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.”