Streamlining Student-Centered Processes at Colegio Alemán

Colegio Alemán Alexander von Humboldt A.C. is a network of three German-language schools based in greater Mexico City. Serving 3,000 students, the organization is one of the largest German educational institutions outside of Germany. In order to serve its growing student body, the organization found the need to reimagine the ways in which it provided core student services, such as enrollment, re-enrollment and scholarships.

The Colegio Alemán team seized the opportunity to digitize and automate key processes using a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system, which enabled them to create electronic forms to capture student information digitally, and automate workflows to streamline document processing. The team started by creating a better experience for students and their families with the re-enrollment process, and has since built on their success by continuing to optimize and automate other key activities throughout the organization.

“We’ve experienced many benefits from automating our workflows using Laserfiche, we’ve found that what we need to do, we can do in the Laserfiche platform.”

—Victor Valverde López, technology manager at Colegio Alemán

Reimagining Re-enrollment

After managing many time- and resource-intensive re-enrollment cycles, Colegio Alemán Administrative Manager Ema Medina brought a challenge to the organization’s leadership: “We couldn’t continue the way that we were doing the re-enrollment process,” Medina said. “Parents had to come to the school with lots of paperwork, documents that we needed signed, and in the best-case scenario, it would take an hour or more to get through with all of the steps involved.”

The Colegio Alemán team worked with Apoint Mexico, a Laserfiche solution provider, to implement Laserfiche with the goal of reimagining re-enrollment as a digital, automated process that would save time for parents and administrative staff. In the new process, a Laserfiche form collects the necessary information from parents — because this is the re-enrollment process, parents only need to confirm and update information as needed. They can review the contract with the school, provide an e-signature and even pay tuition with the new Laserfiche-powered automated process.

“One of the most important parts of our Laserfiche implementation was the ease of integration,”said Valverde López. “It was easy for us to integrate our Laserfiche process with our ERP, Intelisis, which enabled us to streamline the activities — from inputting student information to payments. And with records management, our documents are organized and classified in such a way that it’s easy for administrative staff to find information.”

When COVID-19 hit Mexico in 2020, the Colegio Alemán team was grateful to have a process in place for parents to re-enroll their students online. Now that the staff has returned to the office, however, parents still prefer the online process. “For me, the biggest benefit has been the improvement in our customer service,” Medina said. “The parents are very happy with this process and they tell us all the time. And having all of our documents in a digital platform — it’s such an important tool.”

“Today, parents don’t have to physically go to the school to re-enroll; they don’t have to print a single page. They can do the entire process from their house, from their offices, wherever they are. It takes about five to 10 minutes — the contract, the payment, everything. It’s saved us time and money, but the most important thing is that our parents are happy because they don’t lose one to three hours doing this process.”

—Victor Briseño Candela, CFO at Colegio Alemán

Building on Digital Transformation Organization-wide

The parents and employees’ satisfaction with the new re-enrollment process led the Colegio Alemán team to continue digitally transforming other student-facing processes. Naturally, the new student enrollment process was a prime candidate for automation. “The new student process is very important,” Briseño Candela explained. “Today, we have an enrollment form for new students, so parents can give us information, all the documentation, and it’s all saved in the Laserfiche repository.”

Additional processes that the Colegio Alemán team have automated include:
  • Scholarship requests: Families can provide financial information, which is automatically routed to the relevant personnel to review and make a determination.
  • Bus transportation process: Colegio Alemán provides bus transportation for nearly 2,000 students per school day. This process streamlines the collection of authorizations from parents that their children can take the bus, and updated addresses to support efficient pick-up and drop-off.
  • Vendor registration: Vendors that work with Colegio Alemán provide legal and fiscal documents through this process, which automates validation and document classification.
  • Employees’ children enrollment: Colegio Alemán employees can enroll their children through a special enrollment and approval process.
  • Teacher benefit discount: School teachers can submit a form to receive discounts for different materials and services.
  • Legal or parent meeting attendance: A simple but important process allows Colegio Alemán staff to keep record of who attended meetings.

“Any school district or network of schools operates with a lot of different systems. Laserfiche has helped us to pull information from all of these systems that normally operate independently, so that we have more visibility into the data that we have.”

—Víctor Valverde López, technology manager at Colegio Alemán

A Digital-First Future

The team at Colegio Alemán continues to automate processes and move toward a digital-first approach to student services. As Colegio Alemán started with more student-facing processes, the organization’s future plans include assessing back-office processes for additional efficiencies.

“Ultimately, we want to implement a dashboard for our process data in Laserfiche,” Briseño Candela said. This will enable even more optimization moving forward, allowing the organization’s leadership to identify process bottlenecks or spot trends that can help them make informed decisions when resource planning.

