Simplifying Government Services at Hurunui District Council 

New Zealand’s Hurunui District has a population of more than 13,000 spread across 864,640 hectares just north of Christchurch. Serving a largely rural area, the Hurunui District Council excels at developing a sense of community, partnership and well-being. 

“Our services are extremely broad,” said Stewart Tayles, digital transformation and IT team leader at Hurunui and Kaikoura District Councils. “From dog registrations to consents, or running youth programming to providing social housing — we really do everything essential for our community.”  

This wide-ranging scope requires a flexible technology infrastructure where systems can be integrated and adapted to the territory’s growing needs.  

“Our CEO wants the council to be a 24/7 operation — we need to be engaged with the community and enable them to engage with us,” Tayles added. “We need forms. We need to make information available. We need to be able to provide access to these services when people need them.”  

Replacing Legacy Document Management with Robust Content Services 

The council initially procured Laserfiche to replace a legacy document management system (DMS) when the growing amount of information generated proved too much for the legacy system to efficiently handle, control and retain.  

The Hurunui team worked with Ricoh New Zealand to find an ideal solution in Laserfiche, which would meet the council’s changing needs. Today, Laserfiche serves the council as a versatile, enterprise-wide solution. “Being New Zealand’s eighth-largest district by land size, we needed a system with the capability to connect our multiple offices,” said Scott Linton, IT and GIS manager for Hurunui District Council. “We were really impressed at how easy it was to implement Laserfiche and connect our main office with five satellite locations. It was up and running in no time.” 

Building Consents Made Simple with Laserfiche Forms 

Beyond basic document management, the district manages vital processes — including resource consents — using Laserfiche’s forms, integration and workflow capabilities, supporting the development and economic growth of the territory.  

Building consent applications typically come in through Simpli, which provides a standard form for building control authorities — however, the council found the vetting of these submissions to be laborious and prone to human error. “Before we can process an application, we need to check that all the information is there, it’s valid and it’s suitable,” Tayles said. To address this manual review bottleneck, the team created a Building Consent Vetting Checklist in Laserfiche, which checks and validates the information before it’s officially submitted and reviewed by the district council. “It checks what we call the ‘Hurunui-isms,’ or the requirements that are very specific to our district.”  

With 500-600 applications per year, the checklist process has solved a long-standing headache for the building department and simplified consent review.   

On the back end, Laserfiche enables the council to keep records in a standardized way that is easy to navigate. 

“Each property has its own folder that contains an average of 40-50 pages on the details,” Linton said. “We have tens of thousands of documents that need to be identified and placed with the correct property. We applied a Laserfiche template with metadata information such as the building type, number, property ID, evaluation number and address. Laserfiche Workflow then automatically identifies, filters and files the documents in their correct folders.” 

Enhanced Contract Management with a Centralized Contract Register 

Also an integral part of the council’s infrastructure responsibilities is its ability to work with contractors to provide various services such as road construction, maintenance, waste management or cleaning services. A recent audit uncovered the need for more robust processes surrounding these contract approvals and service procurement — another area that Tayles understood Laserfiche could help. 

“We had a short time to implement a more robust, multi-step process,” Tayles said. “We sat down and said, ‘We can build this in Laserfiche Forms.’”  

The council now has a Contract Register in Laserfiche, which helps to centralize and organize the many projects, subcontracts under those projects and associated documentation that the council must manage. 

“Database lookups query the Laserfiche database directly to pick contract numbers and project numbers, so that we get a standardized naming format,” Tayles explained. “All those records automatically go into that contract or project folder, and we know they are correctly named and easily found later.”  

The biggest benefit to the council has been the transparency of the process. “By recording the decision-making, we can show why we went with a particular supplier, and show stewardship of the funds we receive from the central government,” Tayles said. After the new Contract Register was implemented, the council received glowing feedback from the central government on the new process. “We went from one end of the spectrum to the other.”

