document management - The Value of Truly Agile ECM
Bremer County, IA, faced a problem not unique to modest-sized municipalities: after making a significant investment in a document management system to manage its land records, users had a hard time letting go of the paper. “Scanning files was a very manual process—it took hours to scan and index even small stacks of paper,” remembers Nate Koehler, Bremer County IT Administrator. “Staff would get frustrated and just not use the system at all.”
Agility in Action, Part 1: A New System for Less Than an Upgrade
“We were looking at a substantial enough reinvestment to retain our current system that it made sense to start looking at other solutions,” he says.
Koehler researched other CLRIS/ILR-approved systems and discovered Laserfiche via Advanced Systems, Inc. (ASI) based nearby in Waterloo, IA, which had a relationship with the county from servicing its printer and copiers. ASI solutions consultant Steve Lewis showed Koehler how Laserfiche’s Quick Fields Zone OCR component could capture and index information from specific areas of land records forms, which could then be used to submit images to ILR utilizing the state’s uploading application.
What’s more, implementing Laserfiche could address all of the county’s information document management software needs in a single system—at less cost than upgrading their existing system.
Agility in Action, Part 2: Deployment to Six Departments in Two Months
In March 2010, Bremer County purchased a 24-user Laserfiche Avante system with Quick Fields advanced capture, Import Agent and SDK. Just two months later, Laserfiche was successfully deployed to six county departments:
Auditor
Treasurer
Attorney
Recorder
Assessor
Building and Zoning
Each department was equipped with a scan station that Shane Peterson, solutions engineer at Advanced Systems, set up to automatically recognize and retrieve index information based on the standard forms used by each department.
The impact on document imaging scanning efficiency was immediate: in the Assessor’s office, four stacks of tax credit forms two feet tall were scanned and indexed within a few days. “Quick Fields automated all our scanning processes in all our departments,” Koehler says.
Agility in Action, Part 3: Six Months of Scanning in Less Than a Week
To illustrate the scale of improvement, Koehler uses the example of Bremer County’s Zoning Department. “Zoning was six months behind on their scanning,” he begins. “It would have taken staff over a month and a half to scan in all those documents using our old system. Instead, using Quick Fields, we were able to get those documents scanned in less than a week.”
The end result of significantly improved document imaging software, Koehler says, is the reclaimed staff time. “We can devote the man hours we save from scanning for other projects.”