“A lot of our current Laserfiche processes are communication between the school to our different publics — our parents, our associates, our teachers,” Briseño Candela said. “The next step is to use Laserfiche for our internal processes, to be more efficient in our day-to-day work. It’s our social responsibility not to print so much paper. And it is also our responsibility to be efficient with our time to support the people working in administration, as well as the parents. We want to create a good experience for everyone involved.”

To learn more about how Laserfiche drives digital transformation, schedule a consultation today.

What Is Low Code Automation and What Are the Benefits?

Low-code automation is the use of software to automate a business process, without the need for traditional computer programming.
Compared to building a business process automation solution from scratch, a low-code automation solution offers:
  • The ability to develop, deploy and iterate on your processes quickly as business needs change.
  • A secure foundation that you can clear by IT once and then use to build out multiple processes.
  • An easy-to-use interface that allows non-technical process experts to build powerful solutions.

What is a low-code platform?

A low-code platform is a development environment that enables all types of users, including non-technical ones, to build processes without the need to code much, if at all, compared to building an application for that process from scratch. For both non-career developers and seasoned coders, these platforms are a way for you to build a custom business application or automate a process without the need to code basic functionality or back-end infrastructure elements, such as security and error handling.

By both lowering the barrier to entry to create an app, and speeding up development times, low-code automation platforms enable organizations to be more agile in response to changing needs, regulations and customer expectations.

What is meant by low-code?

Although you may see low-code platform vendors use a variety of terms to describe their offerings, they often share a common thread of digitizing key business operations in a way that’s easy for those without coding experience. This is usually achieved by providing a drag-and-drop interface that lets users design and map out logic for applications, workflows and business processes.

What is an example of low-code?

A low-code automation platform is usually good at gathering information and routing it to the right person or location. More robust platforms, like Laserfiche, with enterprise content management (ECM) technology, can store information as well without the need of a third-party application to support it. Below is an example of a low-code automation platform for a generic request:
Diagram showing a low code process that gathers information, routs information, and stores information.

Gather information: Low-code automation platforms can gather information either directly from a digital form, or a scanned paper form. When dealing with paper, these platforms usually use AI to sort and classify applicable data points from the document and stores them as metadata.

Route information: Using a workflow designer, you can make sure your low-code automation platform routes information based on certain criteria and sets up the logic as you see fit. This example routes a request based on whether it is approved or rejected. However, it’s important to note that you can route information based on a number of criteria and down a variety paths outside of “accept or reject.” This flexibility allows you to create a variety of applications on the same platform.

Store information: At this point, many platforms would integrate with a third-party system to store and archive any information relevant to the automated business process. Although third-party integrations are an important feature of many low-code platforms, they are not always necessary when it comes to storage and archival. If a low-code platform also works as an ECM platform, it can store and archive information in a centralized repository, with added features that enhance an organization’s ability to store and archive information in a way that remains in compliance with industry regulations and organizational policies.

What can you do with low-code platforms?

With the right low-code platform, the possibilities of what you can build are virtually limitless. Some platforms even offer marketplaces for solutions, which allows creators to share what they’ve built and for others to get started faster with pre-built templates. One example is the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace, which has pre-built workflows for many of your everyday processes.

The below infographic “Laserfiche 4 Steps to Innovation” shows how those that use the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace can not only deploy solutions quickly, but get involved with a larger community of innovators.Infographic showing the Laserfiche's four steps to innovation: asking what needs to be automated, seeing how others use Laserfiche, downloading and using solutions and sharing with others.

Below are a few examples of processes you can automate with a low-code platform:
  • HR onboarding: Have new hires fill out and sign paperwork digitally and route the forms to your repository for storage and archival.
  • Expense reimbursement: Streamline expense reimbursement requests by routing them directly to approvers for quick decisions.
  • Accounts payable: Gather relevant information from incoming documents and apply business rules to verify matching POs and invoices.

Which low-code platform is best?

There are a lot of low-code platforms out there, but not all offer the same level of functionality. Here’s a quick list of core features to look for in a low-code platform:

Drag-and-drop: If a low-code platform doesn’t include a drag-and-drop or other visual interface, it may require more coding and other complexities than you expect. See if you can get a demo or product walkthrough that explores how the low-code platform works before making a decision.

Integrations: You want to make sure that any low-code platform you use interacts with the digital ecosystem you already have in place. Check documentation for your desired low-code platform and any applications you plan to integrate it with before investing in a solution.

ECM features: While many low-code platforms can integrate with an ECM system to manage the storage and archival of documents, some of them offer an ECM within the product itself. This allows you to not only build applications around content, but actively manage the content throughout its lifecycle using the same application, making the deployment of these types of solutions more streamlined and centralized.

