Barranquilla Chamber of Commerce Supports Economic Growth Through Online Services

Barranquilla is a cosmopolitan city and one of the largest ports in the northern Caribbean Coast region of Colombia. Rapid urban growth and economic development has transformed the region into a tourism hub and an active business community.

The Barranquilla Chamber of Commerce provides its services to over 72,000 companies that operate in northern Colombia and is tasked with fielding thousands of registry-related requests annually. To help support the area’s dynamic development, the chamber used Laserfiche to digitally transform its operations by giving affiliates the ability to access key services online. The initiative met government requirements and initially eliminated approximately $50,000 in annual costs related to document scanning. Additionally, the chamber’s use of Laserfiche created new opportunities to offer affiliates more convenient, faster online services by automating other core processes.

Changing With the Times

While the Barranquilla Chamber of Commerce prides itself on promoting the competitiveness and economic prosperity of the region, in 2015, the chamber’s processes were not keeping pace with the area’s accelerated growth. That year, the Colombian government mandated that chamber services must be made accessible online in order to meet modern business expectations and enable the country to compete in today’s global economy.

“One of our biggest customer service challenges was to take our traditional services on-site and make them available over the internet,” said Jorge Andon, public registry lawyer for the chamber. “We needed a platform that could satisfy the registry related requests of our more than 70,000 affiliates in a fast and safe way.”

The chamber’s services include enabling citizens to make requests related to the legal creation of businesses, modifying and renewing company information, and dissolving companies.

Previously, to access these services, citizens were required to travel or mail in the necessary documents to the chamber’s office in Barranquilla. For example, to create a company, citizens need to file documents—such as statutes of incorporation and standardized forms—which are received and reviewed by a lawyer who ensures they meet legal requirements. If they do, the documents are registered and the company is created. If information was incomplete or did not meet legal requirements, the process was delayed—documents had to be returned to requesting party, revised as needed and re-submitted to the chamber.

“Document returns constituted around 20% of our operation, which added up to many working hours,” Andon said.

In addition to streamlining these requests, the chamber also needed to make certain documents available online as part of the government’s initiative to increase access to public information.

After assessing a number of solutions, the chamber selected Laserfiche, which would enable the organization to digitally transform how it provides services while offering a centralized place to manage documents and make them available to the public. “Laserfiche met our expectations in regards to information security and integration with other core applications,” Andon added. “We also found that Laserfiche is characterized by innovative solutions in the field of document management software. Having a certified Laserfiche Solution Provider located in Barranquilla was another strong determinant.”

“As a Colombian-based business with many customers, we understand the challenges the Barranquilla Chamber of Commerce faced,” said Jaime Barrios Perez, CEO of Gestech, the Laserfiche Solution Provider that supports the chamber’s implementation. “Laserfiche is a great platform for the chamber since it meets the organization’s current digital transformation needs, while also enabling them to create new solutions and maintain scalability for future growth.

Streamlining Services for Affiliates and Employees

The chamber brought its paper-based registration process online by building a Laserfiche public portal, where affiliates can submit electronic forms to register for business licenses, update operational information and submit other requests.

Rather than having to fill out pages of paperwork and produce physical copies of documents for chamber employees to scan, affiliates can now log into the chamber’s online portal and complete a Laserfiche Form to request the desired service. There, affiliates can also upload documents related to their business’s public registry—such as articles of incorporation and bylaws; appointments of directors and administrators; or bankruptcy or liquidation documentation.

To streamline the process for chamber employees, the chamber used Laserfiche to design an automated workflow which routes information to a public registry lawyer for review. If documents meet legal requirements, the lawyer will approve them and Laserfiche will send the affiliate a tax and service bill, which can be paid online or on-site.

“The ability to request services online has brought an array of benefits for users, such as reduction in travel expenses, and reduced service response times,” Andon says.

Once payment is made, documents are inscribed in the public registry (performed by an application that is integrated with Laserfiche) and available to the public online through a Laserfiche portal. As part of the workflow, Laserfiche sends a notification letter to the affiliate once documents are inscribed. If documents don’t meet legal requirements, however, Laserfiche will notify the affiliate, and the system allows the affiliate to then upload corrected documents using the same filing number within one month.

“By reducing document returns, we also reduce reprocessing requests. As a lawyer, if I have a filing and I return it, then the chamber has to receive it again, and review it again, and scan it again,” Andon says. “Being able to reduce the percentage of documents returned is saving us time, effort and money.”

The automated process has dramatically accelerated the chamber’s response time, enabling better customer service.

“Some chambers of commerce take up to 10 to 15 days to process some registration requests and we take less than 24 hours to process them. Other chambers are now starting to look at us to see what we’re doing to solve these problems and deliver such fast service.”

