Offering Laserfiche records management as a shared service increased efficiency and enhanced countywide collaboration.
A leading manufacturer and supplier of formwork and scaffolding systems, PERI streamlined operations and enhanced the customer experience through an online portal.
New Beginning Children’s Homes Transforms Foster Care Placement and Services
New Beginning Children’s Homes—an Arkansas-based nonprofit dedicated to providing long-term, family-style living to children in the foster care system—began a digital transformation initiative to expedite and better personalize services. Using Laserfiche to digitize and automate many of the manual, everyday tasks required in caring for children in the foster care system, the nonprofit reduced inefficiencies and communication delays across a child’s entire support team.
Powering Faster Placement with Electronic Forms
New Beginning first implemented Laserfiche to streamline its referral program. By using Laserfiche Forms to digitize the paperwork required for placement inquiries, New Beginning now enables Department of Health Services (DHS) caseworkers to submit a complete profile of a child’s background to the organization.
Automated workflows assist staff in quickly evaluating and matching children with the right foster environment. Both caseworkers and foster parents of new placements are instantly notified via email.
“By knowing a child’s background in advance and being able to prepare for their arrival, we are in a better spot to serve them,” says Joseph Rocko, Director of Residential and Community Services at New Beginning.
New Beginning also used Laserfiche Forms to transform a 52-page intake packet that often used to arrive from DHS months after a child’s placement. Now, collecting the information electronically and automating the packet’s review process greatly reduces delays and manual data errors. These improvements enable New Beginning to facilitate rapid action, communication and service delivery among multiple agencies, caseworkers and foster families from the start.
“All of these things have helped to reduce the amount of time we’re spending emailing back and forth, making calls to and from the caseworkers, attempting to touch base with our foster homes to talk with them about the children we’re looking to place,” Rocko says. “Just about any process that took more than two phone calls to make, we made that into an automated process in Laserfiche in one click—simple edit, done.”
Powerful Service with Server-Less Cloud Systems
By implementing a Laserfiche cloud solution, New Beginning benefited from scalability. The organization also automated other critical forms-based processes, like employment applications and monthly summaries, to ensure quality care is provided throughout a child’s stay.
Previously, New Beginning’s staff and foster parents spent hours processing over 60 handwritten pages of weekly case notes. With digital forms, parents can now complete case notes in a matter of minutes, and administrators spend just 40 minutes each week filing case documentation. Laserfiche instantly sends new documentation to a child’s therapists, DHS works and attorneys, forming a complete, accessible and accurate snapshot of a child’s experience in foster care and insight into areas for immediate follow-up.
“By having Laserfiche implemented and having these pre-fillable forms for these families, we have found that 100 percent of the efforts that go into documentation have been reduced,” says Rocko. “Our families are able to turn that time and focus more on the family unit.”
Benefits
“The crazy thing about implementing Laserfiche was that we knew we could save time and be more efficient; however, we never realized the other cost savings that would come with it,” says Rocko. “Best of all though, our parents can now spend more time being a supportive family for the children that come into our care. Instead of hours pushing paperwork, they spend a fraction of the time with the electronic forms.”
Want to learn more about transforming case management with Laserfiche? Click here to get a personalized demo.
Oakwood University transformed student services by replacing its legacy document imaging system with Laserfiche to increase efficiency, reduce paper use and eliminate ineffective manual processes. By automating rudimentary processes with Laserfiche, the university has reclaimed staff and student time and redirected it toward student success.
Adopting a Culture of Automation on Campus
Oakwood University is a private, historically black university located in Huntsville, Alabama. The university, which services nearly 1,800 students, aims to provide the kind of education that will prepare students for the workplace. In order to achieve its mission, the university made it a priority to adopt a culture of automation to meet the expectations of today’s tech-savvy students.
“One of the strategic goals that the Oakwood University leadership team has been working toward is developing a culture of automation on campus,” says Oakwood University interim CIO Anthony Walker. “We are actively working to update manual, paper-driven processes. These updates will enable us to operate as efficiently as possible, ensuring the best possible experience for current and prospective students.”
In order to transform into a modern campus, Oakwood University assessed its technology and determined that it would need to replace a legacy document imaging system since it lacked the ability to automate processes. The university then turned to Laserfiche to improve efficiency, reduce paper use and eliminate ineffective manual processes.
