The Nez Perce Tribe’s Environmental Restoration and Waste Management (ERWM) division plays a vital role in safeguarding irreplaceable cultural resources and critical data related to the cleanup of the Hanford site, a former nuclear production complex.
This program’s crucial work demands robust information management to support data integrity and security, as well as promote accessibility for future generations.
To address these needs, the ERWM turned to Laserfiche. The platform’s advanced search capabilities, comprehensive recordkeeping features, and robust security controls have empowered the tribe to effectively manage critical information while maintaining data sovereignty. Through a partnership with Laserfiche solution provider Intertribal Software, the tribe uses Laserfiche to preserve its heritage and provide leadership in environmental stewardship.
“Laserfiche is important to our function as a program, but also for storing information that relates to our culture — preserving it and making it accessible to future generations is key,” said Antonio Smith, communications specialist at the Nez Perce Tribe.
Established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, the Hanford site occupies 586 square miles along the Columbia River in the state of Washington. While the federal government used the site to produce nuclear materials for national defense, the archaeological record of Native American habitation of the area goes back over 10,000 years.
“We have stories about the land,” Smith said. “We have names for the land that are different than the names people use today. We have purposes for that land that are different than current purposes. This information is for us and our generations to follow.”
When the U.S. government announced a Hanford cleanup effort, the tribes and additional non-governmental organizations got involved. Their role was to guarantee the cleanup respected tribal standards and, importantly, progressed toward a full ecological restoration of the land, beyond simply making it suitable for certain commercial activities.

The amount of information the ERWM has about the land is significant, and ranges from land agreements and culturally significant documentation, to the tribe’s own testing data that is vital to the division’s work with U.S. government agencies. The critical nature of the information, however, was not reflected in how it was stored.
“We had a single-wide trailer full of files from floor to ceiling,” Smith described. “We couldn’t search them, and when we needed to refer to something, the issue was locating the box it was in or even the room it was in. A lot of the documents we have are large. As a Department of Energy-funded program, we receive reports that are quite extensive and involve multiple contractors, so this method of storage was not sustainable.”
The importance of this information necessitated a storage solution that was:
“Laserfiche is the solution we needed,” Smith said. “When we looked at all the different options we had, it came out on top. We have information referencing land that goes back thousands of years. To be able to now capture all of that digitally and make it accessible for future generations is vital. Otherwise, it could be in buildings getting moldy or burnt or stolen.”
Today, the ERWM continues its essential work to restore and protect environmental and cultural resources, now with Laserfiche to support staff in retrieving the information they need, when they need it. The tribe can also rest assured that it has the tools to safeguard precious and confidential information that must be preserved for generations to come.
“Our culture is key to everything,” Smith said. “It’s not just our past; it’s our present; it’s how we function. This information is the future for our children, and we can’t lose that.” The ERWM is also exploring new opportunities to streamline processes in other areas such as human resources forms and travel forms. The effort will help the ERWM to be more efficient, and reclaim time for doing what matters most: protecting the environment.

Government information largely centers on the “what” and the “where.”
Every road, parcel, school, permit and emergency response has a location. To manage this spatial data, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have become indispensable for helping governments understand where things are happening.
But as I reflected on conversations at the 2026 Esri User Conference, it became clear that location alone is no longer enough.
The world’s largest GIS event, the conference brings together thousands of geospatial professionals and leaders from across the public sector to learn how emerging AI and system integrations are amplifying the impact of GIS data.
The future of government isn’t just about mapping a coordinate. It’s about understanding the “who,” “why” and “how” of a place to drive meaningful action.
In his opening plenary session, Esri founder Jack Dangermond emphasized the role of shared data in expanding our “collective intelligence.” Dangermond explained that collective intelligence can only exist when you combine content with context, a relationship made far more powerful by agentic AI. The breakthrough lies in a two-way partnership: AI accelerates GIS insights, while GIS grounds AI with the real-world context it needs to deliver trustworthy answers. However, Dangermond cautioned that AI alone is incomplete.
“AI is an interesting technology because it’s bringing our collective knowledge together as a tool that we can apply. However, it in and of itself is not enough.”
To unlock the full potential of spatial data, says Dangermond, organizations must connect their ArcGIS platform with other core business tools to build an integrated “system of systems.” Folding location intelligence into your business ecosystems bridges the gap between raw information and static geographic data, empowering teams to make smarter decisions.