—Jorge Andon, Barranquilla Chamber of Commerce Public Registry Lawyer

Growing Opportunity for Colombian Business

As a result of the Laserfiche solution, organization-wide savings include a reduction in employee time spent receiving, scanning and returning documents. The chamber has also enabled users to correct large documents without returning them by using Laserfiche’s version control function—which allows the organization to modify documents while keeping a record of changes as well as the intact originals. Improved process management has reduced the risk of complaints and consequential fines imposed by the regulatory commission.

Since the chamber’s success with affiliate service requests, it has implemented Laserfiche in almost every department, including accounting/finance, human resources, legal, operations, sales, executive, information technology, marketing and records management.

“The chamber saves approximately $50,000 per year as a direct result of our online services,” Andon says. “We have also seen increasing ROI at the organization-wide level that is yet to be determined.”

The automated processes have also enabled the chamber to become more data-driven. Using reporting and analytics features in Laserfiche, the chamber creates real-time reports on process health that have led to faster decision making, and improved customer service even further. This has led to reputational improvement of the organization at the national level.

“We implemented Laserfiche in the chamber for two particular reasons: to offer registration services online and to publish our public documents online so people could access them,” Andon explains. “But the benefits we received were much more than just that. Problems we’ve had in the chamber for years—we could solve them in just a couple of weeks. Designing and implementing processes in Laserfiche is so easy. If you can imagine it, you can do it.”

To learn more about implementing technology for enterprise-wide change, click here to download a free eBook, “5 Strategies for Driving Digital Transformation.”

Keller Independent School District Builds a Culture Focused on Students

Everything that Keller Independent School District (ISD) employees do is focused on providing an exceptional educational experience for students, whether it be teaching in the classroom, maintaining the facilities, or offering support and guidance for students and staff alike. This commitment to student success is evident in all of the school district’s business processes, many of which have been automated and streamlined using Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM). The school district now uses Laserfiche in almost all of its departments, increasing efficiency. This has resulted in staff time being redirected to address students’ needs, while also building stronger interpersonal relationships among staff members.

Championing Change

Keller ISD serves more than 35,000 students across Tarrant County, Texas, and employs more than 4,000 staff members. During a recent period of rapid growth, it became clear that there was a lack of uniformity across major business processes. Each department was leveraging a different ECM solution, and each team had their own way of managing core business processes and procedures. This created information silos, which delayed processes and built a culture of mistrust due to a lack of accountability.

New employee onboarding was one process in particular that lacked consistency. “Before Laserfiche the process was essentially a bunch of phone calls and hand-waves,” said Clinton Mehta, systems integration architect at Keller ISD. “It could take weeks, even months, before the process was complete because the process was different depending on the person or department involved.”

Previously, the onboarding process included more than 30 pages of paperwork that needed to be filled out manually. Once new employees completed the paperwork, they would have to physically mail in the documents or deliver them on-site. From there, the process varied from case to case.

Today, the process is completely automated using Laserfiche. The district implemented electronic forms in order to enable new employees to submit their required information online instead of being handed a pile of paperwork to fill out and return. After submission, an automated workflow shepherds the documents through the necessary reviews and approvals. Onboarding can now be completed in a matter of days rather than months, and all parties involved are kept up to date on the progress.

“The HR onboarding process was a quick win that we could use as a selling point to promote adoption in other departments,” said Joe Griffin, chief technology officer at Keller ISD. “There was an initial resistance to adoption because the trust and understanding was not there. This successful implementation in HR was the catalyst for a district-wide adoption.”

Reimagining Student Records

With the success of automating HR onboarding, the Keller ISD team wanted to use Laserfiche to completely reimagine how the district manages student records.

“There is one story that comes to mind when I think about how student records were managed before Laserfiche,” said Mehta. “We had an employee who was transferring student files to another location, and she had placed the folders in her Gucci bag. She had made a pit stop along the way, left the designer bag in her car, and someone broke into the car and stole the bag! Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

Today, the district leverages Laserfiche to manage enrollment documents, test scores, sensitive personal information, legal documents, special education records and more. Laserfiche has enabled the team to centralize student information, manage the lifecycle of documents and automate routine tasks related to records. Authorized employees have easy access to accurate and up-to-date student information, and can seamlessly process student transfers. The electronic records management system has also helped the school district to standardize filing and better enforce records management policies, supporting regulatory compliance.

“Keller ISD is considered a pioneer in student records management, with other districts looking to them as the marquee example,” said Cody Bettis, CEO of DocuNav Solutions, the Laserfiche Solution Provider that supports Keller ISD’s implementation. “It’s exciting to see the district lead the way for tech innovation within the K-12 space.”