Streamlining the Graduations Clearance Process
One of the first processes automated with Laserfiche was the graduation clearance process. Like many universities, in order to graduate from Oakwood, students need to obtain graduation clearance. This involves obtaining signatures from their advisor, the registrar and other university staff which previously took months. Students had to carry a paper form to multiple locations around campus to obtain all the necessary signatures. Students would have to start this process months in advance in order to graduate on time.
By redesigning the process using Laserfiche Forms instead of paper forms, Oakwood University reduced processing time from months to just a few weeks and increased transparency throughout the entire process. Additional benefits include:
Servicing Students at the Highest Level
Since adopting Laserfiche, Oakwood University has capitalized on an automated approach to student services.
“By leveraging process automation, the university has automated rudimentary tasks, allowing staff members to serve students in a quicker and more efficient manner,” Walker explains.
Some of the student-facing processes that have been enhanced through automation include:
“Oakwood University now has a holistic view of each student’s academic history, allowing professors to create a plan of action based on data if a student starts to fall behind,” says Walker. “This is a critical component in ensuring student success.”
In addition, Oakwood University also provides an opportunity for students to become gold certified in the Laserfiche technology. This training—that would typically cost thousands of dollars for future employers—give students a leg-up in the competitive job market, as well as higher paid work opportunities on campus to support the Laserfiche system.
“Not only is Laserfiche enabling us to provide personalized support and guidance for each individual student, but it’s also allowing us to help students achieve tangible, professional success,” says Walker. “Our mission is to prepare students for their professional future, and Laserfiche is helping us achieve this.”
The Los Angeles County Development Authority (LACDA) digitally transformed its records management program, incorporating Laserfiche to digitize, centralize and manage the lifecycle of records. Since deploying Laserfiche, the agency has reclaimed significant time for its case workers while boosting its ranking with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to the designation of “high performer”—an improvement that helps secure funding and enables the LACDA to provide more services and programs to more people.
The LACDA is a public agency responsible for providing LA County residents essential programs related to subsidized housing, community development, and affordable housing development and preservation. Serving the most populous county in the United States requires the LACDA to house decades’ worth of records related to hundreds of thousands of cases. These span a wide range, from groups applying for Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) that provide resources to underserved areas, to people in need of Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers and residents of all ages applying for education and training in an effort to build better lives and better neighborhoods.
The LACDA previously stored records in filing cabinets and across various servers and systems. As the number of records grew, the agency identified the need to digitize and centralize them using a Laserfiche electronic records management solution. Laserfiche was also integrated with the LACDA’s property management software, Yardi, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, PeopleSoft, to eliminate the risk of duplicating information or work.
“Case managers don’t need to switch between applications to look up or copy information, they can view all the documents in one place,” says Rosa Chevarin, supervisor for Yardi/Laserfiche support. “They like the one-stop shop feel, and everything is streamlined in their natural workflow.”
Through this digital transformation, the agency made information more available, accessible and usable to authorized users.
“In an agency that manages more than 3,000 public and affordable housing units and assists more than 24,000 residents through a housing choice voucher program within the county, being able to pull up submitted information at a moment’s notice is vital,” says Doug Van Gelder, Manager of Information Technology at the LACDA.
This also enables the agency to:
The LACDA’s new solution exceeds the basic expectations of records management and incorporates automation. Laserfiche automatically files documents with standardized naming and folder structure. Additionally, when a record’s retention period has ended, relevant employees are notified to handle disposition.
“The need for services is always going to be great, and everyone is always going to be busy doing their jobs,” Van Gelder says. “Finding and pulling documents, and making sure records are taken care of in accordance to regulations is time consuming. The new system takes that tedious work away from the case managers, so they can focus on the people they serve.”
Since transforming its records management, the LACDA has gained the ability to automate additional business processes. Agency staff has automated the new employee onboarding process, which previously required a new associate to spend about half of their first day on the job filling out paperwork. The new Laserfiche solution enables the agency to send the new employee a link to all the necessary forms that can be completed before their start date.
“I want to be as digital as possible,” says Van Gelder, adding that there are also plans to rebuild the LACDA’s housing portal to allow people to apply for programs online. The workflow for processing those applications would also be automated using Laserfiche to facilitate quicker response times, better transparency into the process for both the staff and applicant, and less risk for error.
The agency’s newfound efficiencies have proven essential in a time when the LACDA’s programs and services are needed more than ever. The waiting list to receive Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers has about 44,000 people on it, while the agency’s staff is down to about half of what it was a decade ago due to the economic downturn and attrition. “The only way we’ve been able to provide the same level of service with half the staffing is through technology,” Van Gelder explains.
