The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital process automation (DPA) is reshaping the manufacturing landscape. As businesses strive to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance competitiveness, these technologies offer transformative solutions. This comprehensive analysis explores the synergy between AI and DPA in manufacturing, highlighting their benefits, applications, and potential challenges.
Understanding AI and DPA
AI refers to the ability of machines to simulate human intelligence, encompassing tasks like learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and perception. In manufacturing, AI can be applied to analyze vast datasets, predict equipment failures, optimize production processes, and improve quality control.
DPA is a software approach that automates repetitive, rule-based tasks, streamlining workflows and reducing manual errors. When combined with AI, DPA can create intelligent systems capable of adapting to changing conditions and making informed decisions.
Key Benefits of AI and DPA in Manufacturing
Enhanced Efficiency: Automation of routine tasks frees up human resources for more strategic activities, leading to increased productivity and reduced operational costs.
Improved Quality: AI-powered quality control systems can identify defects early in the manufacturing process, minimizing waste and improving product quality.
Predictive Maintenance: By analyzing equipment data, AI can predict potential failures, enabling proactive maintenance and reducing downtime.
Optimized Supply Chain: AI can optimize inventory management, demand forecasting, and logistics, resulting in a more efficient and responsive supply chain.
Data-Driven Decision Making: AI-powered analytics provide valuable insights into manufacturing processes, enabling data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement.
Applications of AI and DPA in Manufacturing
Production Optimization: AI can optimize production schedules, allocate resources effectively, and identify bottlenecks in manufacturing processes.
Quality Control: AI-powered vision systems can inspect products for defects, ensuring consistent quality and compliance with standards.
Predictive Maintenance: AI algorithms can analyze sensor data to predict equipment failures, allowing for timely maintenance and preventing unplanned downtime.
Supply Chain Management: AI can optimize inventory levels, improve demand forecasting, and streamline logistics operations.
Product Design and Development: AI can assist in product design, generating innovative concepts and simulating product performance.
Best Practices for Implementing AI and DPA
Start Small and Scale: Begin with pilot projects to test the feasibility and benefits of AI and DPA before implementing them on a larger scale.
Prioritize High-Impact Use Cases: Focus on applications that offer the greatest potential benefits and return on investment.
Invest in Data Quality: Ensure that data is accurate, complete, and accessible for AI algorithms to process effectively.
Collaborate with Experts: Partner with AI and DPA experts to leverage their knowledge and experience.
Address Ethical Concerns: Develop ethical guidelines and policies to ensure responsible AI implementation.
AI and DPA are powerful tools that can revolutionize manufacturing operations. By leveraging these technologies, businesses can enhance efficiency, improve quality, and gain a competitive edge. However, successful implementation requires careful planning, investment, and a commitment to ethical practices. As AI and DPA continue to evolve, manufacturers must stay informed and adapt their strategies to harness the full potential of these transformative technologies.
Client satisfaction and regulatory compliance are paramount in the wealth management industry. Yet, at times, your ability to streamline the client onboarding process and improve back-office operations leaves new clients wondering if they came to the right place. You’re not alone.
Many wealth management firms face the same challenges – onboarding clients seamlessly, while ensuring all necessary documentation and compliance requirements are met. Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, while widely used, often fall short when it comes to robust workflow automation capabilities.
Discover the benefits of CRM integration with intelligent process automation to enhance client experience and simplify compliance. If you’re searching for more comprehensive solutions to improve your operational excellence strategy, read on…
The Limitations of Stand-Alone CRMs in Workflow Automation
Despite the high market penetration of CRM software in the industry, wealth management firms struggle to leverage these platforms as the central operational hub for onboarding new clients and other critical processes.
Stand-alone CRMs typically lack the advanced process automation functionalities required to customize electronic forms for different jurisdictions, account types, and approval stages. Plus, many CRMs don’t fully comply with recordkeeping regulations (e.g., SEC Rule 17a-4), offer comprehensive reporting and analytics features, or provide the flexibility needed to reconfigure or rebuild complex business workflows. These limitations can leave you grappling with information silos, manual data entry errors, data security concerns, and inefficiencies across different areas of your business.