“It’s quite an accomplishment to have other districts mimicking our solution for student records,” said Griffin. “We have set up our system in such a way that if we were to ever change our registration system or process, we can easily migrate our workflows so nothing is lost and there isn’t a gap in performance. This has a major impact on student success, and it’s exciting to support our district’s mission through IT support.”

Looking Ahead with Laserfiche

Keller ISD has received a significant return on investment with Laserfiche. In addition to streamlining business processes and creating transparency throughout the district, the district has:
  • Replaced five different software systems with a single solution, initially saving the district $100,000, as well as an estimated savings of $70,000 annually.
  • Saved more than $11,000 as a result of reducing paper use in core business processes.
  • Met the requirements of the Paperwork Reduction Act, which imposes procedural requirements on agencies that wish to collect information from the public.
  • Created a culture of collaboration that has enhanced trust among district employees.

“Once we realized the full potential of Laserfiche, we were excited to expand the solution beyond the storage of digital documents,” said Griffin. “An added bonus was that the software doesn’t just streamline processes, but it also builds relationships by creating transparency and providing accountability. That was a major selling point for us.”

Today, Keller ISD uses Laserfiche in almost 100% of the district in departments such as human resources, finance, IT and student services. Looking ahead, Keller ISD has big plans for its use of Laserfiche in the future: With a successful district-wide implementation, the Keller ISD team is exploring how they can use the technology beyond administrative operations, and to improve processes for students and their families. Some of the student- and family-facing processes that the Keller ISD team plans to enhance with Laserfiche include student enrollment and registration, field trip permissions, and Career and Technical Education (CTE) practicum applications and processes.

“Eventually, we want to provide user-licenses to parents and students so they can be a part of the forms process,” said Mehta. “Right now, we are exploring how we can create a custom solution that would enable us to allow secure access to each parent. There is a lot more we can do in terms of use and integrations that go well beyond document storage. The options are endless.”

Focusing on People and Quality

G&J Pepsi, the largest family-owned and operated Pepsi franchise bottler, built its business on an unwavering commitment to customer service. In order to maintain that focus, the company has aimed to operate as efficiently as possible, digitally transforming much of its business in order to free up employee time for providing the products, solutions and services that exceed customer needs.

As part of this transformation, G&J Pepsi recently centralized its accounts payable operation. By using Laserfiche to streamline and automate invoice processing, G&J Pepsi has reduced managers’ repetitive manual work, enabling them to dedicate more time to strategic decision-making, oversight and interacting with customers. The new system gives the company tighter control over disbursements, supports regulatory compliance, reduces costs per invoice processed, and has increased efficiency across the organization.

An Accounts Payable Refresh

G&J Pepsi is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, with 13 locations across Ohio and Kentucky, and more than 1,600 employees. With thousands of invoices being processed weekly, the company recognized the need to centralize and automate accounts payable.

“Accounts payable used to be in four different buildings,” says Jeremy Harper, director of accounting operations at G&J Pepsi. “As we continue to grow, we knew it was going to be more difficult to process invoices if they were done in different locations, and they were done manually. We needed a way to make the process digital, collect what we needed, push invoices to managers for review and approval, and pull information later if we needed it.”

The legacy manual process involved invoices coming in through the mail, and being physically sorted and placed in managers’ mailboxes. Managers would sign off on the invoices, then the invoices were manually collected and matched up with relevant documents, such as packing slips. An AP clerk would then enter the information into the company’s AP system, Microsoft Dynamics GP; the documents would also have to be scanned into a repository.

“The volume of invoices was growing, and the company was looking at hiring another AP clerk in order to manage them,” Harper says. “The cost of manual processing would continue to grow.”

G&J Pepsi had been using another document management solution to electronically manage records for nearly a decade, so the company turned to Laserfiche Solution Provider Gordon Flesch for support on implementing a new workflow for invoices.

“In order to maintain its commitment to service and support compliance, G&J Pepsi needed a solution that would integrate with other core technology systems and improve efficiency,” says Bill Dermody, managed content manager at Gordon Flesch. “Laserfiche supports the company’s goals and has innovative process automation and reporting capabilities that G&J Pepsi can leverage as the business evolves.”

Today, invoice processing requires very little human intervention once invoices are pushed into Laserfiche. “Once invoices are pulled into Laserfiche we have a lot of workflow automation that kicks in and helps streamline the process,” Harper explains. “Metadata is added automatically, and then invoices are routed to different managers across the company.”

In the new Laserfiche solution, invoices are automatically sent to the appropriate managers. Once approved, invoices are routed back to the AP department for final review. As a result of G&J Pepsi’s integration between Laserfiche and Microsoft Dynamics GP, the solution automatically creates the invoice vouchers and, once invoices are paid, check numbers, dates and payment information are pushed back down to each Laserfiche document so all the critical information along with the image is stored in one place.

