Laserfiche

“One of the driving forces that led to the implementation of Laserfiche was to provide the official version of the opinions to everyone free of cost. The substantial savings realized by terminating the bound volume method was also a considerable advantage,” he says.

Using LaserficheWebLink, a Web portal that provides instant, read-only access to Document Management over the Internet, the Arkansas Supreme Court and Arkansas Court of Appeals publish their latest opinions in PDF format on their Website.

“Most court records and paper copies of opinions are retained indefinitely,” notes Frederick. “In addition, we are required by statute to keep three copies of each bound volume; the final published volume count was 375 when we made the transition. From that standpoint, the storage of electronic records is far more efficient.”

In terms of search and retrieval, “metadata is a gift,” Frederick says. The Reporter of Decisions established the courts’ file structure, templates and fields, which allow anyone to access the opinions using one or more of the following criteria:

• Date.
• Court.
• Order number.
• Justice/Judge.
• Session.
• Session term.

Current Integrations, Future Plans

After enabling live video streaming by implementing a Granicus software solution, the court integrated it with Laserfiche to enable the public and legal community to access archived video footage along with a copy of the opinion tied to the case in question. “We’ve made great efforts to become more transparent,” says Frederick. “By integrating Granicus with Laserfiche, we’ve created a comprehensive digital public record that’s accessible to anyone over the Web.”

The court is currently working on integrating Laserfiche with its court management system (CMS) so that court personnel can access documents stored in Laserfiche when they’re viewing a particular case in the CMS.

Although the courts haven’t yet taken full advantage of Laserfiche Workflow, a business process document management software tool included with Laserfiche Rio, they may use Workflow to route drafts of their opinions to:

• The deciding panel (court of appeals, typically three judges) for review and annotations.
• The Reporter of Decisions for editing, publication and retention.

“Flow is a big buzzword right now, so knowing that we can use Laserfiche to automate more of our processes presents tremendous possibilities,” says Frederick.

Change Management Methodology for Curing “Parchment Disorder”

“One thing I’ve noticed after working in IT across a variety of industries is that the public sector is a little more cautious when it comes to adopting new technology,” says Frederick. “Some people still get comfort in being able to touch a piece of paper, so educating and training everyone on the value of Laserfiche has been interesting.”

In terms of change management, Frederick’s philosophy is that history always denotes the future. “As we were moving to electronic publication, we focused on the input from the Reporter of Decisions and the parameters set by the supreme court. Full integration would have been more easily put in place had we also gotten input from the court about the opinion writing process upfront.”

As Frederick and his team prepare to use Laserfiche to enable attorneys to e-file briefs and other documents that make up the appellate court record, they are training the judges, judicial clerks and administrative assistants first. “The better we understand what each court needs, the more successful the transition will be,” he says.

Frederick explains that e-filing will eliminate the need for lawyers to bring 16 copies of their briefs to court. More importantly, it will allow both courts to quickly find specific pieces of information contained within those briefs, thanks to chapter and marker breaks within electronic briefs, as well as Laserfiche’s sophisticated search capabilities.

“Digitizing will lower our costs and increase our clearance rates,” says Frederick. “Training people ahead of time is a key factor for recognizing the value that Laserfiche has to offer.”

Official court opinions are now electronic and easily accessible by the public

December 5th, 2011 by Meghann Wooster

“People don’t typically associate Arkansas with the cutting edge,” explains Daron Frederick, Network Administrator for the Arkansas Supreme Court. “That’s why it’s such a pleasure to have the U.S. Supreme Court looking to us for ideas about the unique and innovative ways we are implementing technology.”

Although both Arkansas’ supreme court and court of appeals have recently begun broadcasting—and archiving—live oral arguments on their Website, it is the courts’ use of enterprise content management (ECM) technology that has caught the Supreme Court’s eye.

“We’d had a document imaging system in place for several years, but it hadn’t been used much,” says Frederick. “Only a few techs even knew how to access it, and the search and retrieval capability for records wasn’t particularly useful. We had to ask ourselves, ‘Why scan anything if you can’t use the system?’”

He continues, “Our principal selection criteria for an ECM solution included the ability to manage content, automate processes, enable easy access to records and raise visibility for the legal community and the public.”

He notes that, ultimately, it was the unlimited servers included with Laserfiche Rio that won over the courts’ IT Department. “Both courts issue opinions of high interest that are heavily accessed, so we wanted to make sure we had failovers and test servers in place to accommodate that.”

Laserfiche Enables Electronic Opinions

In 2009, Arkansas became the first state to establish electronic reporting as the official medium for appellate court opinions. Substantial cost savings resulting from the transition provided the opportunity to implement Laserfiche.

“Before that, the appellate court opinions had always been officially reported in bound volumes,” says Frederick. “However, the volumes were produced and distributed approximately four times a year, which meant there was significant lag time between issuance of an opinion and its appearance in its official format.”

With declining subscription rates, higher production costs and advancing technology, the court determined that its current method of publication was no longer acceptable. “Although court systems in general have been slow to enter the digital age, we have to remember that we work for the public, and they’re used to finding information quickly on the Internet,” explains Frederick.

Click Here to read Part-II

LONG BEACH, CA (Laserfiche)-June 20, 2011-Laserfiche Mobile today announced the release of Laserfiche, an iPhone app which gives people the freedom to view & approve workplace documents on the go, and also capture and upload new documents by iPhone camera-a convenient and effective form of Document Management. "In today's time, one hasn't to be tied to the office because of all the information being locked away in paper files or the approvals needed are still paper process based.". ”

IPhone's touch screen, gesture recognition & high resolution interface is being taken advantage by Laserfiche Mobile to give immersive user experience with other outlet for Managing Document.. Laserfiche Mobile helps in:

Creating and uploading new content with iPhone camera.

Cropping, straightening and enhancing captured information automatically, with full text recognition.

Copying, moving, renaming, downloading, e-mailing, printing or deleting content.

Browsing documents in a folder structure or searhing the entire repository.

Participating in workflow automation processes by accessing metadata fields.

"Content capture are changed significantly by Laserfiche Mobile", adds Wayman.. "For 25 years, heavy investments have been done by Laserfiche towards the development of innovative ways for capturing information as quickly and as effectively as possible, with patented PhotoDocs photograph processing technology, lightweight Web interfaces and recently, an iPhone app which Laserfiche to one of present day's most popular mobile devices with a form of mobile Document Imaging Software". ”

Laserfiche Mobile, including a built-in demonstration, is available for free download from Apple's App Store Laserfiche Mobile operates by Laserfiche Web Access as a part of Laserfiche Avante and Laserfiche Rio systems. For accepting connections from Laserfiche Mobile, Laserfiche users can download the free add-on, Laserfiche Mobile Add-On, from Laserfiche Support Site.