Building Trust: Improving Accountability and Transparency 

As part of its expansive range of services, Hurunui District Council prioritizes community engagement to build a strong community as well as ensure the mutual respect between government and constituents. Laserfiche’s ability to put information at the fingertips of those who need it provides a strong foundation on which to build that engagement.  

“We have a policy where we must archive every email, so another big project we’ve done is create our email archive in Laserfiche,” Tayles said. This archive provides referenceable information for legal compliance, auditing and accountability, as well as historical record and disaster recovery. “Now, all emails go into Office 365, and we use Laserfiche Connector to archive them in Laserfiche.”  

Tayles explained that Laserfiche was the right choice for the project not only for its archiving capabilities but also for its security tools. “Hurunui grows by 25,000 emails a week, and we are heavy on security,” he said. “We only want people to see their own emails. But we’re also subject to LGOIMA — the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act — where people can request all the information about a subject, so we’re able to give some people delegated access to the whole repository for searches.”  

Prior to using Laserfiche for the archive, the council was spending $50,000 per year on Mimecast, which they were able to retire and redirect funds toward additional security measures and other IT projects.  

A Flexible Solution to Any Problem 

Today, Hurunui District Council has over 220 active Laserfiche Forms, which span the organization’s full operations. “Forms are the backbone for multiple departments in the council,” Tayles said. “Other councils just can’t believe what we do with Laserfiche and how we make it work for our users. Laserfiche is an essential technology at Hurunui.”  

In addition to the processes that are ubiquitous in the government space, niche operations that are more common for district councils — from toilet cleaning and mowing to youth programming — also benefit from Laserfiche. One such process that illustrates Laserfiche’s flexibility: connecting lost dogs to their owners.  

“Because we manage the IT for [neighboring district council] Kaikoura, we built a solution to help them with lost dogs,” Tayles said. “They can get a call any time during the day or night about a dog, so they’ve implemented a solution called Doggone. Owners can consent to being texted so that they can be reunited with their dog quicker. Naturally, we had to get all the owner information into that system, but we also had to track whether people had given consent, because we are sharing contact information with a third party — there is a Laserfiche form for that.”  

Tayles and his team also used the Laserfiche API to connect Doggone to Kairkoura’s ERP system that houses the owner information. “We’re using Laserfiche workflow to get the owner information from the ERP and push it to Doggone,” Tayles said. “It also handles any requests for changes in the database, so that as dogs move or change owners, all systems remain up to date.” 

As Hurunui District Council works toward the CEO’s vision for 24/7 service, Laserfiche remains a core technology that will support its growing and changing needs.  

“What I enjoy about Laserfiche the most is the creative flexibility it gives,” Tayles added. “It gives me a lot of different tools to solve problems. There’s nothing prescribed about it — we can build our forms how we want, and we can set the metadata up the way we need it. There really hasn’t been a problem that I haven’t been able to solve using Laserfiche.”  

What is the difference between RPA and BPM?

For many organizations, achieving digital transformation is not an overnight process. Fortunately, there are tools to help organizations make significant advances and be better positioned to reap the rewards of a digital workplace. For years, business process management (BPM) technologies have been a core part of many organizations’ digital transformation strategies. As new innovations in the industry emerge, organizations are finding even more opportunities to become digitally adept. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been gaining popularity as the latest automation tool to drive workplace efficiency and productivity – but how is it different from traditional business process management approaches?

While distinct in their own right, RPA and BPM are complementary to each other and, when deployed together, provide a powerful platform to enable digital transformation organization-wide.

Key Differences between RPA and BPM

As RPA becomes more of a mainstream solution, how does it fit within the context of existing BPM technologies? Let’s investigate the key differences between RPA and BPM.
Difference Between RPA & BPM

Let’s take a step back to outline the definitions of RPA and BPM as distinct methodologies.

