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.”
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