Scaling a Global Nonprofit as It Strives to End World Hunger

The rapid pace of technology innovation is transforming how organizations manage contracts and collaborate with customers, vendors and partners to drive business results. Heifer International, a global nonprofit organization, is finding ways to use technology tools alongside farm animals and crops to help fight hunger and poverty. Heifer specializes in providing sustainable agriculture and commerce to impoverished communities around the world—and its operations depend on being able to quickly review, approve and access legal contracts. “Helping just one family could take dozens of vendors, several government organizations, hundreds of legal contracts and extensive collaboration,” says Bob Bloom, Heifer International Chief Financial Officer. “This is where technology intervenes to save lives. The vision is to streamline Heifer’s processes and use Laserfiche to manage contracts and track documents for projects that impact millions of families throughout the world.”

Today, more than 1 billion people live in poverty, as defined by the World Bank’s international benchmark of living under $1.90 per day. For over 70 years, Heifer has worked to lift people above that threshold, building thriving, self-sustaining communities with an innovative model that has grown to encompass 30 countries worldwide. It has helped more than 25 million families while attracting high-profile partners including major, multi-national corporations. Projects include an East Africa Dairy Development initiative that affects Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. In Nepal, Heifer empowers women farmers. And, closer to home, Heifer helped launch the Grass Roots Farmers’ Cooperative and Foodshed Farms, which support small-scale, sustainable Arkansas farmers by connecting them to profitable markets.
Formed with support of Heifer International’s Seeds of Change Initiative, the purpose of the Arkansas Sustainable Livestock Cooperative is to operate a processing and marketing cooperative that supports profitable, environmentally conscious, and socially responsible Arkansas livestock farmers. The ASLC promotes local food systems that produce nutritious foods while reinvigorating rural economies.

While its achievements have been no small feat, Heifer is committed not only to alleviating world hunger—but to eradicating it completely. “Our goal is to take 4 million families out of poverty by 2020,” says Bob Bloom, Chief Financial Officer. In order to achieve this, Heifer’s leadership team decided to scale up the organization’s work and diversify revenue streams. Before they could do that, however, the organization had to increase efficiency through technology such as enterprise content management (ECM) software. “We needed to manage our content better. It’s a key component to our global platform strategy.”

A Tech Transformation

In 2010, Heifer began to reassess its core systems including document management. “We have a much different scope today, one that requires a lot more capability in terms of how we manage and report on these projects,” says Bloom, who oversees all financial, treasury, information technology and human resource activities for the organization. “We developed a strategy to increase our scale, diversify our revenue and build a supporting technology platform to enable us to track, report and provide transparency.” Scaling up requires a new level of reporting and accountability as donors target large-scale projects in specific communities. Some projects require multiple corporate sponsors. Dedicated to remaining steadfast in its transparency and compliance, Heifer must be vigilant in monitoring projects that often involve hundreds of contracts, memorandums of understanding, teaming agreements and other project-related documents. Combined with additional marketing materials, field stories and videos, Heifer faced a content overload. The organization’s new strategy included selecting Laserfiche ECM software in 2014 to address issues that Bloom and his team identified, including:
  • Thousands of contracts pending review, with no automated system to track varying versions or the status of reviews and approvals
  • Content spread across offices and project locations, which perpetuated silos and hindered growth

Heifer needed to leverage content and knowledge across projects. Staff in remote locations who worked with families in the developing world needed the ability to collaborate with headquarters staff in Little Rock, AR. “Ideas weren’t being shared across the organization,” Bloom explains. Although Heifer relies on strong relationships between team members and communities, and networks of local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), it is now embracing the idea of moving toward a digital workplace—where offline relationships are strengthened with online cooperation. “We need innovation,” Bloom says. “We need technologies that can help us achieve our mission better, faster.”
Heifer’s legal department folder structure

Laserfiche ECM software enables staff to streamline contract management processes using electronic forms and robust workflow automation solutions. Heifer also automated the Network Account Request process to grant, revoke and change access to its core applications using Laserfiche Forms and Workflow. This has helped to facilitate compliance and protect sensitive information. Bloom has outlined key areas in which Laserfiche ECM software could further improve efficiencies at Heifer:
  • Partner agreements: Continuing to automate processing partner agreements by using Laserfiche Workflow with third party suppliers, vendors and local government agencies
  • Records management: Improving document management and records management processes, breaking down silos, and increasing accountability and transparency
  • Personnel change requests: Managing personnel change requests (i.e., job role changes, etc.) quickly to help it scale up internal staff resources

“Our vision for Laserfiche is to allow all of our field workers, regardless of which country they are in, to be able to interact with documents, find records and submit forms—all from their mobile devices,” explains Cedric Lambert, IT Director at Heifer. The integration has helped the organization on its path to reaching more families and communities, and elevating existing projects, helping communities to help themselves. “We are fairly new on the journey, but we are very excited about what we can do here,” Bloom shares. “Automating our internal business processes using Laserfiche electronic forms and workflow is part of our technology transformation that enables our mission in fighting hunger and poverty.” Click here to learn how Laserfiche ECM software can help your organization streamline contract management and leverage information across the entire enterprise.