A GIS platform excels at answering one question: “Where?”
Inquiries such as, “Where is the water main that failed?” or “Where are building permits concentrated?” can be easily surfaced. But government and GIS leaders are asking questions that maps alone cannot answer.
Questions like “What inspections have been completed for this site?” or “Who oversees this parcel?” can be much more difficult to address. Those answers typically exist in siloed records, emails, contracts and case files across the enterprise.
A public works director may open a map to identify a damaged bridge and then spend the next 30 minutes searching for inspection reports, engineering drawings, maintenance histories, environmental permits and contractor correspondence.
The operational friction isn’t finding the bridge. It’s finding everything connected to it.
This is where AI-powered content management steps in to unlock the true value of GIS. As Dangermond emphasized, when geospatial information and enterprise content are connected, government employees spend less time searching and more time solving problems.
The location becomes the entry point into the organization’s collective knowledge.
Maps provide context. Trusted information provides meaning. Together, they create a richer picture for decision-makers.
Agentic AI is accelerating this conversation. AI Agents can reason across information, recommend actions and execute work autonomously. Even with advanced content management, there are still tiresome tasks associated with organizing, renaming and standardizing information tied to your GIS data. Agents dramatically cut down on the time teams spend on repetitive work. You tell them what to do in plain language and they get to work on your behalf, quickly filing large volumes of contractor correspondence to the correct parcel ID or even identifying and tagging parcels with outdated maintenance records.
While these tools offer immense value, implementation requires safeguards. Public sector leaders should look for solutions that enforce strict security permissions, prioritize human oversight and maintain clear audit trails for every Agent action.
Connecting GIS with enterprise content and AI Agents isn’t just a tech upgrade — it’s how governments deliver faster, better outcomes for the public.
One of the themes that resonated throughout the 2026 Esri User Conference was the importance of creating an authoritative foundation for organizational data.
ArcGIS Enterprise is designed to help organizations integrate business systems, manage authoritative data and support secure collaboration across departments. The same principle should apply to enterprise content. Government leaders have spent years investing in records management, governance and compliance. Those investments should strengthen GIS — not work separately from them.
Trusted, governed and connected information is critical, especially when Agentic AI is involved. Without it, Agents can produce incomplete or unreliable answers, introducing risk and eroding public trust.
Knowing that an asset exists at a particular location is useful. But when you give AI the surrounding context — like past repairs, inspections and resident requests — you transform it from a simple mapping assistant into a strategic decision-support system.
The more trusted the underlying information, the more confidence leaders can place in spatial analysis and AI-driven recommendations.
Outside of the conference, we see the power of uniting location with enterprise records in the Isle of Man Central Registry. Overseeing land ownership, deeds and corporate filings, the Registry historically managed spatial parcels alongside disconnected paper archives and legacy databases. By modernizing its content management system, the agency linked non-spatial records directly to land data, establishing a single digital source of truth, eliminating manual document searches and dramatically accelerating land registration and title verification.
The Isle of Man is just one example of how governments are uniting GIS data with governed content to turn static coordinates into actionable intelligence.
The next phase of government modernization will not be defined by better maps. It will be defined by better decisions.
GIS and enterprise content management are becoming complementary capabilities rather than separate technologies. One tells us “where.” The other explains “why.”
Imagine selecting a bridge on a map and instantly accessing an AI summary of its history, structural health and work orders. Or clicking a parcel and immediately seeing every permit, review and policy decision tied to that location. That isn’t simply location intelligence. It’s decision intelligence.
Together, GIS and content management provide the trusted, governed and connected information needed to reduce operational friction, empower agentic AI and drive strategic action.
If you are ready to step into the future of public service, schedule a personalized demo of Laserfiche AI-powered content management and learn how to get the most out of your spatial data.
Dynamic fields are a useful tool for making your repository metadata cleaner, more consistent, and easier to manage, strengthening data integrity across Laserfiche. This month, we’ve introduced new updates that expand the capabilities of dynamic fields to make them even more powerful.
Previously, dynamic fields were limited to data sourced from static lookup tables. Now, you can configure dynamic fields using data query and web request rules, allowing you to pull live values from external applications directly into your metadata in real-time.
