a uniform approach to file management. To remedy this, the district digitized over 17,000 cumulative student folders and created electronic folders organized by campus, grade level and student document categories and types.

For both new and archived records, Laserfiche can automatically apply document security by document type and employee role, giving New Caney the ability to assign and track nuanced levels of record access across the district. Additionally, records retention schedules help enable administrators to ensure that student files are destroyed at the right time and help enforce proper compliance throughout the records’ lifecycle.

Yarbrough’s team now uses Laserfiche Forms to build solutions for every student and staff need. Administrators, teachers and staff can also quickly upload documents including new report cards, health forms, attendance notes, athletics physicals and more into the digital student folder. The result is a more accurate, holistic student file that can be accessed on-demand through a web portal.

“With Laserfiche, we will never have lost files,” Yarbrough emphasizes.

Expediting Student Enrollment and Record Transfer

By digitizing student files and forms, the district drastically improved the student enrollment process for both parents and staff. Parents now complete enrollment forms online in the district’s student information system, Skyward, and Laserfiche Workflow automatically files them in the relevant folders in the repository. For returning students, a database lookup populates the students’ information from the previous school year—reducing the number of forms that students and parents have to complete and lessening the document management burden on administrators.

Total enrollment processing time has been reduced by 75%. Additionally, all enrollment forms are available district-wide within 24 hours of submission. Beyond these benefits, the district’s student data is more accurate since Laserfiche eliminated much of the manual data entry and folder creation.

Because all student records are digital, file transfers with other school districts are also expedited. Instead of copying and mailing or scanning an entire paper folder, New Caney ISD created a Laserfiche Form that automatically exports student folders and uploads the files to the Texas Records Exchange, a state-run system for school registrars to electronically request and receive records for students attending Texas public schools. Thousands of pages are transferred seamlessly in just a few minutes.

Benefits

The district digitized more than 370,000 HR records, and over 2 million student records and enrollment processes without IT expertise.
The district saved over $330,000 by choosing to implement Laserfiche instead of outsourcing records scanning and storage.
Student enrollment processing, which formerly took two hours per student, now takes less than 30 minutes, and all forms are available for teachers, counselors and registrars district-wide within 24 hours.
Transferring student files from the district’s registrar to state education agencies and other school districts now takes just two minutes instead of 45.
Laserfiche has helped the district’s compliance with FERPA and HIPAA regulations, and enabled the district to control and track records access using granular records security.
Records retention schedules enable administrators to ensure that files are destroyed on time.
Teachers and administrators can now access records from anywhere with an internet connection, rather than being required to physically retrieve documents from a records warehouse.

The success of the initial Laserfiche implementation has led to rapid adoption across all the district’s administrative units. The records team is currently working through a three-month backlog of Laserfiche project requests.

“When others see what Laserfiche can do, they want more,” Yarbrough says. “We can provide administrators with immediate solutions to district issues, like employee onboarding, class coding, and enrollment and implement solutions in a matter of days by using forms and document management. When they ask for something, we can drop everything and can fix it quickly with Laserfiche.”

An Effortless New Hire Process

The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office transformed its Human Resources division by shifting from paper-based methods to become a digital agency using Laserfiche software. The digitization initiative increased efficiency, time management and accuracy, revolutionizing the ways in which the Sheriff’s Office stored documents, communicated within its department, and implemented its onboarding process with new employees.

Seamless Recruiting Tools

The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office is a local law enforcement agency based in central Florida. The agency is the largest and chief law enforcement agency in the county, with 850 employees within the department.

Before Laserfiche, the agency grappled with a diminished amount of storage room and needed a more effective solution for managing documents. Interdepartmental communication problems led to delays in the application process and, at times, lost documents when paper forms were mailed.

The agency first turned to Laserfiche to create a pre-employment application that is accessible to the public through the county’s website. The initial results were staggering, with application intake tripling from about 50 applications per month to now as many as 150 per month.

“We’re facing a nationwide shortage of police officers,” said Haylee Glasscock, Human Resources Technician, Osceola County’s Sheriff’s Office. “Making our application easily accessible online has helped with our recruiting efforts and was a good move for our agency. The application is extensive—it used to be 25 paper pages. With Laserfiche, we now can host recruiting fairs since the online application allows people to apply right then and there. Other applicants may apply via a secure link. In 2012, we had 446 paper applications. In the first year we had Laserfiche, we had 1,305.”

There are multiple job application forms the agency utilizes depending on the applicant, including a criminal history version which is longer compared to one created for recent graduates planning to move into the role of a deputy.

“With paper applications, people would leave fields blank; we had to call them to come in and fill out the information,” said Glasscock. “Now we no longer have incompletes and it saves us time. We can also have people upload files, photos of tattoos, and more—all within the application.”

After an applicant applies online, Laserfiche’s business process automation capabilities allow the agency to perform a paperless background check and file sign-off through its chain of command. Laserfiche simultaneously sends automatic email notifications to keep the applicant updated on the review process—a game-changer compared to years past, when updates on the Review Board date were sent through the mail.

Effortless New Hire Process

Once the application process is complete and an applicant receives an offer, the Sheriff’s Office uses Laserfiche to onboard new employees with digital forms. Laserfiche enables chain-of-command administration staff to sign off on specific files using conditions in a workflow. Relevant personnel say whether the file looks acceptable, and if so, it moves on to the next person. The process is smooth, accurate and far less time-consuming than the previous method of filling out a handwritten form as the official offer document with the salary and start date included.

The Sheriff’s Office’s Human Resources division is now a paperless environment thanks to implementing Laserfiche software. All employee personnel and medical files are stored in the repository and are easily accessible to HR staff. Additionally, Laserfiche has been integrated within the agency’s personnel management system. The software automatically pulls an employee’s information from the personnel management system, including his/her ID number, and completely fills out the template information—improving speed and accuracy.

“We like that information is accessible at our fingertips,” said Glasscock. “The training department now has one full-time staff assistant and a part-time student. They’re able to quickly find documents, email them to deputies if needed, and they’re easily viewed. Having those training files not in boxes anymore really helps them.”

The Sheriff’s Office also digitized the employee transfer form. Laserfiche automatically routes the form to the appropriate reviewer within the agency. The form has been further simplified by the use of variables, look-up tables (integrated with the organization’s computer-aided dispatch software and active directory), as well as field rules.

“Our recruiting department uses Laserfiche every day and a couple of agencies have reached out to me to see if we can share our process with them,” added Glasscock.

Since turning to Laserfiche, the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office has become more productive, effective and efficient. The agency digitized and secured more than 2,500 employee personnel files using Laserfiche software. Moreover, all new hire files are created digitally. The agency can process and prepare files for approval much faster, and automated email notifications mean that staff no longer need to call other departments as frequently to follow up on forms.

The agency realized an initial savings of $2,000 by eliminating supplies for new employee files, as well thousands more in departmental time-savings. Beyond cost savings, the Sheriff’s Office opened the door to a more digital, automated agency. By implementing innovative solutions like its Laserfiche digital records management program, the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office fosters a culture of efficiency and agility to better position the agency for success in a competitive hiring market.

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.

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