Emirates National Oil Company

Since its establishment in 1993, Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC) has provided the energy behind Dubai’s phenomenal growth. With clients ranging from military bases to big-name manufacturing agencies across the United Arab Emirates (UAE), ENOC touches almost every facet of the Emirate’s development and puts its name firmly on the overseas arena. Today, ENOC owns directly and indirectly more than twenty subsidiaries.

ENOC operates through five business segments:
  • Supply, Trading & Processing: Condensate and gas processing and oil trading.
  • Terminals: Storage for various petroleum and chemical products.
  • Marketing: Marketing of aviation fuel, lubes, chemicals and industrials products.
  • Retail: Retailing fuel and non-fuel services at retail stations.
  • Exploration & Production: Development and production of oil and gas.

ENOC first began investigating enterprise content management (ECM) for one of its subsidiaries, Emirates Petroleum Product Company (EPPCO), which was having a hard time managing customer documents. Piles of paperwork were scattered on different employees’ desks, making it hard to locate documents on demand and promptly respond to customer requests.

Although a number of departments within ENOC were already using Microsoft SharePoint, it didn’t meet EPPCO’s needs due to its lack of a scanning solution. After hearing about Laserfiche through Laserfiche reseller Global Technology Services (GTS), ENOC conducted a thorough evaluation of the software to see if it would meet EPPCO’s needs.

According to Ram Mohan Narayanan, Manager of Planning and Performance Management in ENOC’s IT department, “We did an onsite study of the Laserfiche implementation at the Abu Dhabi Water & Electricity Company, where GTS had implemented Laserfiche to archive customer billing documents. It was clear that Laserfiche had provided a great advantage for the utility company, which gave us the confidence to go with Laserfiche.”

The fact that Laserfiche is fully supported in Arabic also played a role in ENOC’s selection process.

Improving Customer Service

To better manage its customer documents, EPPCO was the first part of the organization to implement Laserfiche. EPPCO serves 75 million customers each year through its network of more than 170 ENOC/EPPCO service stations across the UAE.

EPPCO has built its brand on innovation. As such, it launched the first fuel card in the UAE in 1991. To ensure the continued success of the fuel card program, EPPCO’s card marketing department wanted to accelerate customer service. With roughly 300 new documents coming in each day, storing everything in file cabinets was costly and inefficient, and employees were having difficulty finding the right paper documents to process them in a timely manner.

By implementing Laserfiche to store customer request documents and automate the document approval process, Card Marketing is now able to deliver much faster customer service. In addition, it has integrated Laserfiche with a variety of other software applications to improve the customer experience as follows:
  • By integrating with its interactive voice response (IVR) software, EPPCO has enabled its fuel card customers to fax their invoices through the IVR system.
  • These invoices are generated in an Oracle management application and moved into Laserfiche as PDF files.
  • Monthly statements are automatically sent from Laserfiche to customers via an integration with RightFax.

In addition, an IVR-based request from the customer triggers a that automatically sends the PDF invoice to the customer on demand.

“Not only have we improved our customer service, but we’ve reduced our papers expenses,” said Narayanan.

Increasing Efficiency across ENOC

The use of Laserfiche soon spread beyond EPPCO to a number of departments within ENOC. In the past, ENOC had relied on file cabinets to store paper documents. Imaged documents, meanwhile, were stored on a shared “U:\” drive, and electronic content was managed in SharePoint.

This lack of a centralized content management strategy was inefficient, costly and prevented the automation of paper-based business processes. ENOC needed a standard systems architecture and methodology for enterprise-wide content management.

In particular, ENOC’s internal audit department has saved time and money by automating the submission of its Employee Acknowledgement and of Interest forms, which all 1,500 ENOC employees need to sign and submit to the department each year.

Narayanan explains that the Laserfiche SharePoint Integration, a two-way integration that enables paper-based capture and DoD 5015.2-certified records management in a SharePoint environment, allows employees to scan these forms directly into SharePoint, where they are converted into PDFs and automatically filed in the correct HR folders in the Laserfiche repository.

In addition to the benefits Laserfiche has brought to the internal audit department:
  • The HR department uses as a secure, centralized location for all employee documents.
  • The department validates, stores and distributes supplier invoices to their respective PO owners using Laserfiche Workflow
  • Procurement uses to create and store contracts and vendor management documents.
  • The chief executive and general manager office use Laserfiche to track and store all incoming and outgoing correspondence.

Narayanan estimates that ENOC realized a full return on its Laserfiche investment in just eight months. “By using Laserfiche to scan and store paper files, we save at least 6,000 hours of staff time a year, which translates to US $240,000. We’ve also been able to eliminate US $28,800 in paper storage costs per year.”

Sina Khoory, ENOC’s Group IT Manager, adds, “Using Laserfiche Rio, EPPCO and a number of departments in the ENOC group have gained centralized control over our data. Rio’s powerful tools and the Laserfiche SharePoint Integration have simplified information sharing and automated operations between departments.”

City of Eugene

In the decade since the City of Eugene, OR, first implemented Laserfiche, the system has been deployed to the City Manager’s Office, City Attorney’s Office and Public Works Administration, Planning and Development, Police, Wastewater, City Prosecutor and Municipal Court. As Department Application Team Manager Loring G. Hummel explains, this resulted in four separate Laserfiche services, one of which included multiple workgroups that shared concurrent licenses between the City Manager’s Office, Planning and Public Works Administration.

“Everything exposed to the Internet was on this server, so we had problems with licenses being used up,” Hummel says. “About two years ago, a member of my team pointed out that our Laserfiche licensing was actually pretty inefficient—overall the number of concurrent users was inadequate to maintain and grow.”

Hummel saw that a consolidation to an enterprise solution made sense to streamline administration, and would allow him to better leverage his own staff to handle future integrations and deployments. Eugene’s long-time reseller VPCI, of course, had an app for that: Laserfiche Rio enterprise content management.

In April 2009, Hummel submitted a memorandum to Eugene’s Central Services Advisory Board outlining a plan to consolidate Eugene’s four Laserfiche systems by moving to Laserfiche Rio. Besides recapping the “high return on investment” Eugene had already enjoyed in the areas of sustainability, efficiency and “new capabilities”—GIS and SharePoint integration among them—as well as asset protection over the last ten years, he outlined the potential benefits of moving to Laserfiche Rio:
  • Unlimited servers and repositories: With the unlimited servers included in the Laserfiche Rio system, Hummel’s team could easily establish environments for testing and pilot projects.
  • Named user licenses: Instead of limiting mission-critical users like judges and 911 operators with first-come, first-serve concurrent licensing, licenses assigned to individual users would provide constant access.
  • Enterprise-wide features: Because Laserfiche Rio licenses come fully loaded with a complete suite of applications, features previously used only by certain departments—including Laserfiche Workflow, Laserfiche Records Management Edition and the Laserfiche-SharePoint Integration—would now be available city-wide.
  • Unlimited read-only public connections: Laserfiche Rio’s Public Portal provides unlimited read-only connections through Laserfiche WebLink, which would enable the city to meet surges in public demand for information.

