Laserfiche 8.3 Takes Transactional Content Management to New Level

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

LONG BEACH, CA (Laserfiche)—November 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।

http://www.laserfiche.com/news/archives/2011/11/30/laserfiche-8-3-takes-transactional-content-management-to-new-level/

How Workflow Turned Tax Season into ROI Season Part-II

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/scanner/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/

How Workflow Turned Tax Season into ROI Season Part-I

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—associated 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

Laserfiche enables a remote work force at CHMB

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.”

document imaging - Paperless and Purposeful

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—including 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.”

Document Management - Ramsey County Revamps Case Management

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.”

document management - Paperless and Purposeful

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—including 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.

Document Management - How Workflow Turned Tax Season into ROI Season

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/scanner/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.”

document management - Eastmont Towers automates and streamlines patient charting using Laserfiche

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.

Laserfiche Showcases First DoD 5015.2-certified SharePoint Integration at WPC 2011

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®.

Document Management-Laserfiche Mobile Released

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®.

Integration Improves Information Flow

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.”

Document Management - A Healthy Integration

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

Challenge: Document Management efficiency

Located across three campuses, Indigo North Health operates on a tight budget, balancing the provision of quality services with a streamlined yet highly efficient staff and infrastructure. Not surprisingly, internal efficiencies that contribute to improved services are a high priority for the organization’s CEO, Cameron Butler; and high on the agenda in late 2009 was document and file management.

“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.”

Answer: Document Management Software by LaserFiche

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.

“The first and most important aspect of our document management on which we worked with the CPS team was our accounts payable invoice approval process,” Cameron says. “And by the first of July 2010, we had a streamlined workflow that’s nothing short of fantastic.”

Saving a day every fortnight

So where does that saving come from? Firstly, as invoices are received—either electronically or in hard copy—from suppliers and contractors, they are immediately transferred to the organisation’s Laserfiche Document Imaging Software where they are assigned to a particular cost centre. At this point, the customised workflow developed by the CPS team kicks in and an email is automatically sent through to the cost centre’s manager.

The savings realised up to then are through:

Eliminating the manual distribution of invoices.

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

Removing the need to manage a large number of paper-based accounts payable files.

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.

Once closed, the approved or denied invoice is sent immediately through to the accounts payable team who then take the appropriate follow-up action. Again, the savings accumulate. This time, though, through:

Streamlining the invoice approval process.

Achieving instant transmission of approvals from the cost centre manager to accounts payable.

Fully eliminating instances of invoices lost in transit.

Dramatically reducing the “chasing up of approvals” by accounts payable.

A well-defined audit trail

A key enabling factor in the matching of invoices to purchase orders is the advanced and highly accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capabilities of the Laserfiche’s Document Management solution. Whether invoices are scanned in at the MFD or received by fax, the solution automatically scans and translates each word on the document, then updates an integrated index database.