What is the difference between low-code and no-code?

A no-code platform, as its name suggests, requires no code from the user to program a solution. Low code, on the other hand, involves some level of scripting or manual coding from technical staff.

Solutions made using no-code can come in the form of a reporting dashboard or digital form where you’re putting together prepackaged UI elements. Some no-code platforms may allow you to build content management applications, digital workflows or mobile and web apps without code, although potentially with some limitations — it’s not that you can’t create an app without using code, it’s just that without the potential to add code, a platform may be needlessly limiting its own capabilities.

On the other hand, that little bit of code you add doesn’t have to be incredibly complex either, while still providing a great deal of customizability to your applications. Common use cases for these kinds of platforms, include making calculations based on incoming data and integrating with an application that has an application programming interface (API).

What does low-code have to do with APIs?

An application programming interface (API) works as a means for outside applications to interact with the one that the API is designed around. In the same way that a human needs some sort of an interface to interact with technology, like a graphical user interface (GUI) on an application or simply the buttons on a household appliance, an API gives outside applications a specific set of functions it can ask of the application providing the API.

APIs are useful in that they both give a low-code automation platform the ability to interact with other applications it might not otherwise have been able to, while sticking with the theme of simplicity that no-code provides. APIs are usually designed to just take in simple inputs and provide a simple output, with the rest of the logic inside the application providing the API. This makes most API functions light on code, and thus some of the easiest coding snippets to add to automated processes using a low-code platform.

Why is low-code popular?

Low-code is popular because it makes organizations more efficient. Especially in a business climate that can experience large, seismic shifts in an instant, the ability for organizations to develop and deploy solutions quickly is of upmost importance. There’s also a need to remain flexible and adapt the development or use of an automated process to meet new business needs. Although this era was inevitable given advances in technology and communications, its arrival was accelerated by the harsh realities of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Is low-code really the future?

Although opinions may vary, things seem to be trending toward low-code platforms becoming the norm. Analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of new applications will be developed using low-code or no-code technology. The most telling sign that low-code is the future, however, is that future is already here.

Although this may not be the case with some enterprise applications, some kinds of low-code applications and platforms have been around for a while now, from game engines that help create interactive digital experiences, to website builders that empower small businesses to create more robust websites.

While the future of low-code is technically uncertain, it’s likely safe to say that building applications and processes from scratch is largely a thing of the past.

Should developers learn low-code?

Software programmers will probably be some of the first people to tell you that there are multiple solutions to a problem, and that the highest effort one is not the best solution. With that in mind, developers would be of sound decision-making to consider developing on a low-code platform. It allows them to develop faster from the start, and more quickly adapt to changes to a business process’s requirements or specifications. It’s also important for those in IT to have knowledge of the platforms and how they work, to ensure that the platform their organization chooses to deploy meets security needs and other requirements.

Further reading

Want to learn more about how you can design low-code processes with Laserfiche? Visit our low code automation product page.

If you’re interested in choosing the right kind of low-code process automation platform your organization, check out our Process Automation Buyer’s Guide.

MSIG Puts Customers First in Claims Processing

The focus on customer experience was one of the core drivers in the process automation strategy for MSIG Hong Kong (MSIG), embracing customer needs in light of a shifting technological landscape and major disruptions. The company sought to phase out legacy systems and increase efficiency for its claims submission service, requiring a highly adaptable content services tool to do so.

Since implementing Laserfiche for claims in 10 different product lines, the MSIG claims team can now manage all claims in a centralized platform, allowing staff to focus on more important claim assessment tasks. By investing in digital transformation for the organization’s EASY Claims System, MSIG has been able to differentiate itself in Hong Kong’s highly competitive insurance industry. The organization’s EASY Claims system has received wide recognition in Asia’s insurance landscape, as well as won MSIG a number of industry awards. In 2019, the company won a Laserfiche Run Smarter Award; in 2024, MSIG earned the Laserfiche Run Smarter Award for Best Program ROI.

“Laserfiche is the catalyst for our users and customers to improve their day-to-day work experiences,” said Alan Yue, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at MSIG.

Seeking a means to respond to customer needs and enable staff to transition to remote working arrangements, Laserfiche has also helped MSIG successfully achieve business continuity, maintaining a high level of operational efficiency and customer service through dedicated portals.

A Claims Processing System Made EASY

Providing general insurance solutions for more than 100 years, MSIG Holdings (Asia) Pte. Ltd. has a history of combining global and local best practices in the organization’s customer-focused approach, believing that the relationship between insurance companies and customers should be based on trust. This commitment to customers led the organization to reassess its reliance on manual legacy systems for process management. MSIG recognized that customers are embracing more digital solutions, presenting an opportunity to make correspondence with clients more seamless and efficient, as well as reengineer the IT infrastructure.