“It’s fully automated from beginning to end,” Harper says. “And we can pull any of these documents at any time to check them if we have questions.”

Invoice processing is now scalable, and the company has created a clearer separation of duties: Employees who post AP vouchers cannot process disbursements, and vice versa.

Transforming Operations: A Winning Recipe

As a result of the AP automation, G&J Pepsi has been able to centralize its entire accounting function by streamlining processes and giving the company more visibility into operations and control over invoice and payment information. The centralization has enabled the company to consolidate vendor payments, introducing new efficiencies and cost savings. G&J can also identify errors prior to posting payments through the automated workflow which performs a reasonableness check on dates, and verifies that the sum of distributions are equal to invoice amounts.

“Having to manually pass paper documents around introduces a lot of risk,” Harper said. “You’re not completely certain of who signed for it or when; you have to check whether a manager is authorized to sign for certain amounts; documents get delayed and sometimes lost. Once those documents leave your desk, you lose control over what happens to them.”

Now, automated workflows enable the AP department to standardize processing to eliminate issues like lost, duplicate or late payments. Audits—which G&J Pepsi undergoes each year to support compliance with industry regulations—are now much easier since all information related to invoices and payments can be found with a few clicks.

“We’ve gotten great feedback,” Harper says. “Managers that are tasked with approving invoices are very happy with it.”

The company is able to process over 1,000 invoices weekly with just two AP clerks. “As we continue to use the solution and process invoices, the process cost per invoices is dropping, and increasing the bottom line,” Harper explains.

One of the greatest benefits of the solution, however, has been reclaiming managers’ time for more value-added work that requires human interaction, such as oversight, monitoring and, most importantly, customer service. With a history that dates back to 1925, G&J Pepsi has grown from a small operation to the largest family-owned Pepsi bottler on its dedication to customers and ability to respond to their needs.

G&J Pepsi is now looking to automate more key processes, such as contract management, in order to support companywide digital transformation initiatives.

“Laserfiche has a ton of flexibility, and the integration with Dynamics was a big selling point,” Harper adds. “Laserfiche best fit our needs from the beginning to the end of the process.”

Want to learn how AP automation can give you a strategic advantage? Download this infographic and start tackling the challenge of invoice processing.

Reimagine Patient Care

Symbria—a leading provider of rehabilitation, wellness and pharmacy programs and services for senior living and post-acute care providers—recently reinvented the way it manages plan of care documents for patients. By using Laserfiche to digitally transform the process, Symbria eliminated repetitive, manual tasks once required of managerial therapists, creating more time for them to focus on providing the best possible patient care. The new, automated process is also scalable, a priority for the company which expects continued growth in the coming years.

Moving Away from Manual Inefficiencies

As part of its comprehensive programming, Symbria provides services to partners in various settings including skilled nursing, assisted living, independent living, outpatient and home health facilities.

Symbria’s rehab program managers—managerial therapists at these facilities—are required to have “plan of care” documents signed by patients’ physicians. Like prescriptions, these documents prescribe occupational therapy rather than medications.

Initially, Symbria was using a manual process to obtain physicians’ signatures. Once a patient was evaluated, the rehab program manager would generate the plan of care document, which must be signed by a physician within 30 days of the evaluation in order to receive reimbursement for services and avoid denials.

Symbria staff would subsequently use implemented therapy software to print the plan of care form. The document would have to be physically carried to the physician within the building, or the rehab program manager would have to search for a fax number online in order to obtain the signature.

After finally receiving the signature, the rehab program manager would scan the paper form and upload it back to the therapy software to be attached to the patient’s file. Additionally, he or she many times would have to email the document or physically carry it to the medical records department at the facility, since a copy was required there as well. The process was time-consuming, particularly for the rehab program manager, who could spend considerable time locating the physician, reminding his/her office repeatedly to sign the form, and more.

“Our old process was completely manual and exceedingly costly to administer,” said Mark Candiotti, national director-operations liaison at Symbria. “It’s a huge burden on our rehab program managers that detracts from their primary job.” Beyond simply being a headache, the process took time from therapists’ primary focus: providing therapy to patients.

Seamless Digital Tools

The Symbria team worked with Laserfiche solution provider Proven IT to implement Laserfiche and automate the plan of care process, eliminating almost all of the manual tasks associated with it for managerial therapists. Today, the rehab program manager generates the plan of care digitally, uploading it to Symbria’s corporate office using a Laserfiche Form. The electronic form is automatically read for the physician’s registration number and other vital information, so the document can be identified and disseminated with minimal human intervention.