Why Document Workflow Automation in Wealth Management is Vital to Growing Your Business
Forward-thinking firms are turning to CRM integrations with intelligent process automation platforms to revolutionize their operations. By implementing content-centric workflow automation, firms can streamline the client onboarding process, simplify compliance procedures, and break down information silos that create bottlenecks in your productivity. These enterprise content management (ECM) solutions offer robust workflow customization options, advanced ability to leverage data reporting and analytics capabilities, and secure data storage, empowering firms to modernize their digital ecosystem and enhance client experience.
Stonehage Fleming’s Transition to Laserfiche
Stonehage Fleming strategically migrated a substantial portion of their workflows, including the client onboarding process, from Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Laserfiche’s enterprise content management solution. This transition not only resulted in significant cost savings of $55,000 annually, but also unlocked over 35,000 hours of time savings per year.
By leveraging Laserfiche’s advanced workflow automation and integration tools, Stonehage Fleming was able to standardize a group function across multiple jurisdictions and departments, mitigating compliance risks and enhancing operational efficiency.
The Impact of Intelligent Process Automation on Client Services
Gert Bester, IT Business Systems Manager at Stonehage Fleming, highlights the transformative impact of automation on client services: “Instead of getting more resources to do the work and expanding, [our middle office] looked at the processes to automate a lot of steps to be more supportive of the front office team. And in return, the front office team can actually support the clients better.”
Learn about CRM integration with intelligent process automation platform and more wealth management best practices to improve operational efficiency, streamline your client onboarding process, and simplify compliance.
• Needed to replace a legacy enterprise content management (ECM) system
• Sought a more robust, easier to use platform with advanced integration and automation capabilities
RESULTS
• Common forms and workflow platform shared across schools, sites and departments
• Standardized and automated key processes, including Position Control, the Head Injury Protocol, Student Cumulative Folders and Choice Program applications
• Boosted efficiency and enhanced responsiveness
• Able to better allocate personnel and budget to focus on student outcomes
Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) has been recognized as the No. 1 ranked school district in America with over 10,000 students. These high standards extend throughout all of the district’s operations, from enrollment and academics to hiring and IT processes.
“We’re in the heart of Silicon Valley, and with that comes some high expectations,” said Derek Moore, chief technology officer (CTO) at PAUSD. “With the improvements that we’ve made in our technology and processes, we’ve also raised the bar for ourselves.”
This constant evolution led the district to assess legacy systems and processes, to ensure the highest level of efficiency in operations, with the lowest amount of friction to users. Key to the district’s continuous improvement has been Laserfiche, with which PAUSD replaced a legacy enterprise content management (ECM) system. Laserfiche’s ease of use, adaptability to the district’s Mac OS environment, and advanced integration and automation capabilities were the major differentiators that drove PAUSD’s decision.
Today, with support from PAUSD’s Laserfiche solution provider ECS Imaging, Laserfiche has become a core component of the district’s tech stack, helping to integrate and orchestrate data and processes across the organization and support the district’s mission to keep the focus on students and student outcomes.
Using Laserfiche as a Multi-Purpose Tool
“Laserfiche is our Swiss Army knife,” said Moore. “If one of our business systems doesn’t have a solution that meets one of our needs, we fill that gap with an integration with Laserfiche. Whether we need to do a form to augment some other process or figure out how to input data — Laserfiche is our answer.”
Since implementing Laserfiche, PAUSD has integrated it with core pieces of the district’s technology infrastructure to enable more seamless process and information flow. Key integrations include Infinite Campus, the district’s student information system (SIS), as well as ERP, active directory, and single sign-on integrations.
“Laserfiche is the automation engine behind a lot of the tools or applications that we’re using which don’t have a good user interface to do the things we need to do,” said Joshua Hung, business systems analyst at PAUSD.
In addition to connecting formerly disparate sources of information and enabling automation of key workflows, Laserfiche has helped to create a culture of continuous improvement and process automation at the district.