This update allows dynamic fields to display field value options that are based on live business data, reflecting the most current information instantly, no matter where it is stored.
In addition, dynamic field configuration is now available within the template designer, providing a more intuitive place to create and manage these connections.
Together, these updates offer new ways for teams to keep their repository metadata accurate, current and synchronized across their line-of-business systems.
Smart Fields can now use list options supplied by dynamic fields to guide metadata extraction. By checking extracted values against the currently available options, Smart Fields can produce more consistent metadata that aligns with an organization’s approved data. Organizations can continue managing these options in their existing source, without duplicating this information in each Smart Fields prompt.
Laserfiche Cloud Audit Trail is expanding to provide broader visibility into security-sensitive and administrative activity across your cloud environment. Administrators can now better review privileged actions, identity-related changes and account administration activity from a centralized place.
This expansion includes team and project activities along with account-level security and user events. This allows organizations to extend audit visibility beyond the repository into process automation and account-level operations. With a clearer record of what happened and when, it’s now easier to monitor critical account activity and troubleshoot issues for faster investigation and clearer oversight.
Laserfiche Forms Mobile App Update: You can now sign into the Forms mobile app on your iOS or Android device using fingerprint or facial recognition. Biometric authentication now supports Single Sign-On (SSO) for Laserfiche Cloud, including SAML and AD FS authentication. This update also supports a deep linking feature that allows you to open the app directly to a specific form, making it easier to access the right form faster.
Repository API update: The Repository API now supports new capabilities for interacting with documents and metadata, including the ability to manage access rights, document annotations, records management and users’ Recent Documents, Starred documents and personal Collections. See the full changelog for more details.
Idle Session Termination: Administrators can now enable idle session timeout to automatically sign users out after a selected period of inactivity. This gives organizations greater control over session security and helps protect information when a signed-in device is left unattended.
New Toolkit for Developers: Explore the new LF Form Builder, which includes a toolkit of resources and examples to help you modernize how you build, test, and maintain Laserfiche Forms customizations. Learn more about the resource here.
New security suite extends Laserfiche’s proven security controls and adds near real-time data replication for governments, law enforcement and security-conscious enterprises.
LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA, Aug. 6, 2026 — Laserfiche — the leading SaaS provider of intelligent content management — today announced the launch of Enterprise Security, an advanced suite of security enhancements designed for organizations navigating complex regulatory environments. Enterprise Security addresses GovRAMP and CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Services) security requirements based on the NIST SP 800-53 framework. For organizations handling privileged citizen, legal or corporate data, these built-in controls streamline audit preparation and fortify defenses.
With organizations placing a higher priority on data stewardship and corporate governance, enterprise IT leaders require a security architecture that protects data without slowing down operations. Laserfiche Enterprise Security extends Laserfiche Cloud’s highly resilient infrastructure with multi-region data replication, elevated security controls for privileged accounts, and built-in governance safeguards.
“Maintaining data integrity and compliance has always been at the heart of Laserfiche’s operations,” said Michael Allen, CTO at Laserfiche. “With Enterprise Security, Laserfiche provides enterprise IT users, especially those in government, law enforcement and highly regulated industries, with the complementary controls designed to meet stringent information security standards and protect their most sensitive assets.”
High-Security Controls and Regulatory Alignment
Laserfiche Enterprise Security introduces multi-region disaster recovery, enhanced oversight capabilities, and government-ready cloud security controls tailored for mission-critical data and sensitive operations.
Key capabilities included with Enterprise Security:
Laserfiche is listed on the GovRAMP Progressing Product List, with the Enterprise Security suite delivering the architectural controls required to support these standards.
Tailored for Mission-Critical Operations
Enterprise Security is built for organizations that safeguard heavily regulated and sensitive data, where seamless recovery and strict information control are vital to everyday operations:
“Highly regulated sectors, from law enforcement to state and local governments, face a unique challenge: They must modernize content management while upholding non-negotiable security standards,” said Andrea Malick, principal advisory director at Info-Tech Research Group. “Solutions that offer built-in compliance frameworks like CJIS and GovRAMP give enterprise IT buyers the confidence to migrate sensitive workloads to the cloud without compromising control.”