The plan of care form also includes a barcode, so once the physician signs it and sends it back digitally, Symbria can quickly correlate it to the appropriate patient. A Symbria data entry staff member verifies the signature and date on the document, then uploads the signed document to the therapy software—essentially removing the rehab program manager from the process. Simultaneously, the document is digitally sent to the medical records department.

The therapist’s role during the process is solely to generate the plan of care form and upload it.

“Our teams has been extremely receptive to the new process since making the switch,” added Candiotti. “We’ve really freed up the rehab program managers so they are really embracing the change. As we continue to use this process and automate more, the expected ROI is high and we expect scalability, which is important to us.”

The new process has already resulted in impressive time savings for Symbria. Since implementing the new automated process, individual rehab program managers save approximately two to five hours each week. With Symbria servicing over 150 clients, this increased efficiency has been significant for the entire organization.

Additionally, Symbria has automated key HR and accounts payable processes. The new optimized, digital processes support the organization’s aim to surround clients and partners with the creative, future-focused solutions they need to thrive in a fast-changing healthcare landscape.

“Digital transformation is a priority for Symbria,” said Hien Do, software development manager at Symbria. “For any company of our size, you’ll have a lot of legacy systems, and all of these efficiency gains through technology, such as Laserfiche, are what we’re pushing toward. We continue to challenge our employees to help us automate any processes they have in mind.”

To learn more about how process automation can support healthcare staff working on the front lines of patient care while supporting compliance and patient confidentiality, visit the Laserfiche Healthcare Solutions page.

New Caney Independent School District’s District-Wide Digital Transformation of Student and Employee Records

New Caney Independent School District, located in the Houston metropolitan area, manages over 15,000 students across 18 schools and facilities. With a growth rate of 7% per year, the district’s enrollment and hiring began rapidly expanding—along with its student records archives, and process and compliance challenges.

When Superintendent Kenn Franklin joined the district, his vision for paperless processes began a five-year plan to completely digitize the district’s records and operations. After receiving a Laserfiche demonstration, New Caney ISD was convinced it could realize this vision through the solution’s robust search, electronic forms and workflow automation.

“Laserfiche is one system with endless capabilities,” said Tammy Yarbrough, records management officer at New Caney Independent School District. “The solution’s user-friendly implementation enabled our small records team to create a searchable, secure database quickly—without investing significant time and resources into learning and training on the system.”

Creating More Efficient Employee Contracts

The district’s initial goal for using Laserfiche centered around updating its HR contract processes. Using Laserfiche Forms, Yarbrough’s team digitized the creation, review and approval of employee contracts, as well as other HR documents like incident reporting, performance evaluations and salary placements. The initiative was a quick win that solidified Laserfiche’s position as a core software system for the district’s administrative operations.

“The deputy superintendent was amazed at the system’s capabilities,” Yarbrough says. “At a meeting about a district issue, he looked at my boss and said, ‘I don’t know what you need to do, but you need to make this ‘Fiche-y.’ We then created a process to help analyze and review the data.”

Digitizing Student Folders Simplifies Compliance

Before Laserfiche, the district lacked a uniform approach to file management. To remedy this, the district digitized over 17,000 cumulative student folders and created electronic folders organized by campus, grade level and student document categories and types.

For both new and archived records, Laserfiche can automatically apply document security by document type and employee role, giving New Caney the ability to assign and track nuanced levels of record access across the district. Additionally, records retention schedules help enable administrators to ensure that student files are destroyed at the right time and help enforce proper compliance throughout the records’ lifecycle.

Yarbrough’s team now uses Laserfiche Forms to build solutions for every student and staff need. Administrators, teachers and staff can also quickly upload documents including new report cards, health forms, attendance notes, athletics physicals and more into the digital student folder. The result is a more accurate, holistic student file that can be accessed on-demand through a web portal.

“With Laserfiche, we will never have lost files,” Yarbrough emphasizes.

Expediting Student Enrollment and Record Transfer

By digitizing student files and forms, the district drastically improved the student enrollment process for both parents and staff. Parents now complete enrollment forms online in the district’s student information system, Skyward, and Laserfiche Workflow automatically files them in the relevant folders in the repository. For returning students, a database lookup populates the students’ information from the previous school year—reducing the number of forms that students and parents have to complete and lessening the document management burden on administrators.

Total enrollment processing time has been reduced by 75%. Additionally, all enrollment forms are available district-wide within 24 hours of submission. Beyond these benefits, the district’s student data is more accurate since Laserfiche eliminated much of the manual data entry and folder creation.

Because all student records are digital, file transfers with other school districts are also expedited. Instead of copying and mailing or scanning an entire paper folder, New Caney ISD created a Laserfiche Form that automatically exports student folders and uploads the files to the Texas Records Exchange, a state-run system for school registrars to electronically request and receive records for students attending Texas public schools. Thousands of pages are transferred seamlessly in just a few minutes.