Hummel points out that a 100% credit offered by Laserfiche, as well as pooling support costs, not only made the upgrade affordable, but it also allowed the city to centralize administration and IT staffing for further deployment and customization.

Leveraging a city-wide telecom tax set up to support three-year IT projects, Hummel was able to secure a funding boost to launch the project, while giving departments a temporary break from their own support costs until 2013.

The Rio Reality

According to Hummel, “Laserfiche Rio not only solves our licensing problem, but it also lays the framework for Laserfiche as a common content management platform for everyone across the enterprise,” Hummel adds. “Beyond that, it has the potential to become a real information sharing and collaboration tool.”

The biggest improvement, Hummel says, is centralizing Laserfiche administration and service. “I think we’ve made a more professional IT environment for Laserfiche—which is part of laying the groundwork for future deployment,” he says. “We’re proactive in that we’re able to apply patches and fixes all at once. Where we had functions within departments before, we’re able to cultivate expertise in the right place as far as realigning departmental staff into central server administration.”

At the same time, he adds, this centralization has afforded Eugene greater control and oversight of its information assets. “A big benefit is that the whole system is auditable. Because Laserfiche authorization is now controlled by a central administrator, in respect to security roles, we’re able to lock down repositories and folders according to different administrative needs,” Hummel says. “Now, we’re treating Laserfiche like one of our larger information systems such as ERP and database servers that also encompass risk management and compliance.”

And, he says, having a single, standardized ECM system allows staff to be more self-sufficient. “We have a lot of applications with embedded Laserfiche components, so we use the Laserfiche SDK a lot. We’re a .NET shop, so that’s the kind of flexibility that’s important to us,” Hummel says. “Laserfiche offers flexibility and programmability in terms of .NET integration that allows a full-featured IT shop like ours to use the tools we already have to fully customize it for our own applications.”

He points to a recent example: “We built an ASP.net web application for building inspectors in our planning and development department that has GIS maps, their routes, etc. All supporting documents are stored in Laserfiche, but the inspectors use the application in their cars, and click on a button and the supporting documents come up in Laserfiche WebLink—without them knowing where it came from. All the searching and metadata is behind the scenes. We basically wrote our own client.”

Standardizing Enterprise-Wide

For Hummel, standardization is its own combination of reality and potential. “In government, everything seems to grow in silos, by workgroup and department,” Hummel says. “The ability to easily and seamlessly automate information across organizational boundaries—it’s kind of the holy grail of IT.

“Just having Laserfiche isn’t going to get us there, but our Laserfiche Rio-based architecture—and by that I mean both the placement of servers on our network as well as the way we positioned our repositories to simplify the creation of shared processes—gives us the technical framework that will allow departments to create business processes to cut through silos. That’s a good start,” he adds.

He also points to the promise of Laserfiche Workflow, which will enable his department to easily develop and implement standardized, repeatable processes. “For city-wide applications, we’ll write our own custom user interfaces. We want to use the workflow engine, but we’ll build in interactivity using the SDK API and .NET,” he says.

One of these new business processes is city-wide contract management. “Right now, every department keeps its own copies of contracts and its own retention policies, even though everything’s in the City Recorder’s archives. They may not know what’s being kept centrally and if they do, they think it’s a big process to access them,” Hummel says. “One of the things that attracted us to Laserfiche Rio was the idea of transparent records management, so we could make the actual storage transparent and be able to assign access to certain folders according to who needs to get them. That way, we can really increase the transparency of information back to the organization, which will translate into efficiency.”

Hummel points to this efficiency in the evolution—and simplification—of how the Eugene Police Department (EPD) shares reports with the Eugene Municipal Court (MuniCourt).
  • In the past, the EPD used shortcuts to a special distribution folder in Laserfiche, then a custom integration that briefcased police reports to move them into the MuniCourt repository—which still created multiple copies.
  • Now with Laserfiche Rio, EPD staff use a simple “yes/no” MuniCourt template field to give the court read-only access to designated reports in the EPD folder, which are searchable by case number.

“We actually had a customization written for the prosecutor [to briefcase reports for MuniCourt]. But since going to Laserfiche Rio, now that they’re sharing common services, we’ve eliminated a ton of custom code and complexity,” Hummel says.

Reaching ROI

Hummel is confident this self-sufficiency will translate into enterprise efficiency, especially on the staffing side. “We’re not talking about using automation to eliminate positions, but we’re looking at using technology to cope with positions we have already lost during the economic downturn, as well as any future staff reductions,” Hummel says. “We want to make sure the level of service doesn’t deteriorate. We want to cope with the reduced footprint using automation tools. Laserfiche is one way to do that.”

Besides increase efficiency, he says, Laserfiche Rio has allowed his staff the freedom and focus to excel as well. “The information services department is 40-plus people, where all six city departments have two to three analysts to determine their application needs,” Hummel explains. “Every department is really its own business. One of the challenges is to serve very specialized departmental needs with a fairly modest staff. Each member of my team is assigned directly to a department for application support, so professional collaboration among IT staff has always been a challenge.

“Laserfiche has been a unifier,” he adds. “We have a team of Laserfiche IT folks so we can make the most of where the expertise lies to serve all the different departments. It’s made the upgrade possible. We have this collaborative environment that’s made the lines between assignments more fuzzy, so hopefully that will be a catalyst for other [IT-driven] endeavors.”

Hummel notes that functionality his staff once had to develop themselves is now available out of the box. That, and the collaborative, catalyzing environment standardizing on the Laserfiche Rio ECM system inspires, is encouraging, he says, both for the success of the Laserfiche consolidation, but in terms of the reality and potential of his own department.

“If you look at companies like Microsoft or Apple, they owe a lot of their success to the way developers are able to build innovative solutions in it,” Hummel says. “It’s not locked down. Like Laserfiche, it’s a broader base of development that encourages more innovation, because users are not just customers, they’re partners.”