“As a core part of our business, the claims system is one of the most important parts of the MSIG customer journey,” Yue said. “We realized that the entire process was actually quite paper-driven, making it the perfect candidate to digitalize and automate.”

MSIG initiated a business transformation program known internally as “Transformer” in 2017. Laserfiche was chosen as MSIG’s core digital transformation solution with the goal of automating manual and paper-based core business processes, targeting the customer claims submission platform as a starting point. Eventually named EASY Claims, the system improved both operational efficiency and service with a focus on the customer experience. The platform supports self-service submissions, as well as provides transparency of claims status to MSIG customers.

Within the first three months of launch, EASY Claims significantly improved efficiency at MSIG, automating over 100,000 tasks that previously required manual user input. Additionally, the number of clients submitting claims via the new system has increased by up to 80%. This has streamlined and simplified the claims submission process for customers, aligning with shifting technological expectations and improving response times.

The EASY Claims system also improved the experience for staff processing customer submissions. Originally, acknowledging a newly submitted claim could take two days. Today, it takes fewer than 15 minutes. This translates to a savings of more than 200 work days a year for the claims processing staff organization-wide. The property claims management team specifically was able to save 57 days a year through the EASY Claims system.

The initiative has created the opportunity for ongoing optimization. In 2022, MSIG introduced Zero Touch for Helper insurance plan claims. Zero Touch is MSIG’s digital solution for claims assessment, enabling customers to submit their claims form, supporting documents and contact details online. The system then checks the customer’s claims history, policy validity and claim payment amount. For eligible clinical or dental expenses claims, payments are settled in just two working days. MSIG is planning to add Zero Touch to more products, creating a more seamless customer experience across product lines.

Along with facilitating claims submission for customers and acknowledgement in the backend, the automated process has helped save 12 days a year during the claims finalization stage. In terms of improved staff efficiency, MSIG has increased overall productivity by 1.4 times per hiring cycle within the Claims department alone. As a team with a significant amount of customer facetime and interaction, the Claims department’s increased productivity has improved both employee and customer experience.

In 2022, MSIG Hong Kong honored over HK$356 million, with a claims ratio of 92.9%, seeing a consistent increase for three consecutive years. The organization also reduced the number of complaints received by 50% in two years.

As the platform that powers the EASY Claims system, Laserfiche has helped to ensure a high level of customer service and a user-friendly, customer-oriented interface. The platform removes friction from the process of filing a claim, with intuitive features such as a “save-as-draft” function that enables customers to retrieve incomplete forms at any time using an email link, and smart suggestions that provide basic information and documents that customers will need to make a claim before they fill out the form. Customers can also receive SMS messages, email confirmations and tracking numbers to stay informed of the status of their claims.

“Claims is only the beginning of our digital transformation. Since implementing Laserfiche, we are looking at expanding to multiple channels, underwriting teams and core business processes to digitize and automate as well,” said Yue.

Investing in the Future

Recognizing that the insurance industry has historically relied on legacy processes, MSIG looked to digitize its claim service, rebuilding it to address both staff and client needs. With core business processes established between 10 to 20 years prior, the firm had an intimate knowledge of its users’ needs, refreshing a part of its business that focused heavily on customer and employee input. Working with Laserfiche to develop a nimble IT strategy, MSIG has been able to improve the customer and back-end experience within the claims process without disrupting day-to-day operations.
“Both business and technology landscapes have experienced so much rapid change and development,” said Yue. “These are the primary driver for MSIG’s digital transformation program, equipping us to anticipate our future needs as well as our customer expectations.”

Experiencing unprecedented and unanticipated changes in 2020, the EASY Claims System has proven itself to be highly adaptable, highlighting the need for digital transformation at MSIG. With claims as an obvious starting point, MSIG is looking to expand Laserfiche to other departments and processes. The organization is preparing to introduce claims process tracking for customers, allowing customers to track their claims in real time through the MSIG app or website — further enhancing visibility and continuing to build trust with customers.

“We now have a way to differentiate ourselves within Hong Kong’s insurance marketplace,” said Yue. “Laserfiche has helped users throughout the company to identify opportunities to improve day-to-day work. The sky is the limit.”

To learn more about how Laserfiche drives digital transformation, schedule a consultation today.

Santa Monica’s Digital First Approach

The City of Santa Monica, California, leverages Laserfiche to provide better services at a lower cost and with lower friction to constituents.

Transcript

Santa Monica is a city of 8.3 square miles. 93,000 residents and about 1800 staff members. We’re a full service city. We have our own utilities, our police, fire traffic, even our federal airport. First, we got a great beach and we have a lot of technology, a very complex environment with probably over 300 applications that we utilize. So I came to the city about five years ago.