“Laserfiche has facilitated better communication between departments and between people,” Moore said. Mapping out processes to validate or question each step has strengthened teams’ understanding of how or why actions are taken. “It’s really helped define our organizational processes in a way that I don’t think anyone in the organization understood. We’ve got a whole list of departments and processes that touch Laserfiche, from our student services to human resources, to our business office and our educational services. Laserfiche has been the backbone.”
Banishing Busywork to Focus on What Matters
One critical process that helped to get teams excited about Laserfiche-driven improvements was the Head Injury Protocol. Because head injuries — from minor bumps to serious blows — can have serious health implications, the process of reporting them requires significant documentation and multiple notifications to be distributed internally and externally.
Transforming the legacy, paper-driven process with a Laserfiche solution meant that documenting these events were now a lot less manual and less time-intensive, but also reported with more accuracy and accountability.
Because of the integration between Laserfiche and Infinite Campus, a staff member can now enter a student number into the Laserfiche form and the necessary information populates the form — parents’ contact information, parents’ email addresses, etc. From there, the staff member simply answers the required questions and submits the form. The principal then approves it, and the information is distributed to the nurse’s office, risk management, legal services, and the child’s parents.
Transformation of the Head Injury Protocol inspired various teams to realize the power of Laserfiche solutions. “It’s a really fun place to be,” Moore said. “Our users are bringing ideas to us, and we’re able to evaluate and prioritize projects. We’re thinking about our pain points as an organization and how we can create Laserfiche Forms processes to solve them.”
Building on the initial success, PAUSD began creating more standardization around other processes that require the alignment of multiple departments, approvals and systems.
“Our entire organization’s staff is very competent and wants to be empowered to do the job themselves,” Moore said. “That’s where Laserfiche fits in. We help by building small pieces for them or helping to standardize a process. Laserfiche empowers them to complete the tasks that they’re charged with without requiring a lot of tech team intervention.”
A complex yet critical process at the school district, Position Control is one such process which enables the district to track hiring and monitor costs related to various positions. Previously a paper form that was physically passed from stakeholder to stakeholder, the process is now digital and automatically routed in Laserfiche, leveraging an integration with the district’s ERP system. “The Laserfiche process ensures that we are fulfilling the necessary roles from an HR hiring perspective, to the business fiscal department, making sure there’s budget allocated for it,” Moore added.
The updated, expedited process extends to the IT team, which is now automatically notified when people are hired so that accounts and access can be set up immediately. “We want to make the new employee feel welcome,” Moore explained. “We’re onboarding them with a good experience and making sure they have everything they need so they’re ready to go on day one.”
The Future is Digital-First
As PAUSD builds a more automated future, Moore and his team understand the importance of being digital-first. One large step the district took toward this goal was to digitize all student cumulative folders, which contain students’ permanent records, including personal information, enrollment, academic records, and other relevant information. The IT team built a Laserfiche form and workflow to input, tag and sort all student documents into the correct places.
“We can say at this point that all of our active files are electronic,” Moore said. “Some information comes in as paper if it starts in another district, for instance, or it may be a doctor’s note that needs to be scanned in. But it’s scanned in via a Laserfiche form.”
This digital-first approach is also evident in the processes that collect information externally, as in PAUSD’s Choice Programs process. PAUSD Choice Programs offer parents and students options beyond their assigned neighborhood school, providing diverse learning environments for different interests and needs.
The district enables parents to fill out a public Laserfiche form, which is routed to staff members who validate the information through an integration with the SIS. The workflow also pulls additional data into the form that needs to be evaluated.
“These lookups save reviewers a lot of time, because instead of clicking to five different pages where the information exists, it’s all there on that one page,” said Hung. Additionally, the Laserfiche form enables the district to collect accurate data from the outset, eliminating the time-consuming data cleaning that used to be inevitable in the legacy process. “We also created a notification process with Laserfiche, to make sure that parents and students receive the right notifications for the specific lottery programs they are being accepted to. Our staff can just click a button that sends out notifications as part of the business process; it’s made it a lot less stressful.”