About Laserfiche

Since 1987, Laserfiche has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 30, 000 organizations worldwide-including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies-use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process managementSINCE 1987, LASERFICHE® HAS USED RUN SMARTER® PHILOSOPHY FOR CREATING SIMPLE AND ELEGANT ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT (ECM) SOLUTIONS. MORE THAN 30000 ORGANIZATIONS WORLDWIDE, THAT INCLUDES FEDERAL, STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNNMENT AGENCIES AND FORTUNE 1000 COMPANIES, USE LASERFICHE TO STREAMLINE DOCUMENT, RECORDS AND BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT..

New software release delivers immediate value to customers’ lines of business

LONG BEACH, CA (Laserfiche)—Novemb er 30, 2011—Delivering on its commitment to help customers grow the value of their enterprise content management (ECM) investment, Laserfiche today announced the immediate availability of Laserfiche 8.3. The new release spans various lines of business, helping organizations improve information governance and automate transactional processes such as accounts payable processing, case management, document management and HR onboarding, among others.

“We are committed to providing product enhancements that improve the way organizations do business. Over the past year, our customers have begun automating more and more complex business processes, and we developed Laserfiche 8.3 to respond to their needs,” said Tom Wayman, Vice President of Product Strategy at Laserfiche.

Laserfiche 8.3 includes the following new and enhanced features:

• New Workflow activities that improve productivity. With Laserfiche, organizations quickly automate transactional processes by dragging and dropping pre-built workflow activities onto a graphical canvas.
• Database activities automate the process of retrieving and updating information from third-party databases, simplifying integration.
• PDF activities add immediate value to the product suite by enabling Laserfiche administrators to automatically import PDF forms into Laserfiche, retrieve information from PDF fields and map them to Laserfiche fields.
• More than 60 built-in workflow activities make it easier than ever to customize workflow configuration to the unique needs of each organization and line of business.
• Digital signatures that simplify information governance. Digital signatures in Laserfiche 8.3 are validated with signing certificates on the server, so users know that a signature is trustworthy. Digital signatures can also prompt Workflow activities that guide documents through the approval process.
• A new Web Administration Console that improves deployment flexibility. Laserfiche 8.3 offers an easy way for administrators to securely access the administrative functions of the repository from anywhere—including remote sites, client computers and even mobile devices—making administration more flexible than ever.

“The advanced business process management capabilities and administration tools in Laserfiche 8.3 enable organizations of all sizes to rapidly implement a wide variety of transactional content management solutions,” said Wayman. “Laserfiche 8.3 is an infrastructure deployment that enables our customers to use ECM as a foundation for delivering shared services across the enterprise.”

Learn More about Laserfiche 8.3:

• Watch quick, 5-minute video on the user-value of the new release, and the development philosophy behind it.
• Get a full technical overview of features in our whitepaper.
• Or visit support.laserfiche.com for videos, forums, Knowledge Base articles, and more.

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 30,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—use Laserfiche® software to streamline document imaging, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure while still offering business units the flexibility to react quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built on top of Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports the Microsoft SQL platform and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche®, Run Smarter® and Compulink® are registered trademarks of Compulink Management Center, Inc।

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Ease and familiarity of use speeds an already speedy deployment

HFG purchased a 15-user LaserficheAvante system with Web Access (for deployment to its Ventura County office) and Audit Trail in December of 2010. With April 15 on the horizon, initial deployment focused on the tax preparation side of HFG’s business, beginning with a substantial backlog conversion of paper files. “Considering the holidays, it took around 30 days to deploy, customize and integrate the system. We had one day of training for full-time staff. And it took me 30 minutes to train the part time staff on how they’d be using Laserfiche,” Mroue recalls. The ease of deployment was significant, he adds—based in no small part on Laserfiche’s ability to mirror the firm’s familiar paper filing structures with electronic document management . Tax worksheets are automatically sent to Laserfiche with a single click from Microsoft Office programs, while all forms from the Intuit Lacerte system are sent to Laserfiche using Snapshot.

“We were able to mimic our exact process in the Laserfiche system. Nothing changed for staff; I told them, ‘The client file doesn’t exist—it’s now a client folder.’ That made it easy for the employees to understand the change. Instead of people getting up and moving files from cabinets, it ‘jumps’ by itself,” Mroue says.

Workflow makes a $20,000/1,000 hour difference

The jumping-by-itself, Mroue continues, is the result of implementing Laserfiche Workflow. “A file used to jump between seven sets of hands, from client meeting to the client delivery,” he begins. “File clerk/ front desk staff/preparer/checker/sc anner/processor/mail clerk, and back to the file clerk.”

“Now, using Workflow, the front desk sets up the appointment and creates the file for the preparer, and it’s just ‘click’ the field, ‘approve,’ ‘approve,’ ‘approve,’ all the way through the process. If something isn’t approved, it is sent back automatically with a ‘sticky note’ on the document imaging in Laserfiche. Nobody has to leave their desk, and I can monitor the whole process and see where everything is so I know what’s getting done. It just raises the level of efficiency and accountability,” he adds.

“Operationally, we had the best tax season ever, especially for me since I could monitor every detail of the business and everyone’s performance from my screen,” Mroue says. “We delivered content on a CD instead of paper, so we used five boxes of paper instead of 50, plus we saved a lot on postage. We also saved the cost of our part time clerks—which is about $20,000 a year. We made our ROI in the first year alone. But the biggest savings was the preparers’ time—at least 10 minutes for every hour. When you add that up, that’s literally a thousand hours our staff can spend working with more clients.”

Coincidentally, the firm’s Laserfiche installation and training took place right around the time of the annual Empower 2011 Laserfiche Institute Conference in January, inspiring an even quicker adoption. “Everyone from our office agreed the Conference was pretty amazing in the amount of knowledge provided,” Mroue adds. “I was actually able to continue writing the Workflow automations for our tax preparation process at the Conference.”

Expanding deployment, saving more clicks with image-enablement integration

As of June 2011, the firm has extended scanning to Al Hewitt, Inc., its RIA firm. “Our goal is to eliminate all the files in our office by the end of August—which will free up a big space,” Mroue says.