How Ramblers Worldwide Holidays Uses Laserfiche Forms and Laserfiche Workflow

Laserfiche Solution Contributed by: Richard Clowser, IT & Business Systems Manager, Ramblers Worldwide Holidays

Based out of the United Kingdom, Ramblers Worldwide Holidays has been organizing guided walking tours and holidays around the world for over 60 years. Most of their business processes are centered on documents. Here is how Laserfiche Forms and Laserfiche Workflow transformed its day-to-day operations.

Laserfiche Forms

Ramblers uses Laserfiche Forms to:
  • Coordinate a meeting time with the tour and clients who will not be travelling on the same flight as the group
  • Register tour leaders around the world for the annual Ramblers conference

Laserfiche Forms also drives Ramblers’ private group sale cycle from the conception phone call to providing a quote. This process works as follows:

1.  The private group manager captures the client’s requirements in a form
Information about private group tours is entered into a Laserfiche form

2.  Once the requirements are submitted, information must be obtained regarding travel, itinerary and available trip leaders to see if this trip is logistically feasible and generate trip costs. All of this information is entered into a different form by representatives from various departments. They can either indicate that they require more time to find pricing or information or supply the final information.
  • Each price quotation has to have a “Valid Until” date specified in the form. Laserfiche Workflow monitors this field and sends reminders when a quotation is about to expire.
  • A private group prospect can request an extension on any price quotes. The private group manager can approve or reject the extension.
Extensions are rejected or approved by filling out another Laserfiche form

3.  The final form is sent to the sales manager, who generates a final price quotation

Laserfiche Workflow generates reminder emails at each step to ensure that any completion or cancellations of the prospects will notify any departments and people involved. These include:
  • Sales and reservations
  • Product planning
  • Travel department
  • Tour leaders
  • Overseas departments

Laserfiche Workflow

Laserfiche Workflow is also used to automate 15 key business processes, which include:
  • Extending support to disaster recovery processes by replicating the critical documents to the Laserfiche cloud server when changes are made
  • Assisting departments in filing documents
  • Performing nightly statistical report runs that would otherwise exhaust system resources during working hours

Marketing research indicated that customers who booked a second holiday with us in the first six months after their first were more likely to become regular customers.

Laserfiche Workflow monitors the reservation database and identifies first-time clients who have just returned from a holiday. It then sends them a voucher for a second holiday, which is redeemable within six months. Laserfiche Workflow:
  • Runs a defined SQL query every night to identify returning clients
  • Checks that the tour they have just taken is not on any exception list (such as a private group tour)
  • Gathers data about the client from the database such as their current loyalty bonus points earned and points redeemed (if any)
  • Calculates a date six months from the day of return and stores it in a token
  • Identifies the parent company of the tour that the client has returned from
  • Checks to see if the client is a first time booker by counting the number of tours the customer signed up for in the database
  • Inserts the booking reference number into the database. This acts as the unique voucher number and is used when the customer redeems the voucher in the future
  • Creates a new document in the “Welcome Home Letter Voucher” folder and attaches a PDF form template to this document
  • Fills out this PDF form with the data collected in the first part of the process and also uses it to populate the document’s template
An example of a voucher with associated metadata

Here is what this workflow looks like:

Laserfiche Workflow moves the completed voucher into a special folder, where it awaits review by operations management. The supervisors check the voucher for accuracy and confirm that the client is new and is not found in the old reservations system. Once verified, they change the status field to “Approved,” which triggers a second workflow that sends an email to the client with the voucher included in the text as well as a PDF attachment. The final document is then stored in the processed folder.