Pricing and Availability
Enterprise Security is available starting today as a supplemental SKU for qualifying Laserfiche Cloud deployments.
Laserfiche is also introducing Business+, a new comprehensive subscription tier designed for organizations that want high-level security capabilities built directly into their standard platform deployment.
For More Information

In the modern enterprise, information is often compared to oil—a raw resource that is valuable only when refined. However, for many organizations, that “oil” has become a “swamp.” We are drowning in Ghost Content: the vast quantities of documents, emails, and data points that are stored daily, tucked away, and promptly forgotten. This hidden hoard isn’t just a storage cost; it’s a locked chest of insights and a potential compliance liability.
In a recent thought leadership webinar, experts from Info-Tech Research Group and Laserfiche sat down to discuss how artificial intelligence is finally providing the key to unlocking your data, moving organizations from digital clutter to operational clarity.
For decades, IT departments have drawn a thick line between “Data” (structured numbers in databases) and “Content” (unstructured documents like PDFs and emails). According to the Info-Tech experts, those lines are officially dead.
AI doesn’t care about the format of your information. Whether it’s a row in a spreadsheet or a paragraph in a contract, modern AI agents see it all as Knowledge. To be “AI-ready,” organizations must stop managing these assets in silos. Integrating technology, architecture and governance teams is the first step toward a unified information strategy that is cost-effective and compliant.
Nysa Zaran, data and analytics director of research at Info-Tech, emphasizes the importance of this shift, saying, “One of the moves that we need to begin to make as organizations is to think more broadly about our information as a whole, our knowledge, our data and our content, and start thinking about how we can manage that and leverage that together.”
The Four Dimensions of AI
To understand how to leverage this technology, Zaran breaks AI into four core capabilities that are reshaping the workplace:
While some of these technologies have existed for years, their accessibility is what has changed. Tools that were once reserved for data scientists are now available at the fingertips of every office worker.
If you turn a powerful AI loose on a “content swamp”—a disorganized SharePoint or a messy file server—you won’t get insights; you’ll get amplified chaos. The experts suggest a principle-based approach to decide what information actually matters. Info-Tech proposes the “I-VALUE” framework. High-value information is:
By establishing these principles, leadership can share the responsibility of data ownership across the company, rather than leaving it solely on the shoulders of the IT department.
One of the biggest misconceptions in digital transformation is the idea that “we aren’t ready for AI because our data is too messy.” The Info-Tech team flips this script: You can use AI to clean your house.
This is where AI-powered information management comes in. Instead of manual audits that take years, organizations are now using AI for auto-classification, metadata prediction, and deduplication. You can use AI to identify personally identifiable information (PII) at scale or to flag expiring vendor contracts that were previously hidden in the depths of your archives. In this way, AI isn’t just the end goal—it’s the janitor that helps you get there.
“Use your technology. It’s powerful,” said Andrea Malick, principal advisory director at Info-Tech. “Use it to its potential, and you’ll now be set up for emerging technology.”
So, where should you start? The panel suggests a “strategic but practical” approach. You don’t need an “easy button”; you need a six-month roadmap.
The shift from complex, fragmented data to clear, actionable intelligence isn’t just a technological upgrade; it’s a cultural one. By breaking down the barriers between data and content and using AI-powered information management to streamline governance, your organization can stop searching for information and start using it.
To learn more about how to unlock your organizations unstructured data and hear directly from Research Directors of Info-Tech Research Group, watch the full webinar.
As a systems analyst, Geethmi Dissanayake spends her time helping the City of Tucson improve how residents access services. But long before Tucson began modernizing its processes, the city faced a problem so physically large that officials questioned whether part of a building floor could safely support the weight of years of paper records.
“At that time, almost everything depended on paper,” Dissanayake said. “As the city grew and the services we offered expanded, it became harder to manage information efficiently and deliver the experience residents expected.”
Paper-based processes created delays across city operations. Residents often had to call city offices or visit in person to submit requests. Employees manually routed documents between departments for approvals and reviews. Some processes took days or weeks to complete.
City leaders recognized that Tucson needed a more practical and reliable way to deliver services. They selected Laserfiche in 2020, shortly before the pandemic accelerated demand for digital services and remote access. The priority was to digitize forms and simplify internal workflows with Laserfiche Forms. As departments saw results, use of the platform steadily expanded into additional employee and resident-facing processes.