Innovating with Intent
The IT team continues to innovate the organization’s many processes and procedures that make up PAUSD’s operations. One of the best parts of using Laserfiche for this innovation, the team says, is that they know they are not alone.
“We go to the community events to connect with other Laserfiche users, and we communicate about what challenges they’ve run into, or what new processes they are trying,” Hung added. “We learn from them, and we can pass on what we’re doing, too.”
As the district grows, the technology team is confident in its ability to support the student-centric mission of the organization. Through digital solutions, PAUSD can prioritize the programs and budget items that are going to have a positive impact on student outcomes.
“We’re still adding people and adding positions, but what we’re not talking about adding is people to simply process paperwork or process data,” said Moore. “We’re more focused on how we can better use people and budget to serve students.”
How GenAI and Digital Process Automation Are Impacting Manufacturing Productivity
In this webinar, discover how generative AI (GenAI) technologies can directly improve process automation and business productivity for those in the manufacturing and commercial sectors. Gain insights on how best to implement GenAI into digital process automation (DPA) to streamline document controls and reduce costs and time associated with addressing ever-growing compliance and governance requirements.
Businesses can also leverage AI and DPA to improve business resilience, drive productivity of process cycles, and integrate with other technologies to ensure your organization stays ahead in a fast-changing digital landscape.
Guest speakers Craig le Clair, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, and Steve Everett Jr., SVP of operations at FCA Packaging, will join experts from Laserfiche to discuss:
Current digital trends and use cases involving DPA in the manufacturing and commercial sectors
How to build implementation roadmaps involving GenAI and DPA tools
Frequent challenges in the digital transformation journey, and how to overcome them for improved business productivity and immediate ROI
Why now is the best time for leadership to digitally transform their legacy business processes
Join this free hands-on, instructor-led training and learn to build user-friendly, intuitive templates in the repository with new metadata features in Laserfiche 12.
Curious about Laserfiche 12?
Leverage metadata templates and fields to easily categorize documents, improve searchability, and empower automation! Get an early preview of new metadata updates in Laserfiche 12 while learning about existing metadata concepts to improve your repository right now. This training will help you learn about new features available in Laserfiche 12 to support designing metadata templates.
This training is applicable for any skill level; even if you’ve never created a metadata template before! This free hands-on training will walk you through:
New features in Laserfiche 12 related to metadata templates
Building user-friendly, intuitive metadata templates with the new metadata features in Laserfiche 12 like dynamically showing and hiding fields, adding static help text, and more!
Choosing appropriate field types to categorize your data and simplify user experience
To learn more about the November 2024 Laserfiche 12 self-hosted release: Click Here
• 2,000 staff responsible for individuals across nearly two dozen facilities
• Needed a way to streamline information management
RESULTS
• Saved considerable costs by no longer paying for physical storage or shipping files between facilities
• Increased accuracy while mitigating lost or outdated information
Spanning facilities across the state, the Idaho Department of Correction (IDOC) represents nine prisons, five community re-entry centers, and seven district probation and parole offices. Its mission is to “create a model correctional system that provides equitable access to programming and opportunities that reflect a community experience, foster connection and restore victims of crime.”
With a litany of documents, different business systems and overall legality playing major roles at the Department of Correction, IDOC needed a “system of systems” to support its complex information management needs.
Laserfiche fulfilled many of IDOC’s initial requirements, and today the organization continues to work with Laserfiche and solution provider MCCi to leverage its integration, forms and automation capabilities to streamline information flow and improve workflows while finding new ways to better serve its thousands of staff and the people in their care.
A Standardized and Integrated Approach to Client Information
Housing approximately 8,000 incarcerated individuals, IDOC is accountable for managing people convicted of felony offenses and sentenced to prison, probation or a period of “retained jurisdiction.”
IDOC also oversees approximately 24,000 individuals on probation/parole, and supervises those living in the state’s communities, offering education, treatment and re-entry services to assist in lowering relapse behavior.
About 2,000 staff are employed at IDOC spanning its three divisions (Prisons, Probation and Parole, and Management Services), with roles including security positions such as correctional officers, and non-security positions such as teachers, human resources, mental health clinicians and more.