Colorado Department of Natural Resources

Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) manages a wealth of information across eight divisions, including:
  • Colorado Division of Forestry
  • Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife
  • Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining, and Safety
  • Colorado Division of Water Resources
  • Colorado Geological Survey
  • Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC)
  • Colorado State Land Board
  • Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB)

According to Susan Lesovsky, Application Support Manager for the CWCB, the DNR purchased a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system in 2005 to replace a legacy IBM system that lacked an out-of-the box web interface, optical character recognition (OCR) functionality and the ability to automate business processes. “Our old system was pretty much limited to search and retrieval,” she explains.

She notes that a top priority for implementing Laserfiche was making it easier for citizens to stay informed about government activities. “Ultimately, our customer is the public, and our success is measured on how we provide and process information for them,” Lesovsky says.

To that end, the DNR upgraded to Laserfiche Rio in 2009. According to Lesovsky, “Laserfiche Rio has allowed us to increase the transparency of information to the public, and it’s done it in such a way that we don’t have to worry about connections or cost.”

In particular, she describes the benefits of upgrading to Laserfiche Rio as:

Laserfiche Rio Enables Citizens to Cut through Red Tape

Lesovsky notes that Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper recently called for every department in state government to reduce red tape. Good government, he says, is characterized by “efficiency, effectiveness and elegance.”

“As one of only two recommended content management systems for the state, Laserfiche epitomizes all three E’s,” Lesovsky says.

She explains how easy it is for citizens to access documents such as the CWCB’s meeting documents:
  • The current year’s materials are available on the Board’s website in a table that provides direct links to PDFs stored in Laserfiche.
  • Archived materials are accessible through a custom search box (created using the WebLink Designer) on the lower right side of same page or through this link.
  • The custom search box is limited to three fields (title, date range and document type) to streamline access and reduce user confusion. (Custom search components have been included throughout the CWCB’s website to help direct the public’s search for Board-related documents.)

Colorado’s Decision Support Systems website also includes custom search boxes throughout its Website, such as the one at the top of this page that searches according to document type and a few other parameters, while a set of “Google-like” search results based on document type displays below thanks to an encoded URL string.

“We used the WebLink Designer to create custom searches because we noticed that our users would get overwhelmed when presented with a long list of templates and fields,” says Lesovsky. “Each custom search focuses on a particular program area or topic and uses a limited set of search criteria within the associated template.”

Quick, easy and efficient searches support Hickenlooper’s goal of driving the “three E’s” into government operations. Lesovsky explains, “In the past, people had to come to our offices to request information. Laserfiche WebLink provides a simple and elegant way for the public to get immediate access to the information they need whenever they need it.”

Integrations Make ECM “Mission-Critical”

By integrating Laserfiche WebLink with other software applications, the DNR has been able to make information even more accessible. For example, by integrating Laserfiche with ESRI ArcGIS, staff can click on a stream and retrieve associated court documents, while public users can quickly access information associated with flooding and flood hazards in the state.

To see the public-facing integration in action:
  1. Visit Colorado’s Flood Decision Support System page
  2. Click on the Flood DSS Map Viewer.
  3. Agree to the disclaimer.
  4. Click the Documents tab in the top menu.
  5. Enter your search criteria in the pop-up window. For example, select:
  6. Group: Historical Flooding.
  7. Document: Historical flood photographs.
  8. Type: Photographs.
  9. Hit the search button.
  10. A new window displays the results (produced on-the-fly by an encoded URL string) in a grid format.

It’s the integrations with applications like ESRI ArcGIS that make Laserfiche “mission-critical.” According to Lesovsky, “When you integrate Laserfiche with business-specific systems, you embed it into your existing workflow processes and it becomes integral to how you operate.”

ECM Enables Electronic Forms Processing

Laserfiche Rio has been a particularly effective ECM solution for the DNR because different divisions can configure it to meet their unique needs. For example, the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) uses Laserfiche to enable an eForm application that provides an interface for oil and gas operators to enter and submit permit forms and supporting documents. There are currently six active forms and three in development.

According to Ken Robertson, Application Developer for the COGCC, “Uploaded files are stored in our production web server. Once the operators submit the form to our internal server, we export the attachments to Laserfiche.”

He explains that the public can view the files directly from the production web server or wait until the files are imported to Laserfiche and use Laserfiche WebLink to access them. Furthermore, he outlines how the COGCC has used the Laserfiche SDK to create customized Laserfiche scripts and programs.

Robertson says, “For those attachments still sitting in our production web server, we created a Windows service to check queued files in the Web server every 15 minutes and use the Laserfiche Toolkit [SDK] for .NET to import files to the Laserfiche repository server. In the meantime, we also collect the Laserfiche reference numbers in our attachment table so that system (eForm) can provide a Laserfiche WebLink download page for users to view the attachments.”

He notes that there is a separate application that allows oil and gas operators to upload well logs, which are imported into Laserfiche using Laserfiche Import Agent, a tool that captures and processes electronic documents. Scanning staff members use Laserfiche Quick Fields to index other types of electronic documents.

The biggest benefit of processing permits and well logs with Laserfiche is time. Robertson says, “We used to shuffle files from one person to another until they were approved, and then we scanned everything into the system. Having the operators upload their attachments to their documents saves an average of 15 minutes of scanning and indexing time for our staff, not to mention the time saved on data entry.”

He goes on to explain that having everything available electronically at the beginning of the process allows multiple people to work on the same forms simultaneously, further reducing processing time.

“Not only do we save time,” Robertson says, “but the approval process is now more transparent for the public.”

Lesovsky adds, “Laserfiche is powerful, flexible and easy to work with. Even though all our divisions use the same system, we can all use it a little differently.”

Looking Ahead

Lesovsky is particularly excited to use Laserfiche to harvest data across organizations. She explains that the CWCB has already conducted a feasibility study and has a grant in place to make it happen.

“Colorado State University has an ECM solution other than Laserfiche but a healthy collection of water information. The Colorado Water Resources Development & Power Authority and the Colorado River Water Conservation District currently use Laserfiche, with repositories of useful water documents. By hooking our systems together and using common metadata, we’ll be able to search for information across all four entities and gain a more complete picture of accessible water information in the state.”

She says that the DNR is also working on integrating Laserfiche and SharePoint. “Most of our divisions use SharePoint for their external websites. Right now, people have to conduct separate searches if they want to find content stored in both Laserfiche and SharePoint. What we’re looking to do is enable searches that return results from both systems at the same time.”

All in all, she says, “Laserfiche Rio is a great tool. The bottleneck now is just finding the time to make it do everything we want it to do.”

Chesterfield County

With a history dating back to the 1600s and a growth rate of three percent a year, Chesterfield County, Virginia, has no shortage of records to manage. So with its Laserfiche system working perfectly, why would the county change it? To keep up with the ever-changing demands of managing information, of course. The challenge came in successfully migrating to Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME).