Laserfiche was already in our environment. I saw an Opportunity to leverage tools like Laserfiche more extensively to help digitize our environment. And the game changer for us was when Laserfiche came to us and talks about an integration with DocuSign. And so we implemented that. One of the big benefits is that it’s in sustainability.

We no longer use as much paper as it. And in the past three and a half years, we estimated you’d saved over 180000 hours staff time. That integration when the pandemic hit, we had to quickly and become a virtual workplace. We had made the city workforce completely mobile with technology. We had created a user experience that was the same whether you were virtually working or face to face on site.

And we had done all this not because we were anticipating a pandemic We did it because we wanted to enable flexibility and Work-Life Balance for our staff. What we were able to do very quickly was to pivot and have 80% of our staff teleworking with all the tools they needed in 36 hours. Part of that was we had workflows already in place which utilized these Most people don’t think of government as being frictionless.

This matter of fact, most people consider the government a main source of friction But why does it have to be that way? Can we see a way to provide better services at a lower friction, at a lower cost to our constituents? If we can use the same tools that any other organization uses, it’s just thinking about things different.

I see Laserfiche as one of our key platforms that we can leverage and simplify our environment, but also give us greater capability within one system to do more. I’m Joseph Cevetello, and I’m using Laserfiche to empower the people of Santa Monica.

Community College Enables Agility, Innovation and Security

Hudson County Community College automates and accelerates business processes while enabling access for students and staff to information from anywhere.

Transcript

Hudson County Community College is located in Jersey City, New Jersey, right across the water from New York City. Serves about 8000 students a year with about 600 staff and family members. They have an award winning library and a nationally ranked culinary program with amazing kitchens set up for students and the chefs. The school experience with Laserfiche has been a breath of fresh air.

Currently, Hudson’s using it on a few different areas. The biggest area is financially because students submit a lot of documents for financial aid. So the financial aid office, we really focused on getting up and running right away. And then we branch branched out to COVID vaccination tracking for employees and staff. Hudson wanted to track employees and staff that and received the COVID vaccination and reached out to Trisha for ways to be able to track that and attach it to records to make it easier for everyone, not just submitting it, but having to track it.

And Laserfiche was the first response, one for security purposes and confidentiality for those submitting it, and then ease of use So reached out and we had that up and running in a week and a half and we rolled it out to users, adding the participants emailed them and it went into the repository and got access. And so far it’s been a pretty seamless process with them being able to connect it to people’s records.

Enter the information in colleague and information system and then look up if there are any issues. So it’s been a great resource having that ability for them to submit the vaccination forms and see it in college for human resources. The turnaround on this vaccination form was just incredibly fast from its perspective. I want you to be able to access what you need to from anywhere, and that’s totally possible with Laserfiche

So some of the challenges that Hudson has faced was obviously with the pandemic, the shift to remote workforce and the general use of paper and getting people away from that sort of area and being able to get people to understand how easy it is to use a paperless process so that as everyone returns to campus, we maintain that paperless process and keep moving forward.

Laserfiche is making the school more productive and more efficient, which helps in any departments, so we really appreciate that

Bank of China Eliminated 90% of Paper Usage and Simplified Compliance Processes

The Bank of China uses Laserfiche to automate workflows, meet compliance requirements and take a modern approach to banking operations.

Transcript

The Bank of China as a group was founded in 1912 and is the second oldest bank that is still in existence. The bank is the fifth largest bank by capital in the world as of this year. And we are proud to be the most globally oriented. We have over 500 employees and our assets is over $50 billion. The bank started using Laserfiche over 10 years ago and at first, Laserfiche was used as solely a storage for old bank document files as a sort of a hard drive — it’s been over 10 years.

And when I first joined the bank about four years ago, I started looking more into the other services offered by Laserfiche and stumbled into Laserfiche’s offerings that were a lot more than just a repository for documentation management — more process management, workflow management. So that’s where I submitted the idea of paperless to the bank. We got rid of 90% of paper and also helped improve 30% of the manual work and more importantly, Laserfiche also help us meet a lot of regulatory compliance requirements.

My favorite part of Laserfiche I think is the people. Laserfiche helped the bank catch up about 15 years that we were lagging behind, especially when we are talking about paperless, you know, automating manual work. I’m Frank Chen and I’m using Laserfiche to empower Bank of China.

Explore additional insights on the Laserfiche banking solutions page: https://www.laserfiche.com/solutions/financial-services/banks-and-credit-unions/

Public Records and Process Automation Power the County of Newell’s Digital Business Strategy

Located in Alberta, Canada, the County of Newell is known for its central location and dynamic and diverse economy. Recent years have brought growth to the region, including Amazon’s first renewable energy investment in the country — a 80MW solar project expected to produce enough energy to power more than 18,000 Canadian homes for a year. The Newell County government is committed to the area’s progress, continuously improving processes with an eye toward its vision statement: “to encourage and support sustainable growth and quality of life.”