When the client wants to redeem the voucher for £50 off their next holiday, the sales assistant checks that they have a valid voucher stored for future use, and moves it to the Redeemed folder.
Vouchers are saved in a special section of the repository

Benefits

Implementing Laserfiche at Ramblers Worldwide Holidays has resulted in the following benefits:
  • Laserfiche Forms makes it possible to directly populate external database systems without having to export a csv file or import the data manually
  • Projects can go live sooner than standard application development because Laserfiche Forms enables a fast response to changing requirements
  • Laserfiche Workflow has made Ramblers more efficient in handling day-to-day manual tasks related to data checking
  • The Laserfiche Workflow designer is so intuitive that an external business process analyst was able to create five workflows that managed the entire online sales support process after just half a day of training
  • Instead of hiring four additional employees to drive the secondary sales voucher initiative, Ramblers was able to automate the process with Laserfiche and have only one staff member handle approvals

Would you like to see how Laserfiche Forms and Laserfiche Workflow can automate processes within your organization? Get a free demo today.

D.L. Evans Automates Compliance and Records Management

SITUATION

• Needed an electronic document repository to store scanned documents
• Paper-driven operations were becoming overly expensive and time-intensive to manage

RESULTS

• Estimated $1 million in annual savings
• Enhanced employee experience
• Foundation for an optimized omnichannel experience for customers

D.L. Evans Bank is a century-old organization with over $3.2 billion in assets and dozens of branches across Idaho and Utah. As a true community bank, D.L. Evans offers a variety of personal, business and investment services while maintaining a simple mission: Help people.

To remain responsive to customer needs while addressing the banking industry’s ever-changing compliance requirements, D.L. Evans has built a strong digital ecosystem that includes Laserfiche as a key component. Laserfiche acts as the bank’s information backbone and main processing system, integrating with its core applications to support growth and scale. 

“We’re a $3.5 billion-in-assets institution today, up from $175 million around 25 years ago — a big part of that has been possible because of Laserfiche,” said Gerardo Munoz, D.L. Evans CIO.

“Over time, our use of Laserfiche evolved from document management to a business-critical system,” said Munoz. “Every process can be refined and automated, and Laserfiche was able to help with that.”

As a part of this evolution, the bank leverages Laserfiche’s integration tools to connect Laserfiche to other core systems including its eSignature application, core banking software, CRM and loan origination program. Munoz and his team even use Laserfiche Connector as an integration tool to bridge applications for operations that do not use Laserfiche at all.

“Our Laserfiche repository has over 80 million documents in it, so it’s as critical to us as our core banking system,” Munoz said. “Laserfiche is the second-most critical application that we use in our institution.”

Beyond the time and cost efficiency gains, D.L. Evans counts Laserfiche as a trusted system due to its robust records management capabilities. As a financial institution, the can’t afford to make mistakes with its record management procedures, which are heavily regulated by FDIC rules.

Laserfiche has helped minimize FDIC violations by standardizing how records are kept and updated; for example, retention rules notify compliance officers when a policy document needs to be updated and versioning enables policy reviewers to know if they are working with the most up to date copy of a document.

Auditing has also been streamlined. Whenever the FDIC requests a records audit, D.L. Evans’ team is able to promptly retrieve and present the electronic documents and files in question. “Laserfiche has brought audit time down from four weeks to two,” explains Munoz. “This is actually a bigger improvement than it sounds because as we’ve grown, we now have twice as many loans to audit.”

Transforming the Employee Experience

In addition to making information easier to access, Laserfiche has enhanced the employee experience by standardizing and automating review and approval. Furthermore, integrations eliminate much of the manual data entry and application switching that waste employee time and cognitive energy.

“Just about every process needs some level of automation. The fact that automation can standardize procedures and processes is a major reason to do it. Using Laserfiche to do that has helped us save time and money, as well as prevent a lot of mistakes.” — Gerardo Munoz, D.L. Evans CIO

The bank recently reimagined the loan process, starting with vehicular loans, using Laserfiche. The integration between Laserfiche and Meridian — the bank’s loan origination program — allows many of the previously manual tasks associated with loans to be entirely managed through a Laserfiche form and automated business process. 

A Laserfiche form reads information directly from the loan application program and creates the loan packet, routes it through approvals and files everything in a centralized location.

This process also leverages a Laserfiche-DocuSign integration, enabling customers to submit signed documents that are automatically filed in the correct folder in Laserfiche, eliminating that task for loan officers.

“Rather than hire more loan processors, we are trying to automate the process so we can be more proactive,” Munoz said. “It also gives our loan officers better visibility and trackability into all activities.”

Similar automations are used to create new accounts, where information gathering and routing is managed by Laserfiche. As a result, bank employees can spend more time on the activities that require a human touch, such as customer service.

Another process that sounds deceptively quick and easy, but in reality can require multiple manual steps, is that of replacing a lost or stolen credit card. To accelerate these activities, the bank built a solution on an integration between Laserfiche and its CRM, 360 View. This enables representatives to easily create a service ticket in the CRM to start the replacement process for a customer. When a customer reports a lost or stolen credit card, a representative uses Laserfiche to automatically populate the service ticket with the customer’s information and then route the ticket to the appropriate reviewers and approvers. The improvement has reduced processing time by 66% — from six weeks to two weeks.