For IT maven and Laserfiche Administrator Michael Wells, the system is always evolving. He recalls the conversion from paper to document imaging. “The original motivation was to get rid of paper and to allow sharing of documents internally.” In 2001, the IT staff installed Laserfiche in five pilot departments. “All of those departments are still happy users,” says Wells.

Laserfiche has certainly simplified life for Kevin Payne, Chesterfield’s Acting Accounts Payable (A/P) Manager.

“It’s made the biggest difference you could imagine. A/P spends a lot of time going back to look at invoices for auditors, our own research or for other departments. It’s made our lives so much easier because we can access the invoices from our PCs—we don’t have to spend hours searching in the file room.”

Laserfiche has made the Chesterfield HR team’s life easier, too. Jeannie Harper, Chief of Administrative Services, loves Laserfiche’s search capability. And it’s not just a matter of time saved.

Harper uses Laserfiche when she looks into a personnel situation. “Our HR system is good, but it’s easier for me to get the information I need from Laserfiche. I can look at the personnel action form to see the signatures and the notes I made. All those supporting documents aren’t in the HR system.”

It’s hard to imagine tampering with such success, especially since the HR department had built into Laserfiche the complex security model it had labored to create on paper. HR staff relied on Laserfiche’s solid template fields and strict auditing to allow appropriate access to users.

But in 2005, the county had to address an important component of records management: the retention cycle. That’s when Wells supervised the installation of Laserfiche RME, integrating the program with the county’s existing records management model.

Changing the way the county managed records was an ambitious project. Creating a new folder structure to serve new records-management needs would change everyday procedures, and meshing a new system with the established security structure seemed like an insurmountable challenge.

Chesterfield County found that combining Laserfiche RME with Laserfiche Workflow created an ideal solution. Staff used Laserfiche RME to manage the records retention schedule, assigning access restrictions and creating shared folders to replicate the existing security structure. Using Laserfiche Workflow, they then copied records to the shared folders.

The first step in migrating to the new system was to recode the application that created a template for empty records. Chesterfield’s IT department then created an application to copy existing records into Laserfiche RME using the new template. Finally, the team planned out a records series in Laserfiche RME.

To implement the process, the scanning staff froze all additions and changes to records. The conversion application created and renamed files and copied the template data from the old system. Wells says that in the future, staff will develop techniques to flag new documents rather than freezing additions and changes.

Huge as the task seemed, after 30 days, staff had successfully migrated most of the records. Department liaisons and HR personnel who had used the old system barely noticed the interface had changed. And Chesterfield’s Scanning Coordinator Nancy Pearse has noticed an improvement in security.

“Nothing can be added or taken away—Laserfiche keeps everything where it’s supposed to be.” She especially appreciates the time saved with the automated retention schedule, because previously, she had to manually delete records.

Routing documents with Laserfiche Workflow has been an added benefit for Pearse. “We always know where documents are in the approval process. The email piece has also been very useful for us—if someone needs a document, I can just email it directly from Laserfiche.”

County employees can donate their leave time to seriously ill coworkers or those with illness in their families. Laserfiche Workflow has put an end to scrambling to meet deadlines for the leave donation program.

“HR scans the donation forms in, and the status field triggers the workflow,” says Jeannie Harper. “When payroll deducts the leave from the proper party and changes the status, Laserfiche sends a notification and moves the document to the appropriate folder, based on the fiscal year. It’s great because we typically get requests right at the deadline—with a paper system, we might not be able to make it.”

Harper expects retention schedules to change again. As will technology, no doubt. But Chesterfield County will be ready. Laserfiche Administrator Wells looks forward to more integrations in the future. And he’s off to a good start.

He points to the integration of A/P with the overall accounting system as a particular success. Staff members barcode invoices and input the codes into the mainframe. When the invoices are scanned in, a batch job populates the template fields and moves the invoices to the proper location.

Wells has also integrated Laserfiche with the county planning department’s GIS system. When Planning installed Laserfiche, its GIS system already included hard links for each land parcel to PDF files on a shared network. “Our reseller and our engineering department devised a program that changes all those links to Laserfiche WebLink search links. Now, users click on a parcel to bring up a Laserfiche WebLink window with all the pertinent information.”

In the future, Wells envisions providing citizens with web access to the most frequently requested documents. Currently, the county is adding more storage to prepare for future use of drive space. When asked how he measures the county’s success with Laserfiche, he asks, “You mean, other than the number of departments clamoring to be put on the system?”

Kevin Payne puts it this way: “I would definitely say that this has been the best enhancement to any A/P process that we’ve done—I’ve been here 5 years, but I’ve heard the same thing from people who have been here for 20 years. It’s a great product.”

Bremer County

Bremer County, IA, faced a problem not unique to modest-sized municipalities: after making a significant investment in a document management system to manage its land records, users had a hard time letting go of the paper. “Scanning files was a very manual process—it took hours to scan and index even small stacks of paper,” remembers Nate Koehler, Bremer County IT Administrator. “Staff would get frustrated and just not use the system at all.”

Besides the already low user adoption rate, the county faced stringent formatting for annual submission of digital copies of its land management records (“fee book pages”) to the state’s County Land Records Information Services (CLRIS) agency—now the Iowa Land Records System (ILR)—utilizing an application provided by the state to upload images. Or at least it was supposed to.

“We were never able to get this integration set up with our old system,” Koehler admits. “We had to pay the ILR an extra $2,500 in fees because we were simply unable to submit our images to the state.”

Agility in Action, Part 1: A New System for Less Than an Upgrade

By January of 2010, Koehler faced a challenge—and a choice. The county was on version 5 of EMC Application Xtender (AX), and it was being phased out by provider EMC/Documentum. So not only was Koehler’s team facing a mandatory upgrade, but also a service agreement renewal. And they were still likely facing $2,500 annually in fees to the state for fee book page submission.

“We were looking at a substantial enough reinvestment to retain our current system that it made sense to start looking at other solutions,” he says.

Koehler researched other CLRIS/ILR-approved systems and discovered Laserfiche via Advanced Systems, Inc. (ASI) based nearby in Waterloo, IA, which had a relationship with the county from servicing its printer and copiers. ASI solutions consultant Steve Lewis showed Koehler how the Laserfiche Quick Fields Zone OCR component could capture and index information from specific areas of land records forms, which could then be used to submit images to ILR utilizing the state’s uploading application.

What’s more, implementing Laserfiche could address all of the county’s information management needs in a single system—at less cost than upgrading its existing system.