For next tax season, Mroue says HFG will utilize Cities Digital’s Unfetterfiche to image-enable their Lacerte system with a single hot key. Deployment for the Al Hewitt, Inc./RIA side of the business is also being mapped out. “Each client file has about six folders, so that transition will be immensely beneficial,” he says.

“We’re taking things step by step,” Mroue adds. “One thing we’ve learned from this process is that in order for the transition to a totally paperless environment to be successful, users have to accept it and want to use it. Laserfiche has the flexibility to make that happen.”

For his part, however, Mroue is very satisfied. “From an IT standpoint, Laserfiche is easy to maneuver and to develop and change. You’re not going back and asking the VAR for help all the time, so it won’t cost you money down the road,” he says. “We’re already thinking about upgrading the system and adding more users.”

For More Information : http://www.laserfiche.com/news/archives/2010/12 /14/a-grand-story/" title="http://www.laserfiche.com/news/archives/2010/12 /14/a-grand-story/" target="_blank"http://www.laserfiche.com/new...

Hewitt Financial Group saves $20,000 and 1,000 hours in its first year automating its tax preparation business

Al Hewitt Inc./Hewitt Financial Group (HFG), headquartered in Palmdale, CA, is a combination fee-only Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) and tax preparation firm serving 6,000 clients between its two offices in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties.

During tax season, staff regularly doubles from 15 to 30, owing to the sheer volume of work—and paperwork—associate d with tax preparation. But as HFG’s businesses steadily grew, the firm had also steadily outgrown what Chief Operating Officer Ali Mroue calls its “Stone Age document management system.”

In 2004, the firm had implemented the proprietary and non-SQL based system, which was an add-on module for the firm’s Intuit Lacerte tax preparation software, “purely for storage,” he says. Data transfer to PDF was difficult and error-prone, and “we were essentially scanning to create a back-up for the actual physical file. But that was unreliable—we lost data once, and it had no security or audit trail of any sort.”

From just paperless to purposeful: An ECM vision takes shape

By 2010, HFG files containing 10 years of data were simply too big to manage and too hard to find. “We’d already added a scanning clerk and a designated file clerk, but it was quickly becoming an operational nightmare, with more staff to manage and more documents getting misplaced,” Mroue remembers.

The irony is that when the firm’s search for a proper enterprise content management (ECM) solution brought Mroue to Laserfiche, it was not the first time. “We first looked into Laserfiche in 2006, but back then, we weren’t looking at ECM in terms of business process automation or any bigger-picture operational improvements,” he says. “We just wanted to get rid of the paper.”

Working with Patrick Welsch of Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital, Mroue began to see how integral ECM deployment was to not only keep up with, but also anticipate, Hewitt’s projected growth. “We looked at a few solutions, and they all did things in their own way. Only Laserfiche offered the flexibility to develop our own folder structures and templates—and we’d be able to change them depending on requirements without calling in a consultant,” Mroue says.

“Plus, we required that Laserfiche integrate with our Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Intuit Lacerte tax software, as well as send Microsoft Office document management directly to Laserfiche. We wanted everything to mesh together, other systems either didn’t integrate, or if they did, it was going be complicated and expensive.” Click Here to read Part-II

Six years ago, if you’d asked Ron Anderson how to add 150 employees to his medical billing company without relocating or acquiring new office space, he’d have looked at you and laughed. “I’d have told you it’s impossible,” says Anderson, director of business development at San Diego, California-based CHMB and a past president of the California chapter of the MGMA. “We’d have had employees sitting on each other’s shoulders.”

Back then, CHMB was struggling to manage a surplus of paper documents so colossal that “we were using filing cabinets as walls and dividers between cubicles,” Anderson remembers. When this elicits chuckles from his listeners, he suddenly gets serious: “It’s funny until it costs you money. And, boy, that paper was costing us a lot.”

With over 700 physicians as clients, CHMB currently processes more than two million patient encounters annually—which translates into approximately 10 million documents a year. CHMB breaks the various types of documents down into four different “batches” for processing:

Charges.Includes superbills, operative reports and patient information.

Payments.Includes explanations of benefits (EOBs), checks and deposit slips.

Correspondence.Includes requests for additional information from insurance companies/payors.

Discrepancies.Includes items that require corrections or more complete information.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche, we were using couriers to transport materials back and forth between our office and our clients’ practices, and paper storage was consuming valuable work space,” recounts Anderson.

But the cost of managing so much paper wasn’t limited to courier, mail and storage costs; it also extended into employee time and productivity. “Staff had limited access to the paperwork they needed to process, so there were a lot of inefficiencies there,” says Anderson. “And with so much paper coming in and out the door, we were constantly struggling to intelligently manage our workflow; there were just too many moving parts.”

To stop the bleeding, CHMB started looking into document management solutions. According to Anderson, “There are less expensive options out there, but if your system becomes an obstacle to productivity, that’s a problem. We chose Laserfiche because we knew that it would make us more efficient. There was no question about that.”

With the help of Laserfiche reseller JPI Data Resource, CHMB implemented its content management solution in 2004. Since then, the billing company has been released from its dependence on paper. The volume of paper coming into the office has decreased, since approximately 50% of CHMB’s clients scan and upload their documentation directly to the medical billing company via a secure FTP site. Although the other half of its clients still send paper, CHMB immediately scans the paperwork into Laserfiche and securely disposes of the paper originals after 30 days. “Our shredder stops by twice a week,” says Anderson. “Paper is ugly, and we’re no longer using file cabinets as cubicle walls.”

Thanks to its increased productivity and profitability, CHMB has been in acquisition mode of late. In September 2008, it acquired a San Diego-area billing company, and in October 2009 it bought a billing company in Orange County. “The first company we acquired was already using Laserfiche,” says Anderson, “so that merger was incredibly smooth. The second company used a different enterprise content management platform, so that transition has taken a little more work.”

Overall, “Laserfiche has been a huge differentiator for us,” Anderson concludes. “We’re saving money, we’re more efficient and we’ve added 150 new employees without having to pay for additional office space. Laserfiche is a great product that’s had a huge impact on CHMB and the high quality results we provide for our clients.”

Northern Michigan’s Muskegon County Community Mental Health Services (MCCMHS) implemented its Avatar practice management system back in 2003 to automate electronic health records (EHR). Although the Avatar system had a document imaging module that could digitize the patient histories, lab reports and documents that would always require doctor and patient signatures, several of the county’s non-clinical departments—includi ng HR and Finance—were also contending with overflowing file cabinets and rising storage and handling costs.

