Meet the Client
The City of St. Charles sits just outside Chicago, home to 33,000 residents who expect quick, reliable service. Like many municipalities, this Illinois community relies on Infor Lawson for accounts payable. Their finance team was drowning in paper invoices, physical filing cabinets, and intraoffice mail routes that slowed down what should have been simple approvals.
Daily Detour: The invoice shuffle that ate up hours
Finance staff received vendor invoices and scanned them to local drives. Then they printed physical copies and routed them through intraoffice mail to department managers for approval. Electronic invoices got printed too, because the existing process demanded paper. When approvals came back, staff manually released payments in Lawson and filed documents in vendor folders. At year’s end, the team boxed up 10 to 13 banker boxes of invoice files for storage. Eighty-eight boxes sat in city archives, waiting out retention requirements. The process wasted time, created risk, and prevented the finance team from focusing on more valuable work.
About our Client
CLIENT NAME:
POPULATION:
est. 33,000 residents
SOLUTIONS:
The Solution: Integration that actually works
City Records Division Manager Jackie Uhler and Senior Systems Analyst Michael Drake knew they needed something better. They wanted software that could handle historical records, migrate data from their legacy system ApplicationExtender, and automate processes across departments including administration, human resources, information systems, and public works.
“We knew we wanted a dynamic system that allowed us to handle the historical records we scan in and store and migrate our data from ApplicationExtender, but we wanted to make sure that whatever we were also utilizing had the ability to automate business processes for the city,” said Uhler.
St. Charles chose Laserfiche because the interface made sense to their team. MCCi’s reputation as a Laserfiche partner and their clear explanation of what the implementation would look like sealed the deal. The city launched an internal campaign with fliers throughout City Hall and held kickoff meetings to answer staff questions about the switch.
“Having MCCi do our training as we implemented Laserfiche and being able to collaborate with them in training to develop that workflow was huge for us,” said Uhler. “Not only did we learn how to use the tool, but by the end of the process we were able to have fully functioning workflows that we could implement with only some minor adjustments on our side.”
MCCi also connected St. Charles with the City of Corpus Christi, Texas, another client who had integrated Laserfiche with Lawson. Corpus Christi shared specific code that made St. Charles’ transition even smoother. The two cities continue collaborating on their Laserfiche implementations.
The Solution: Faster approvals, zero paper, real savings
Invoice approvals now happen entirely through digital workflows. There’s no risk of lost paperwork, no intraoffice mail delays, and no banker boxes filling up storage space. Processing time dropped 80 percent. The finance office no longer collects physical invoices at all.
Success in accounts payable created momentum across the organization. In early 2016, Laserfiche recognized St. Charles with the Run Smarter Award for best-in-class enterprise content management integrations. Since implementation, approximately 56,000 documents have migrated from legacy systems into Laserfiche.
“In the City of St. Charles, there is tremendous excitement,” said Drake. “I think MCCi did a great job of building that up. People were ready to change. We have a lot of excitement for what we can do with this product.”
Other departments are now lining up to implement Laserfiche workflows. What started as an invoice problem became a city-wide win.