Agility in Action, Part 2: Deployment to Six Departments in Two Months

In March 2010, Bremer County purchased a 24-user Laserfiche Avante system with Laserfiche Quick Fields advanced capture, Laserfiche Import Agent and Laserfiche SDK. Just two months later, Laserfiche was successfully deployed to six county departments:
  • Auditor
  • Treasurer
  • Attorney
  • Recorder
  • Assessor
  • Building and Zoning

Each department was equipped with a scan station that Shane Peterson, solutions engineer at Advanced Systems, set up to automatically recognize and retrieve index information based on the standard forms used by each department.

The impact on scanning efficiency was immediate: in the Assessor’s office, four stacks of tax credit forms two feet tall were scanned and indexed within a few days. “Laserfiche Quick Fields automated all our scanning processes in all our departments,” Koehler says.

Agility in Action, Part 3: Six Months of Scanning in Less Than a Week

To illustrate the scale of improvement, Koehler uses the example of Bremer County’s Zoning Department. “Zoning was six months behind on their scanning,” he begins. “It would have taken staff over a month and a half to scan in all those documents using our old system. Instead, using Laserfiche Quick Fields, we were able to get those documents scanned in less than a week.”

At the same time, Koehler adds, staff who had given up on the previous system and scanning in general have warmed up to Laserfiche. “I am starting to see more people getting rid of the paper and using Laserfiche,” he says.

The end result of significantly improved scanning, Koehler says, is the reclaimed staff time. “We can devote the man hours we save from scanning for other projects.”

Agility in Action, Part 4: Integration Saves $2,500 in Fines

By November of 2010, Bremer County was submitting land records’ fee book pages automatically to the ILR, thanks to a combination of Laserfiche Quick Fields, Laserfiche Workflow and a custom integration developed by ASI:
  • When staff in the Recorder’s Office scan land records, Laserfiche Quick Fields automatically retrieves index information from the image utilizing Zone OCR and Pattern Matching.
  • Laserfiche Workflow then sends the image from a processing folder to a completed folder in the Laserfiche repository, where a custom integration exports the image and index information into an XML file.
  • The XML file is then used to send the image to the state.
  • This index information is then searchable by both the county and the state to tie the image to other pertinent index information about the land record.

Koehler says this process is not only more efficient, but more cost-effective, too. “We’re no longer charged $2,500 in fines for not providing the digital documents to the state that was such a problem with our old system,” he says.

Agility in Action, Part 5: Adding the Sheriff’s Office and More

The newest chapter of Bremer County’s information management overhaul has been the 2011 addition of five more named users for the Sheriff’s Office, which will use its own repository to catalogue video, photographs, ticketing, incident reports and other documents. The expanded implementation will include Laserfiche Web Access to enable the county attorney to retrieve information without going to the Sheriff’s Office to request that a detective put files on a disk for the attorney to review.

Koehler notes that with the addition of the Sheriff’s Office comes enhanced document security concerns. “We’ll be utilizing the auto-redaction capabilities of Laserfiche Quick Fields for more sensitive information, but we’re also able to manage the system from a central point of control,” he says.

Laserfiche use, Koehler predicts, will keep growing with each departmental success story. “The remaining three departments that don’t use Laserfiche are seeing how much the other departments love its ease of use and speed, so they’re starting to ask how they can use it too.”

How Franklin County Deployed Laserfiche Enterprise-Wide

SITUATION

• Needed to make information more accessible to those who needed it
• Safeguarding sensitive data and compliance with recordkeeping requirements is a high priority

RESULTS

• Centralized documents and records
• Strengthened information governance across the organization
• Simplified the audit process

Ed Yonker joined the Franklin County IT department in 2004, after spending many years in the banking industry. “Government is a different world,” he explained. “Because of its size and structure, it’s a lot harder to implement new technology and get everyone on the same page.”

With approximately 150,000 residents, Franklin County comprises 52 different departments, including the Commissioners’ Office, Human Resources, Human Services and Risk Management, to name just a few. Yonker noted that these departments “operate like 52 separate businesses under the same umbrella.”

In this kind of environment, it’s especially important to establish enterprise-wide IT standards to promote consistency and cross-departmental collaboration, Yonker said. However, it’s often difficult to find technology that’s agile enough to meet the needs of many different departments and flexible enough to adapt quickly and cost-effectively to changing conditions.

“It’s hard to convince all the different departments that they can all use the same system,” said Yonker. “Because of that, we didn’t start out thinking Laserfiche was going to be enterprise technology. But after the enterprise content management seed was planted in one department, suddenly all our departments wanted to know more.”

The Beginning: Going Digital in the Commissioners’ Office

Franklin County worked with Laserfiche solution provider ICC Community Development Solutions to implement Laserfiche, with the county’s earliest adopters being in the Commissioners’ Office. “We had some younger commissioners come in, and they were more familiar with technology and the benefits it could have for Franklin County than previous commissioners had been,” explained Jean Byers, deputy chief clerk in the Commissioners’ Office. “They selected Laserfiche for its instant search capabilities, as well as the fact that we could install it directly on the computers already in use.

“We immediately realized tremendous benefits from Laserfiche,” she added. “Documents that used to take days to find became available with the click of a button. It used to take hours to find specific text within meeting minutes that were hundreds of pages long, but with Laserfiche it only took seconds.”

Laserfiche also made it easy to share documents with colleagues, and due to its intuitive interface, Laserfiche quickly became popular with both management and staff.

The Evolution of an Enterprise Standard

As Laserfiche took root in the Commissioners’ Office, other departments began to take notice. With their focus on compliance and prudent financial management, both the Fiscal Office and the Controller’s Office deployed Laserfiche shortly after the success in the Commissioners’ Office.

“Laserfiche is great for accounts payable functions and auditing. For AP, instant document retrieval speeds and simplifies the review and approval of invoices. And with electronically stored documents, employees can quickly and easily pull the files needed to satisfy an auditor’s request, with no need to spend hours digging through file cabinets. That’s a pretty impressive efficiency boost right there.”

Ed Yonker, CIO (retired), Franklin County

Yonker notes that rolling Laserfiche out to additional departments was an easier sell than other system expansions because there was buy-in from the top right from the start.

“Whenever county purchases exceed a certain amount, they need to be approved by the commissioners,” he explains. “Because the commissioners were already very familiar with the value of using Laserfiche, they never hesitated to give the go-ahead when other departments wanted to get on board.”

The next departments to raise their hands and ask for Laserfiche were Human Services, which was particularly excited about Laserfiche from a disaster recovery standpoint, and Human Resources.