Rather than implementing separate solutions for the clinical and non-clinical sides of the house, MCCMHS officials recognized that enterprise content management (ECM) Document Management Software would be the most efficient and cost-effective way to answer its document-related challenges.

ECM Supports EHR

MCCMHS’ search brought the organization to Jeff Nelson of Bolt Document Management, a Laserfiche reseller based in Elkhart, IN. “Initially the objective was for the Laserfiche system to act as a bridge between legacy information and future digital content,” Nelson remembers. “At the same time, implementation of Laserfiche allowed MCCMHS to address areas where working with paper was simply inefficient.”

In 2003 Pat Latimer, the former project manager, led the effort to implement a 118-user Laserfiche system in the agency’s centralized scanning bureau. Staff began migrating and adding patient histories and signature forms for use in conjunction with patient records, which were being generated from Avatar by Crystal Reports and then scanned into Laserfiche.

Dave McElfish, Director of Technology, says that although the original idea was for clinical staff to simultaneously access patient information from Laserfiche and the practice Document management system, “the reality was, even though we purchased Avatar with the idea of integrating it with Laserfiche, when we explored it further, it was going to be cost prohibitive on the Avatar side of the project.”

In the meantime, Laserfiche deployment had been extended to MCCMHS’s HR and finance departments, which likewise began migrating backfiles to ease storage costs and give staff the ability to retrieve information on command. System use has since grown to the point that the Laserfiche repository now houses over 800,000 documents.

More recently, McElfish says clinical staff have once again expressed interest in being able to access to information from Avatar and Laserfiche Document Management Software at the same time, even going so far as to revisit the idea of using Avatar’s add-on imaging module. “After much consideration, our clinical staff felt that would put us no further ahead in our goal for a true, single database to model our EHR from,” McElfish says. “The reality is that Laserfiche is designed to manage unstructured data, so in that respect it’s closer to that single database because we are able to include unstructured data, such as lab reports and doctor’s notes.”

According to Rochelle Waldoch, Compliance and Records Manager at Ramsey County, the need for more efficient paper-based business processes drove the county to investigate enterprise content management (ECM). “The Human Services Department had always been a paper-heavy department, but as caseloads grew, we started having difficulty with sharing paper files. In addition, client information was siloed, so employees had to collect the same data over and over again. It wasn’t an efficient process, and it needed to change.”

She notes, however, that the county wasn’t interested in deploying a departmental ECM Document Management solution. “If the Information Services Department was going to invest the time and resources in implementing ECM, the solution we chose needed to provide a standard systems architecture and methodology for managing all types of documents across the county—not just in one department.”

Needs Analysis and Selection Process

To that end, Waldoch and Toyia Arvin, EDMS Business Analyst, worked with county staff to analyze business processes and document needs in every department. This analysis included:

Interviews with more than 500 county employees.

Document inventories completed by each department.

A review of each department’s network shared folder directory structures.

An inventory of software applications used by each department.

Armed with the results of the needs analysis, Waldoch and Arvin authored the county’s RFP. “Prior to implementing Document Imaging Software by Laserfiche, we were using the DocuWare system to store a variety of document types, but it didn’t have the advanced workflow or capture functionality necessary to streamline business processes enterprise-wide,” explains Waldoch.

In terms of the selection process, Arvin says, “Laserfiche was beyond impressive when we were doing our RFP. Laserfiche Rio offered a familiar, Windows-like interface of Document Management for our users; included all of the components we needed to achieve ECM success across the county, including Workflow, Records Management and unlimited servers; and received excellent recommendations when we did our reference checks.”

Efficient Case Management Commences

Implementation in Human Services, which started out with a 75-user pilot project (including 28 case managers), has taken a little more time. “Elections is a small department with a limited number of document types,” explains Waldoch. “Human Services, on the other hand, is a huge department with hundreds of users and hundreds of forms requiring Document Management—and a heavy need for Workflow.”

Northern Michigan’s Muskegon County Community Mental Health Services (MCCMHS) implemented its Avatar practice management system back in 2003 to automate electronic health records (EHR). Although the Avatar system had a document imaging module that could digitize the patient histories, lab reports and documents that would always require doctor and patient signatures, several of the county’s non-clinical departments—includi ng HR and Finance—were also contending with overflowing file cabinets and rising storage and handling costs.

Rather than implementing separate solutions for the clinical and non-clinical sides of the house, MCCMHS officials recognized that enterprise content management (ECM)/document management software would be the most efficient and cost-effective way to answer its document-related challenges.

ECM Supports EHR

MCCMHS’ search brought the organization to Jeff Nelson of Bolt Document Management, a Laserfiche reseller based in Elkhart, IN. “Initially the objective was for the Laserfiche system to act as a bridge between legacy information and future digital content,” Nelson remembers. “At the same time, implementation of Laserfiche allowed MCCMHS to address areas where working with paper was simply inefficient.”.

Dave McElfish, Director of Technology, says that although the original idea was for clinical staff to simultaneously access patient information from Laserfiche and the practice document management system, “the reality was, even though we purchased Avatar with the idea of integrating it with Laserfiche, when we explored it further, it was going to be cost prohibitive on the Avatar side of the project.”

In the meantime, Laserfiche deployment had been extended to MCCMHS’s HR and finance departments, which likewise began migrating backfiles to ease storage costs and give staff the ability to retrieve information on command. System use has since grown to the point that the Laserfiche repository now houses over 800,000 documents.

Going Mobile

“We know that allowing staff to access information from Laserfiche on iPads in the field would be a huge boost in our productivity,” says McElfish.

An Avante upgrade would provide lot of potential for automation as well. McElfish notes that Nelson and Bolt have recently been discussing implementing distributed capture processes for paperless faxes and digital signatures via virtual rubberstamps, all routed by Workflow through the agency’s central scanning office for oversight.

Looking ahead, he is understandably pragmatic. “Although Laserfiche is not our primary practice document management system, it represents a critical and necessary content management tool that complements Avatar.

By 2010, HFG files containing 10 years of data were simply too big to manage and too hard to find. “We’d already added a scanning clerk and a designated file clerk, but it was quickly becoming an operational nightmare, with more staff to manage and more documents getting misplaced,” Mroue remembers.

The irony is that when the firm’s search for a proper enterprise content management (ECM) Document Management solution brought Mroue to Laserfiche, it was not the first time. “We first looked into Laserfiche in 2006, but back then, we weren’t looking at ECM in terms of business process automation or any bigger-picture operational improvements,” he says. “We just wanted to get rid of the paper.”