IDOC’s complex operations require the organization to house information in multiple Laserfiche repositories, the main ones being human resource files, investigation files, policies and SOPs (standard operating procedures) that are public and available to staff.
To facilitate the efficient flow of information throughout the organization as well as with external providers, IDOC has built a solution that leverages a Laserfiche API integration with its internal client management system (CMS). Because the CMS is only available to staff on the internal network, IDOC uses the API to enable external providers to submit data through Laserfiche Forms, which then get reviewed by our providers internally.
“The value provided by this integration is huge for us,” said Cassie Lint, project manager at IDOC. “With this integration we’re able to save staff time by automating notes and data entry, plus assist our external IDOC partners by enabling auto-filling of publicly available information on forms as they are filling them out.” Meanwhile, as data is submitted to IDOC, Laserfiche helps to standardize the input, making the data easier to find, use and report on.
Enhancing Data Management
The approach to continuous improvement has also led IDOC to digitize its medical records for management within Laserfiche repositories. “We are working with multiple departments to make sure documents are imported correctly and have the correct metadata attached to them, so that when they get filed into the client and resident management files, they are easily relocatable by OCR text or the metadata associated with those files,” said Lint.
The benefits IDOC has experienced have been immediate. “We no longer have to pay for physical storage, shipping of the files between facility locations, documents getting lost or even misfiled — even digitally,” she added. “OCR enables us to search on text recognition. If a document is misfiled, we can still locate it and re-file it. In physical files, if something is in the wrong folder, we may never find that information.”
Digitizing medical records in Laserfiche also eases the process when clients move to different facilities, which previously required the transport of boxes to different locations, which introduced additional cost and the risk of misplaced or unauthorized access to information.
“Laserfiche enables us to restrict portions of client files to only those who have the appropriate permissions to access,” Lint said. “We utilize forms for access requests and integrate with our IT support system to create tickets as needed once access requests have been approved.”
As IDOC looks ahead, there are numerous plans for broadening Laserfiche’s use. The first will be implementing records management with IDOC’s documentary repository systems. IDOC is currently in the discovery phase of determining the record custodians and retention requirements to better manage document lifecycles.
“It’s important to not host information and documentation that is out of date,” Lint said. “Not only is that documentation no longer valid or useful, but it could also be returned for a subpoena or e-discovery or a public records request. It could increase risk of litigation or misunderstandings, or discovery of information that is no longer pertinent to the client or resident.
Laserfiche will help IDOC to automate the processes around records management lifecycles, which are dictated by federal, state and local government recordkeeping requirements.”
The Future of IDOC: A More Connected, Automated Organization
IDOC continues to look for new ways to innovate processes and information management. As part of its 2024-2027 Strategic Plan, it aims to leverage technology to reduce manual data collection burden on staff and increase time savings.
Lint explained that she sees opportunity in potentially working with local counties to integrate their Laserfiche environments with IDOC’s, enabling better communication and minimizing duplicate data entry, or the need to fax or email documentation.
Additionally, IDOC has plans to replace an in-house built web application — that requires a special database — with Laserfiche, creating even more efficiencies and cost savings. “We can take advantage of the API integration with our client management system, and reduce the amount of support and technical requirements that the in-house web application needed,” Lint said.
Ultimately, Lint sees in Laserfiche a system that takes care of the many manual and granular tasks that IDOC employees should not have to spend time on — instead, they should be focused on the mission of creating safer communities and increasing the success of the individuals under IDOC’s jurisdiction.
“Laserfiche enables us to develop processes so they’re super easy to relate to and use, and then have the back-end load take care of all the heavy details that the end user doesn’t need to know or interact with,” Lint said. “It just takes that burden off employees. And Laserfiche makes that easy to do.”
The digital transformation in healthcare heralded by electronic health records (EHRs) is creating its own challenges. As the industry rapidly adopts advanced technologies, healthcare organizations find themselves drowning in a sea of digital “paperwork.” In turn, the patient information and medical data deluge forms bottlenecks that impede workflows, hinder strategic operational goals and ultimately affect the quality of patient care — the opposite of what digital healthcare tools are designed to do.