Digitizing Human Resources

The first thing the HR department did after implementing Laserfiche was to start scanning personnel files into the system and develop a folder structure that separated employees’ employment records from their confidential medical records and discipline files.

A few of the benefits of this digital transformation include:
  • Reduced paper consumption: The department used to photocopy hundreds of thousands of pages of job applications a year for review by elected officials; today, officials have access to everything they need in Laserfiche.
  • Reclaimed time from searching for information: Laserfiche’s search capabilities makes it easy for staff to find the information necessary to do their jobs, along with fulfilling ad-hoc requests from directors for material from an employee’s personnel file for various purposes.
  • Higher staff productivity: “Doing more with less” is a familiar adage for local governments, and Franklin County is no exception. The county’s Laserfiche system accelerates processes and eliminates manual tasks so that staff can focus on the work that matters.
  • Reduced document storage space and cost: The county was able to remove a large 1,500 file-capacity cabinet in addition to five other standing file cabinets, allowing for more space for staff.
  • Easier audits: Digital files and a standard folder structure streamline audits for the county and enable the HR department to easily show compliance with recordkeeping mandates. The department no longer has to stop work on all other projects in order to organize for the audits.

In addition to managing personnel files in Laserfiche, the HR department has also added recruitment documentation and union and arbitration files to the system, which has led to quicker resolution of grievances.

“Franklin County is a forward-looking organization— which is reflected in their use of Laserfiche,” said Sandy Hess, sales operations manager at ICC Community Development Solutions. “By implementing an enterprise-wide system of record, the county has been able to preserve and protect the information that’s important to the county, while enabling staff to operate in a streamlined, responsive way that today’s employees and citizens appreciate.”

Laserfiche Rolls Across the Enterprise

With some technologies, organizations hit a tipping point for enterprise adoption. For Franklin County, that tipping point for Laserfiche was the implementation in HR.

“After HR deployed Laserfiche, everybody started to ask for it,” Yonker recounts. “People saw how successful the HR implementation was, and they began to talk about what the benefits for their departments could be.”

As Laserfiche was adopted by more and more departments, the types of content stored in the system grew more and more diverse:
  • Emergency Services uses Laserfiche to manage notes from its 911 calls and cases.
  • Franklin County Jail stores inmate records and requests in the Laserfiche repository.
  • Planning, which is tasked with fostering the proper growth of communities within Franklin County, manages new development records with Laserfiche.
  • Open Records, with its goal of making government transparent to County citizens, makes plans, drafts and studies stored in Laserfiche available to the public.
  • Real Estate manages audit reports and past voting results using Laserfiche. It is also able to respond to 13,000 queries a week in a fast and efficient manner thanks to Laserfiche’s ability to email digital documents.

Although the IT Department had not initially planned to implement Laserfiche as the county-wide standard for ECM, it’s now grateful to have that consistency in place. “We got rid of a couple departments’ antiquated imaging systems in order to move them onto Laserfiche, which makes my staff more efficient because it only has to administer the one ECM system. It’s also easier from a user training perspective, since everybody’s using the same thing,” Yonker said.

City of Long Beach Modernizes Citizen Services with Laserfiche

After the recession, the City of Long Beach turned to technology to cut costs — and create innovative ways to improve citizen services. To this end, it produced a three-pronged service delivery plan that would earn it numerous honors as a top ten digital city in the U.S.:
  • Consolidate information and communication technology services.
  • Increase transparency and collaboration across the enterprise.
  • Digitize processes, forms and workflow.

With a shared understanding of the value new technology could bring to Long Beach, the city tasked its technology services department to spearhead a citywide information management overhaul.

IT’s Strategy: Consolidate and Standardize

Long Beach has worked hard to consolidate technology functions while still providing flexibility for departments to run efficiently. For example, in 2009, Long Beach replaced its departmental IBM FileNet system with a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system that could be used citywide.

The city’s ongoing strategy to consolidate services and decrease costs has paid dividends. By implementing Laserfiche, it has cut annual ECM support costs by 50%.

Other cost-saving IT consolidation efforts include:
  • An enterprise-wide online phone system expected to save $165,000 annually.
  • Virtual servers and workstations expected to generate $100,000 in energy and hardware savings over three years.
  • Cluster databases that reduce licensing and hardware fees.

ECM and Open Government

In April 2011, the Long Beach City Council adopted an open government policy identifying transparency as a core function of local government, which has become a top priority for staff and citizens alike.

“Long Beach is dedicated to fostering open, transparent government where everyone in our community can easily participate and engage,” explains City Clerk Larry Herrera. Herrera further notes that the City Clerk’s office uses Laserfiche to help deliver improved, cost-effective service. “Previously, we needed 28 people to answer citizen questions quickly and accurately. Today, with a staff of 17, our customer service is better than ever before.”

As more and more records are added to Laserfiche, information access improves and storage costs decrease. The document types stored in Laserfiche include:
  • City contracts
  • Campaign finance reports
  • Statements of economic interest
  • Council agendas and staff reports
  • Election ballots
  • Sample ballots
  • Voted returns

Long Beach has made all city contracts executed as of 2011 available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink, a read-only public portal. With 24/7 online viewing access, the city simplifies citizen information access and saves time for both requestors and city staff.

Elements of Success

Other departments that have worked to digitize paper processes include:
  • Financial Management
  • Human Resources
  • Development Services

For example, Long Beach began streamlining accounting processes by integrating Laserfiche with its business intelligence (BI) system. This integration streamlines expense research by making images of invoices available to authorized users through the BI interface.

Long Beach citizens, leadership and staff have shown full support for its Laserfiche initiative.

As a result of its collaboration between city leadership, staff and citizens, Long Beach has used technology to position itself as a leader for the future.

3 Reasons to Start ECM Implementation with Accounts Payable

If you’re an organization considering the move to cloud document management, you might be wondering about the differences between self-hosted and SaaS solutions. Some organizations want complete control over their software and hardware. Others prefer lower maintenance costs, pre-configured security features and automatic software updates.

Read on to see how SaaS and self-hosted solutions differ, so you can make a more informed decision on how to deploy a document management system for your organization.

Software as a service (SaaS)

SaaS offers customers access to software over the internet on a subscription basis, with the software hosted by the vendor or another third-party.

There’s no installation required, and resources such as servers or storage capacity can typically be scaled up automatically, or via a quick conversation with the SaaS vendor. On top of that, using SaaS generally means you don’t need to worry about the costs of maintenance, server space or hardware that you’d need if you were maintaining your own solution in-house.