This commitment recently drove a number of transformative efforts at the county, including the digitization and automation of business processes that employees and residents use on a daily basis. The county, a Laserfiche customer since 2004, has been going through processes strategically, optimizing steps using a lean project management methodology.

“We strategically approach everything that we do,” said Roberta Fernell, director of information technology at the County of Newell. “Every process or system we introduce, we want to understand how it fits, and where we may need to adjust to make some improvements. That’s why we did an organization-wide implementation of Laserfiche.”

Reimagining Records Management

Working with Laserfiche solution provider Inspiris, the County of Newell achieved a strategic priority by digitizing and centralizing information in Laserfiche. The Laserfiche platform became the foundation on which departments could build automated processes and integrate with other systems to streamline information flow throughout the organization.

“Digital transformation is a journey, an evolution in how our organization works, operates and moves forward to better serve the public,” said Joanne Wells, records management technician at the county. Departments that now use Laserfiche include:
  • Administration
  • Agricultural Services
  • Corporate Safety
  • Enforcement
  • Engineering Services
  • Finance
  • Fire Services
  • Fleet Services
  • Human Resources
  • Information Technology
  • Municipal Services
  • Planning and Development

The centralization and digitization of records has also supported the county’s commitment to open government, and compliance with Alberta’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIP), as well as the federal Access to Information Act and Privacy Act. The county website’s public portal removes the burden from county staff who previously had to manually pull records, which could cause delays.

“I receive a lot of internal requests for information,” said Ariana Nielsen, executive assistant at the county. “And the search capabilities of Laserfiche allow the public to find information on their own without having to wait for a response.”

Plus, Fernell added, the visibility into what documents are being downloaded enable county staff to gage what the public is interested in: “This information gives us insights into the hot topics — we might find, for instance, that we should do an educational campaign on social media because we see high interest on something particular. We’re leveraging our information in a connected way that can inform other areas of the organization.”

Reclaiming Time in Accounts Payable

As the county assessed the potential for further improvements, accounts payable came up as one process that touched multiple departments but heavily relied on manual tasks. The county re-engineered the AP process, capturing invoices digitally in the Laserfiche repository and using a Laserfiche workflow to automate the routing of information to various departments for reviews and approvals.

This transformation increased visibility of invoices across the organization, enabling the county to accelerate payments and more accurately determine cash flow. Laserfiche integrates with the county’s financial management software, Diamond, as well as its CentralSquare asset management system to create a seamless experience for employees who interact with the AP process.

“The AP process in Laserfiche is efficient and great time saver,” said Emerson Pankratz, the county’s accounting clerk. “It is very easy to enter new invoices into the system and get them to the appropriate person for coding and approvals quickly. Also, Laserfiche’s ability to recognize duplicate invoices helps stop duplicate payments and duplication of efforts.”

“We not only reduced our inaccuracy and our opportunity time — or the time that should be reduced to improve process performance — but we increased our value-added time, or the tasks we do that actually add value to the process, by 27%.”

— Roberta Fernell, director of information technology at the County of Newell

Simplifying the COR Audit Process and Enhancing Employee Experience

As the county’s success with digitization and automation projects spread, the county’s IT team began leveraging a lean methodology to prioritize projects that would have the highest impact.

The organization undergoes a Certificate of Recognition (COR) audit each year to maintain its recognition for developing health and safety programs that meet the standards established by the Alberta government. A previously arduous audit process led the county to reassess its health and safety training documentation, a critical process for the county, which requires all employees to be educated on occupational hazards, preventative measures and best practices.

“For the COR audit, we have to be able to deliver on-demand what they need,” Fernell said. “They need to know that people have received the training required to be competent in their roles, and that we as a county government are keeping them safe by providing that training.”

The IT team built a Laserfiche Form and set up document templates that enable employees to get certificates into the Laserfiche records repository with minimal data entry. The transformation resulted in a reduction of information inaccuracy — from a 58% inaccuracy rate down to below 10%. The county also built notifications into the workflow so that HR employees had visibility into the process — and Laserfiche reporting tools enable managers to view the time it takes to complete the progress, opening up further opportunity for optimization.

While the county used to see about 100 documents related to health and safety training recorded in Laserfiche per year, it now sees about 100 per quarter, thanks to the team’s optimization efforts. The end-to-end process time was also reduced from 135 days to 5.2.

“Staff members want to be recognized for the training they’ve taken,” Fernell said. “And managers need to know what training their staff has taken, or what training they need to take — to help support health and safety in the workplace, and to resource plan.”