Definition of RPA

Robotic Process Automation is a software technology that enables employees to better focus on high priority tasks by pushing routine, monotonous tasks to software “robots” to complete. These robots work directly across application user interfaces, automatically inputting data and triggering actions across multiple systems acting on the behalf of an employee. As a business user-friendly tool that does not involve any programming, robotic process automation technology enables non-technical professionals to self-serve and configure robots for themselves to solve their own automation challenges.

Definition of BPM

BPM is a strategic approach that concentrates on reshaping an organization’s existing business processes to achieve optimal efficiency and productivity. BPM software is the foundational backbone to facilitate completion of an organization’s projects, providing a variety of tools to help improve and streamline how business processes are performed. BPM software components can include business analytics, workflow engines, business rules, web forms, and collaboration tools. Often large-scale projects, BPM process improvement initiatives can impact an organization’s technology, employees, and customers, bringing about significant transformational returns.

BPM and RPA as a Combined Approach

Given their similar goals of increasing productivity and efficiency, BPM and RPA are not competing approaches and work together in harmony. RPA can be a valuable tool in boosting gains achieved with a traditional BPM system.

In many cases, an organization may not always have the resources and time to fully implement a completely integrated and automated process or have a process that does not require any human involvement. Implementing BPM and RPA together can bring about much greater process automation and value that one technology approach alone may not be as positioned to achieve.

Example of BPM & RPA in Action: Network Access Request

Members of the IT department are involved with a number of highly important responsibilities for the organization but may be hindered by a number of repetitive, manual tasks that do not require complex decision making.

Below is a simplified version of an automated network access request process where an employee submits a request to be granted access to or be removed from a certain software application. After being approved by a supervisor, IT can then review the request and complete the request as appropriate.

In this situation, the process has been automated with a BPM system, but still involves some manual work by IT. Completing the request could involve logging into multiple applications, opening up the appropriate pages to grant access rights, applying the appropriate settings, logging out of the applications, and marking the request as completed.

As an individual request, performing these tasks may not take a significant amount of time, but if it is happening multiple times a day, it can distract from other valuable actions that a skilled IT professional will need to complete.

While IT may want to closely monitor the requests to see who is gaining access to what, the actual actions involved with granting access may not be as important. Adding an RPA bot to perform the manual tasks that will likely need to be repeated multiple times as employees change roles, join the organization, etc., will further optimize the overall process flow and free up the IT staff to focus time on other priority work. It benefits the organization to have IT professionals focus their energy on tasks that actually require human decision-making and nuanced consideration.

Tackling Repetitive, Time-Consuming Work

For professionals, moving between applications to perform specific actions is a common activity. With this so-called “swivel chair” work, employees must constantly switch between multiple systems to complete a particular task in an automated process. Possibly the applications the employees are working with did not have an API available to integrate with or a complete integration was not justified to reduce the employees’ manual work. Manual tasks could include actions such as data entry, searching, copy and pasting, or pulling together reports from different places.

RPA technology helps fill in these types of gaps in a BPM process, allowing organizations to achieve an even higher level of efficiency that may not have been as possible before. Existing systems remain in place, where bots would perform the monotonous actions a person would typically need to perform. Once the bot has completed its task, BPM can take over, pushing follow-up actions and results to the employee to complete or review. Offloading time-consuming, repetitive tasks to bots as part of a BPM solution will help enable employees better focus their talents on more productive work only they can do.

Digital Transformation Driven by BPM and RPA

Although BPM and RPA technologies can be deployed separately in digital transformation initiatives, it is when they are strategically implemented together that their individual benefits are compounded. BPM and RPA complement each other, forming a powerful duo that can help organizations further deliver on their process automation goals. In the future, RPA will become even more of an incorporated part of traditional BPM systems and organizations’ overall digital transformation toolkit.

Laserfiche has long been a provider of powerful BPM tools including workflow, web forms, business reporting and analytics, and capture solutions to streamline and transform business processes.

