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.”