Built-in security is also a particularly attractive benefit of SaaS products. The right vendor will have security controls already in place that are continually assessed, updated and improved to respond to the latest threats. Some vendors can also provide specialized security services to support compliance concerns and industry regulations, so customers have peace of mind that they’re abiding by the rules. Some of these features and services may include:

  • Automatic and on-demand detection of system threats and vulnerabilities
  • Penetration testing and other services that simulate real-world threats
  • Security controls that restrict access to sensitive content and features

Software as a service platforms can also be well-suited for organizations wanting built-in business continuity measures. In many cases data stored in these solutions is replicated and encrypted in real time to multiple sites at different geographical locations, so if disaster strikes in one location, your data is safe and sound in others.

Especially as technology improves with vendors innovating on their platforms year after year, SaaS is proving to be a convenient and cost-effective solution for the modern enterprise.

Self-hosted solutions

Unlike a SaaS platform, where your back-end infrastructure is managed by experienced IT professionals outside your organization, these deployments offer ways for you to take more control of your hardware, software and updates. Organizations in certain industries, such as government or finance, may also be subject to certain regulations that restrict how they can store information, thus preventing them from deploying a SaaS solution for the time being.

However, a self-hosted solution can still be cloud-based, and therefore share some of the advantages of a SaaS platform. Let’s take a look at each of the self-hosted solution types.

On-premises

Before cloud technology systems, on-premises deployments were the de-facto standard for document management. The most notable differentiator for this type of deployment is owning and maintaining hardware, and the need to manually deploy software updates. Here’s a look at advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

  • Ability to purchase the highest-performance or most-specialized machines for your purposes
  • Security that can be configured for your organization, in-house by your own IT staff
  • More control over computing resource usage
  • Capability to increase access points for custom integrations and other add-ons

Disadvantages

  • Top-of-the-line hardware can be expensive
  • Managing backups and associated sites can be labor-intensive and time-consuming
  • Need to spend money and time to upgrade hardware to keep up with pace of technology
  • IT will need to spend time and resources to implement even basic security settings
  • Recurring costs such as maintenance, server rooms and extra electricity usage

Self-hosted cloud

A self-hosted cloud deployment operates in largely the same way as an on-premises deployment with the exception of maintaining your own hardware. In fact, the applications themselves are the same and simply hosted on a vendor’s servers — most of the popular platforms, such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, allow you to run standard computer operating systems on them. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

  • Scalability and flexibility to grow the solution with your business
  • Reduced system downtime after a disruption with built-in security and backup features
  • Hardware infrastructure maintained by experienced IT professionals outside your organization
  • Capability to increase access points for integrations and other add-ons

Disadvantages

  • Costs of renting hardware and specialized support services can add up
  • Implementations aren’t completely configurable as hardware isn’t on-site or owned by you
  • Hardware might not be optimized for your needs (or customizable to do so)
  • IT will need to spend time and resources to implement even basic security settings
  • Recurring costs such as maintenance, server rooms and extra electricity usage

Finding the right solution

The first question you really need to ask is if you need control over the hardware itself. These days, SaaS solutions offer so many valuable benefits, like managed security, disaster recovery and automatic updates that they are a worthwhile choice unless you absolutely need to use your own hardware. Modern cloud applications offer flexibility without any of the hassle setting up hardware or paying for extra space, power or cooling for your server room. They can give your IT team extra time and resources to keep your business running smoothly.

To learn more about a document management solution that can be deployed as either an SaaS or self-hosted platform, take the Laserfiche Cloud product tour.

Hanover County

Located just outside of Richmond, VA, Hanover County serves a population of more than 100,000 residents. During tax season, keeping up the books for the constituency can be a daunting task for the Commissioner of Revenue’s Office, which manages all of the county’s real estate, personal, property and state income tax information.

The department purchased Laserfiche to eliminate paper processes and decrease the time staff spent finding and filing tax records.

It began using Laserfiche as a digital file cabinet and digitized over 85% of its tax documents in the first year.

When the department’s systems administrator, Amy Johnson, attended a user meeting hosted by the county’s reseller, Unity ECM, she saw how other organizations were leveraging Laserfiche’s advanced functionality. She knew Hanover County could use Laserfiche to do more than document search and retrieval.

To take advantage of Laserfiche’s newest features, the county upgraded to Laserfiche Rio and started revamping entire business processes.

Improving Document Approval with Workflow

Even without a background in IT, Johnson quickly began using Laserfiche Workflow to automate important departmental processes.

For example, every year the office completes statutory assessment worksheets to measure the personal property assets of each local business in the county. Before Laserfiche, compiling and processing these worksheets prior to review led to significant printing costs and time delays.

With Laserfice:
  • An integration between Laserfiche Quick Fields and the department’s AS/400 database has the eliminated cumbersome, upfront manual data entry.
  • Laserfiche Workflow automates the entire records approval process. New worksheets are immediately searchable in Laserfiche from managers’ desktops, allowing staff to quickly review worksheets and better serve customers.
  • With Laserfiche Snapshot, an image capture tool, the office has eliminated redundant printing of records. “Snapshot seems like a minor thing, but it was a huge benefit for us because we don’t have to print paper anymore,” says Johnson, estimating that the system saves the office from printing about 15,000 pages a year.

Automating Records Management

The county also relies on Laserfiche as an automated backbone for records management and retention. With paper, each staff member dedicated at least one day a week to sorting records for filing. Laserfiche has eliminated the need for this rotating position by automatically filing and storing approved documents by type and name for the six-year retention period.

“Everything we do is linked onto a foundation based on Laserfiche Records Management Edition, which allows us to log our records according to state records management standards,” says Johnson.

Getting Buy-in

Johnson says that upfront planning with every employee involved in the process has eased the office’s transition to digital document approval. When she began using Laserfiche Workflow, Johnson invited all the managers responsible for approving documents, along with the division manager, to join her as she drew out the process on a piece of paper. The group discussed every step together and determined how the managers would prefer to approve worksheets in Laserfiche.

“Time spent diagramming upfront will more than pay itself back later. Because we took the time to evaluate our documents, we ended up eliminating a lot of junk in our paper files,” notes Johnson. “It’s also really important to give staff ownership over the process.”

Tapping into the Laserfiche User Community

Beyond her work at the county, Johnson is also a leader of the Laserfiche User Group in Virginia, a consortium of Laserfiche users that holds quarterly meetings to foster the exchange of ECM knowledge. The group has grown to include more than 100 members throughout the state.

“The user group is so beneficial for networking and talking with other users. It’s a great place to hear about the lessons that other users have learned,” says Johnson.