Laserfiche has also played an important role in mergers, as the bank is able to easily bring documents and data into their systems from acquired organizations. In one merger, Munoz explained, the bank avoided a $50,000 cost and monthslong wait to have a professional services firm convert and import documents.

“It took me two hours to write a workflow and the documents were converted in a week,” he said.

A True Community Bank

While most of the bank’s Laserfiche initiatives are considered back-office solutions, D.L. Evans customers directly benefit from the increased efficiency. “Laserfiche helps us be more productive and provide faster responses to our customers,” Munoz said.

The customer experience continues to be a guiding light for the D.L. Evans team, which was all-hands-on-deck during the COVID-19 pandemic. The bank’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan process was developed over a weekend, and staff — including the entire executive team — were trained on how to process PPP loans in a matter of hours.

“We even had our CEO processing PPP loans,” Munoz said. “Everything worked seamlessly and was processed through the proper channels. Afterward, all the documentation was there, and customers were satisfied.”

Thanks to the IT team’s quick response with Laserfiche and the entire staff’s commitment, D.L. Evans was the largest PPP provider in the state of Idaho.

Today, the bank provides other forms of community service, including its scholarship program. Students can submit a Laserfiche form for D.L. Evans’s Education Pays program — a drawing which rewards high-performing students with laptops — or its Scholarship Program, which awards thousands of dollars each year to high school seniors to attend any accredited college, university or trade school in the U.S.

Looking to the future, D.L. Evans is committed to creating a more cohesive, omnichannel experience for its customers. Laserfiche initiatives on the horizon include creating a self-service customer portal of Laserfiche Forms, enabling quicker and easier, 24/7 access to various services.

“All things considered, Laserfiche saves us about $1 million every year since we’ve implemented it,” says Munoz. “Laserfiche has never been one of those products that just sits on the shelf and doesn’t get used.”

Click here to learn how your financial firm can automate records management and compliance.

How College of the Desert Modernized Student Forms to Reduce Application Processing Time by 40%

Enhancing Student Success by Digitizing Enrollment and Financial Aid Forms

College of the Desert in Palm Desert is one of the 112 institutions in the community college system of California. With an enrollment of 13,000 students, as many as 20,000 to 30,000 documents are processed annually at the college. Using a paper-based application and filing system, the college was servicing a high volume of commuter students with inconvenient and inconsistent enrollment processes.

“With paper forms, students had to travel up to three hours to submit documents or complete their student files,” says Dr. Annebelle Nery, Executive Dean, Enrollment Services. “Student lines at the counter were very long. Once students got to the front of the line, they were extremely frustrated because we’d either lost their documents or the documents were stuck in processing—but where exactly, we weren’t sure.

Information requests were funneled through as many as five departments in order to compile a complete and accurate student file. Records systems were siloed from the college’s student information system (SIS), and staff members had to search multiple locations to find a complete student file.

Standardizing Records Access Across Campus

To improve operational efficiency, the college  replaced 20 different paper forms with Laserfiche electronic forms that are instantly accessible through a student’s online portal.

Students can now view, complete, sign and submit degree applications, change of major requests and other student forms all from one online portal. Once a form is submitted, Laserfiche automatically:
  • Routes it to required employees and departments for processing.
  • Emails status updates to the student throughout the review process.
  • Attaches documents to the corresponding student file in the SIS.
Associating metadata fields with electronic forms track the exact status of each application at every step of records processing.

Today, every student form at College of the Desert is received electronically through Laserfiche. The college also automated more than 50 business processes, including:
  • Petitions
  • Concurrent enrollment
  • Enrollment verification
  • Name change
  • Request to add a class
  • Information releases

All departments now access and use a centrally managed document management system, reducing overall costs for maintenance and IT support. Staff members aren’t just sharing information more efficiently with students—they’re collaborating across departments to reduce excessive paper volume and needless filing efforts.

Improving Student Satisfaction and Accreditation with Document Management Software

With Laserfiche, the admissions and records and financial services departments now require 40% less time to process applications and petitions. Inquiries from students and lines at the service counters have decreased significantly now that students receive email notifications about their applications.

“The frustrated phone calls from students are down and now we’re getting calls from other departments that want to use Laserfiche,” says Dr. Nery.

