document management - The Value of Truly Agile ECM

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.”

Document Management - Shaking Up Shakopee’s Approach to ECM

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.”