Additionally, Johnson cites the annual Laserfiche Empower conference, reseller support and technical white papers as invaluable resources for improving her skills in using the software.

“Our implementation is so successful because of the community. Laserfiche listens to feedback and uses it to shape its next release. Everyone’s so approachable and helpful, and that makes it easy to like the product,” she says.

Gaining Top Value

Adopting new software functionality as it becomes available has helped Hanover County gain top value out of its ECM system. With these new tools, the county is truly leveraging the power of its constituent data in digital form to help transform the way county business is accomplished.

“Laserfiche is the one tool on your desktop that actually does what it’s supposed to do and what you ask it to do,” notes Johnson. “It’s one of my favorite parts of my job.”

Jackson County

Located in the scenic southwest corner of Oregon, Jackson County is home to a growing population of more than 200,000 residents—a growing population that in recent years has produced both a higher demand for services and more public records. Like many local government offices, Jackson County was flush with paper documents and short on storage space.

Additionally, the county must store and organize most of its departments’ records in complex records structures according to state and federal laws for records retention. With paper records, enforcing retention schedules while ensuring staff could still find and retrieve records involved tedious manual steps for staff across the county.

“There was a complicated system of filing with colored labels on the folders,” says Devin Goble, Programmer Analyst for Jackson County’s IT department. “Complying with retention meant staff had to look through each folder on the shelves, a very time-consuming process.”

Even though the county knew its departments needed an enterprise content management (ECM) system, skepticism toward digital content—and new IT projects—was strong among employees.

“It was a hard fight to get ECM implemented in the county. People were thoroughly entrenched in their paper processes,” says Goble.

To offer a valuable solution to staff, Goble led a search for an ECM system that could satisfy many different users’ needs and eliminate manual paper processes.

Laserfiche appealed to the IT department because it offered a well-supported feature set with a solid, built-in records management component. After hearing the positive experiences of other cities and counties using Laserfiche, Goble was assured that his IT department could structure Laserfiche in a way that would win over skeptical departments.

Warranting a Transparent Records Management Solution

Although many departments wanted a solution to their paper problems, the county worked with Laserfiche solution provider CDI to begin its Laserfiche implementation in the Sheriff’s Office in 2011. The diverse types of records handled by law enforcement staff offered the perfect testing ground for an improved records management process. Felony records, for example, must be retained by the department for ten years, while records managers can destroy certain types of warrants after five and others after ten. Keeping track of different retention schedules while making paper documents easily accessible to clerks was difficult for the department.

Laserfiche’s Records Management Edition, a DoD 5015.2-certified records management solution, allowed the IT department to separate what Goble calls the “nuts and bolts of records management” from general document use. Using Laserfiche’s transparent records management approach, the department was able to customize content management based on staff members’ job functions and easily organize the same documents in different ways for records managers and deputies.

For example, the four types of warrants handled by the department all require two separate retention schedules. When a warrant is received and scanned into the department’s digital document repository, Laserfiche automatically puts every warrant in its own record series folder, allowing records managers to view warrants in a batch by type or year and purge them at the appropriate time.

At the same time, Laserfiche establishes a separate folder structure for deputies and clerks that lists individual warrants by warrant type and warrant number. Because deputies are usually searching for more granular information within a specific case or a subpoena, Laserfiche automatically organizes documents so that deputies can easily find the detailed case information within a record.

It’s a best of both worlds solution: records managers can easily find and filter warrants based on disposition schedules while, at the same time, deputies can access individual warrants without knowing anything about records naming conventions. Everyone can work with law enforcement documents in the manner they prefer.

“Laserfiche’s transparent records management tools allow us to create a second view of the data in as many places as we need to. Records managers see it in one way. Clerks see it in another way. In some cases, others in the Sheriff’s hierarchy can see it in a completely different way,” says Goble.

Furthermore, an integration between Laserfiche and Tiburon, the department’s CAD/RMS system, pulls relevant names, place and incident dates from the police records upon scanning. Laserfiche Quick Fields auto-populates this information as metadata within the warrant file. Laserfiche Workflow then routes the warrant through the transparent records management filing process, eliminating the time-consuming, manual data entry and document routing steps for staff.

Streamlining Information Management

Laserfiche has also completely automated the department’s civil jacket process, which once included tedious data entry by records managers.

For civil cases, deputies compile an envelope of documents called a civil jacket that includes court documents and other records related to an incident when a subpoena is served. When these envelopes are scanned into the document repository, Laserfiche automatically fixes the civil jacket number to comply with the state’s records policy and forwards the documents to clerks for quality assurance.

“We take that act of moving data around and complying with retention policies out of users’ hands as much as possible. In some cases, users never have to touch the documents after they scan them. Laserfiche does all the rest,” says Goble.

Eliminating manual steps helps staff focus on getting their jobs done instead of tracking down and organizing paper. Temporary staff can complete scanning tasks without needing to be trained on document retention parameters, and records managers aren’t burdened with data entry. Laserfiche’s automation tools also eliminate the security risk of records being moved out of their records series.

“Not only do users not have to worry about where things go, they can’t change the filing structure even if they want to. This structure is locked in place by policy,” says Goble.

Furthermore, the Sheriff’s Office can directly push documents to the District Attorney’s office using Laserfiche WebLink, an online Web portal that provides read-only access to documents. High-profile cases often require transferring thousands of pages of records to the DA. With WebLink, the Sheriff’s Office can upload select documents to the online portal and give DA staff secure access to the information, eliminating costly printing and shipping expenses and streamlining litigation.

Building Enterprise-Wide Enthusiasm for ECM

The initial implementation was so successful that the skeptical end users have started evangelizing Laserfiche to other departments. Goble says he is fielding questions from other departments about records management and Laserfiche all the time.

“It’s nice to give users something solid. Now that our staff has had a chance to see what the product can do for us, they’re getting excited about it,” says Goble.

In addition to using Laserfiche for other documents like purchasing records and contracts for the Sheriff’s Office, IT has expanded ECM to the County Assessor’s Office. The department uses Laserfiche to scan and store historical deed cards, 100-year old property assessment jackets and current personal property returns for local businesses. The county’s Human Resources department has also started integrating Laserfiche with its Oracle ERP system to manage personnel records.

Using Laserfiche Workflow and Laserfiche Quick Fields to automate as much of the capture and indexing process as possible went a long way in showing the value of the application to multiple departments. Goble says that setting up a system that requires as little user interaction as possible was key to expanding ECM into an enterprise application.

“I’m more proud of our users than anything else. We’re really happy to see the expansion that we’ve been able to do with Laserfiche,” notes Goble.