“Plus, we required that Laserfiche integrate with our Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Intuit Lacerte tax software, as well as send Microsoft Office documents directly to Laserfiche. We wanted everything to mesh together, other systems either didn’t integrate, or if they did, it was going be complicated and expensive.”

Ease and familiarity of use speeds an already speedy deployment

HFG purchased a 15-user Laserfiche Avante system with Web Access (for deployment to its Ventura County office) and Audit Trail in December of 2010. With April 15 on the horizon, initial deployment focused on the tax preparation side of HFG’s business, beginning with a substantial backlog conversion of paper files. “Considering the holidays, it took around 30 days to deploy, customize and integrate the system. We had one day of training for full-time staff. And it took me 30 minutes to train the part time staff on how they’d be using Laserfiche,” Mroue recalls. The ease of deployment was significant, he adds—based in no small part on Laserfiche’s ability to mirror the firm’s familiar paper filing structures. Tax worksheets are automatically sent to Laserfiche’s Document Management system with a single click from Microsoft Office programs, while all forms from the Intuit Lacerte system are sent to Laserfiche using Snapshot.

Workflow makes a $20,000/1,000 hour difference

The jumping-by-itself, Mroue continues, is the result of implementing Laserfiche Document Management Workflow. “A file used to jump between seven sets of hands, from client meeting to the client delivery,” he begins. “File clerk/ front desk staff/preparer/checker/sc anner/processor/mail clerk, and back to the file clerk.”

Coincidentally, the firm’s Laserfiche Document management installation and training took place right around the time of the annual Empower 2011 Laserfiche Institute Conference in January, inspiring an even quicker adoption. “Everyone from our office agreed the Conference was pretty amazing in the amount of knowledge provided,” Mroue adds. “I was actually able to continue writing the Workflow automations for our tax preparation process at the Conference.”

Eastmont Towers, a continuing care retirement community in Lincoln, NE, offers multiple levels of care and a range of services between five buildings on two campuses, which leads to multiple levels of information management challenges. Patients transferring from area hospitals bring electronic and paper medical records with them, creating distribution bottlenecks, logistics and the need for more and more filing cabinets—along with potential compliance and confidentiality concerns.

When Eastmont Towers’ Health Care Administrator Beth Nelsen RN, CHPN, began exploring enterprise content document management systems, she soon discovered that “paperless” meant a lot more than just empty file cabinets. “First, we looked at outsourcing to a company that would scan our records onto disks,” remembers Nelsen, “but we were concerned about how we’d be able to use the information once it was digitally stored.”

Quick Fields and Workflow: impressive possibilities

Kathy Gentile of Laserfiche reseller Bishop Business Equipment had worked with Eastmont Towers as an MFP hardware provider. Gentile, Bishop’s Laserfiche Document Management Specialist, invited Records Management staff from the agency to attend a workshop to see Laserfiche in action. Nelsen and her staff saw how Laserfiche Quick Fields could create files on the fly with document management software. Once files were created, Workflow could then notify decision makers of pending approvals and track those approvals throughout multiple business processes.

“We’re a multidisciplinary team caring for people across a continuum, so that ability to share documents between departments, reduce paperwork and improve communication would greatly increase efficiency and positively impact patient care,” she adds.

Thus inspired, Nelsen and her team purchased a 30-user Laserfiche Rio pilot system and have spent the first half of this year preparing to roll it out. “Laserfiche Rio made the most sense in terms of meeting our immediate needs. It includes Workflow and the Records document imaging Management component to work with our EMR, as well as unlimited servers.

“As we progress, we can just add users to grow the system to meet our future needs and goals. Scalability was a big factor in choosing Laserfiche Rio,” Nelsen explains.

Goodbye filing cabinets, hello automated patient charting

Eastmont Towers’ medical records staff is now halfway through a backlog conversion process that Nelsen anticipates will eliminate at least four filing cabinets by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Nelsen and her staff have been analyzing business processes to guide the upcoming implementation. “After we had our initial training, we sat down to map out what exactly we do with our documents, where they are sent and why,” she says.

Initial focus has been on automating the patient charting process with document imaging to compile and distribute client records and information as they enter Eastmont Towers from hospitals and other healthcare agencies. “We have several departments we need to route various information to, so we needed a way to streamline and simplify everything coming in and have it work with our EMR so staff could find everything in one place,” explains Nelsen.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Laserfiche)—July 12, 2011—Laserfiche (booth 719), a gold sponsor of WPC 2011, will deliver an educational session entitled “Adding Agile ECM: Streamlined Data Governance for SharePoint Portals in the Virginia Port Authority (VPA).” The session will take place today at 2:15PM in the Partner Solutions Theater at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

“Well-planned corporate governance is essential,” said Alex Wilson, Partner Director at Laserfiche. “By integrating fully-certified records Document Management with SharePoint, Laserfiche enables Microsoft partners to deliver solutions that support employee collaboration, ensure executive accountability and drive better business outcomes.”

During the presentation, Wilson and Laserfiche Vice President Brian LaPointe will cover how the VPA integrated Laserfiche with SharePoint to:

Drive business process automation.

Capture hundreds of thousands of paper records.

Improve information governance.

“Our integration with SharePoint 2010 provides Microsoft partners with a proven, agile way to help customers quickly,” Wilson added. “With Laserfiche, documents are immediately accessible and secure, regardless of its source: through SharePoint Document Management Software scanners, fax servers, ERP systems, online forms, mobile devices or even digital cameras.”

Laserfiche first obtained DoD 5015.2 certification in 2003. Last year, Laserfiche obtained joint certification with SharePoint 2010 to provide a unified business collaboration platform with enterprise content management (ECM) Document Imaging functionality.

Laserfiche will be on hand at booth #719 throughout the event to demonstrate the joint records management solution.

About Laserfiche

Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 30,000 organizations worldwide use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure while still offering business units the flexibility to react quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche Document Management Software product suite is built on top of Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports the Microsoft SQL platform and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

LONG BEACH, CA (Laserfiche)—June 20, 2011—Laserfiche today announced the release of Laserfiche Mobile™, an app for the iPhone that provides people on the go with the freedom to view and approve workplace documents, as well as capture and upload new documents with the iPhone camera—a more convenient and efficient form of Document Management.