These improvements have not gone unnoticed:
  • The college met accreditation standards by being able to offer its main campus services to extension centers and online students.
  • Student satisfaction levels have risen sharply and even the Board of Trustees has complimented the college on its Laserfiche initiative.
  • Recently, the college received the Models of Efficiency Award from University Business Magazine, which recognizes institutions with business savvy and technological expertise.

Looking to digitize student records and paperwork processing at your institution? Schedule your free demo of Laserfiche Forms for colleges and universities. 

Community Action Partnership’s Automated Case Management for Low-Income Energy Assistance

Automating Case Management Paperwork Processing

Each winter, thousands of residents in Minnesota’s Ramsey and Washington Counties struggle to access basic heating and utilities. When a household finds itself in need, it turns to the Community Action Partnership of Ramsey and Washington Counties, which runs one of the state’s largest low-income home energy assistance program.

“We receive thousands of calls from clients anxious to know if we can help,” says Catherine Fair, Director of Energy Assistance Programs. “These kinds of calls were hard for our staff to field since we had over 25,000 active applications stored in filing cabinets. We knew that automating our application approval process would make us more efficient and accelerate our ability to help households in need.”

To automate the case management process, the agency began scanning applications and related documentation into a Laserfiche document repository connected to automated document filing, routing and approval workflows.

Case workers can now quickly determine grant amounts and deliver assistance faster:
  • Workflows automatically create case folders for new scanned applications, including eligibility worksheets and case note logs, and route them to case workers for review.
  • Urgent cases can be automatically sent to an expedited processing queue.
  • Staff members can re-direct files to other groups for review and action. If a case worker chooses “yes” under Furnace Problem metadata field, Laserfiche will auto-route the file to the furnace repair group for attention.

“We have significantly improved crisis response time,” says Fair. “Urgent calls for assistance are much more productive. We can find a client’s application immediately by looking in Laserfiche and can then let the client know exactly what he needs to do to complete his application.”

Standardizing Record Archival, Auditing and Security

In addition to expediting service delivery for low-income residents, the new case management process also streamlined the program’s twice-yearly audits. By law, the agency is required to keep archived case files for three years.

Fair explains, “Files are randomly selected by the auditors, and it was a daunting task to find the ones they requested among 25,000 others!”

Being able to store all records in TIFF format was another reason the agency choose document management software. The open file format ensures that the files stored in Laserfiche will still be supported in 25, 50 or even 100 years.

“Vendor lock-in is a big concern for the IT department. If you choose a file format that’s controlled by a single vendor, you invite a lot of unnecessary risk from both an IT and an information governance perspective.”

Laserfiche’s TIFF archival format means that the agency can continually adopt advances in hardware, software and communication technologies without limiting access to their records.

Built-in Windows authentication and named-user access to the repository also enabled the agency to better protect sensitive client information, like social security numbers.

“Laserfiche protects sensitive information while making our business processes more efficient, “ says Fair. “It has helped us tremendously and we hope that other non-profit agencies that deliver federal programs can learn from our success!”

Looking to digitize the case management process at your agency? Get a free demo of Laserfiche software for case management today.

Tompkins County, NY, Saved $5.5 Million with Electronic Records Management

Taking Government Records Management Digital
Tompkins County avoided building a $5.5 million records warehouse by using Laserfiche software to digitize records.

Two centuries’ worth of county records packed into 9,000 boxes take up a lot of space, enough to (almost) justify building a $3.5 million storage warehouse.

Before moving forward with the new warehouse, the Tompkins County Clerk’s Office was tasked with cataloging the millions of archived documents and examine storage alternatives. Records management software quickly entered the conversation for its ability to track records in a digital database.

“Our original plan had been to put barcodes on the boxes of records to keep better track of them and then to either build a new records center or renovate the existing one,” says Maureen Reynolds, Deputy County Clerk.

However, driven by an office culture that prizes sustainability and workplace flexibility, Tompkins County’s plan shifted. “We quickly realized that we could extend the value of the system by scanning all 9,000 boxes of files into a Laserfiche system.”

“Our analysis showed that with an investment of $400,000 to $500,000 for scanning, software upgrades and IT infrastructure updates, using Laserfiche could save us as much as $5.5 million dollars,” says Deputy IT Director Loren Cottrell.

Kicking the Paper Habit to Transition into an Electronic Records System
Thousands of legacy county records were transitioned into a digital file management system.

With a new records repository, the Clerk’s Office envisioned a digital records system that would dramatically reduce the need for paper records. “We wanted to bring greater efficiency and cost savings to the county by implementing, maintaining and instructing all county departments on the best practices of using a digital records management system,” says Reynolds.

Unfortunately, this vision hit an impasse as the county staff reverted to old paper habits.