Additionally, over 70 percent of the LACDA’s funding comes from HUD, which regularly audits housing authorities to ensure funding is going toward serving people who need these critical programs and services.
“If a housing authority does not rank well, HUD could potentially take funding back and give it to another housing authority that proves it is helping more people and running more efficiently,” Van Gelder says.
Since the LACDA deployed its Laserfiche records management initiative, it has boosted its ranking and maintained its status as a high performer.
“The need is always going to be greater than the funding, but IT is one of the units within the organization that has the ability to provide productivity enhancements while bringing cost down,” Van Gelder says. “We’ve been able to serve more people with quality services and programming with half the staffing we used to have through these technology solutions.”
Leading public sector organizations use an electronic records management solution to increase efficiency and improve citizen services. To learn more, download the free white paper: “Streamlining the Business of Government.”
Lebanese American University (LAU) is an accredited American university operating in the Middle East with two main campuses in Beirut and Byblos, hospital facilities and an academic center in New York. The university consists of seven major schools and 800 faculty and staff serving approximately 10,000 students each year.
To maintain LAU’s status as a leading institution, the organization’s leadership is always looking for new ways to align its administrative services with student preferences, and reduce bottlenecks during busy enrollment and graduation periods.
“Students these days are digital natives, and they like to transact with us on their preferred devices, which are their phones,” says Camille Abou-Nasr, Assistant Vice President for Information Technology at LAU. “We needed really to automate all the processes that students carry out with the Registrar’s Office, and to do it in a manner that is plausible and really encourages them to do these kinds of transactions with us.”
Starting with the Admissions and Registrar’s Offices, the university used Laserfiche Forms to provide students with online access to transcripts and academic records. With on-demand digital access, academic advisors across student enrollment, recruitment, advising, student retention, outreach and student aid programs can now immediately review, approve or follow up with students in days instead of weeks.
Due to Laserfiche’s ease of use and open integrative capabilities with core systems like Banner and SharePoint, the university quickly expanded its initial mobile forms solution to other campus departments such as Student Development, Legal and Facilities Management. With a campus-wide solution, the university can truly enable students to submit any academic or administrative form online and get their results quickly.
Mobility has also benefited busy executives in the Facilities Management department, who oversee the numerous campus facilities. They can now use iPads to access and approve budget allocations in Laserfiche while traveling abroad.
“There is one platform where you can do document management, you can do forms, and you can do business process automation,” said Abou-Nasr. “It’s scalable.”
“Through mobility and document management, we were able to achieve our goal to go green, to make our services more accessible and deliver our services in a faster manner,” says Abou-Nasr.
Click here to learn more about using Laserfiche to enhance student services.
As one of the most populous cities in New York state (after New York City and Buffalo), the City of Rochester relies on its IT department to increase efficiency between city departments and enable more effective public services. Servicing over 14 departments including Public Safety, Police and Fire, the city’s IT teams need systems that can power the city’s many interconnected processes.
After a thorough study of how to redesign and modernize multiple city processes together, the city saw Laserfiche’s strength in business process automation, workflow and document retention and management as an opportunity to use one platform to improve many functional areas.
The city’s initial improvements came from using Laserfiche to build a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) portal that enables citizens to submit public records requests online.
Previously, it would take staff up to five days to start processing new records requests using paper request forms. With the new portal, citizens can now file new requests via a simple online form and inquiries are immediately sent to the relevant city department for review and approval. Throughout the process, citizens can check the status of their request at any time in the FOIL portal.
An internal Laserfiche progress dashboard also shows department managers the status of open requests and how long it takes each staff member to fulfill them, providing critical data about the city’s efficiency.
“We have gotten really positive feedback from users about the system,” says Harriet Fisher, Senior Business Analyst at the City of Rochester. “One user, in particular, said, ‘This is the best thing since sliced bread!’”
In addition to reducing processing time for FOIL requests, the city’s police department is currently using Laserfiche for five internal processes, and the accounting department relies on Laserfiche as the backbone of invoice processing. Laserfiche’s user-friendly interface ultimately allows the city to see a quick return on its investment for automation projects and open new avenues for shared services across departments.
“It allows us to easily manage the creation of forms, the development of workflow and security in a way that you do not need to be an application developer,” says Greg Luna, Enterprise Process and Systems Manager at the City of Rochester. “It really is a nice departure from the in-house developed applications—to think out of the box about how we can re-engineer processes, and Laserfiche makes it easy for us to do that.”
