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Overview
 Lakes & 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 programs, special projects, and emergency services.
Steve Long, Director of Data Processing for Lakes and Pines, tells about his experience implementing Solbrekk’s 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. We considered adding an additional 40’ x 40’ of storage space to our current office, leasing storage space in a warehouse, or purchasing $50,000 of sliding file equipment. These options were not only costly, but inefficient.”
Solution
“We evaluated a number of document management solutions,” says Steve. “We chose LaserFiche because of its modular licensing, which allowed us to purchase what we needed at the time, and then ad other modules later. We also found it much easier to use than other products. Larry Phelps (Solbrekk VP of Sales) trained me on the product, and I was able to train the rest of my staff. The total cost of the LaserFiche system we purchased was less than $13,000, including three small Fujitsu scanners for departmental scanning.”
Benefits & Results
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Steve stated, “We had several employees that were initially very resistant to the change, but have since completely embraced the solution. Documents can easily be brought up on-line and two employees can view a document at the same time. We frequently use the scanning and searching features based on key words to find information. One example of this is when we remember a decision that was made at a board meeting, but we can’t remember which meeting it was made. A full text search allows us to quickly find the minutes for that particular meeting, saving us a great deal of time.”
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“Other benefits of LaserFiche are that files don’t get misplaced or filed incorrectly. Accounting can search a report for an amount they are out of balance to find the entry with the error, the Head Start department can scan the children’s crayon drawings so they can give the parents the original drawings, and we save about 1-2 boxes a month of 11”x17” green-bar accounting paper and 1 box a month of 8˝”x11” computer paper by printing reports directly into LaserFiche.”
“In addition, filing 2,000 sheets of payment histories for the Energy Assistance Program used to take 2-3 months, but now it can be done in 3 minutes with LaserFiche Snapshot and the AS400. Also, the staff at the front desk doesn’t have to put customers on hold anymore while they find information for them.” Steve concluded by saying, “Larry is like the Maytag repairman, because we just never have problems with the LaserFiche solution!”
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