“We looked around the county and realized everyone was still making paper,” says Reynolds. “They’re creating records on the computer, printing them, storing them in boxes and then three or four years later would bring the records to us and ask us to put them away and track them.”

Reynolds and her team went from department to department to prove the ease and value of digital records. Her team:
  • Examined departmental files and records.
  • Interviewed department staff to understand the use and flow of documents.
  • Scanned documents into Laserfiche.
  • Destroyed the physical documents.
  • Created a digital folder structure within Laserfiche that mimicked the organization of physical folders.
  • Integrated Laserfiche into other systems used by the department.

Improving Records Indexing, Retrieval and Retention

The Laserfiche repository provides a more sophisticated indexing and retrieval system that improves how the departments process their information. More importantly, the repository is integrated with the applications employees are already using.
Records templates in Laserfiche standardize how incoming documents are classified and routed.

“Records are available through a web browser either on the desktop or via a mobile device,” says Cottrell. “The mobile feature makes key documents and records available to engineers, inspectors and other employees working in the field.”

For example, the sheriff’s department previously used an archaic index-card system to track arrest reports crammed into a records room that overflowed into a garage. After scanning the arrest reports, the department was able to reclaim office and parking space.

Court officials have also adopted digital processes. The county court handles approximately 1,400 civil cases and 4,500 criminal cases a year. Before Laserfiche, it could take hours for law clerks and legal secretaries to find and retrieve pertinent records. The court now can now:
  • Automatically route and process court case files between departments.
  • Enable judges and employees to use iPads to easily access case files while in court.
  • Improve efficiency and lower printing costs.

Expanding Records Management as a Shared Service Across County Departments

Laserfiche has been so successful for the county’s records program that Reynolds decided to onboard the county’s municipalities onto the same system.

Using $450,000 in state archiving grant money, the county formed the Tompkins Shared Services Electronic Records Repository (TSSERR), a Laserfiche-powered digital archive that is hosted by the county and serves 20 partnered government agencies including the City of Ithaca.  Each member municipality is given its own dedicated repository and has complete control over its content with various levels of security. This also means the Laserfiche system can continue to grow and accommodate every new TSSERR member.

This shared service records capability has reduced support maintenance costs and created a public portal that allows citizens to search for public records. In addition to saving taxpayer money at all levels of government, TSSERR ensures that records across the county are compatible and easily accessible.

“We wanted to be transparent for years and years,” says Reynolds. “People always say the government is hiding information. It wasn’t that we were hiding anything—before Laserfiche, we just couldn’t find it!”

Want to implement electronic records management at your county or municipality? Download our free guide to getting started with digitizing and automating records management.

Managing New Social Work Caseloads

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) sent many government and county social service agencies scrambling to process the sudden increase in welfare assistance applications. For Olmstead County, Minnesota, the new law catalyzed the need for a more responsive case management paperwork process in the County’s Community Services (OCCS) unit. “The ACA scared us to death, because we didn’t have a document management product at the time. The State of Minnesota has a very complex eligibility system for assistance benefits. There’s a lot of variance in the paperwork,” said Olmsted County Community Services Director Paul Fleissner. Without a technology solution, the county anticipated needing to hire 12 full-time employees to handle the expected caseload increase. “We already handled hundreds of thousands, even millions, of pages per year. We had piles of paper everywhere and would occasionally lose a page or file. We needed to find a way to operate more efficiently.”
Paul Fleissner, Olmsted County’s Community Services (OCCS) Director
Rob Ronnenberg, Olmsted County’s Continuous Improvement Manager

OCCS’ need to improve its efficiency was supported by Olmsted County’s LEAP (Lean Efforts and Automated Processes) Initiative. The LEAP Initiative uses the Lean methodology—creating greater value with fewer resources—in combination with Laserfiche software to create efficient and sustainable operations throughout the county. “With ACA, the staff and funding we needed just weren’t going to be there,” said Rob Ronnenberg, Continuous Improvement Manager. “We needed a better way to do things. To provide the same level of services, we had to be 5% more productive with 5% less funding.”

