How Does ECM Word as a Shared Service?

In July, the Center for Digital Government released the results of its 10th annual digital counties survey. Not surprisingly, the survey revealed that county governments are focused on using technology to cut costs and improve service delivery. One key strategy for achieving these goals is implementing shared services.

A shared service is one that is used by multiple parts of an organization but purchased and supported by one area of the organization. For example, rather than having different departments select and support their own enterprise content management (ECM) systems, the IT department purchases, implements and maintains one system that all departments use.

The digital counties survey revealed that 78% of the counties surveyed are pursuing joint service delivery, an increase of eight percent over 2011. But the trend toward shared services isn’t limited to government :Deloitte’s 2011 Global Shared Services Survey revealed that “shared services is increasing its reach into the ‘middle market.’”

Benefits of Implementing ECM as a Shared Service

These findings certainly reflect what we’re seeing among our customers. When you implement enterprise content management as a shared service, you minimize support and maintenance costs while also gaining the opportunity to:

·         Leverage economies of scale.

·         Share skillsets between organizations.

·         Piggyback off the efforts of your peers.

Rather than implementing ECM on a departmental basis, many organizations across industries have implemented ECM as an enterprise-wide shared service. For example, Texas A&M notes that the benefits of offering a “centrally supported, enterprise-level document management system provides many benefits,” including:

·         Save costs through shared central support and eliminating the need for individual departments to maintain their own systems.

·         Facilitate document sharing with colleagues while protecting confidential information.

·         Enhance overall office efficiency by eliminating paper-based processes, improving information accessibility and decreasing the need to store paper documents.

·         Ensure continuity of operations by securing records and providing web access to critical documents during emergencies.

·         Streamline life-cycle management of business records with automatic enforcement of consistent, organization-wide records policies.

·         Support compliance requirements for document retention.

Computing and Information Services (CIS), the central IT department for the Texas A&M University System, supports the ECM shared service offering across 11 System universities, seven state agencies and a comprehensive health science center.

Beyond the Enterprise

Looking beyond the walls of the enterprise, many government organizations are teaming up to offer ECM as an inter-agency shared service. For example, Loudoun County, VA, and the Loudoun County Public School District came together and are implementing a shared ERP system with ECM integrated on the back end.

According to Bill McIntyre, Division Manager of Enterprise IT at Loudoun County, VA, “Laserfiche Rio provides the enterprise document management functionality we need in our ERP system, along with standalone benefits for a number of county departments—including a cost savings of $51,000 a year on office supplies in the Department of Family Services alone. By deploying ERP and ECM as a shared service, we’re leveraging economies of scale and making more efficient use of our IT resources.”

Canada’s Essex County, meanwhile, teamed up with seven county municipalities to purchase and use Laserfiche WebLink as a public information portal. Wendy St. Amour, Essex County’s IT Manager, explained, “The ability to share knowledge and expertise with each other has proven to be very beneficial. By taking a shared-service approach, we can develop a process once, and with a few small changes, eight different organizations can benefit from it.”

Law enforcement agencies, too, are getting in on the shared-service action. According to Renee Lura, Professional IT Services Manager for the City of Fargo and an IT liaison/lead for the Red River Regional Dispatch Center, “In the realm of public safety, sharing resources across agencies allows everyone involved to get more bang for their buck. Multi-jurisdictional agencies allow participants to pool their funding so that they can invest in more sophisticated technology and provide better, faster service to their communities.”

A Simple ECM Shared Service Maturity Model

According to Deloitte’s 2011 Global Shared Services Survey, “Every organization approaches shared services differently and regardless of the approach organizations are delivering year over year incremental value to their bottom line.”

As you consider implementing ECM as a shared service within your organization, keep in mind that following a maturity model such as the one outlined below can provide a roadmap to success.

1. Localize your best practices. Analyze the processes conducted by your business units. Calculate their lowest common denominator. Figure out which process is most efficient—and then make it repeatable so you can roll it out to the entire organization.

2. Thoughtfully standardize across business units. Look at your metadata models. Consider implementing a master model like the Dublin Core Set. On the delivery side, develop a standardized skill set for your staff.

3. Consolidate. Standardize the central system and customize the delivery. Deployment-wise this means consolidating all of your content into one ECM system and integrating to allow the users to access content through any application.

4. Cost benefits. This is where the economies of scale kick in. You’ve developed your service level agreements and are rolling out a menu of ECM functions in terms of head-count. At this stage your focus is no longer just internal optimization. You are actually creating value for the organization through your service offerings.

5. Continuous review. Constantly refine your menu of offerings through continuous and proactive auditing. Quality improvements are implemented using formalized change management processes like Six Sigma.