The Town of Okotoks is the largest town in Alberta, Canada, and provides services to over 30,000 residents. The city operates 20 different business centers that are each responsible for their own document filing. Prior to using a document management system, the city battled isolated information gathering and collaboration, leading to delays in public service delivery and data entry errors.
“The town was looking for a more streamlined solution with a central filing location, easier searching capabilities for the employees and everybody on a broad spectrum,” says Sheila Andrew, HR/Corporate and Strategic Administrator for the Town of Okotoks.
Using Laserfiche’s combined electronic forms, workflow and records management capabilities, the city jump-started an enterprise-wide digital records initiative. One central document repository provided a single point of access for information across the city and standardized each department’s disparate document filing and archiving methods.
The system quickly evolved from just a document storage system. It’s now the town’s primary tool for improving future and ongoing operations. Using Laserfiche Forms, the municipality implemented over 150 forms-based processes for numerous activities, including:
Using metadata, federated search and digital document access, employees across city departments can instantly find and collaborate on the information they need to deliver faster public services.
“We’ve gotten great feedback about how quickly approvals are happening now and the ease of access to forms,” says Andrew. “We only have one location to find forms, instead of lots of different places where people were saving PDFs or filing them.”
Staff collaborates more quickly and in a more transparent manner on documents and requests.
PERI Formwork Scaffolding Engineering Ltd, based in South Africa, is a global manufacturer of formwork and scaffolding and provides consultant, project and engineering services for the construction industry. With wide-reaching operations across 60 global subsidiaries, the firm manages complex payment streams that require efficient processes and quick response times.
“As technology changes, there’s a need to communicate and distribute to customers more efficiently,” says Jacques Lotriet, Business Analyst for PERI’s Financial Efficiency Projects.
The organization previously relied on paper mail to sort, distribute and pay invoices. Collecting payments from customers often took up to two weeks with no guarantees that documents and payments would be returned on time.
With Laserfiche, the company built a web portal that provides customers and staff with web-based access to monthly statements and invoices. The accounting portal significantly decreased the time it takes staff to process invoices, improved the customer experience and helped the company provide more transparent operations for regulatory compliance.
“Feedback from our customers and our staff internally has been extremely positive, especially with the way to quickly and easily access and distribute documents,” says Lotriet.
The ability to quickly model and execute digital business processes helps PERI Scaffolding continually improve its customer experience and remain competitive in its industry.
“It is very versatile,” says Lotriet. “I like to describe it also as a blank canvas. If you can think it up, you can build it. The electronic flow and distribution is also very efficient, and saves a lot of time and money.”
Click here to learn more about using Laserfiche to streamline the accounts payable process.
New Zealand’s Hurunui District has a population of more than 13,000 spread across 864,640 hectares just north of Christchurch. Serving a largely rural area, the Hurunui District Council excels at developing a sense of community, partnership and well-being.
“Our services are extremely broad,” said Stewart Tayles, digital transformation and IT team leader at Hurunui and Kaikoura District Councils. “From dog registrations to consents, or running youth programming to providing social housing — we really do everything essential for our community.”
This wide-ranging scope requires a flexible technology infrastructure where systems can be integrated and adapted to the territory’s growing needs.
“Our CEO wants the council to be a 24/7 operation — we need to be engaged with the community and enable them to engage with us,” Tayles added. “We need forms. We need to make information available. We need to be able to provide access to these services when people need them.”
The council initially procured Laserfiche to replace a legacy document management system (DMS) when the growing amount of information generated proved too much for the legacy system to efficiently handle, control and retain.
The Hurunui team worked with Ricoh New Zealand to find an ideal solution in Laserfiche, which would meet the council’s changing needs. Today, Laserfiche serves the council as a versatile, enterprise-wide solution. “Being New Zealand’s eighth-largest district by land size, we needed a system with the capability to connect our multiple offices,” said Scott Linton, IT and GIS manager for Hurunui District Council. “We were really impressed at how easy it was to implement Laserfiche and connect our main office with five satellite locations. It was up and running in no time.”
Beyond basic document management, the district manages vital processes — including resource consents — using Laserfiche’s forms, integration and workflow capabilities, supporting the development and economic growth of the territory.
Building consent applications typically come in through Simpli, which provides a standard form for building control authorities — however, the council found the vetting of these submissions to be laborious and prone to human error. “Before we can process an application, we need to check that all the information is there, it’s valid and it’s suitable,” Tayles said. To address this manual review bottleneck, the team created a Building Consent Vetting Checklist in Laserfiche, which checks and validates the information before it’s officially submitted and reviewed by the district council. “It checks what we call the ‘Hurunui-isms,’ or the requirements that are very specific to our district.”