County-wide Digital Transformation Continues

The County of Newell continues to strategically optimize processes and integrate systems with Laserfiche with the aim of providing the best possible employee and citizen experience. Major business processes that have already been automated include:
  • Accounts payable approvals
  • Corporate safety
  • Training documentation
  • County of Newell Water Project registration
  • Pre/post trip process
  • Performance reviews
  • IT change requests
  • Gravel haul cards
  • Inspections
  • Fire permits

The IT team also has significant Laserfiche projects on the horizon, including HR onboarding and offboarding, equipment rentals, expense claims and development permits.

“What impresses the County of Newell is the versatility of Laserfiche. Not only does it effectively manage county documents, applying records management, but it also offers efficiencies in the processing of documents, ways to transfer/share data between systems and methods to electronically capture data to be used for reporting and analytics.”

—Roberta Fernell, director of information technology at the County of Newell

“Laserfiche has totally changed how we operate, and how we think about operating,” said Matt Fenske, chief administrative officer at the county.

To learn more about how Laserfiche drives public sector digital transformation, schedule a demo today.

FCA Packaging Strengthens Employee and Vendor Experience through Business Processes Automation

FCA Packaging designs and manufactures highly customized packaging products and solutions for major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Following two recent acquisitions, the organization sought a solution to rebuild key business processes throughout departments. The company sought to address needs in engineering and human resources, as well as industry-specific requirements such as inventory management. Additionally, the FCA Packaging team wanted to process invoice and customer documentation with more efficiency and transparency to support company growth.

“Not only has Laserfiche helped to improve customer and vendor satisfaction, but our staff have also been able to focus more on higher-value processes,” said Sandra Lund, payroll manager at FCA Packaging. “It’s changed the way we function here and just made us so much more efficient working together as a team.”

Using Laserfiche, FCA Packaging transformed the accounts payable process — from a manual, paper driven activity to a streamlined, digital process that has accelerated response and payment times. FCA has since expanded its use of Laserfiche to manage a wide range of both internal and external processes, increasing productivity and accuracy across departments. In addition to automating business-critical processes, employees have been able to reclaim time and increase capacity, enabling the company to optimize costs while providing a high standard of service and products to an expanding client base of manufacturers around the world. “Implementing Laserfiche aligned with our core values of growth and empowerment,” said Steve Everett Jr., a president with FCA Packaging. “Our team members have been able to develop and deploy a solution that scales with us as we continue to grow organically and through acquisition.”

“Implementing Laserfiche aligned with our core values of growth and empowerment. Our team members have been able to develop and deploy a solution that scales with us as we continue to grow organically and through acquisition.”

— Steve Everett Jr, president at FCA Packaging

Buying Into Accounts Payable Transformation

Working with a long list of vendors and with over 1,000 employees across 35 locations, the FCA Packaging accounts payable team saw an opportunity to improve invoice management, which was previously a manual process using a legacy ECM system that was approaching end-of-life. Looking to improve compliance for audits, the team needed a solution that would support granular control access for accounting and financial documents, balancing both accuracy and ease of use. With the support of Laserfiche solution provider Momentum ECM, FCA found a solution in Laserfiche.

Before implementing Laserfiche, two staff members were assigned to reviewing financial statements and payment documentation manually and submitting completed invoices to stakeholders for approval. The manual process could take up to four days to complete. The updated invoice approval process now takes just five hours:
  • Vendors upload credit card receipts to Laserfiche for the AP team to review.
  • Laserfiche automatically extracts key information.
  • Laserfiche uploads the information, organizing it in specific file locations with granular access rights.

The streamlined process also provides an enhanced employee experience with increased accountability, while at the same time accelerating the payment cycle, improving FCA’s reputation among vendors.

“By enabling us to leverage automation and access rights for individuals, we have been able to finalize invoices more efficiently,” said Lund. “Now that we have greater visibility on our AP processes, we can respond to vendor needs more quickly with more accountability.

“In the beginning, some team members were concerned that automation would make certain roles redundant,” added Lund. “But after experiencing how the solution would free up their schedules, many employees were able to accelerate their own personal growth by taking on new projects in other departments. Laserfiche has done more than transform our operations, it has transformed the way we work as a team.”

Additionally, as a result of the Laserfiche initiative, the AP team can now quickly find invoices and other financial documents for review, simplifying the auditing process. The system has been used in a similar capacity for internal audits, as well as streamlining the overall audit process to support industry-specific OSHA documentation and ISO standards. This has further improved industry-specific safety and manufacturing management processes, allowing users to identify additional processes to manage through the digital platform. Laserfiche has provided FCA with more control over financial documents, giving specific members of the company access to the documents needed for internal and external audits to optimize the collection of this high-value data and improve turnaround and compliance.