This administrative burden is felt across the entire healthcare spectrum. Frontline staff are stretched thin, struggling to balance patient care with increased documentation demands. From patient intake to discharge to medical billing and followups, back-office workloads intensify as patient populations require more complex and frequent care. Meanwhile, IT departments grapple with interoperability issues and data management challenges when solutions don’t integrate, resulting in lower returns on chosen technology investments.
Electronic content management (ECM) systems present a powerful solution to these mounting pressures. These digital platforms organize, store and manage medical documents, patient records and other healthcare-related information to improve accessibility, efficiency and compliance within healthcare organizations.
ECM solutions offer a way to modernize outdated methods and bridge the gap between various processes and departments. Leading ECM systems provide the tools to efficiently manage critical patient information and increasing volumes of medical records, enhance operational effectiveness through digital process automation, and maintain compliance with strict regulatory standards.
Healthcare comes to a critical crossroads
The urgent need to find a better way to work is underscored by the U.S. healthcare system’s looming staffing crisis, as an aging population with increasing medical needs is coupled with a shrinking workforce to provide care.
Compounding this issue is the high burnout and turnover rate among younger healthcare professionals seeking meaningful work who feel their skills are underutilized.
Grace Nam, Strategic Solutions Manager, Healthcare at ECM provider Laserfiche, attributes this attrition to a misalignment of expectations. “While we are preparing for the retirement of baby boomers, we’re also witnessing a rapid exodus of younger generations from healthcare fields because they don’t feel like they are doing what they invested their time and money to do in the workforce,” she said.
Nam identified a key factor in this disillusionment: the disproportionate time many healthcare staff currently spend on repetitive administrative tasks rather than on direct patient care. Across various healthcare settings, data silos and the burden of paperwork are eroding the core motivations that initially drew many to these professions.
“End users from front to back offices expressed challenges, especially with extended EHR/EMR processes, that take up too much of their time,” Nam said. “Not only that, but these inefficiencies are causing errors that lead to a few weeks or even a few months of work delays, all because of a simple typo or manual data error.”
Breathing new life into healthcare workforces
Advanced technologies, particularly in areas of automation and data management, can play a crucial role in retention rates for both patients and their providers. ECM solutions in particular offer transformative benefits for healthcare organizations, including:
Bridging interoperability gaps, particularly between legacy and niche applications, to improve data consistency across departments for better clinical decision support.
Managing unstructured data by integrating disparate data sources, simplifying indexing and chart retrieval and securing data access — all of which speeds up revenue cycle management (RCM).
Mitigating workforce shortages and relieving staff burnout by streamlining administrative processes to create a more efficient and supportive work environment.
Enhancing patient engagement and loyalty through patient portal integrations that automate patient-centric processes such as billing, invoicing and medical records management.
Building digital resilience that ensures continuity of care, even in difficult circumstances.
Simplifying HIPAA compliance to support data accuracy and patient privacy with automated audit trails.
Working with or adjacent to EHRs at the heart of today’s healthcare organizations, ECM solutions allow healthcare practices to flourish under challenging conditions and make the most of the large volumes of healthcare data that are now generated daily.
• Proactively responding to Royal Commission recommendations, the Archdiocese needed modern methods to enhance and streamline information management.
RESULTS
• Used Laserfiche technology to digitize and preserve historical documents
• Safeguarded the Archdiocese’s rich history while seamlessly integrating contemporary records for future efficiency
Located in Western Australia, the Catholic Archdiocese of Perth is a nearly 200-year-old religious organization with strong roots in the community. It consists of 110 parishes, 26 agencies and organizations, and about 70 schools. The Archdiocese is based in Perth, the capital city of the State of Western Australia.
As a large and historic religious community, the Archdiocese manages a vast flow of information across its many services. To improve its processes, proactively safeguard its community by following Royal Commission recommendations, and streamline operations, the Archdiocese partnered with Laserfiche to implement a secure and robust records management system.
