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.”

The Laserfiche Solution Exchange: A One-Stop Shop for User Knowledge

At Empower 2012, we unveiled the full functionality of the Laserfiche Solution Exchange, our newest resource for Laserfiche users!

The Solution Exchange is a library of concrete, real-world examples that help the enterprise content management  community justify, implement, configure and optimize their ECM systems. Contributed by ECM users, resellers and staff, each article provides detailed instructions for implementing practical solutions for improving your ECM system.

What will I find on the Solution Exchange?

The Solution Exchange is a comprehensive resource that provides takeaways that you can act upon immediately on topics ranging from ECM implementation to the Laserfiche upgrade process.

You’ll find integration details and utilities for account conversion alongside best practices for configuring effective searching mechanisms—and much more—straight from the enterprise content management community. Every post is instruction-based and includes many visual elements, such as screenshots of folder, template and workflow structures, actual code snippets, scripts and ROI planning tables.

With each post, you can also quickly access related resources, like technical white papers, guided help videos and development notes. Solutions are easily filtered by a number of categories, such as industry, business process, utilities and code, and best practices.

By combining comprehensive ECM functionality with powerful business process management (BPM), security and auditing tools, Laserfiche Rio provides a solid ECM infrastructure that:

·        

•            Manages your content.
• ·         Integrates with your existing IT portfolio.
• ·         Supports intelligent decision-making enterprise-wide.
• ·         Grants the IT Department central control over standards, security and auditing.
• ·    Gives individual departments flexibility to customize their filing structures, views and workflows.

ECM is designed to give your organization central control over its information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while also offering individual departments, offices and business units local flexibility over content and business process management. This unique design creates value by providing a single system that meets the needs of all departments while improving compliance by implementing a central point of control over enterprise information assets. 

Tech Tip: Scheduling Workflows

By combining comprehensive ECM functionality with powerful business process management, enterprise content management is able to provide an infrastructure that:

• · Manages your content.
• · Integrates with your existing IT portfolio.
• · Supports intelligent decision-making enterprise-wide.
• · Grants the IT Department central control over standards, security and auditing.
• · Gives individual departments flexibility to customize their filing structures, views and workflows.

The new schedule starting rules are highly customizable, allowing you to run workflows at whatever times make sense for your business processes.

In Workflow 8.3, you can now run workflows on a schedule, which means your workflows no longer need a starting event to run, giving you more flexibility when automating your business processes. The new schedule starting rules are highly customizable, allowing you to run workflows at whatever times make sense for your business processes. You can create schedules that run only certain months of the year, that run only on certain weeks or days, or that repeat throughout the day.

Monthly

If you select to have your workflow repeat monthly, you can choose which months you want the workflow to run (every month or only certain months), and you can select which day of the month you want to the workflow to run. When setting the day, you can set a calendar date, such as the fifteenth of each month, or a relative day, such as the last Friday of the month.

Weekly

With the weekly option, you can choose which day or days of the week you want your workflow to run. You can also specify if you want the workflow to run every week or every few weeks.

Daily

Workflows can be set to run on a daily schedule. For example, you can have a workflow run every day, every weekday, or every few days.

Hourly

Once you set a monthly, weekly or daily schedule, you can configure the schedule so that the workflow will repeat every few hours or minutes.
Example: The city of Bedrock processes a large number of building permits. It wants to make the processed permits available to the public as quickly as possible while keeping its records updated. Instead of using Workflow to update its Website and sync with its database every time a permit is processed, it is more efficient if the city can upload and sync several permits at once. The city creates a scheduled workflow to run once an hour, Monday through Friday. The workflow copies the metadata from all the permits in the Processed folder and inserts that information into a database. The workflow also moves the permits into a folder that is publically accessible with WebLink.

Enterprise Content Management – Tools and Strategies.

Laserfiche, running since 1987, has been using its Run Smarter philosophy to create simple and elegant solutions for content management. With a client list of more than 30000 organizations worldwide that includes federal, state, local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies, Laserfiche has been catering their need of software for streamlining documents, records and business process management.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) refers to the strategies, methods and tools that are used to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content documents related to organizational needs. ECM tools and strategies may allow managing an organization’s unstructured information.

Keeping the organization’s needs in mind, Laserfiche has released Laserfiche 8.3, a content management tool. The product spans across various business verticals and helps organizations to improve information management and automated transaction processes such as accounts payable, case management, contract management and human resources.

Laserfiche 8.3 has included new features such as

1. New Workflow. New Workflow may improve the productivity of enterprise content management by automating transactional processes as the workflow activities need to be dragged and dropped on a graphical canvas.

2. Database. This feature automates the information retrieval and updating process from third-party databases by simple integration.

3. PDF. It enables the Laserfiche administrators to add immediate value to product suite and import PDF forms into Laserfiche automatically. It also enables to retrieve information from PDF files and map them as per Laserfiche fields.

4. More than 60 in-built Workflow. This enterprise content management feature makes it easier to customize the product’s configuration to the needs of an organization and business vertical.

5. Digital signatures. In Laserfiche 8.3, the digital signatures are validated with the signing certificates on the server. Digital signatures may also prompt Workflow activities in guiding documents by approval process.

6. Web Administration Console. Web Administration Console in enterprise content management (ECM) enables an administrator to access the functions from anywhere, such as remote sites, client computers and mobile devices. In short, it makes the administration flexible.

Laserficherio - General Business - Walsh Station - California

Laserficherio - General Business - Walsh Station - California