With 500-600 applications per year, the checklist process has solved a long-standing headache for the building department and simplified consent review.
On the back end, Laserfiche enables the council to keep records in a standardized way that is easy to navigate.
“Each property has its own folder that contains an average of 40-50 pages on the details,” Linton said. “We have tens of thousands of documents that need to be identified and placed with the correct property. We applied a Laserfiche template with metadata information such as the building type, number, property ID, evaluation number and address. Laserfiche Workflow then automatically identifies, filters and files the documents in their correct folders.”
Also an integral part of the council’s infrastructure responsibilities is its ability to work with contractors to provide various services such as road construction, maintenance, waste management or cleaning services. A recent audit uncovered the need for more robust processes surrounding these contract approvals and service procurement — another area that Tayles understood Laserfiche could help.
“We had a short time to implement a more robust, multi-step process,” Tayles said. “We sat down and said, ‘We can build this in Laserfiche Forms.’”
The council now has a Contract Register in Laserfiche, which helps to centralize and organize the many projects, subcontracts under those projects and associated documentation that the council must manage.
“Database lookups query the Laserfiche database directly to pick contract numbers and project numbers, so that we get a standardized naming format,” Tayles explained. “All those records automatically go into that contract or project folder, and we know they are correctly named and easily found later.”
The biggest benefit to the council has been the transparency of the process. “By recording the decision-making, we can show why we went with a particular supplier, and show stewardship of the funds we receive from the central government,” Tayles said. After the new Contract Register was implemented, the council received glowing feedback from the central government on the new process. “We went from one end of the spectrum to the other.”
As part of its expansive range of services, Hurunui District Council prioritizes community engagement to build a strong community as well as ensure the mutual respect between government and constituents. Laserfiche’s ability to put information at the fingertips of those who need it provides a strong foundation on which to build that engagement.
“We have a policy where we must archive every email, so another big project we’ve done is create our email archive in Laserfiche,” Tayles said. This archive provides referenceable information for legal compliance, auditing and accountability, as well as historical record and disaster recovery. “Now, all emails go into Office 365, and we use Laserfiche Connector to archive them in Laserfiche.”
Tayles explained that Laserfiche was the right choice for the project not only for its archiving capabilities but also for its security tools. “Hurunui grows by 25,000 emails a week, and we are heavy on security,” he said. “We only want people to see their own emails. But we’re also subject to LGOIMA — the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act — where people can request all the information about a subject, so we’re able to give some people delegated access to the whole repository for searches.”
Prior to using Laserfiche for the archive, the council was spending $50,000 per year on Mimecast, which they were able to retire and redirect funds toward additional security measures and other IT projects.
Today, Hurunui District Council has over 220 active Laserfiche Forms, which span the organization’s full operations. “Forms are the backbone for multiple departments in the council,” Tayles said. “Other councils just can’t believe what we do with Laserfiche and how we make it work for our users. Laserfiche is an essential technology at Hurunui.”
In addition to the processes that are ubiquitous in the government space, niche operations that are more common for district councils — from toilet cleaning and mowing to youth programming — also benefit from Laserfiche. One such process that illustrates Laserfiche’s flexibility: connecting lost dogs to their owners.
“Because we manage the IT for [neighboring district council] Kaikoura, we built a solution to help them with lost dogs,” Tayles said. “They can get a call any time during the day or night about a dog, so they’ve implemented a solution called Doggone. Owners can consent to being texted so that they can be reunited with their dog quicker. Naturally, we had to get all the owner information into that system, but we also had to track whether people had given consent, because we are sharing contact information with a third party — there is a Laserfiche form for that.”
Tayles and his team also used the Laserfiche API to connect Doggone to Kairkoura’s ERP system that houses the owner information. “We’re using Laserfiche workflow to get the owner information from the ERP and push it to Doggone,” Tayles said. “It also handles any requests for changes in the database, so that as dogs move or change owners, all systems remain up to date.”
As Hurunui District Council works toward the CEO’s vision for 24/7 service, Laserfiche remains a core technology that will support its growing and changing needs.
“What I enjoy about Laserfiche the most is the creative flexibility it gives,” Tayles added. “It gives me a lot of different tools to solve problems. There’s nothing prescribed about it — we can build our forms how we want, and we can set the metadata up the way we need it. There really hasn’t been a problem that I haven’t been able to solve using Laserfiche.”