Transforming to Digital
Odhran O’Brien serves as the Director of the Archives and Information Governance Office, whose mission it is to oversee, preserve and make accessible the archives and digital information throughout the Archdiocese. When O’Brien was appointed in 2016, he and his team of seven individuals discovered the organization was managing information, particularly digital information, in inconsistent methods, that do not follow industry best practice. “Previously, information was siloed, and people could not access information from other departments. We felt we needed a high-level strategy to change that and bring the organization into the future,” said O’Brien. As a result, they created an Information Governance Strategy, focused on managing the Archdiocese’s digital information in a consistent manner across all its many agencies, parishes and organizations.
O’Brien and his team set to work right away finding the technology that could safely handle and store the information they planned to include within a records management system, some from nearly two centuries ago. Having worked with workplace technology provider Ricoh Australia for over a decade, the Archdiocese team partnered with the organization to find and implement the perfect solution. Laserfiche’s capabilities made it the obvious choice. “We’ve got records dating back to the 1840s. We’ve got sacramental information (information about people getting baptized and various sacraments within the church), but also all the business records of the organization, again, going back to the 1840s,” O’Brien shared.
The Archdiocese was able to easily and quickly use Laserfiche’s technology to digitize the abundant mix of historical documents and archive them within Laserfiche’s records management system. Additionally, they implemented a way for contemporary records to feed into the same system, enabling all documents to be organized and stored together in one, secure location.
A Single Source of Truth
Since turning to Laserfiche, the Archdiocese has experienced numerous benefits, especially when it comes to having one designated home for all information across the organization. “The primary benefit has been the fact that we now have a single source of truth for our 200 employees in our major administration center,” said O’Brien. “We’re also using automation throughout our 110 parishes. So, all the inquiries they receive for religious services, education and charitable requests are automated, allowing them to serve the community much more efficiently than they ever have in the past.”
O’Brien highlighted the significant benefits Laserfiche has brought to the Archdiocese and the community it serves: “Digitizing our information has not only enhanced our administrative creativity but also greatly increased our efficiency. What used to take weeks to find can now be accessed in real time.
“For example, by using Laserfiche, our Safeguarding Office has noticed that their small team of four people, serving tens of thousands in our community, can streamline workflows and improve accessibility to information. This efficiency not only allows the team to provide accurate, up-to-date information to stakeholders, clients, and the community but also frees up hundreds of hours per year for important safeguarding support with the Perth Church community.”
Laserfiche has also streamlined how the Archdiocese handles a wide range of inquiries, from religious sacraments to school enrollments and charitable support. O’Brien noted, “Laserfiche enables us to quickly and accurately direct individuals to the services they need, whether it’s for homelessness support or financial relief.”
Laserfiche provides nationwide accessibility, enabling historians, scholars and family members across Australia to easily request and access ancestral heritage and stories. This improved access accelerates research, supports publications, and enriches family trees. O’Brien added that since implementing Laserfiche’s search functionality, his office and small team have successfully fulfilled hundreds of requests each year.
Still to Come
Looking forward, the Archdiocese plans to expand its successful use of Laserfiche to other areas within the organization. One major aspect will include automation. “We’re hoping that a number of our large parishes and charities’ service and information requests will be completely automated through Laserfiche. So, they’ll be able to use all the services they provide, whether it be community services or simply religious services. People will log on to a website, access Laserfiche Forms, and those processes will go through automatically,” said O’Brien.
The Archdiocese also has plans of broadening Laserfiche’s reach in general and to include mobile options, such as an app, within the next two years. O’Brien shared, “We certainly hope we’ll move to a cloud-based solution so it can be implemented more widely. Currently, Laserfiche is implemented across both the Archdiocese of Perth and one of our neighboring archdioceses. So, that’s roughly an area the size of Spain or France. We’re hoping that we’ll continue to be able to expand that out further.
”The Archdiocese is committed to staying at the forefront of technology, with Laserfiche integral to its future plans. “What excites me most about our ongoing Laserfiche project is its potential for the future,” O’Brien said. “Embracing AI ethically and further automation in an easy UI and UX for staff, volunteers and stakeholders will enable us to enhance our services and more effectively support the community we are dedicated to serving.”