Benefits
  • The district digitized more than 370,000 HR records, and over 2 million student records and enrollment processes without IT expertise.
  • The district saved over $330,000 by choosing to implement Laserfiche instead of outsourcing records scanning and storage.
  • Student enrollment processing, which formerly took two hours per student, now takes less than 30 minutes, and all forms are available for teachers, counselors and registrars district-wide within 24 hours.
  • Transferring student files from the district’s registrar to state education agencies and other school districts now takes just two minutes instead of 45.
  • Laserfiche has helped the district’s compliance with FERPA and HIPAA regulations, and enabled the district to control and track records access using granular records security.
  • Records retention schedules enable administrators to ensure that files are destroyed on time.
  • Teachers and administrators can now access records from anywhere with an internet connection, rather than being required to physically retrieve documents from a records warehouse.

The success of the initial Laserfiche implementation has led to rapid adoption across all the district’s administrative units. The records team is currently working through a three-month backlog of Laserfiche project requests.

“When others see what Laserfiche can do, they want more,” Yarbrough says. “We can provide administrators with immediate solutions to district issues, like employee onboarding, class coding, and enrollment and implement solutions in a matter of days by using forms and document management. When they ask for something, we can drop everything and can fix it quickly with Laserfiche.”

How Collin County Automates the Early Identification of Mental Illness Process

Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Paul Garrison, Records / ERMS Specialist and Tim Nolan, Senior Applications Manager, Collin County, TX

Collin County, TX is one of the fastest growing counties in Texas and the nation. The county’s population is 980,000 and the county is part of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.

In order to serve an expanding population, the county has been shifting to digitizing and automating many business processes in multiple departments. One recently automated process that has a huge impact is the Early Identification of Mental Illness (EIMI) process in the jail.

Every person who is booked into jail has to go through a mental health screening. Certain inmates who complete the screening end up being placed on a mental health watch list. Each person must go through the entire process in 12 hours for the jail to not incur violations.

The EIMI process used to be entirely paper and email based, resulting in lost documentation and failed audits. The county decided to streamline it with Laserfiche Forms and Workflow.

“The most essential reason for automating and standardizing this process is that we don’t want anyone slipping through the cracks,” says Tim Nolan, Senior Applications Manager. “The new Laserfiche process has become one of the most critical systems in the county.”

Processing has decreased from four hours a day to minutes

Whenever a person is booked into jail, the booking staff fills out an extensive electronic form that contains Yes or No questions about the person’s mental health. Any Yes answer is considered a red flag.
The EIMI screening is performed using a Laserfiche form. Click the image to see the whole form

 Once the form is submitted, it is added into the queue for the medical team to review. If the medical team doesn’t finish review of the form within an hour then the supervisor is notified to sign off on the form instead. In order to simplify medical and supervisor review, any questions with a Yes answer are highlighted in blue.
In order to improve review, all questions with an answer of Yes are highlighted in blue
The workflow that notifies the supervisor if the medical team doesn’t review the EIMI form within an hour

Once the supervisor approves the form, Laserfiche Workflow generates a report from the data and emails it to the magistrate. If no one signs off within eight hours, the magistrate is also notified that the review isn’t finished.
The email that is sent to the magistrate contains a link to the Laserfiche folder where the EIMI form and relevant documents is stored
The report that is sent to the magistrate is generated through Workflow using SQL Server Reporting Services
A section of the workflow that generates the report and emails the magistrate

All forms, whether completed or incomplete, are stored in folders in Laserfiche with appropriate records management properties automatically applied.
All screening forms are stored in the records management section of the repository and kept for one year

Each form has its review and approval history included on the first page, which simplifies audits.
The history of each screening is recorded and timestamped

This is what the entire process looks like in the Laserfiche Forms process model:
The EIMI process is created in Laserfiche Forms

EIMI is one of the most critical processes in the county

The EIMI process is up 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Processing time has decreased from four hours a day to just minutes. Audits are so much more painless since the full history of each screening is recorded and timestamped along with the form. Timers and notifications enable screenings to take no more than 12 hours to complete from start to finish, ensuring that the county is following rules and regulations.

How Symbria Inc. Uses Laserfiche to Streamline Plans of Care for Patients

Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Hien Do, Software Development Manager; Boris Remus, Senior Software Engineer, Symbria Inc.

Symbria Inc. provides therapy services to hundreds of skilled nursing facilities. The organization was challenged with manual paper processing prior to implementing Laserfiche. One area that was especially paper heavy and inefficient was obtaining the required physician signatures and dates on the patient plans of care forms.