“Laserfiche Mobile gives you the freedom to do everything you can do in your office from wherever you are, empowering you to work smarter and more efficiently,” said Tom Wayman, Laserfiche Vice President of Product Strategy. “In this day and age, you shouldn’t have to be tied to your office because all your information is locked away in paper files or the approvals you need are still based on paper processes.”

Laserfiche Mobile takes advantage of the iPhone’s touch screen, gesture recognition and high resolution interface to provide an immersive user experience with another outlet for Document Management. With Laserfiche Mobile, users can:

Create and upload new content with the iPhone camera.

Automatically crop, straighten and enhance captured information, with full text recognition.

Copy, move, rename, download, e-mail, print or delete content.

Browse for documents in a folder structure or search the entire repository.

Participate in workflow automation processes by accessing metadata fields.

“Laserfiche Mobile significantly changes content capture,” Wayman added. “For twenty-five years, Laserfiche has invested heavily in the development of innovative ways to capture information as quickly and efficiently as possible, with patented PhotoDocs™ photograph processing technology, lightweight Web interfaces and, now, an iPhone app that extends Laserfiche to one of today’s most popular mobile devices with a mobile form of Document Imaging Software.”

Laserfiche Mobile, which includes a built-in demonstration, is available for free download from the Apple App Store. Laserfiche Mobile operates with Laserfiche Web Access as a part of Laserfiche Avante and Laserfiche Rio systems. To accept connections from Laserfiche Mobile, Laserfiche users can download the free add-on, Laserfiche Mobile Add-On, from the Laserfiche Support Site.

About Laserfiche

Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 30,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to react quickly to changing conditions with Document Management Software. The Laserfiche product suite is built on top of Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

The Virginia Port Authority hired Angela Ellis as its SharePoint Administrator in 2007, but it wasn’t long before her boss, Deputy Executive Director of Administration and CFO Rodney Oliver, enlisted her to start looking into enterprise content management (ECM) Document Management Solutions.

“Rodney recognized that although SharePoint Document Management Software could do many great things for our organization, records management wasn’t one of them,” says Ellis, who today is a senior web analyst for the Port Authority.

“SharePoint,” she explains, “with all of its many features is so much more robust than a network drive. In particular, the Port Authority uses document workspaces heavily, because they make it easy to collaborate on works in progress such as contracts. However, once you go beyond about 10,000 documents, you’ve got a real mess on your hands.”

According to Ellis, the Port Authority didn’t want to lose the collaboration features inherent in SharePoint, nor did it want to take a familiar interface away from the staff, so it needed to make sure that the ECM solution it selected had a seamless Document Management SharePoint integration. “I was the lead on the team that built our RFP,” Ellis says. “In the end, we had more than 400 requirements and 24 vendors vying for our business. The SharePoint integration was our top concern.”

Other important selection criteria included:

Robust records management functionality.

The ability to electronically store a wide range of file types, including AutoCAD drawings.

Open architecture allowing integration with line-of-business applications such as CRM.

Availability of workflow functionality for process improvements—and a reduced paper flow.

“Before we implemented Laserfiche, our records management plan was very inefficient,” Ellis explains. “We’d print out documents, process them by hand and then file them in cabinets. We had a whole warehouse dedicated to file storage, containing all kinds of old documents in Bankers Boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling that we didn’t have time to properly manage.

Laserfiche + SharePoint = Transparency

By integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint, the Port Authority now has the ability to collaborate on documents, retain them electronically, and efficiently manage and dispose of digital records—all while giving users access to content through the SharePoint interface.

But the cost and space savings aren’t the most significant benefits the Port Authority has realized as a result of its Laserfiche implementation. By acting as integrative middleware, Laserfiche Document Management allows users at the organization to access information in the environment with which they’re already familiar: SharePoint.

“The Port Authority’s had SharePoint for close to ten years, so people are pretty familiar with it,” says Ellis. “Most of our users won’t even know they’re using Laserfiche. With the integration, our content is searchable on an enterprise level, and the results are returned to users transparently through SharePoint. It enables us to access all our information from one central location without having to train our users on a new system.”

Indigo North Health uses tight Laserfiche-Ricoh MFD integration to boost workflows, accumulating savings and streamlining internal processes

Challenge: Document Management efficiency

“We rely heavily on suppliers and contractors,” Cameron says. “So it’s important for everyone that the flow of information, whether in the form of general correspondence or finance-based documents is incredibly efficient. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case; and with the business having doubled over the past five years, we were in the position of having to identify and implement a more efficient means of managing our documents and files.”

In partnership with Copy Print Scan (CPS) Albury, a Ricoh Business Partner, Indigo North Health sought to evaluate the suitability of a Laserfiche and Ricoh MFD (Multi-Function Device) solution. Following an extensive evaluation process, Cameron gained approval from the organisation’s board to partner with CPS on the solution’s implementation.

Saving a day every fortnight

The savings realised up to then are through:

Reducing the instances of having to request misplaced invoices from suppliers.

Next, it’s the Laserfiche-based approval process that adds even greater efficiency and savings. With the e-mail received, cost centre managers receive an embedded link to the invoice, which, when clicked, displays the invoice on their screen along with the ability to approve or deny the payment, specify an expense code and add notes for the accounts payable team if required.

Streamlining the invoice approval process.

Fully eliminating instances of invoices lost in transit.

A well-defined audit trail

Bremer County, IA, faced a problem not unique to modest-sized municipalities: after making a significant investment in a document management system to manage its land records, users had a hard time letting go of the paper. “Scanning files was a very manual process—it took hours to scan and index even small stacks of paper,” remembers Nate Koehler, Bremer County IT Administrator. “Staff would get frustrated and just not use the system at all.”

Agility in Action, Part 1: A New System for Less Than an Upgrade

“We were looking at a substantial enough reinvestment to retain our current system that it made sense to start looking at other solutions,” he says.

Koehler researched other CLRIS/ILR-approved systems and discovered Laserfiche via Advanced Systems, Inc. (ASI) based nearby in Waterloo, IA, which had a relationship with the county from servicing its printer and copiers. ASI solutions consultant Steve Lewis showed Koehler how Laserfiche’s Quick Fields Zone OCR component could capture and index information from specific areas of land records forms, which could then be used to submit images to ILR utilizing the state’s uploading application.

What’s more, implementing Laserfiche could address all of the county’s information document management software needs in a single system—at less cost than upgrading their existing system.