For an expanded version of this maturity model, see Agile ECM as a Shared Service.

Government runs on IT, regardless of who is in office

The nation is holding its collective breath over the upcoming elections, waiting to see what the impact will be on Medicare, the deficit and national economic policy. One thing that is not likely to change is that government will continue to run on IT regardless of who is in office, and administrators do not appear to be worried about who is going to win in November.

It isn’t politics but the need to deliver services on increasingly tight budgets that drives technology purchasing at the federal, state and local levels, according to one recent survey.

This finding is the result of an effort to prove a theory that initially appears so self-evident that it needs no proof. “My theory was that administrations have an effect on government technology purchases,” said Kimberly Samuelson, director of government strategy for Laserfiche, an enterprise content management (ECM) vendor.

So she sent out a brief survey to the company’s customers and prospective customers. The first question was: Will the upcoming presidential election affect tech purchases within your organization?

“I would say my theory was wrong,” Samuelson said. “Eighty percent of responders said no, the election does not affect technology purchases.”

The survey probably falls short of being a statistically valid randomized sampling. The 530 responders represent about a 10 percent response rate from a collection of contacts within an enterprise content management  database. About 10 percent of responders were federal officials, about 25 percent were state, and the rest were from local government. But the lopsided conclusion is interesting, and at first glance counterintuitive. Many of the respondents explained that their IT funding was not dependent on political appointees or elected officials.

How can that be? Ultimately all government spending depends on appropriations decided by elected officials, from Congress down to the county council and town board. The answer is that the assumption was phrased wrong, Samuelson said. It is not a matter of buying or not buying technology, it’s a matter of what kind of technology is being bought.

“People buy for different reasons under different administrations,” she said. But over time it all evens out.

Her experience from talking to Laserfiche customers is that social service implementations now are “on the uptick.” But under a more hawkish law-and-order administration the emphasis could easily swing to law enforcement technology. And with deficit hawks in office, revenue generation and collection technology, such as land management tools, is likely to be popular.

The bottom line from the survey is that budget pressure is the business driver for IT purchases. “It was absolutely reducing cost,” Samuelson said. “Cost is the number one issue in terms of what they buy.”

And budget pressure is something that is not likely to disappear no matter who wins in November. Priorities might change from one administration to the next, but in guessing what kinds of tools agencies will be investing in come 2013, it is safe to say that it will be those that can demonstrate a return on investment. Vive le ROI.

Family Office Drives Efficiency Using ECM

Since 1928, Piedmont Trust Company, a family office and private trust company based in Greensboro, NC, has been responsible for asset allocation, investment monitoring, estate planning, tax preparation, bill payment and education management for all the members of a single family. Over the last 80 years, what began as a two-person office serving a single household has grown to a staff of 25 servicing 650 accounts.

“There are a lot of unique financial things that you do in a family office that you may not do in a typical bank, trust company or credit union. We handle all their accounting and tax work, for instance. We’re essentially a one-stop shop,” explains Ed Wright, Managing Director of IT and Middle Operations.

“One thing is you never seem to get rid of any information—and that works great until you have nothing in your office but a ton of file cabinets.”

By 2008, the firm began looking into enterprise content management (ECM) systems to get rid of file cabinets by digitizing information, and also to automate how that information moves and is used in everyday business processes such as transaction approvals.

“We looked at some solutions that were great at loading a TIFF and filing it away so that, 10 years from now, if you needed to go look for it, you searched and found it and there you were,” Wright says. “But we were looking for something more—we wanted to automate workflows and document filing and things like that.”

The firm discovered enterprise content management, Laserfiche through a user group for another one of its software providers, Advent Software. There, Wright met Kevin Smith from One Source Document Solutions, a Laserfiche reseller also based in Greensboro. “We were impressed with the fact that Laserfiche was such a well-known name in the industry and with how many people were using it,” recalls Wright. “One of the things that attracted us to Laserfiche was that each company tends to use it in a different way. I felt that Laserfiche was able to bring me a lot of things with workflows, intelligent capture, great search capabilities and other things that I just couldn’t get from other vendors.”

Together with One Source, Wright mapped out a plan to integrate Laserfiche with Piedmont’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM system to better serve clients. They also determined how Laserfiche Workflow could automate transaction approval processes using notification e-mails, as well as serve as an integral component of a composite application for client reporting using Advent Portfolio Exchange and Fi-Tek’s Trust Portal trust accounting system.

Says Wright, “Laserfiche gave us the most flexibility to store data, it gave us great search capabilities, and we were able to integrate it with our other solutions.”