A Full-Package Solution

After the initial success in the accounts payable department, other departments sought to automate and improve core company processes. Across 35 branches nationwide, Laserfiche has been implemented in almost every department. Laserfiche Forms help to manage processes in HR, accounts receivable, IT, staff safety and beyond. Serving more than 1,000 employees company-wide, the payroll department utilized Laserfiche to manage processes such as vacation requests and salary increases for full-time employees, helping FCA achieve substantial savings in time and resources. For example, compiling and processing sales and tax information for tax returns could take up to three days. Now, the process can be completed in four hours.

In addition to increased efficiency, Laserfiche has helped to increase accountability and for users, enabling staff to take ownership of their respective roles. Employees across all branches can manage invoices and other business-critical content, having access at any time of the day with insights on the progress of each open task. Users can use this information to identify obstacles and bottlenecks at any point of the workflow in order to streamline approval or turnaround a task overall. In an increasingly digital business environment, FCA Packaging has been able to boost efficiency and transparency company wide.

“Laserfiche has helped us to grow within our roles, take on additional projects and have a greater sense of ownership over the work we do,” Lund said. “For departments such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and payroll, our long-term goal will be to use Laserfiche as close to 100% as possible.”

To learn more about how Laserfiche can empower your organization with solutions to help you scale growth and improve the employee and vendor experience, schedule a demo today.

What You Need to Know About the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace

With its easy-to-use, no-code workflows, forms and content management offerings for both cloud and on-premises deployments, Laserfiche makes it easy for all types of teams and individuals to streamline their day-to-day processes.

Since early 2022, customers now have a faster way to innovate on everyday workplace processes with the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace, a hub for Laserfiche community members to explore solution templates from Laserfiche, its industry partners, third-party vendors and even citizen developers.

What is the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace?

The Laserfiche Solution Marketplace is a place for users to download solution templates that include pre-built forms, workflows and other resources for the Laserfiche platform. It’s also a community hub where Laserfiche users can share their owns solutions with each other. (Want to contribute? You can submit your solutions here.)

Watch the video below for a quick overview of the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace, and read on to take a deep dive into how the marketplace can help you deploy solutions faster.

While the ability to create many of these solutions exists for most Laserfiche users, it can be much easier and faster — especially for resource-strapped individuals and organizations — to use or build upon what other platform experts have already created.

What kinds of solutions are available on the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace?

Here are a few examples of the types of resources you can find on the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace:

What are the benefits of using the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace?

While the time-savings are readily apparent in the use of pre-built solutions, there are also additional benefits one can get from using the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace:

  • Put your ROI in overdrive: A faster start from pre-built solutions means less lead-up time to enjoy the efficiency and productivity benefits of the Laserfiche platform.
  • Enjoy solutions with built-in expertise: Many pre-built solutions are created by industry leaders and already have best practices baked into them.
  • Democratize big ideas: Enable employees across departments and disciplines to take the role of citizen developers, combining and building on solutions to foster innovation.

How do I get started with the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace?

Visit the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace site to explore a growing library of 100+ solution templates for Laserfiche self-hosted deployments and Laserfiche Cloud.

Also be sure to check out the below infographic “Laserfiche 4 Steps to Innovation” for a step-by-step guide on how to get started deploying solutions and sharing your innovations with the larger Laserfiche community.Infographic showing the Laserfiche's four steps to innovation: asking what needs to be automated, seeing how others use Laserfiche, downloading and using solutions and sharing with others.

Calling all innovators! Stake your claim as a digital transformation pioneer by being one of the first to have their innovative ideas on the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace. Community members looking to submit their own templates can do so here.

Creating a Covid-19 Vaccine Wait List in under 2 Hours.

How Collin County, Texas leveraged Laserfiche to serve its citizens during the pandemic — without working overtime or weekends.

Transcript

Our citizens were desperate to at least do
something on their own behalf for their own health care.

Let me tell you the story
about how we developed our Collin County

COVID-19 vaccine waitlist.

My name is Tim Nolan. I work for Collin County, Texas

and I am the applications manager.

The day before we went on holiday for New Year’s Day,

the judge gives us a call around 2 p.m. and
said we need to put together a waitlist,

and so we reached out to the team

and they were able to put something
together in Laserfiche Forms in two hours.

We had 45,000 people that day enter
their information.

We didn’t have to work over that holiday weekend.

We actually launched and went live right there.

Everyone on our list either got vaccinated by us,

our partners or some other means.

So now you can come directly to our website

and schedule your own appointment to get your own
vaccine.

There’s no need for a waitlist any longer.

And so we intend to use Laserfiche well into the
future with health care.

I think it’s here to stay.