Overview
Lakes and Pines Community Action Council is a non-profit corporation that offers a variety of programs to assist low-income families and individuals in a seven-county area north of the Twin Cities. They provide assistance to eligible consumers in the following areas: Early childhood and family development; Energy and housing; family loan program; special projects and emergency services.
Steve Long, Director of Data Processing for Lakes and Pines, spoke about Lakes and Pines experience with Hemingway Solutions (formerly Solbrekk) Laserfiche document management solution.
Challenge
Steve stated “Several years ago we were informed by our funders that we would be required to increase our document retention from 3 years to 6 years, meaning we needed to double our storage space. An additional 40x40ft storage space or leased storage space in some warehouse or purchasing a $50,000 sliding file equipment. Our other options were quite costly and inefficient
Solution
“We evaluated a number of document management solutions. We chose Laserfiche because of its modular licensing, which allowed us to purchase what we needed and then add other modules later. We also found it much easier to use than other products. Larry Phelps trained me to use it and I was able to train the rest of my staff. The total cost of the LaserFiche system purchased was less than $13,000 including three Fujitsu scanners for departmental scanning.
Benefits
We had several employees that initially were very resistant to the change, but have since completely embraced the solution. Documents can easily be brought up on-line and 2 employees can view a document at the same time. We frequently use scanning and searching features based on keywords to find information. One example is remembering that a decision was made at a board meeting, but not remembering which meeting. A quick search on key words saves a great deal of time.”
The time to find a file and then multiple employees can look at the same file and then not having to refile them again. The one employee that wanted a file scanned instead of just bringing the file to her desk was a major breakthrough. Accounting can search very fast for an amount their balance is off to see if that entry was in error or not. Head Start can scan the children’s crayon drawing’s so they can give the parents the original drawing of the child. We save about 1 to 2 boxes a month of the 11×17 green-bar accounting paper and 1 box a month of 8 ½ x 11 computer paper.
Results
Filing 2000 sheets of payment histories for EAP would take about 2 to 3 months when employees had spare time. I could file these in about 3 minutes with Laserfiche simply by printing out of our software application using Laserfiche snapshot.
The front desks loved not having to put customers on hold, while they went to pull the file and then find time later to refile.
Laserfiche has been better than I could have imagined, it has made our office much more efficient.
Steve concluded by saying “Larry is like the Maytag repairman because we just never have problems with the Laserfiche solution.”
Laserfiche paperless solutions for Community Action Agencies