More recently, the city’s focus shifted toward accessibility. With fast-approaching deadlines to meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements, Tucson began improving hundreds of public-facing forms to make digital services easier to navigate for residents using assistive technology.
What started as an effort to reduce paper gradually evolved into a broader strategy for improving how residents interact with city services.

Today, Laserfiche Forms supports more than 300 public-facing forms and workflows across 18 city departments, including water, transportation and environmental services. Residents can start or stop water service, request the correct trash bin size for their household and submit disability-related transportation requests online without having to create an account or visit city offices.
Before Laserfiche, many of these requests depended on paper forms, phone calls or in-person visits during business hours. Incomplete submissions often created additional delays because city staff needed to contact residents for missing information before they could move requests forward. Laserfiche Forms helped solve that issue with guided submissions and built-in validation checks that prevent forms from being submitted without all the required information.
The city also improved consistency across departments by standardizing how employees collect information and move requests through approvals. Instead of relying on paper handoffs, emails or phone calls to check statuses, departments now track requests directly in Laserfiche and quickly identify where action is needed. Employees spend less time tracking down information, which helps them respond to residents more quickly.
“Laserfiche has teams across the city looking at how they can make services easier for residents to access and easier for employees to manage behind the scenes,” said Sudhakar Makham, systems analyst for the City of Tucson.
Successfully streamlining public-facing processes inspired departments to modernize additional employee-facing workflows. One of the most widely used is the employee badge request process, which every new hire completes before receiving access to city facilities. Previously, employees passed printed paperwork between offices for approvals. Staff waited for signatures before forwarding requests to the next department. Because it involved building access and security clearances, delays slowed onboarding for new employees.

Now, staff simply submit a Laserfiche form that automatically routes approvals through the appropriate departments. The workflow generates tracking numbers, sends notifications and securely moves requests through each approval stage. What once took weeks can now be accomplished in four days — up to 60% faster.
“Laserfiche removed a lot of the manual coordination that used to happen between departments, saving hours of staff time,” said Dissanayake. “Employees no longer physically send secure documents back and forth, and departments can immediately see where requests are in the process. That visibility makes collaboration much easier and helps approvals move faster.”
Upcoming federal ADA accessibility deadlines further expanded the city’s use of Laserfiche Forms to meet the requirements for its public-facing forms. Laserfiche designs and develops its products with digital accessibility at the forefront, routinely publishing Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs) to provide state and local governments with the architectural foundation to build compliant public-facing solutions.
Even with the right tools, however, achieving compliance can be a massive hurdle for local governments. Tucson’s audit and remediation initiative meticulously evaluated the city’s digital assets. Rather than outsourcing the work, the city tapped the custom JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) capabilities within Laserfiche Forms to achieve compliance. For example, one issue involved browser tabs displaying generic form titles such as “New Submission,” which created confusion for residents using screen readers to navigate multiple forms. Using Laserfiche Forms customization capabilities, the city developed a solution that dynamically updated form titles to improve screen reader navigation and usability.
The team applied these tailored structural improvements across hundreds of forms through a structured rollout process. By utilizing Laserfiche’s robust, developer-friendly architecture, Tucson successfully turned a strict regulatory mandate into a community asset. In addition to strengthening accessibility and usability for residents, the initiative reduced long-term maintenance costs and circumvented the need to invest in additional software.

The City of Tucson has come a long way since officials worried about the physical weight of paper files. Today, more than 900 employees across departments actively use Laserfiche for forms and approvals.
“We regularly get requests from departments that want to replicate what another team is doing with Laserfiche,” said Makham. “Once our colleagues see how much faster and easier the process becomes, they start looking for other workflows they can improve.”
The platform’s usability also makes it easier for the city to train employees with a wide range of technical experience. “Employees with very different backgrounds learn Laserfiche quickly,” said Dissanayake. “Laserfiche is intuitive, which makes it much easier for departments to adopt new workflows and manage them confidently.”
A case in point is Makham himself, who joined the city with no previous Laserfiche experience, learned the platform through Laserfiche Aspire training resources and is now a certified Laserfiche developer.
“Technology works best when it makes life easier for people,” said Dissanayake. “That’s what Laserfiche did for city residents and employees alike.”