Taking a Hub Approach 

Migration from various shared-drive folders into the Laserfiche repository took six months. In essence, Piedmont created a centralized “hub” to service information to staff and departments. Says Wright, “We took this hub approach, where we our staff are constantly going in and retrieving Excel files or Word documents and depositing them into Laserfiche using the add-on features that work with Microsoft Office.”

Key to this hub approach, Wright explains, is giving Relationship Managers access to all client documents directly within the CRM by integrating Microsoft Dynamics with Laserfiche. Relationship Managers can now click on Account Documents in the Account tab of the CRM to view all of the documents associated with that particular account directly in Laserfiche Web Access.

Turning Hours to Minutes: Using Workflow to Automate OFAC Approval 

As part of the hub approach, Laserfiche Workflow is used to automate the transaction approval process. “Many of the trusts we deal with have large numbers of transactions, disbursements, receipts and transfers associated with them. Each of these transactions has to go through a multi-step approval process called OFAC (Office of Foreign Asset Control). This process basically involves checking that the people involved in the transaction aren’t on a list of suspected terrorists,” Wright says. “In the past, we would have to manually run through a ton of these transactions in a day, which was very painful for us being such a small office.”

Today, the automated OFAC process is much simpler:

·         Staff scans transaction documentation into Laserfiche.

·         Laserfiche Workflow automatically generates e-mails with links that instruct people to fill out the Laserfiche fields to approve the relevant transactions.

·         Meanwhile, Middle Office Operations managers get e-mails regarding exactly where in the approval process each transaction is.

·         Once Middle Office Operations gets the e-mail that the transaction has been approved by everyone, they can go into the Trust Portal and release it.

“So what in effect happens is you take a process that could take three hours to complete for three signatures and turn it around in a matter of minutes,” Wright says.

In order to give clients online access to their important documents, Piedmont created a custom Website and integrated it with Laserfiche using the Laserfiche SDK. Once logged in, clients are able to both download and upload documents through this portal using a secure log-in. .

In addition, the portal is used as part of a composite application to enable client reporting from the firm’s Advent Portfolio Exchange system and its Fi-Tek’s Trust Portal trust accounting system, which is not only more convenient, but saves paper costs and printing headaches as well. (To learn more about this and other composite applications leveraging existing infrastructure and Laserfiche.

Easier Audits

Last year, the firm went through its first paperless audit with the North Carolina Banking Commission. “We decided we were going to leverage the electronic technology that we had in Laserfiche and in our CRM system. Basically, when they gave us a list of the accounts they wanted to review, we moved them into a secured folder in Laserfiche that the auditors could access with an audit login and password. They were only able to access that one folder. The response we got was very positive,” Wright explains. “We felt it was a very successful trial and we intend to continue with this paperless approach moving forward.”

Wright says the ongoing value of using Laserfiche has been more time and space. “The time savings have given us the capacity to take on additional work. We’ve also cleared out so many file cabinets that we’re actually getting ready to reclaim the storage space in the form of new offices, and we’re all excited about that.”

Computerized Management Services Incorporates ECM into Its IT Infrastructure

ForComputerized Management Services, a medical management company that focuses onmeeting the needs of radiologists, technology paves the path to a profitablefuture.

“Becausewe’ve never lost a customer and have extremely low employee turnover as well asstrong long-term relationships with all of our key suppliers, we have the meansto invest in the technology necessary to build a world-class infrastructure tomeet the future needs of our clients,” says President Tom Brajkovich.

Thisforward-thinking approach led the company to implement Laserfiche enterprisecontent management back in 2006. “There’s a lot of miscellaneous paperassociated with medical billing, a lot of non-standardized communicationscoming from patients, payers and providers,” Brajkovich explains. “We knew thatdigitizing the paper and automating associated processes would make us moreefficient.”

Priorto implementing ECM, ComputerizedManagement Services housed its paper archives in bankers boxes at offsitestorage lockers, making it difficult for staff to find older documents. Filesthat had yet to be reviewed for coding and billing purposes were kept in filingcabinets, creating bottlenecks when documents were misplaced and limiting themanagement team’s visibility into the company’s overall workflow.

Tofacilitate access and improve productivity, the company now uses Laserfiche toprocess, manage and store four main document types:

• Reports and face sheets from     providers.
• Explanation of benefits forms     (both paper and electronic) from payers.
• Credentialing documents from     providers.
• Internal training documents.

“We’reconstantly scanning, uploading and processing information,” Brajkovich says.

Documentsare processed and stored using  Laserfiche Quick Fields 8, a high-volumecapture and processing tool, and Laserfiche Workflow 8, a business processmanagement tool. These tools eliminate the need for manual data entry andfiling by:

• Automatically extracting     metadata from documents.
• Auto-populating index fields.
• Creating new folders.
• Auto-filing documents.