Within 30 days from the start of a patient’s care, their treatment plan must be approved by a physician or reimbursement for the treatment may be denied. Previously, the Rehab Program Manager printed a patient’s plan of care from the therapy software. The plan of care was then hand delivered or faxed it to the appropriate physician for a signature. Once the signatures were obtained, the Rehab Program Manager scanned in the plan and attached it to the patient’s record back into the therapy software. The program manager would also have to fax or hand-deliver the plan of care to the medical records department at the facility in order for the payments to be processed correctly.

Rehab Program Managers, who are highly trained therapists themselves, spent a lot of their time performing administrative tasks like tracking which documents haven’t been signed and following up with physicians who did not sign the plans of care. Facilities vary greatly in size which means some process a small number of documents a week, while others can process in excess of 100. This volume resulted in a significant amount of program manager time investment.

Symbria evaluated the entire process and decided to use Laserfiche to optimize it. The current process transfers most of the work from the Rehab Program Manager to the staff at the corporate office and uses Laserfiche Forms and Workflow to automate routing and faxing.

The Plan of Care is Routed and Faxed Electronically

The new process still starts with the Rehab Program Manager generating the plan of care document, but now, he or she uploads it to a Laserfiche form. From there, everything is handled by staff at the corporate office.

Once the plan of care is uploaded and the form is submitted, the plan of care is saved in the repository and Laserfiche Workflow creates and stamps a barcode onto the document. The barcode uniquely identifies the plan of care. Workflow then runs a series of checks to make sure that the information in the plan of care is correct. Workflow checks that:

  • The physician identification number has 10 digits
  • The patient name is valid
  • The therapy discipline is valid
  • The date is valid

 

If the plan of care does not pass all the checks, then it must be validated manually. The corporate processing staff performs the validation task in Laserfiche Forms.

Once the plan of care is validated, Laserfiche Workflow looks the physician up in the database to obtain his or her fax number. The document is then faxed digitally to the fax number using a faxing service.

When the physician signs and faxes the document back, Symbria receives an electronic version of the document from the fax service that is then imported into Laserfiche using the Import Agent. Workflow reads the barcode to associate the document with the original and routes it to the processing staff at the corporate office to verify the document is correctly signed and dated. Once that step completes, the processing staff attaches the document to the patient’s record in the therapy software and Workflow sends a copy to the medical records department at the appropriate skilled nursing facility.

If the physician doesn’t return the plan of care in a timely matter, the corporate staff member gets a task assigned to him or her in Forms to follow up with the physician. When opening the task, the staff member sees helpful information, such as the physician’s fax and phone numbers. The physician is also automatically notified through Workflow on a regular basis if he or she hasn’t sent back the signed plan of care.

Automation Saves Each Facility an Average of Five Hours a Week

On average, with this automation, each facility saves five hours a week by not having to manually fax and deliver plans of care. The largest benefit, though, is that the Rehab Program Manager no longer has to obtain physician’s signatures. Instead of chasing physicians down, the Rehab Program Manager can focus more on patient care. Laserfiche also gives the company stringent control over document access, which is a must in the heavily regulated healthcare industry.

An Effortless New Hire Process

The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office transformed its Human Resources division by shifting from paper-based methods to become a digital agency using Laserfiche software. The digitization initiative increased efficiency, time management and accuracy, revolutionizing the ways in which the Sheriff’s Office stored documents, communicated within its department, and implemented its onboarding process with new employees.

Seamless Recruiting Tools

The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office is a local law enforcement agency based in central Florida. The agency is the largest and chief law enforcement agency in the county, with 850 employees within the department.

Before Laserfiche, the agency grappled with a diminished amount of storage room and needed a more effective solution for managing documents. Interdepartmental communication problems led to delays in the application process and, at times, lost documents when paper forms were mailed.

The agency first turned to Laserfiche to create a pre-employment application that is accessible to the public through the county’s website. The initial results were staggering, with application intake tripling from about 50 applications per month to now as many as 150 per month.

“We’re facing a nationwide shortage of police officers,” said Haylee Glasscock, Human Resources Technician, Osceola County’s Sheriff’s Office. “Making our application easily accessible online has helped with our recruiting efforts and was a good move for our agency. The application is extensive—it used to be 25 paper pages. With Laserfiche, we now can host recruiting fairs since the online application allows people to apply right then and there. Other applicants may apply via a secure link. In 2012, we had 446 paper applications. In the first year we had Laserfiche, we had 1,305.”

There are multiple job application forms the agency utilizes depending on the applicant, including a criminal history version which is longer compared to one created for recent graduates planning to move into the role of a deputy.

“With paper applications, people would leave fields blank; we had to call them to come in and fill out the information,” said Glasscock. “Now we no longer have incompletes and it saves us time. We can also have people upload files, photos of tattoos, and more—all within the application.”