Agility in Action, Part 2: Deployment to Six Departments in Two Months

In March 2010, Bremer County purchased a 24-user Laserfiche Avante system with Quick Fields advanced capture, Import Agent and SDK. Just two months later, Laserfiche was successfully deployed to six county departments:

Auditor

Treasurer

Attorney

Recorder

Assessor

Building and Zoning

Each department was equipped with a scan station that Shane Peterson, solutions engineer at Advanced Systems, set up to automatically recognize and retrieve index information based on the standard forms used by each department.

The impact on document imaging scanning efficiency was immediate: in the Assessor’s office, four stacks of tax credit forms two feet tall were scanned and indexed within a few days. “Quick Fields automated all our scanning processes in all our departments,” Koehler says.

Agility in Action, Part 3: Six Months of Scanning in Less Than a Week

To illustrate the scale of improvement, Koehler uses the example of Bremer County’s Zoning Department. “Zoning was six months behind on their scanning,” he begins. “It would have taken staff over a month and a half to scan in all those documents using our old system. Instead, using Quick Fields, we were able to get those documents scanned in less than a week.”

The end result of significantly improved document imaging software, Koehler says, is the reclaimed staff time. “We can devote the man hours we save from scanning for other projects.”

City upgrades to Laserfiche Avante to provide instant access to records, streamline business processes and move data across multiple platforms

Organization Profile

Located in the southwest corner of the Twin Cities metropolitan area, Shakopee is home to approximately 35,000 residents. It’s also the county seat of Scott County, one of the fastest growing counties in the United States.

Situation

Shakopee had been using a small, four-user Laserfiche system since 2005 to manage building permits, council agendas and other miscellaneous items with Document Imaging. The city’s IT Department recognized that the benefits of Laserfiche could extend throughout the organization and began pushing for system expansion in 2010.

Solution

After integrating Laserfiche with the Police Department’s New World case management software in October 2010, Shakopee’s IT Department was able to build a strong case for upgrading to a 50-user Laserfiche Avante system.

Benefits

The Finance Department uses Laserfiche Quick Fields to scan barcoded accounts payable documents into the repository, where they’re instantly searchable from the desktop.

Building permits are stored in Laserfiche and made available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink.

The Police Department currently uses Laserfiche to manage evidence photos, but it will soon begin scanning all case files into the system.

After digitizing HR records, the city will use Laserfiche’s Document Management Software Workflow to automate the hiring process.

These benefits, Duckett notes, are vital to Shakopee, which has a two-person IT Department supporting approximately 125 city staff in nine different departments. In fact, if Laserfiche wasn’t easy to use, maintain and integrate, the city wouldn’t have considered shaking up its approach to enterprise content management (ECM) by upgrading from four concurrent users to a 50-user Avante system.

The desire to upgrade the system came last year, when the Police Department hopped on the Laserfiche Document Management bandwagon. “In October 2010,” Duckett says, “the Police Department started using Laserfiche for evidence photos, and we integrated Laserfiche with New World, the PD’s case management system, to enable officers to automatically open photos that pertain to specific cases.”

Jennifer Boudreau, Shakopee’s Police Records Technician, explains that one way the PD leverages the integration is to track graffiti, making it easier for officers to identify all instances of a tagger’s work so the city can recoup clean-up costs.

She also notes that Laserfiche Document Management allows officers to access photos in the field from their squad cars, which is something they couldn’t do in the past. “It’s an officer safety issue,” she says. “For example, if the officers come across a tagger with a known gang affiliation, they can treat that individual with more caution.”

Virginia Port Authority leverages Laserfiche as records Document Management back-end for SharePoint

February 18th, 2011 by Meghann Wooster Comment on this article

The Virginia Port Authority hired Angela Ellis as its SharePoint Administrator in 2007, but it wasn’t long before her boss, Deputy Executive Director of Administration and CFO Rodney Oliver, enlisted her to start looking into enterprise content management (ECM) solutions.

“Rodney recognized that although SharePoint could do many great things for our organization, records management wasn’t one of them,” says Ellis, who today is a senior web analyst for the Port Authority.

“SharePoint,” she explains, “with all of its many features is so much more robust than a network drive. In particular, the Port Authority uses document workspaces heavily, because they make it easy to collaborate on works in progress such as contracts. However, once you go beyond about 10,000 documents, you’ve got a real mess on your hands.”

According to Ellis, the Port Authority didn’t want to lose the collaboration features inherent in SharePoint, nor did it want to take a familiar interface away from the staff, so it needed to make sure that the ECM Document Imaging solution it selected had a seamless SharePoint integration. “I was the lead on the team that built our RFP,” Ellis says. “In the end, we had more than 400 requirements and 24 vendors vying for our business. The SharePoint integration was our top concern.”

Other important selection criteria included:

Robust records management functionality.

The ability to electronically store a wide range of file types, including AutoCAD drawings.

Open architecture allowing integration with line-of-business applications such as CRM.

Availability of workflow functionality for process improvements—and a reduced paper flow.

“Before we implemented Laserfiche, our records management plan was very inefficient,” Ellis explains. “We’d print out documents, process them by hand and then file them in cabinets. We had a whole warehouse dedicated to file storage, containing all kinds of old documents in Bankers Boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling that we didn’t have time to properly manage.”

Laserfiche + SharePoint = Transparency

By integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint, the Port Authority now has the ability to collaborate on Document Management, retain them electronically, and efficiently manage and dispose of digital records—all while giving users access to content through the SharePoint interface.

“Laserfiche has dramatically reduced the flow of paper throughout the organization,” says Ellis. “It’s opened up space for new offices and enabled us to tear down an entire warehouse for profitable use!”

But the cost and space savings aren’t the most significant benefits the Port Authority has realized as a result of its Laserfiche implementation. By acting as integrative middleware, Laserfiche allows users at the organization to access information in the environment with which they’re already familiar: SharePoint.

“The Port Authority’s had SharePoint for close to ten years, so people are pretty familiar with it,” says Ellis. “Most of our users won’t even know they’re using Laserfiche’s Document Imaging Software. With the integration, our content is searchable on an enterprise level, and the results are returned to users transparently through SharePoint. It enables us to access all our information from one central location without having to train our users on a new system.”

If Gary Agira’s story were a movie, the story would include the Ugandan IT Systems Analyst navigating government bureaucracy, stubborn workers, and perhaps most dramatically, a national registry and warehouse overflowing with 34 million government documents—to bring them all into the digital world. It’d be a charmingly idiosyncratic story, but still a universal one: document management as a metaphor for progress, with Agira’s unwavering belief in the power of technology as he moves a nation and a workforce into the digital age.

