9.03.2012 - 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.”

29.02.2012 - document management-Streamlining Service without a Hitch

13.02.2012 - document management-Laserfiche Identified as a Champion by Info-Tech Research Group

Info-Tech Research Group’s ECM Vendor Landscape pays tribute to exceptional vendors

December 28th, 2011

LONG BEACH (Laserfiche)—December 28, 2011—Laserfiche today announced that it has been listed as a Champion in Info-Tech Research Group’s document management for Process Workers Vendor Landscape. Based in Ontario, Canada, Info-Tech Research Group is North America’s fastest growing full-service IT analyst firm.

Assessing vendors by the strength of their offering and their strategy for the enterprise, Info-Tech Research Group Vendor Landscapes pay tribute to the contribution of exceptional vendors in a particular category. According to Info-Tech Research Group, the research is designed for organizations looking for an ECM solution that will:

• Increase the efficiency of workers that engage in repetitive tasks.
• Improve key transactional processes such as accounts payable or onboarding.
• Integrate with key line-of-business applications such as ERP, GIS or CRM.

“Laserfiche is a stalwart that is exploiting the new capabilities of emerging technology,” said George Goodall, Senior Research Analyst with Info-Tech. “It has strong alignment with Microsoft technologies, an innovative iPhone app that allows for remote scanning using the iPhone camera and an Integration Marketplace, where connectors can be purchased for a wide variety of products.”

Of the four vendors listed as Champions in the report, Laserfiche received the highest Value Score. This means that, of all the Champions, Laserfiche offers the most “bang for the buck” in terms of features, usability and stability.

“The Info-Tech Research Group ranking confirms that our focus on providing cost-effective transactional Document Management Software is paying off for our customers,” said Tom Wayman, Vice President of Product Strategy at Laserfiche. “The advanced business process management capabilities and administration tools included in our newest release, Laserfiche 8.3, will enable even more organizations to increase efficiency and improve transactional processes such as case and contract management.”

About Info-Tech Research Group

With a paid membership of over 8,000 organizations worldwide, Info-Tech Research Group (www.infotech.com) is the global leader in providing tactical, practical information technology research and analysis. Info-Tech Research Group has a thirteen-year history of delivering quality research and is North America’s fastest growing full-service IT analyst firm.

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 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/2011/12/28/laserfiche-identified-as-a-champion-by-info-tech-research-group/

18.01.2012 - U.S. Supreme Court Looks to Arkansas Appellate Courts for Forward-Thinking Use of IT Part - I

Official court opinions are now electronic and easily accessible by the public

December 5th, 2011 by Meghann Wooster

“People don’t typically associate Arkansas with the cutting edge,” explains Daron Frederick, Network Administrator for the Arkansas Supreme Court. “That’s why it’s such a pleasure to have the U.S. Supreme Court looking to us for ideas about the unique and innovative ways we are implementing technology.”

Although both Arkansas’ supreme court and court of appeals have recently begun broadcasting—and archiving—live oral arguments on their Website, it is the courts’ use of enterprise content management (ECM) technology that has caught the Supreme Court’s eye.

“We’d had a document imaging system in place for several years, but it hadn’t been used much,” says Frederick. “Only a few techs even knew how to access it, and the search and retrieval capability for records wasn’t particularly useful. We had to ask ourselves, ‘Why scan anything if you can’t use the system?’”

He continues, “Our principal selection criteria for an ECM solution included the ability to manage content, automate processes, enable easy access to records and raise visibility for the legal community and the public.”

He notes that, ultimately, it was the unlimited servers included with Laserfiche Rio that won over the courts’ IT Department. “Both courts issue opinions of high interest that are heavily accessed, so we wanted to make sure we had failovers and test servers in place to accommodate that.”

Laserfiche Enables Electronic Opinions

In 2009, Arkansas became the first state to establish electronic reporting as the official medium for appellate court opinions. Substantial cost savings resulting from the transition provided the opportunity to implement Laserfiche.

“Before that, the appellate court opinions had always been officially reported in bound volumes,” says Frederick. “However, the volumes were produced and distributed approximately four times a year, which meant there was significant lag time between issuance of an opinion and its appearance in its official format.”

With declining subscription rates, higher production costs and advancing technology, the court determined that its current method of publication was no longer acceptable. “Although court systems in general have been slow to enter the digital age, we have to remember that we work for the public, and they’re used to finding information quickly on the Internet,” explains Frederick.

Click Here to read Part-II

1.12.2011 - 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.”

1.11.2011 - 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.”

5.10.2011 - 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.”

21.09.2011 - 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.

3.09.2011 - 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.”

22.08.2011 - 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.