Key Differences between RPA & BPM [Text Version]
 Robotic Process AutomationBusiness Process Management
TechnologySoftware Technology

 

Software “bots” are configured to complete routine, monotonous tasks that an employee would normally have to do

Holistic Technology

 

Encompasses a wide range of software technology components including business analytics, workflow engine, and more to optimize business processes for maximum value and efficiency

Automation FocusManual Tasks

 

Minimizing manual, repetitive, and rule-based tasks that do not require complex decision making

End-to-End Process Automation

 

Re-engineering process flows to eliminate bottlenecks, connect systems, and increase productivity enterprise-wide

Deployment EffortLow

 

Non-disruptively works across an organization’s existing processes and applications without requiring coding or extensive training

High

 

A longer-term effort which could require dedicated technical resources, depending on process complexity and depth of integrations

Business ImpactQuick & Immediate

 

Returns can be realized quickly and cost-effectively, but implementations may not always address underlying process inefficiencies

Significant & Transformational

 

Wide gains can be achieved in overall productivity, agility, cost reduction, efficiency, and compliance

Want to Learn More?

For an overview of how process automation can help your organization streamline operations, watch our webinar, ECM 101: An Introduction to Process Automation Capabilities.

Download the Guide to Robotic Process Automation to take a closer look at the features, benefits and use cases of RPA.

Getting Started with Laserfiche eBook

Laserfiche ECM software eBook guide

What’s inside this free eBook?

Getting Started with Laserfiche is your quick start guide to using the platform with ease.

This guide walks you through the most commonly used features to help you easily master the basics

This resource provides a high-level overview of Laserfiche’s interface and platform capabilities, plus bonus tips to make the platform even more intuitive.

In this eBook:

  • Tour of Laserfiche to get you familiar with the user interface
  • Quick guide of the most popular features
  • Tips & tricks to customize the settings for your organization’s needs
  • A glossary defining key Laserfiche terminology

How Oakland County Drives Innovation for Better Citizen Service

Located just north of Detroit, Oakland County, MI, has more than 60 cities, villages and townships with over 1.2 million people living within its borders.

The county’s ongoing commitment to innovation—led by CIO Phil Bertolini, who was inducted to the CIO Hall of Fame in 2017—has resulted in award-winning initiatives such as the G2G Marketplace (an online resource for governments to research, purchase and implement technology solutions and professional services), and Automation Alley, the state’s nonprofit technology and manufacturing business association.

“At the end of the day, my job is about working with a team that provides innovation and collaboration for Oakland County to improve customer service,” Bertolini says.

Oakland County’s IT team recently assessed its document management system, which was becoming time- and cost-intensive to maintain and update in order to keep up with the county’s constant state of digital transformation.

Increasing Information Access and Automating Processes

After evaluating a number of options, the county selected a Laserfiche enterprise content management solution to replace its legacy system. “The Laserfiche team was able to prototype and show us exactly how we would be able to use the software in our organization,” says Kevin Bertram, IT Applications Services Leader. “That was a key factor for us.”

Oakland County is now implementing Laserfiche across departments and business units including the county courts, to provide better access to information and automate key government functions.

“We want to make those processes more efficient, more automatic and better for the public,” says Bill Jobes, Program Manager at Oakland County. “In order to grow, we have to innovate.”

Empowering Employees and Citizens

By using Laserfiche to digitize information and automate processes, Oakland County aims to empower government employees to streamline operations and improve citizen services.

Benefits include:
  • Reclaimed IT staff time previously spent maintaining and supporting the legacy system
  • Increased access to information for authorized government employees
  • Around-the-clock access to public information and services for citizens through online portals
  • Better reporting and analytics for department leaders, leading to more informed decisions about resource allocation
  • Enhanced transparency of processes for citizens who want to be kept informed of how their service requests are progressing

“We’re always looking for opportunities to be more effective and really bring that cost for service or cost per unit down,” Bertram says. “Not for a bottom-line profit like in the private sector, but to try to reduce the cost of service to our constituents, and use their tax dollars appropriately and as wisely as possible.”

