document management -Making a Deluge of Documents Disaster-Ready

January 19th, 2012

“With cemetery records, record-keeping is literally eternal,” says Brian Pellegrin, IS Business Support Manager at Stewart Enterprises, Inc.

As the second largest death care provider in the United States, Stewart Enterprises safeguards contracts pertaining to every aspect of funeral or cemetery services, from memorialization and property purchases to inscription details. In the past, when people passed away, contracts from funeral homes and cemeteries were permanently added to the millions of pages of records in each of the company’s regional storage centers.

Although Stewart Enterprises initially considered implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) solution in 2005, it failed to anticipate that its documents might incur damage. Unfortunately, when Hurricane Katrina struck later that year, the company’s New Orleans Records Management Center was hit and tens of thousands of documents were submerged for over a week.

“The hypothetical doomsday scenario became a reality for our organization,” says Pellegrin. “Unfortunately, we were not as forward-thinking at that time as we are now. Rather than accepting an initial ECM proposal for $175,000, we spent $1.5 million recovering and restoring our documents.”

Setting a Document Imaging Standard

Despite the loss, the disaster gave the organization the forward velocity it needed to go digital with Laserfiche ECM. “When implementing a new functional area, as soon as I put the Katrina pictures up, everyone is on board,” says Pellegrin. “When you talk about buy-in, it isn’t a hard sell.”

As a direct result of Hurricane Katrina, the company first digitized the records in its New Orleans Records Management Center. Before implementing ECM enterprise-wide, Pellegrin started discovery by physically walking through various company facilities and taking stock of employee processes, paper piles and organization structure—a preliminary step he recommends for anyone beginning a Laserfiche project.

“The sheer volume of documents involved in digitizing a record center astonished me,” he says. “Walk through a variety of departments and ask yourself, would it would be beneficial to management to see the documents and to have real-time tracking for every step in this process?”

These discoveries allowed Pellegrin to seize the opportunity to standardize records management across the company by upgrading to Laserfiche Rio. He rolled out digital archiving to the company’s other records centers in Miami, Dallas and Orlando, as well as individual facilities and corporate offices in 25 states and Puerto Rico.

Configuring Laserfiche Rio across multiple departments and integrating Laserfiche Quick Fields with the company’s contract number system and reporting systems transformed Stewart Enterprises’ Laserfiche ECM system from a simple disaster recovery plan to a flexible, yet central, point of control.

“We’re not looking at an individual person or process, we’re thinking enterprise-wide,” he says of the company’s IT strategy. “What we have noticed as a result of implementing Laserfiche is not only a more efficient process, but a structured workflow that can be implemented nationwide.”

Centralizing Contracts

Because Stewart Enterprises juggles different regulations on its contracts and facilities for every state in which it operates, Pellegrin sought a standard workflow that could track and store documents in compliance with these regulations while still offering fluid access to documentation when adjusting a client’s file.

Laserfiche Rio allowed the company to greatly restructure the contracts workflow. Using the Laserfiche SDK, Pellegrin configured Laserfiche Quick Fields to draw information between the company’s .NET point-of-sale applications and Laserfiche. This integration, along with standardized scanning methods and better quality control, led to much faster processing:

750 field employees now image documentation as .TIFF files onto a national network drive using Canon scanners.

Laserfiche Import Agent then transfers those documents from the drive into the Laserfiche repository automatically, day and night.

Laserfiche Quick Fields runs a real-time SQL search against the company’s account receivable contract system based on individual contract number.

Laserfiche Quick Fields then indexes each document by geographic location, sorts and routes it to separate workflows depending on values identified in the SQL lookup.

Users across the regional centers and corporate headquarters can route, process and update contracts using Laserfiche Workflow and Laserfiche Snapshot.

Prior to Laserfiche, these records centers contained vaults full of filing cabinets and shelves of manila folders that a contract research team mined during contract retrieval requests. With this system in place across all facilities, the company has already scanned more than 30 million pages from its document management centers into Laserfiche’s digital repositories, repurposing filing cabinets into valuable real estate and saving thousands in paper costs. Now the company can scan, monitor and check the quality of its financial transactions, such as deposits, to better ensure compliance with each state’s regulations.

Enterprise-Sized Gains

Unlocking critical contract information from paper forms brought an unprecedented level of enterprise visibility to the company, which Pellegrin lauds as Laserfiche’s main asset. When Laserfiche Workflow creates a permanent record for storage, it also makes the contracts available for real-time access to over 1,000 employees nationwide via a Laserfiche WebLink Web portal.

Now, users ranging from executive vice presidents to customer service representatives can research the contracts and their indexes and status information with the click of the Laserfiche icon on their desktop.

“Giving real-time, simultaneous access to a variety of functional areas and hierarchies brought immediate value and efficiency to our organization,” explains Pellegrin.

For example, read-only access to contracts for the company’s audit department has eliminated travel costs during audits. The audit group may perform a facility audit without the facility knowing about it, right from their own computers.

“Laserfiche has allowed us to not only standardize our processes, but to easily monitor them as well. We now have access to empirical data about employees indicating efficiency, accuracy and completeness on a real-time basis,” notes Pellegrin.

