Contributor: Stacy Seiberling, business technology manager at Prince William County, Virginia.
Located on the Potomac River just outside Washington, D.C., Prince William County is the second-most populous county in Virginia. It serves almost a half-million residents.
With a goal of increased efficiency, the county government began using Laserfiche for records management 15 years ago. It started when a single department explored implementing the technology, and they quickly realized what a powerful tool it could be for many of their operations. They turned to MCCi for help customizing Laserfiche workflows and applications to make it happen.
Today, the Prince William County government uses Laserfiche on its client server for records management across multiple departments, including integration with the State Health Department website.
Records Retention Benefits
Cost Savings
Organization-Wide Efficiency
The real star in a records management solution is not retention, it’s disposition. Retention makes people feel good, because everyone wants to keep their documents. Disposition, on the other hand, keeps you in compliance with state and federal requirements.
Standardized Naming Conventions
We have employees come and go, some stay for 30 years or 30 months. You must be consistent when naming your documents to help everyone stay organized and easily find documents. The county uses records management best practices to effectively standardize and manage its documents, including important record retention schedules.
“Once you set up standardization rules, they apply across the board,” said Seiberling. “Because our searches return more relevant results with automated records management, we’re giving our citizens and customers better service.”
Manage Electronic Trash
These days, a terabyte of data is no big deal. People do not realize the media file (i.e. meeting recordings, etc.) that contribute to the amount of data needed in your organization. So, where is that data stored? If its in cloud or on-premise, it doesn’t matter – it’s still data. At this rate, managing servers and on-premise solutions, costs more than a cloud option.
A cloud option for your data has many cost and efficiency benefits. One benefit is to charge each department for their data storage. When your system is in the cloud and organized with Laserfiche volumes, its easy to report on each departments usage and data load.
Share the Data Load with System Integrations
“The system performance was slowing because we were approaching a terabyte of data storage.” Seiberling said.
MCCi also helped the county resolve a major storage issue by implementing infrastructure records management standards. One of their projects, a cost product for real estate taxes called CountyOne, had a database that was growing too large.
MCCi recommended to pull documents out of the CountyOne database and store them in Laserfiche. With the integration, a service runs in the back and pulls the document once uploaded through CountyOne. It decreases the need for storage because the documents are eventually deleted from the database.
The county’s goal is to convert every department to electronic document management. “It’s not going to be an overnight process,” said Seiberling. “But we are drafting a strategy to make that transition a reality.”