North County Transit District Improves Public Records Access and Retention

The North County Transit District manages public transportation operations in the North San Diego County area, including light rail and community rail systems, buses and disability transportation.

“We move approximately 12 million people a year,” says Sonya Finley, Document Control Coordinator. “We’re small in size, but we do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to transit.”

Maintaining proper access to public records is critical to compliance with regulatory requirements. As a transportation organization, the transit district’s key processes—such as confirming staff members are following standard operating procedures—also ensure the safety of the operation’s millions of passengers.

Moving Away from Shared Drives

In the past, the transit district stored documents on shared drives without a standard organization method, making it difficult for staff to find the right versions for public information requests and new projects. “If you can’t find the documents, you can’t really do business,” Finley says.

To improve staff efficiency, the transit district needed to create a more centralized structure for document management and an organized repository for records retention.

Streamlining Records Retention

Using Laserfiche, the transit district created an organized shared repository for public records as well as department-specific document structures. “If they’re in one centralized place, then my job is a lot easier when it’s time to do a records destruction,” Finley says.

The transit district also used Laserfiche to add in workflows and digital forms to automate processes such as time off requests and new employee onboarding. “The document flows through, and boom, the person gets it. They fill it out and it moves to the next step,” Finley says. “Nothing gets lost on somebody’s desk.”

Benefits include:
  • Reduced staff time spent finding and retrieving documents for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests
  • Quicker submission, review and approvals for contracts, time off requests, staff reports, project approvals and more
  • A more organized, compliant records retention and destruction process

“When staff comes in the morning, they’re opening Laserfiche; it has become part of our daily routine,” Finley adds. “When we have that approval process, those things get cleared and reviewed in a timelier manner. That ensures that all of our staff and even our contractors are following standard operating procedures, so that we can ensure the safety of our passengers.”

Digitization Empowers the Arkansas Department of Labor to Better Serve Constituents

The Arkansas Department of Labor works to ensure workplace safety for more than 3 million citizens each year, overseeing inspections for everything from elevator operations and amusement park rides to child labor, minimum wage and overtime practices.

Structured information access is critical for the departments’ inspectors to review claims quickly and improve workplace safety standards.

Identifying Inefficiencies

“The biggest challenge that we face is making it easy for the people that we service,” says Ken Anderson, Senior Software Analyst for the department. “We want to be able to efficiently serve them and respond to them quickly.”

With claim documents spread across hundreds of filing cabinets, employees previously spent days trying to find the documents they needed during the inspection process. Wage claims could take up to three months to complete.

The department turned to Laserfiche enterprise content management software to reduce the length of inspections by digitizing the wage claim process and provide instant search and retrieval.

Going Digital for Faster Constituent Service

With Laserfiche, the department created an electronic form which enables anyone to submit a wage claim online. The claim is automatically assigned to an investigator for review and stored in the Laserfiche digital repository. Inspectors in the field access Laserfiche on iPads, enabling them to instantly update the claim with new documentation in real-time. Throughout the process, Laserfiche automatically notifies the submitter of the status of their wage claim.

The new process has expedited the department’s public service and produced significant ROI for the use of taxpayer dollars.

Benefits include:
  • The department can complete wage claims in 36 days instead of 120 days
  • The department saves $60,000 annually on building and storage space for records
  • Investigators receive reports from inspectors in field instantly

“Not only is Laserfiche effective within the agency, but it means so much to the person waiting on that check,” Anderson says. “To be able to get it 70 or 90 days sooner is so important to them.”

Linn-Benton Community College Enhances Student Experience with Streamlined Transcript Evaluations

With over 22,000 students, Linn-Benton Community College is one of the largest community college systems in Oregon.