Implementing Digital Case Management

Before Laserfiche software could be implemented in OCCS with the LEAP Initiative, the LEAP team had to show county administrators and commissioners that it fully understood OCCS’ needs and that document management software was the appropriate solution. “Right from the start, it wasn’t the IT director saying, ‘I have a new toy I want to play with,’” said David Nault, ITS manager. “All 12 county departments and the state district courts signed a service-level agreement and came to the IT department saying, ‘We need your help to implement this.’” With everyone highly motivated to do away with paper processes before ACA came into effect, the department implemented Laserfiche quickly. OCCS scanned 15,000 paper case files and converted paper information to electronic data, and the results were immediate. The new ECM-powered process allowed OCCS to:
  • Increase case worker productivity by 20%
  • Hire only three additional case workers instead of the estimated 12
  • Eliminate nearly 125 filing cabinets

“The number one result was improved staff productivity. Everyone felt Laserfiche made their jobs easier,” Fleissner said. “Time spent filing papers, shuffling papers, sorting and distributing mail or scanning files for telecommuters, was replaced with the task of scanning each document once and never touching paper again.”

Ronnenberg added, “Telling social workers that they don’t have to skip their lunch — that they can take a 15-minute breather and still ensure that their clients are taken care of — that’s powerful.” Overall, Olmsted County believes that investing in technology is a sound strategy for the future. “We as government can be more efficient. There are tools out there to do it, and it’s worth the investment,” says Fleissner. “I think there’s a great return on investment story to be told when you automate the right way, for the right reasons and in the right business areas.” Want to improve case management in your office? Schedule a demo of Laserfiche software for case management today!

How Steinhafels Automated 100+ Employment Forms

Improving HR Efficiency with Updated Employee Forms
  • Lost paperwork
  • Inconsistent filing
  • A lack of security and confidentiality
  • Missed review deadlines
  • A lack of transparency
  • Lost time (up to 10 hours per week were devoted to physically managing files
  • Lack of integration between legacy software systemsAs Malmberg jokingly puts it, “We had more issues than Reader’s Digest!”

Implementing New Job Requisition and Employee Onboarding Processes

“When I tell people about our culture and technology change, I frequently get the question, ‘Where do you begin?’” says Malmberg. “Well, how would you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Malmberg and her team first sat down to create a list of what frustrated them the most. “We literally put up giant Post-it® notes across my office wall. Then we got out markers, scribbled notes and redrew our process workflows. It was a little tedious, but it saved a lot of time on implementation.”

With a strong understanding of its ideal processes, Steinhafels’ HR department turned to Laserfiche and Laserfiche solution provider CDI to facilitate the flow of information across different locations, managers and systems. Steinhafels’ first order of business was to eliminate all of the non-standardized forms. Using Laserfiche Forms, Malmberg’s team turned the paper forms into a smaller set of standardized electronic forms a hiring manager and new employee can complete and submit through an their intranet website.
Lynda Malmberg, Steinhafels’ Senior HR Manager
Electronic forms can be submitted online and automatically routed to key staff for immediate action.

With Laserfiche, users don’t need to constantly reenter the same information on each form. For example, when a manager enters an employee ID into the new hire form, the form prepopulates with data mined from the initial job application. This eliminates duplicate entries. Likewise, when employees fill out their new hire paperwork, entry of the employee badge number auto-populates the necessary demographic data. Steinhafels also automated various stages of the process:
  • A completed job requisition form launches a workflow that notifies a recruiting manager to review and approve the form prior to posting
  • Approved job requisitions are automatically posted to specific third-party career sites like Monster.com|
  • Employment applications (along with any uploaded resumes) are stored together with the requisition, and the hiring manager is notified by email that they have a new application to review
  • The pre-hire process, which includes a background check, is launched via a status change to the metadata on the application
  • Once the application is changed to “hired,” Laserfiche:
    1. Generates an employee and digital employee folder
    2. Sends an email link to the hiring manager to complete the New Hire form
    3. Sends a welcome email to the new employee
    4. Automatic processes purge documents that have reached the end of their retention schedules

Becoming Experts in HR Automation

“This is what our IT department does for Laserfiche: it sets up the server, monitors the server processes and occasionally installs updates. That’s it,” says Malmberg. “Once we learned how to build workflows, we copied and pasted and changed what we needed to make them work for the new form we developed.” However, Steinhafel’s IT department still keeps busy. “They have bigger fish to fry and are happy to let us take the lead on HR-related projects,” says Malmberg. Left to its own devices, the HR department has achieved major success. By becoming more efficient, HR was able to continue driving Steinhafel’s growth without expanding its own department. This has resulted in annual savings of $80,000 that would have gone to more HR staff. Additionally, the HR team has more time to devote to engaging employees and helping them solve issues as they arise. The HR department’s results have inspired other departments to try Laserfiche. “We started with 36 HR forms in the repository. Now we’re up to 88 forms across all departments—from Sales to Merchandising,” says Malmberg. “Laserfiche spread everywhere after people got used to seeing what we built and how easy it was to work with.”

So what do you think – is it time for HR automation at your organization?