Fora company that receives thousands of documents a day from more than 100locations in California and Arizona, this automation results in a bigproductivity boost. It also makes it easy for employees to retrieve documentsby conducting simple field and text searches.

Processing EOBs with Enterprise Content Management

Furtherenhancing productivity, Computerized Management Services uses Laserfiche tomanage the explanation of benefits (EOB) forms that most insurers still send inpaper format.

“Weuse Quick Fields to convert paper EOBs into usable data, and Workflow tofacilitate EOB processing,” explains Denise Van, Vice President of Operations.

Viadocument shortcuts, the company uses Workflow to route EOBs to the appropriateclient teams for processing. Client team personnel work with dual screens, sothey’re able to view a document on one screen while performing data entry intothe company’s CPU billing software on theother.

AlthoughCPU and Laserfiche aren’t yet integrated, the Laserfiche Entry ID for eachdocument is logged in each patient’s record in CPU so that it is easilyretrievable. After the EOBs have been processed, Workflow removes the EOBshortcuts from the client team folders. Workflow then archives the EOBs by dateof service.

Workflow Automation AcceleratesCoding 

ComputerizedManagement Services also uses Laserfiche in conjunction with A-Life, its computer-assisted coding system.

Whenthe company receives new information from a client site, it imports it intoLaserfiche using either Laserfiche Import Agent,which captures electronic faxes, or LaserficheSnapshot, which converts electronic documents into TIFF images.Documents are then processed by Quick Fields and exported to A-Life. Oncedocuments have been coded in A-Life, Workflow archives the documents.

Thebiggest benefits of Laserfiche, however, are felt when the company can’t useA-Life. “If a facility changes the format of its reports or face sheets, ittakes time to reprogram A-Life,” says Brajkovich. “When that happens, Laserfichetakes over.”

Accordingto Van, employees need a mere 24 hours to complete the coding process inA-Life. When done on paper, the process takes 5-10 days. When used as thecompany’s “coding back up,” Laserfiche enables staff to complete the coding processin 48-72 hours.

“Laserfichehelps us solve problems,” says Van. “If we had to code on paper every time afacility changed its format, we’d lose a lot of time.”

Thecoding process in Laserfiche works as follows:

• Documents are imported into     Laserfiche using Import Agent or Snapshot.
• Documents are processed by     Quick Fields, metadata is applied and Workflow moves document shortcuts to     the Coder folder for processing.
• The coding manager assigns work     and Workflow moves the folder to the assigned coder.
• The assigned coder codes the     document using the preview pane in Laserfiche, adding coding metadata to     the Laserfiche template.
• Workflow then moves the     document to the billing team, which exports it to CPU for processing.
• Once the completion criteria     have been met, Workflow archives the documents.

“Workflowis a wonderful tool,” says Van. “We rely heavily on it.”

The Key to Going Digital 

Brajkovichand Van stress that Computerized Management Services’ success with Laserficheis the result of a phased approach to implementation and training. They firstworked with Laserfiche reseller JPI Data Resource to configure the system totheir specifications, and then they trained their staff.

“Wedidn’t roll out everything at once,” says Brajkovich. “Implementing the capabilitiesof Laserfiche slowly allowed us to make sure that adjusting to the new systemdidn’t slow us down.”

Initially,staff learned how to use Laserfiche to search and retrieve digital documents.Once the company rolled out Workflow, Brajkovich and Van took atrain-the-trainer approach, working with key staff from the data processing andclient teams to ensure that they were comfortable with the system and able toshow their team members how to perform their various tasks.

Today,as always, the company is in the process of improving its workflows.“Continuous improvement is important to us,” says Brajkovich. “In order toensure that we offer truly exceptional service to clients in the heavilynuanced field of radiology, we constantly look for ways to fine tune ourprocesses and our use of technology.”

Computerized Management Services Incorporates ECM into Its IT Infrastructure

For Computerized Management Services, a medical management company that focuses on meeting the needs of radiologists, technology paves the path to a profitable future.

“Because we’ve never lost a customer and have extremely low employee turnover as well as strong long-term relationships with all of our key suppliers, we have the means to invest in the technology necessary to build a world-class infrastructure to meet the future needs of our clients,” says President Tom Brajkovich.

This forward-thinking approach led the company to implement Laserfiche enterprise content management back in 2006. “There’s a lot of miscellaneous paper associated with medical billing, a lot of non-standardized communications coming from patients, payers and providers,” Brajkovich explains. “We knew that digitizing the paper and automating associated processes would make us more efficient.”