After an applicant applies online, Laserfiche’s business process automation capabilities allow the agency to perform a paperless background check and file sign-off through its chain of command. Laserfiche simultaneously sends automatic email notifications to keep the applicant updated on the review process—a game-changer compared to years past, when updates on the Review Board date were sent through the mail.

Effortless New Hire Process

Once the application process is complete and an applicant receives an offer, the Sheriff’s Office uses Laserfiche to onboard new employees with digital forms. Laserfiche enables chain-of-command administration staff to sign off on specific files using conditions in a workflow. Relevant personnel say whether the file looks acceptable, and if so, it moves on to the next person. The process is smooth, accurate and far less time-consuming than the previous method of filling out a handwritten form as the official offer document with the salary and start date included.

The Sheriff’s Office’s Human Resources division is now a paperless environment thanks to implementing Laserfiche software. All employee personnel and medical files are stored in the repository and are easily accessible to HR staff. Additionally, Laserfiche has been integrated within the agency’s personnel management system. The software automatically pulls an employee’s information from the personnel management system, including his/her ID number, and completely fills out the template information—improving speed and accuracy.

“We like that information is accessible at our fingertips,” said Glasscock. “The training department now has one full-time staff assistant and a part-time student. They’re able to quickly find documents, email them to deputies if needed, and they’re easily viewed. Having those training files not in boxes anymore really helps them.”

The Sheriff’s Office also digitized the employee transfer form. Laserfiche automatically routes the form to the appropriate reviewer within the agency. The form has been further simplified by the use of variables, look-up tables (integrated with the organization’s computer-aided dispatch software and active directory), as well as field rules.

“Our recruiting department uses Laserfiche every day and a couple of agencies have reached out to me to see if we can share our process with them,” added Glasscock.

Since turning to Laserfiche, the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office has become more productive, effective and efficient. The agency digitized and secured more than 2,500 employee personnel files using Laserfiche software. Moreover, all new hire files are created digitally. The agency can process and prepare files for approval much faster, and automated email notifications mean that staff no longer need to call other departments as frequently to follow up on forms.

The agency realized an initial savings of $2,000 by eliminating supplies for new employee files, as well thousands more in departmental time-savings. Beyond cost savings, the Sheriff’s Office opened the door to a more digital, automated agency. By implementing innovative solutions like its Laserfiche digital records management program, the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office fosters a culture of efficiency and agility to better position the agency for success in a competitive hiring market.

AFP Crecer, El Salvador

My name is Carlos Ramos. I work for AFP Crecer as the digitalization manager.  AFP Crecer is one of El Salvador’s largest fund management firms.  We manage the pension funds for about 1.7 million affiliates. Our mission is to guide our clients as they save for an important life change: retirement. We’re working on growing their savings, so that when they retire, they’ll be able to continue providing for their family and themselves.

From a technological standpoint, the biggest challenges that we faced was having a document management system that would be flexible, that would allow us to have quality control for our stored information, and also streamline the digital capture processes to serve our customers in a more efficient manner through our channels. We evaluated several tools and Laserfiche was the one we liked the best.

Somehow, we discovered that document management goes beyond just digital archiving. We’re giving the opportunity to all of our client representatives to access information in a timely manner. Thanks to Laserfiche, as a tool, we’ve been able to change our processes. We were able to shorten processes that took five days to three days. We reduced processes that took 15 days to just five days.

Using the product has opened up additional improvement opportunities. It is not only about archiving digital documents, but also having the necessary documents throughout our key business processes. In addition, the use of electronic forms allowed us to reduce our use of paper. We were using around 650 packs of paper, which equals about 350,000 sheets of paper per year.

We’ve been working with Laserfiche for about 10 months and the experience has been fabulous. Now we have more visibility and we can do more complex searches and reports. Throughout our journey, we learned that things that we imagined and believed couldn’t be done with a software can be done with Laserfiche.

Time savings, reduction in costs, and an easier capture and digitization process. A client file took close to 100 days from its creation until it was ready for record archiving. Now it only takes two days for the client file to be archived. We get notifications if we made an error or notifications if image capture was successful.

With Laserfiche, and where I see future opportunities, such as analyzing our processes to identify those we can automate, what documents are required for those processes, and not only opportunities to automate them, but also to completely redesign them, and see how we’re doing things now and how we can do them tomorrow.

We must remember that we work and are dedicated to serve our clients’ needs. Financial needs with regards to pensions, and for them it’s very important to get speedy service, and that’s why Laserfiche has been a fundamental part of that.

City University, Hong Kong

City University of Hong Kong created a shared services platform for human resources and finance using Laserfiche.