When Star Tribune’s corporate parent, McClatchy, sold the newspaper, the IT staff at the Tribune had a huge project on their hands. With the sale, says Star Tribune Software Engineer Corrie Kuester, came a provision that we had just nine months to replace all it’s legacy financial systems from McClatchy. One of these systems was the Bluebird imaging software utilized by Star Tribune’s Asset Management, Accounts Payable, and Travel & Expense systems. And another system was PeopleSoft. Both of these systems were highly customized to handle their accounts payable process.
They were informed that Blue Bird software was no longer supported so it had to be replaced. It was determined that the PeopleSoft application was meeting their needs so they decided to keep using it.
With all the changes that the organization was going through, they knew it would be best if they could keep as many of their business process the same. Especially in the accounting department, it was important to pay their vendors in a timely manner without disruption during the transition.
Solution:
After reviewing a number of enterprise content management systems (ECM) they determined that Laserfiche was the best fit for their situation. And Solbrekk (now Hemingway Solutions was chosen as their implementation partner. Corey Kuester, IT Application Specialist for the Star, said that we chose them because they have experience in accounts payable processing, integration to accounting systems such as PeopleSoft, and their willingness to handle a project of this magnitude with a very tight schedule.
Results:
The first major task of this huge project was to move the data and images from the BlueBird document management system into Laserfiche. Corey said, “I have to say they did an amazing job. Not only did they transfer all our critical files, during the migration process over 25,000 missing files were found. My best guess is that they were files that were stored in Bluebird but were not linked to PeopleSoft due to business rules,” Kuester proffers. “Because they were not visible to PeopleSoft, they really were not accessible—but now they are right there in Laserfiche.”
“The next project was to replicate our accounts payable workflow process and integrate Laserfiche to PeopleSoft. This part of the project went off without a hitch. And the outcome was that our accounting staff had no downtime and they were able to process payables with very little changes in their daily tasks.”
“All in all, this project was completed on time and under budget. And probably best of all, almost seamless to our staff.”