Stewart Enterprises truly leverages the full scale of Laserfiche Rio, using it for everything from conversion and storage of microfilm records to streamlining and enhancing internal audit processes across the entire company.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche, I was virtually in the dark with respect to ECM. I didn’t have the slightest idea of the impact this one system could have throughout the organization. We’re changing the culture of our company in a span of three to six months at each record facility.”

document management - Heartland Advisors Streamlines Research with Laserfiche

Intelligent forms processing helps RIA manage information for over 1,600 companies, even on the go

January 17th, 2012

Heartland Advisors, Inc. (“Heartland”) is an independently owned Milwaukee-based firm established in 1983. As of November 30, 2011, the Firm managed approximately $4.9 billion in assets for institutional and high net worth clients and the Heartland family of value-driven mutual funds.

Heartland is an active manager, seeking out those few companies from the broad market they believe fit the criteria of its investment discipline, embodied in Heartland’s Ten Principles of Value Investing™. This discipline is grounded in rigorous fundamental analysis, and has been exercised for over a quarter century. Each stock Heartland is potentially interested in is subject to a thorough review of multiple variables, resulting in a rich legacy of information and understanding of thousands of individual securities. This legacy also results in many pages of information and data!

In addition to research, the Firm has built a substantial file of client related material, going back to the Firm’s inception.

By 2010, decades of paper records had accumulated—much of which, for compliance purposes, required locked cabinets. “Any time we had a company visit, analyst research notes, quarterly company earnings reports, news articles or anything impacting an active company, paper was placed in a general location for administrators to file manually,” explains Mike Riggs, Senior Vice President and CTO of Heartland.

The pile of paper accumulated weekly and could require full days of filing by administrative staff. “We’d already gone through the 20 years’ worth of research, but we were still looking at 1,600 active companies for which we needed to maintain records,” he adds.

The Challenge

While the Firm had a fully developed and tested disaster recovery process for its mission-critical electronic information system, there were limited procedures in place for its paper-based stored files. “Both systems maintained single copy masters which took a large amount of floor and file cabinet space—and a lot of manual paper filing,” Riggs says. “We actually had a legacy scan-and-file system that was not being used because it added to the work load of users.”

Riggs led the Firm on a search for a more comprehensive electronic content management (ECM) system with two directives in mind—function and friendliness. As Riggs puts it, “We needed an intelligent forms processing system where we could develop a forms library to identify and process client-related paperwork, but it also had to be user-friendly.”

The Solution

In 2010, the Firm acquired a Laserfiche ECM system and began an extensive backfile conversion project using Laserfiche Quick Fields for advanced document management software. “For our client filing system, we were able to back scan all of our legacy files into Laserfiche according to form type and then organize the data according to client account code,” Riggs says. Using the Affinity integration tool, the Firm linked its CRM system to the digitized files in the Laserfiche repository using the client access code.

In the past, a sales administration representative would have to leave the phone call or schedule a call back with a client, go to the file cabinet and check out the file data. Now, with online access to the system, they can stay on the call and pull up client data using the shared client access code right from the CRM interface.

At the same time, Riggs notes, the flexibility of Laserfiche allowed him to grant remote, read-only access to staff who need to view files offsite for client servicing issues. “We have only one office but several executives who spend time at remote locations. Laserfiche gives them the opportunity to retrieve files when connected to their computers via a remote session.”

The process that saw the most operational improvement, however, was research. “We used Quick Fields to back scan our rich legacy of stock research, and we used Workflow to develop a way for research and portfolio managers to file directly to the Laserfiche repository,” Riggs says.

Here’s how it works:

· By utilizing a research template, analysts can drop files into a Workflow starting rule folder to kick off the template to select the research media type.

· Workflow then routes it to the proper security and media filing type.

· The workflow will run an SQL query to match the template security with an in-house security holding system to identify the full company name to place on file and route it to the proper Laserfiche research file folder.

“Now compliance, analysts and portfolio managers have ready access to research wherever they are, on-site and remote.”

Going with the Workflow

Heartland is now using Laserfiche and Workflow to deploy an accounts payable processing system that will scan in invoices from vendors, have operations staff identify cost centers and allocations, and then route them to department managers for approval. After the approval is routed back to the operation admin, it will then be posted directly into the accounting system for check processing.

Likewise, Riggs is also using Workflow to develop an automated system for approving marketing material that will handle markup and approval from multiple team members, as the document management need to be monitored for FINRA and SEC guidelines. “It’s a very time and paper intensive process that requires group participation,” Riggs says.

More recently, the Firm upgraded to a Laserfiche Rio enterprise system. “This allows us to have multiple Laserfiche servers, which means we have a mirrored Laserfiche server environment running at our disaster recovery site pointing to a backup copy of our production repository that is replicated to the disaster recovery site daily.” Riggs says he’s also looking forward to deploying Laserfiche Mobile to enable Heartland staff to use iPads to access data securely via Web Access.

By using Laserfiche ECM, the Firm is confident it will achieve its goal of limiting paperwork. Says Riggs, “We hope to build custom Web forms to avoid paper-based system processes that pop up as people develop templates for a variety of management tasks.”