A growing student population placed increased demands on the college’s Enrollment Services division, which processes around 15,000 applications each year. In order to keep up with the demand, the college needed to expedite transcript review and find an efficient way to inform students about their course options and graduation goals.

Identifying Areas for Efficiency

“Before Laserfiche, it took us about six to eight weeks to complete a transcript evaluation,” says Amy Sikora, Assistant Director of Enrollment Services. “We would get transcripts in from the students, and then they would just sit there unless the student filled out an online request form asking us to evaluate them.

“We had students calling us all the time asking if we received their transcript or if we evaluated their transcript,” Sikora adds. “It was a really clunky process.”

Driving Digital Student Services

The college worked with Laserfiche solution provider CDI to implement a Laserfiche solution for an online transcript evaluation service that:
  • Allows students to instantly upload transcripts and request an evaluation
  • Automatically assigns transcripts to a reviewer
  • Instantly cross-references transcripts with the college’s Banner system
  • Analyzes and automatically emails enrollment criteria to students with further instructions and outcomes

By applying this process to class petitions, transfer credits, course refunds and more, staff can stay in constant communication with students about their options.

“Students are communicated with every step of the way, which is great because it saves us a ton of phone calls,” says Sikora. “Staff like it because it just does everything for them. It helps in many different ways—for students going into special admissions programs, and even bypassing placement testing can be really beneficial for students.”

Benefits include:
  • Students can instantly submit and request transcript reviews online and receive personalized instructions on next steps
  • Average time to review transcripts has been shortened from six weeks to a single week
  • Staff workloads can be reconfigured in real time based on transcript volume and document types

“The goals were to reduce the time that it takes to evaluate transcripts, keep everybody notified and just have the process flow better,” said Sikora. “Laserfiche solved all those things for us.”

Laserfiche Enables Digital Transformation in the North Carolina Division of Water Resources

The North Carolina Division of Water Resources’ mission is to protect the state’s surface water and groundwater resources, which includes ensuring safe drinking water, issuing pollution control permits, evaluating environmental water quantity and quality, and enforcing environmental regulations.

The division’s functions—from day-to-day operations to long-term initiatives—require the collaboration of multiple agencies, communication with citizens and the relaying of time-sensitive decisions and documents.

“When it comes to project-related decisions, we have a 30-day turnaround, and sometimes we need to send information across the state,” says Beverly Strickland, Laserfiche Administrator for the North Carolina Division of Water Resources. These deadlines, coupled with the growing need to operate more efficiently, led the division to examine how it was managing information.

Changing Tides

“When we used to snail-mail documents, it was really hard to meet deadlines,” Strickland says. “If the mail gets lost or delayed, you’ve just waived a project. It doesn’t matter how big it is.”

To facilitate faster review and decision-making, the division digitized documents with Laserfiche enterprise content management software. Using Laserfiche, employees can now perform quick searches for information, automatically archive records and easily share documents with other employees or the public by simply sending a link.

Even employees who work in remote areas benefit from the division’s digital transformation. “We have people in the mountains and on the coast that have small bandwidth,” Strickland says. “Laserfiche enables them to view necessary information without having to download an entire PDF.”

The Wave of the Future

The division recently began automating business processes using Laserfiche, which will unlock even more efficiencies as managers gather data on workflow and resource allocation. The Laserfiche Business Process Library, which provides downloadable templated solutions to automate hundreds of common business processes, has been a starting point for the division.

“What I love about the Business Process Library is that I’m not having to reinvent the wheel,” Strickland says. “I can sit with people involved with the process and say, ‘What do you need to see?’ and make adjustments to what Laserfiche has already created.”

Benefits include:
  • Shortened response times to requests for information from days to minutes
  • Reclaimed staff time that is now used for tasks such as writing permits and enforcing environmental regulations
  • Digitized information that enables the division to automate processes for even more efficiency

“It’s the wave of the future,” Strickland says of the division’s digital transformation. “If we want to work toward processes that are more efficient for citizens as well as staff members, we have to find those time savings.”