Members Trust Company (MTC) manages trust and investment services for more than 65 credit unions and thousands of individual clients across the United States. Through these partnerships, credit unions offer trust and investment products to their members, while MTC administers the underlying accounts and records.
Combining the scale and capabilities of a national trust institution with the personalized, relationship-driven service of a boutique firm, MTC operates under strict federal oversight by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Its 60 employees oversee more than 5,000 accounts — a lean structure that makes efficiency, reliability and compliance essential to maintaining client trust.
Despite its lean size, MTC’s growing client base and expanding account volume made manual, disconnected processes difficult to sustain. Employees stored tens of thousands of client records, such as account opening forms and trust agreements, in shared drives. This made information retrieval difficult, inconsistent, and prone to errors. “It was a challenge to locate the right documents quickly,” said Diana Begley, process architect at MTC. “We wanted a system that was more structured, reliable and easier to manage.”
When Hurricane Irma knocked out power across Florida, MTC recognized that its locally managed systems created risk for both business continuity and client service. MTC made the strategic decision to move information to the cloud to better protect client assets, maintain uptime and modernize operations. The company selected Laserfiche for its secure, accessible infrastructure and powerful automation capabilities. This would enable staff across the country to access records for its nationwide client base reliably and securely, even during a disruption.

MTC’s first goal was to improve accuracy and efficiency in two key areas of account management while maintaining strict regulatory compliance. Laserfiche automated its account opening and account request processes so that every document, approval and audit trail is captured and stored correctly.
Records management and metadata automation capabilities from Laserfiche keep these processes consistent and auditable. Each document is filed with complete metadata, making information easy to locate during regulatory audits and internal compliance reviews. Laserfiche also reduces manual errors and variability between departments.
These improvements allow MTC to maintain the personalized, relationship-driven service it’s known for, even as the company’s client base continues to grow.

After launching the new system, MTC immediately saw measurable improvements. It reduced account servicing steps from 15 to two, cutting average handling time from 45 minutes to about 15 minutes per request. The new workflows eliminated the need to interpret incomplete requests or manually route tasks between departments, replacing that guesswork with clear, automated steps that keep every request on track.
Since introducing the Request Portal, MTC has processed more than 1,300 automated tasks, with full adoption still underway. Each process includes integrated notifications, approvals and filing, eliminating the back-and-forth emails and status checks that staff once handled manually. Staff report higher satisfaction and fewer errors, while clients experience faster turnaround times and consistent service. “Laserfiche lets our team focus on client relationships instead of administrative tasks,” Begley said.
To create a unified experience, MTC connected Laserfiche with other essential systems across the organization to create a unified view of client activity and documents:
Together, these integrations give staff and partners faster, more reliable access to client information. Digital signatures speed up document turnaround, while synchronized data ensures teams always work from the most accurate record. The result is a more connected client experience, with fewer handoffs and less manual work across departments. That means MTC can provide faster, more consistent service without losing the attentive client care that defines its approach.

Today, 83% of employees use the system daily. Automation significantly reduced the time staff and partners spend on repetitive tasks while improving data accuracy and compliance readiness. The decision to deploy in the cloud also reduced IT overhead, eliminating the need to manage servers, perform updates or handle routine maintenance.
As a result, MTC enjoys stronger business continuity, fewer interruptions and better scalability for future growth. “We have a reputation for reliability,” Begley said. “Laserfiche enables us to deliver on that every day.”
MTC continues to expand automation to additional account processes and explore new ways to leverage AI capabilities. The company plans to connect Laserfiche with its trust accounting system for straight-through processing. It is also looking to implement Intelligent Data Capture to handle incoming checks and invoices more efficiently.
Together, these connected processes create a consistent, compliant framework that supports growth and reliable client service. With Laserfiche, MTC can continue operating with the reach of a national firm while preserving the personal service that sets it apart.
“Laserfiche gives us the agility to scale without adding staff,” Begley said. “It’s helping us build a smarter, more efficient future for our clients and our team.”
In the fast-paced, often chaotic world of healthcare, every second counts. For a multi-state healthcare organization with 50 locations, the challenge wasn’t just delivering quality patient care; it was also managing the complex web of administrative tasks that often pulled their staff away from what mattered most — patients.