But this isn’t a movie, and the real Gary Agira is the IT Systems Analyst for Uganda’s Privatization & Utility Sector Reform Project (PUSRP). The PUSRP is the department of the Ministry of Finance and Planning charged with the epic task of overhauling the way the African nation archives, stores and perhaps most profoundly of all, actually works with records to support the divestiture and reform of 42 public enterprises. It’s all part of an initiative to move Uganda’s economy forward.

On paper, the PUSRP’s mission was simple: to provide an information management infrastructure to support improved commercial and utility services through divesting and restructuring public enterprises like telecom, energy, water and transport by increasing private sector participation using document imaging software.

But the paper itself that needed to be archived and managed, well, that’s what Agira refers to as “the horror of the heaps.” The national registry overflowed with 10 million documents, which, owing to an inconsistent filing system, led to information silos and misplaced documents. Then there was the massive national warehouse, located 20 minutes away. “That’s 20 minutes on our roads,” Agira laughs. “These aren’t four-lane highways.” There, another 24 million documents were precariously housed, subject to water from burst pipes, exposure, and perhaps most memorably, “vermin damage.” Yes, rats were eating the paper.

In short, there was a need for document management, even if no one knew that’s what it was called yet. “There was a lack of know-how of modern document management techniques,” Agira sighs. Librarians held a monopoly on information. Representatives from the national government viewed document management as a librarian’s task and not a part of business processes. “There was a lack of collective ownership,” he says.

Agira lobbied his administrators with pictures of workers searching for records in the national warehouse, protected by makeshift hazmat suits. Finally, after a few false starts, he secured funding for the much-needed system and, by 2005, the search was on. Agira carefully assembled a team, including government sceptics, as he puts it, “to experience document management as a group.

Agira and his team looked at half a dozen options and agreed on Laserfiche’s document imaging. “It was easier, it was faster and we got more functionality for our money,” he explains.

Managing past and current septic permit applications for areas totaling just over 425,000 residents without an enterprise content management (ECM) Document Management solution meant a lot of paper trails and time-consuming manual processes for Idaho’s Central District Health Department (CDHD). “As each year passed, it became increasingly more difficult to locate documents without spending large amounts of research time to do so,” says Margaret Ross, IT Manager of the Boise-based CDHD.

Serving Ada County, Boise County, Elmore County and Valley County, CDHD manages the Board of Health and the Community Health, Communicable Disease, Immunization, Reproductive Health and WIC Departments in addition to the Environmental Health Department. The planning and zoning authority of each county requires the Environmental Health Department to review every subdivision’s application for sewage permits, which can include:

Test hole inspections for sewage installation.

Plot plans.

Building permits.

Zoning certificates.

“Paper copies of the records were located in each county’s office, which made them difficult for us to access without a lot of copying and faxing,” Ross explains. Efficient storage, Document Imaging, organization and access to the documents crucial to the permit process was compromised until CDHD decided to implement Laserfiche ECM.

Powering Permitting

After the previous director of CDHD saw Laserfiche featured at an environmental health conference in 2004 and was impressed with its agility and Document Management Software, the department decided to implement the software later that same year. The initial objective was to find a program that could scan in past and present septic permits and applications, while providing central access to the records across all the offices in the health district.

Today, CDHD uses Laserfiche not just to scan and store permit documents, but also to enable external clients to access the information themselves using Laserfiche WebLink, which provides read-only access to records stored in the Laserfiche repository. Clients include:

Realtors selling homes that need permit information for potential buyers and appraisers.

Septic pumpers looking to access permit information to find the location of septic tanks for pumping.

Septic installers who are on-site and legally in need of a copy of the permit before proceeding with the installation.

Although clients applying for permits are supposed to provide a copy of their permits to septic installers (permits are required on the job site at all times), this frequently doesn’t happen. In the past, installers would have to come into the department and wait for a copy of the appropriate paperwork to be located and copied, or sometimes faxed over from the appropriate county. “Locating permit information for clients sometimes took hours to accomplish,” says Mike Reno, Supervisor of Land Based Programs for CDHD. “It slowed things down for both us and them.”

He continues, “With Laserfiche, the installers and other external clients can view the permit online and print their own copy if needed. This saves our clerical and field staff a lot of time making copies of permits and faxing them over.”

Ross notes that CDHD saw a significant reduction in information requests from external clients and that they continue to decline—especially from realtors—as clients realize most of their questions can be answered by accessing Document Management Solutions Laserfiche WebLink through the department’s Webpage.

“The ability to access data that resides in other offices is extremely helpful. It’s my favorite feature,” Reno says. If for some reason clients are unable to access the internet and attain records themselves, Reno can pull up the permit information on his desktop and provide the information within minutes.

With secure and easy public access and more efficient staff response time, Ross is pleased to report that CDHD “can concentrate on customer service, not paperwork.”

Laserfiche has announced the winners of its annual Run Smarter Awards program, including India-based Essar Group. Each year, Laserfiche honors organizations that succeed in promoting organizational agility through innovative use of Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) Document Management Software.

Essar Group is a conglomerate of 63 companies in the Steel, Oil & Gas, Power, Communications, Shipping Ports & Logistics, Projects and Minerals sectors with operations in more than 20 countries across five continents and annual revenue of $15 billion.

“We saw Laserfiche as a way to bring visibility, time-bound execution and accountability to our accounting business processes,” said Mandeep Singh, Head of Finance Shared Services at Essar.

Singh estimates that Essar Group has realized a 40% return on its Laserfiche Document Management investment already, but foresees ongoing and expanding operational improvements.

“As our ongoing success has shown, Laserfiche is agile enough as an enterprise solution to manage document-based workflows and accelerate turnaround time. Laserfiche has been a tremendous tool for developing new, more comprehensive business processes that have given Essar Group fresh perspective and improved our overall investment perspective as a company,” said Singh.

Other 2010 Run Smarter winners include: Central District Health Department of Boise, ID; City of Maple Grove, MN; Dallas Associated Dermatologists; Durham County, NC; ECOM Atlantic; Hamilton-Wentworth School Board; London Borough of Tower Hamlets; Long Beach Police Department; Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians; NE Metro Intermediate Schools; Pulte Mortgage; South Essex Partnership NHS Trust; Spire Investment Partners, LLC; Texas A&M University Kingsville; Virginia Port Authority; and Wythe County Community Hospital.

About Laserfiche

Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 28,000 organizations worldwide use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management through Document Imaging Software.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions through easily accessible Document Imaging.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.