Alabama Department of Mental Health Digitizes Patient Records

The Alabama Department of Mental Health provides critical services to over 200,000 patients annually at hospitals and clinics across the state. With medical archives dating back over 150 years, the agency must manage patient data in a manner that enables staff to easily and quickly find the information they need.

Implementing Agency-Wide Records Management

“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act asked all organizations, such as ours, to demonstrate meaningful use for information and have electronic health records to keep funding with Medicare and Medicaid,” said Cindy Shrum, Director of Information Systems. “We want to maintain our Medicare or Medicaid funding, but having an electronic records management system is also just easier. We’re able to get the information when we need it.”

Upon the recommendation of the State of Alabama, the agency selected Laserfiche as its records management solution. Laserfiche’s ease of use and competitive pricing meant the department could more productively use federal funding to create an agency-wide records management system for patient records.

Improving Patient Care through Staff Efficiency

The department partnered with the state, which was already using Laserfiche, to procure the software; this partnership also shortened implementation time and improved data sharing. The department has since digitized all medical records at Bryce Hospital, the state’s oldest and largest inpatient psychiatric facility.

“We’ve got them organized so you can see the physical history, the summary, and the progress notes,” Shrum says. “What I like about Laserfiche is that in just three clicks, we’re in the electronic health record. For a clinician, especially our doctors, that time matters to them.” Benefits include:

  • • Eliminated the need to build a warehouse for patient archives, freeing up additional funds for patient services
  • • Created efficient process to automatically digitize, organize and file full charts of new and archived patient data in a shared repository accessible to clinicians and nurses across departments
  • • Integrated document management with the agency’s CoCentrix medical system eliminates repetitive data entry
  • • Increased compliance with federal laws, ensuring continued Medicaid and Medicare funding

These financial and operational improvements have ultimately enabled the Alabama Department of Mental Health to provide better quality health care and a greater volume of patient visits. “We started out small, but the potential is unlimited,” Shrum says.

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St. Louis Public School District Streamlines HR Management

As one of the largest urban school districts in Missouri, the St. Louis Public School District oversees 70 schools and 4,700 employees. For the district’s HR office, transparency and quick communication between hiring and budgeting teams is critical for efficiently allocating staffing resources to classrooms throughout the year.

Reducing the Paper Burden

The district maintains over 4.5 million documents dating back to the early 1900s. To find files, staff previously had travel to a storage facility 10 miles away. This paper-intensive search and retrieval could often delay hiring decisions that require multi-department reviews.

“If the request for a new position involved funds outside of what the district was allocated, the information could really go a million different places,” says Clarissa Buckley, Coordinator for Human Resources Information Systems. “We had almost eight levels of approval built into the previous process that made having a paper form extremely difficult and cumbersome. And we never want to reach a point where we’re asking, ‘Do we let this classroom go without a teacher because we’re waiting on this paper form to get approved?’ ”

Streamlining Staff Requisitions

The district began using Laserfiche to digitally organize its archived and active paper storage, and quickly moved on to automate new hiring, benefits enrollment and other core HR services.

Staff requisitions are now completed in hours, with all involved parties able to share information and collaborate on decisions. “Laserfiche helps everyone stay on track,” Buckley says. “We can always see and monitor where our requisitions are caught up in the process.” Instant information access also means the HR department can better service teachers and staff with timely W2s, emergency information, student transcripts and more.

Benefits include:
  • 80 percent of the district’s HR active records and historical archives have been digitized
  • HR documents are instantly accessible, where previously staff needed to wait 48 hours to retrieve a file from a storage facility
  • Staffing requisitions are completed in three hours instead of three weeks

“Our teachers are beginning to see when they bring other records to us, not only are we able to receive that information and quickly digitize it, but we’re also able to retrieve it for them if needed in the future,” Buckley says.