“Our corporate mission statement is to deliver quality, effective nursing care to our seniors, pediatrics and young adults,” said Jeff Nichols, chief technology officer at The Alden Network. “But our mission from an IT perspective is to deliver a great experience to our clients, who are also our fellow employees.”

One factor getting in the way of that mission was the organization’s reliance on manual processes. Documents were being faxed, emailed, or physically carried from one department to another. This led to delays and prevented staff from spending all their time and skills on patient care.
To address the issue, Alden turned to Laserfiche. Now, instead of faxes and emails, the organization has over 100 automated Laserfiche Forms processes in place, with even more on the way. The solution has improved efficiency by 70% to 80%, allowing staff to refocus their time and talent to patients.
Before Laserfiche, core business processes — like those in human resources or accounts payable — were not only manually driven but also largely inconsistent across Alden’s 50 locations. When the Alden IT team began looking for an electronic document management system, they saw in Laserfiche a larger opportunity for consistent data orchestration.
“We thought that document storage was going to be 90% of how we used Laserfiche,” Nichols said. “But we are now using Laserfiche Forms and workflow automation in a significant way. Laserfiche Forms helps us get the tasks into the hands of our users, and workflow does all the backend processing of the data.”
In the accounts payable (AP) department, for instance, employees were using triplicate carbon copy forms for purchase orders (POs). “Correspondence [was] going back and forth in email, or some buildings were even just sending a stack of paper in a tote via courier to the AP department,” said Ralph Reinhofer, IT project manager at Alden Network. AP processors had to manually match invoices to receipts, a cumbersome process that could easily lead to delays.
Another company-wide activity — the onboarding process for new hires — was also full of manual, disconnected tasks. “There were times IT would find out that when someone started, they didn’t get a notebook, or door access, or whatever they needed,” Nichols explained. These manual tasks were not just frustrating; they also detracted from the core mission of providing excellent care.
The Solution: Streamlining with Forms and Workflow
“One of the main goals with Laserfiche was removing monotonous, repetitive tasks from our employees, so they can spend more time focusing on the patient, or things related to patient care, rather than moving data from one place to another,” said Reinhofer.
Laserfiche Forms and workflow were the key to solving some of Alden Network’s biggest challenges. Working with Laserfiche solution provider Proven IT, Alden used Laserfiche as a solution to automate AP processes and streamline HR administration. This initiative allowed Alden to digitize and standardize operations across all 50 locations.
Now, instead of relying on couriers or faxes to send information between locations, the organization manages a wide range of tasks digitally. These include:
“Name any internal business process at Alden, and there’s probably a Laserfiche form for it,” Reinhofer said. “And we’ve now given everyone a single way to do everything, so there’s a lot of consistency now.”
The consistency is not only more efficient, but it also helps with employee retention and recruitment. When a new employee needs to learn a process, “there are four other buildings doing it the same way and there’s certainly enough people they can lean on to ask, ‘How does this work?’” Nichols explained. “And it’s always the same answer.”
Since implementing Laserfiche, Alden has seen dramatic improvements in efficiency and productivity. The team has automated over 100 Laserfiche Forms processes with more on the way. Many of these automated processes now run 70% to 80% more efficiently than the manual workflows they replaced. Work that required a full week of manual effort can now be completed in an hour, allowing the IT team to manage workloads that were previously difficult to scale. “We created a monster, because we let the staff think outside of the box,” Nichols said. “Anything that they’ve asked for, we’ve made it into a process. We don’t fault them, because we started this — and it’s effective.”

Alden also relies on Laserfiche to support evolving Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services CMS administrative requirements. The platform’s flexibility allows the team to respond quickly to regulatory changes while maintaining consistent documentation and tracking across the organization.
The most significant benefit has been empowering staff to focus on their core duties. By automating repetitive administrative tasks, the organization has freed up employee time. “We know people have other things to do,” Nichols said. “They have better uses of their time than these manual tasks you can deploy a robot to do. That’s essentially what Laserfiche has done for us.”
Ultimately, the goal has been to get back to the heart of the organization’s mission. “We want our clinicians to do clinical work,” Nichols explained. “The IT department doesn’t know how to take care of your mom or dad or grandparent. We want the clinicians to do that. We don’t want processes to take our healthcare providers away from what they do best.”