Prior to implementing ECM, Computerized Management Services housed its paper archives in bankers boxes at offsite storage lockers, making it difficult for staff to find older documents. Files that had yet to be reviewed for coding and billing purposes were kept in filing cabinets, creating bottlenecks when documents were misplaced and limiting the management team’s visibility into the company’s overall workflow.

To facilitate access and improve productivity, the company now uses Laserfiche to process, manage and store four main document types:

• Reports and face sheets from providers.
• Explanation of benefits forms (both paper and electronic) from payers.
• Credentialing documents from providers.
• Internal training documents.

“We’re constantly scanning, uploading and processing information,” Brajkovich says.

Documents are processed and stored using  Laserfiche Quick Fields 8, a high-volume capture and processing tool, and Laserfiche Workflow 8, a business process management tool. These tools eliminate the need for manual data entry and filing by:

• Automatically extracting metadata from documents.
• Auto-populating index fields.
• Creating new folders.
• Auto-filing documents.

For a company that receives thousands of documents a day from more than 100 locations in California and Arizona, this automation results in a big productivity boost. It also makes it easy for employees to retrieve documents by conducting simple field and text searches.

Processing EOBs with Enterprise Content Management

Further enhancing productivity, Computerized Management Services uses Laserfiche to manage the explanation of benefits (EOB) forms that most insurers still send in paper format.

“We use Quick Fields to convert paper EOBs into usable data, and Workflow to facilitate EOB processing,” explains Denise Van, Vice President of Operations.

Via document shortcuts, the company uses Workflow to route EOBs to the appropriate client teams for processing. Client team personnel work with dual screens, so they’re able to view a document on one screen while performing data entry into the company’s CPU billing software on the other.

Although CPU and Laserfiche aren’t yet integrated, the Laserfiche Entry ID for each document is logged in each patient’s record in CPU so that it is easily retrievable. After the EOBs have been processed, Workflow removes the EOB shortcuts from the client team folders. Workflow then archives the EOBs by date of service.

Workflow Automation Accelerates Coding 

Computerized Management Services also uses Laserfiche in conjunction with A-Life, its computer-assisted coding system.

When the company receives new information from a client site, it imports it into Laserfiche using either Laserfiche Import Agent, which captures electronic faxes, or Laserfiche Snapshot, which converts electronic documents into TIFF images. Documents are then processed by Quick Fields and exported to A-Life. Once documents have been coded in A-Life, Workflow archives the documents.

The biggest benefits of Laserfiche, however, are felt when the company can’t use A-Life. “If a facility changes the format of its reports or face sheets, it takes time to reprogram A-Life,” says Brajkovich. “When that happens, Laserfiche takes over.”

According to Van, employees need a mere 24 hours to complete the coding process in A-Life. When done on paper, the process takes 5-10 days. When used as the company’s “coding back up,” Laserfiche enables staff to complete the coding process in 48-72 hours.

“Laserfiche helps us solve problems,” says Van. “If we had to code on paper every time a facility changed its format, we’d lose a lot of time.”

The coding process in Laserfiche works as follows:

• Documents are imported into Laserfiche using Import Agent or Snapshot.
• Documents are processed by Quick Fields, metadata is applied and Workflow moves document shortcuts to the Coder folder for processing.
• The coding manager assigns work and Workflow moves the folder to the assigned coder.
• The assigned coder codes the document using the preview pane in Laserfiche, adding coding metadata to the Laserfiche template.
• Workflow then moves the document to the billing team, which exports it to CPU for processing.
• Once the completion criteria have been met, Workflow archives the documents.

“Workflow is a wonderful tool,” says Van. “We rely heavily on it.”

The Key to Going Digital 

Brajkovich and Van stress that Computerized Management Services’ success with Laserfiche is the result of a phased approach to implementation and training. They first worked with Laserfiche reseller JPI Data Resource to configure the system to their specifications, and then they trained their staff.

“We didn’t roll out everything at once,” says Brajkovich. “Implementing the capabilities of Laserfiche slowly allowed us to make sure that adjusting to the new system didn’t slow us down.”

Initially, staff learned how to use Laserfiche to search and retrieve digital documents. Once the company rolled out Workflow, Brajkovich and Van took a train-the-trainer approach, working with key staff from the data processing and client teams to ensure that they were comfortable with the system and able to show their team members how to perform their various tasks.

Today, as always, the company is in the process of improving its workflows. “Continuous improvement is important to us,” says Brajkovich. “In order to ensure that we offer truly exceptional service to clients in the heavily nuanced field of radiology, we constantly look for ways to fine tune our processes and our use of technology.”