If Your House Is Flooding, Hope Your City Has Laserfiche

The City of Shoreview, MN, has found some ingenious ways to use Laserfiche.

The City uses Laserfiche for inter-and intra-departmental information sharing. It also makes council minutes and agendas available to its 26,000 residents via Laserfiche WebLink.
The Public Works Department, in particular, has been busy streamlining their processes with Laserfiche.

“One of our townspeople recently had a water leak in their basement,” Dick Crumb, the city’s Information Services manager said. “The family was panicking. We had to find out where the water main was located and shut it off at the source.”

The procedure for finding this information used to be difficult. Index cards were kept on file with the exact location of each and every water main, sewer pipe, and water meter in town. At last count, there were over 10,000 3×5 note cards.

“In the past, it was a very long and tedious process to find the locations of water mains. The city worker would have to leave the residence, drive back to the department and look through all the cards,” Crumb said.

The worker would then have to search through a huge book with every city address listed and then another book that contained all corresponding index card numbers. Once they found the number they’d have to go through the boxes of cards and hope it was still in the correct order. “Just to look it up would take 30 minutes. Then the worker would have to head all the way back over to the residence,” Crumb said.

The City now has all the index cards scanned and indexed into Laserfiche. “It makes look-up a breeze,” Crumb said.

“Time is critical. Now with Laserfiche, the worker just calls into the office and has the person on the other end look up the address in the system. The address brings up the card with the shut-off valve location. He had the main shut off in minutes,” Crumb said.

Crumb added that soon even that short amount of time would be cut. They plan to put all their index card information onto Laserfiche Plus CDs. “With the CD’s the workers could have all the information available on laptops in their trucks, they wouldn¹t even have to call into the office.” Crumb added, “Laserfiche is a huge time-saver.”