Meet the City of Grapevine, Texas
Grapevine, Texas, sits at the heart of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex as a vibrant community of 51,000 residents. Known for more than 200 restaurants, bars, and wineries, the city hosts GrapeFest, the largest wine festival in the American Southwest each September. Grapevine earned a 2023 Great Place in Texas award for its Main Street and Dallas Road district. Behind the scenes, city staff and law enforcement worked long hours wrestling with paper-based processes that couldn’t keep up with the community they served.
Daily Detour: Buried in Binders and Drowning in Delays
Hard copies dominated operations. Performance evaluations languished in Excel spreadsheets for months. Over 25 filing cabinets held records staff couldn’t quickly find. More than 106 forms and 74 workflows relied on carbon documents requiring hand routing.
The City Secretary’s office faced painful delays. With 5,000 birth and death certificate requests annually, staff trekked to a records vault containing 40 years of vital records in dust-covered binders. Finding a specific record took so long that certificates were only issued once a week. Staff pulled certificates, copied them onto certified paper, wrote issuance information by hand, mailed copies, and refiled originals.
The Police Department was stuck in paper. Captain Rebecca Graves, a 17-year veteran, saw potential in going digital but faced resistance. “Cops don’t like change,” she admits. Sergeants filled out briefing sheets four times daily on paper while an administrative assistant manually typed everything into Excel. Officers kept paper receipts and certificates, made photocopies at headquarters, and waited for approvals. Potential officers faced six-month onboarding delays. Texas requires a 40-page personal history statement that confused applicants who had to answer sections that didn’t apply.
The ‘Flood of 2019’ exposed how vulnerable paper records were when a water tower line broke.
About our Client
CLIENT NAME:
MEMBERS:
est. 50,500 citizens
SOLUTIONS:
The Solution: Forms, Workflows, and Mobile Access That Work
Building Buy-In One Smart Form at a Time
Grapevine chose Laserfiche as their digital backbone. MCCi partnered with the city to implement Laserfiche Forms across departments, knowing the real challenge was human, not technical.
Captain Graves understood this. “It doesn’t do any good for me to design a form and force it on the officers,” she says. “It’s really important in any police department to get buy-in.” She found her gateway: briefing sheets. When sergeants could enter shift information from computers or mobile devices, providing real-time data to dispatch without retyping, even skeptical officers saw value.
“I had a lot of crusty old sergeants that I had to win over,” Graves says with a chuckle. “When I first introduced this idea, I went to a senior sergeant and had him demo it with me. Because if I could win him over, I knew it would work. Now it’s just an everyday fact of our department.”
Success with briefing sheets opened doors to 30 more forms. Officers now submit expense reports and upload training certificates from mobile devices in the field. For onboarding, Laserfiche Forms reduced the personal history statement from 40 pages to an average of 11 by showing only relevant questions. No military service? You never see that section.
The City Secretary’s office transformation was dramatic. MCCi migrated data from the city’s STW system into Laserfiche, creating a central repository with extensive indexing and instant retrieval. Staff now look up file numbers in Laserfiche, print certificates directly, record issuance information in metadata, and hand certificates to applicants immediately.
For new records from the State of Texas TER database, staff use Laserfiche Snapshot and Quick Fields to automate work that required printing, stamping, size reduction, data entry, and filing. Quick Fields automatically reduces size to fit certificate paper, applies the registrar’s stamp, and auto-populates names and file numbers.
MCCi Scanning Services digitized 40 years of vital records totaling 55,000 certificates in three months while Grapevine kept access during scanning.
Citywide, Laserfiche automated approximately 1,200 documents. Dynamic evaluation forms tie into the HR database, letting staff track documents, add comments, and send automated reminder emails. Business Process Manager Shawna Barnes, the “Goddess of Workflows,” built processes for Accounts Payable, Police Training, and IT Management.
Document sharing between departments and public safety improved dramatically. 911 operators, police officers, and firefighters access documents instantly, helping them assess field situations more effectively.
Laserfiche completely changed business processes within our city.
Shawna Barnes shares her experience with our support team. She’s thankful that our team is there when she finds herself in a bind and needs a fix, quickly!
The Results: Hours Saved, Cabinets Emptied, Citizens Served Faster
Numbers That Tell the Real Story
The city removed over 25 filing cabinet systems and freed up office space. Staff automated approximately 1,200 documents. The Police Department deployed 30 digital forms that officers now use as routine tools.
Birth and death certificates that were issued once a week now go out the same day. The City Secretary’s office handles 5,000 requests annually with dramatically less staff time. The six-month onboarding process for new officers dropped to four months.
“Our automation allows us to reduce paper, streamline processes and free up staff to focus on higher priorities,” said Shawna Barnes, Business Process Manager.
“[Laserfiche] has completely changed many business processes within our city and will continue to streamline many more in the future. We as a city are collaborating more than we ever have,” Barnes added.
When disaster struck during the 2019 flood, Grapevine’s digitized records protected decades of vital information.
Captain Graves reflects on the cultural shift: “The Grapevine PD’s success story shows that it’s possible to get buy-in on digital transformation practically anywhere.”
City Secretary Tara Brooks summed up the broader impact: “The ease of searching records in Laserfiche has made researching the history of our City quick and easy. With a limited staff time and IT resources, MCCi Managed Cloud helped us with projects we had planned.”
Looking ahead, Barnes sees even more opportunities with Laserfiche for the jail system, records dispatch, and fire department operations. When she encounters any issue, the MCCi support team steps in quickly to keep things moving.