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It is the ultimate content management solution with a centralized, secure repository that’s accessible no matter where your work takes you.

Growing Bank Expedites Loan Application Processing in 20-Plus Branches

SITUATION

• A growing bank’s acquisitions led to many ways of managing documents.
• Locating missing information resulted in wasted time.

SOLUTION

• Laserfiche helped to centralize information and save time searching for documents.
• Laserfiche automated loan applications eliminated repetitive tasks and accelerated the process.
• Bank employees have immediate document access from any of the bank’s branches.

For this bank, growing from a startup with less than 10 employees to a bank with multiple acquisitions and 250 staff came with a challenge.

“The banks we bought all had different ways of managing documents — some of them used paper files, while others had software in place,” said one of the bank’s assistant vice presidents. “As a result, we spent a lot of time calling other branches to locate missing information.”

Having disparate approaches was a liability to bank operations and client service. New account applications had to be mailed or faxed from branch offices to the main office, resulting in lost documents — and wasted time.

“We wanted a centralized system to house our information,” the AVP said. “We needed something that would be fully functional across all departments and locations.”

The organization found Laserfiche document management software. “We chose Laserfiche for its flexibility. We like that the system can be used by all our employees while still being customized to fit specific departmental needs.”

Streamling Loan Application and Approval Paperwork

“Our top goal was that loan application processing or opening a new account wouldn’t take forever,” said the AVP.

Using Laserfiche, the bank automated the processing of new accounts and loans:
  • The customer fills out and submits new account paperwork, which can include signature cards, credit card applications and online banking enrollment forms.
  • A personal banker scans the documents into Laserfiche.
  • A customer data specialist enters important document metadata into Laserfiche, such as name, account number and Tax ID.
  • Laserfiche automatically routes the documents to the appropriate department for review and approval.
  • The department marks the document as approved, rejected or still in process, and the customer receives notification of the decision.

Growing Bank Expedites Loan“This process saves time on administrative tasks and provides immediate document access from any of the bank’s branches. For example, if a customer questions a check, the signature card can quickly be found in Laserfiche and a copy of the signature can be instantly retrieved for verification.

“Every department wants Laserfiche,” the AVP added. “They all have different ideas about what they want to do with Laserfiche.”

How Laserfiche ECM Helps Financial Advisors Compete with Robo-Advisors

Today, financial advisors operate in a far more competitive landscape than in years past. Robo-advisors and other technology-driven changes are impacting the traditional practices of advisors, creating urgency to adopt the latest industry innovations.

Here are three factors that are contributing to the industry’s shifting landscape and how enterprise content management (ECM) systems helps financial advisors adapt to them.

Robo-advisors

The term, “robo-advisor” refers to algorithmic technology that is helping investors—particularly beginning investors with smaller portfolios—cost-effectively make more informed financial decisions.

One of the ways traditional advisors can compete with robo-advisors is through software integration. When they integrate primary applications like a customer relationship management (CRM) and ECM system, advisors can quickly collect business-critical data and gain insight into their organization’s processes.

As robo-advisors enter the wealth management space, advisors must re-think their approach to technology in order to increase productivity and remain competitive.

RIA Growth Curve

The number of registered investment advisors (RIAs) has grown steadily in recent years and is expected to reach 28% of market share by 2018. This figure has grown from just 11.9% in 2013. In fact, research group Cerulli Associates recently identified RIAs as the fastest growing segment of the financial advisor market.

With many new practices entering the industry, it is crucial for advisors to focus on establishing competitive differentiators. ECM systems gives advisors a comparative advantage by streamlining business processes that can take their competitors longer to complete. For example, some ECM systems can:
  • Auto-populate electronic forms, reducing the processing time and errors of manual data entry
  • Automate compliance review and approval processes, allowing advisors to quickly book new trades
  • Email electronic forms to account holders for e-signatures, saving significant document turnaround time

Compliance

With a renewed focus on compliance from regulators, advisors can expect more frequent and in-depth audits than ever before. Top advisors are using ECM systems to prepare their firms for strict compliance regulations.

When advisors automate business processes like new account opening, blotter submissions and trade approvals, some ECM systems record an audit history of every action that takes place. This allows RIAs to easily discover documents requested during an audit.

Advisors can also use ECM systems to manage client records by automatically assigning retention and destruction dates based on their records management requirements. Girard Securities—a San Diego-based RIA—uses Laserfiche ECM to improve productivity and compliance around its blotter process:
 

The combination of robo-advisors, new competitors and stricter compliance makes for a tipping point in the wealth management industry. The advisors that come out on top will be defined by how they streamline their operations with technology.