Introduction
Sugar Land, Texas, is a regional employment center with more than 25 million square feet of commercial space.
The City is home to many high-profile corporations, including but not limited to Minute Maid, UnitedHealthcare, Texas Instruments, Schlumberger, Fluor Corporation, Noble Drilling Services and Bechtel EO.
The Problem
The City of Sugar Land did not have a content management solution prior to Laserfiche. One department had an old legacy system that was no longer supported by the vendor.
Prior to Laserfiche, documents and paper files were stored in shared drives. This did not allow for easy access to documents or files throughout the organization.
They needed a content management system that could store documents and allow those documents to be easily retrieved and accessible by other users in the entire organization. They chose Laserfiche because it was the perfect solution.
Laserfiche offered alternatives to many of the manual processes they had, and allowed them to automate many of the business processes that were previously manual. Before making the decision, The municipality reached out to other users in Texas, as well as gathered insights from their vendors and analysts.
Laserfiche replaced their Winocular legacy system. Sugar Land’s Winocular system was over 15 years old, the vendor had gone out of business and the software was no longer supported. It became increasingly difficult to retrieve and find items in the software. Also, the system was only in use in one department, therefore, members of other departments could not benefit from its use.
The Solution
Having contracts, ordinances, resolutions, or agendas readily available in Laserfiche has enabled the Office of the City Secretary to respond to internal and external information requests much faster, sometimes within minutes rather than days.
Their staff is now able to concentrate on other tasks and meet important statutory deadlines.
The Laserfiche functionalities used most by the City of Sugar Land are Quick Fields and Workflow. Quick Fields is set up to process employee files with more consistent and correct information. They also built Quick Fields sessions that run after hours (so as not to slow down the system).
The sessions are created to identify, rename and move documents to the correct folder. If a folder does not exist, the quick field agent creates the folder for the document to be moved into.
Laserfiche Workflow allows them to build workflows that identify certain types of documents, rename the documents using the naming convention selected by the department and then move the documents to the appointed folder for storage.
In terms of integrations, they integrated Laserfiche with their online job application system. When the HR coordinator opens an application, the application is sent to Laserfiche via Snapshot and saved under the applicants’ name and position applied for. In addition, Laserfiche was integrated with their performance evaluation application, which is also a browser-based application.
The return on investment is evident when other city departments received information efficiently from the Office of the City Secretary, and those departments, in turn, have been able to make more progress on projects and complete work in a more effective manner – often responding to vendors, contractors, and grantors again within minutes or hours, rather than days.
Getting the correct information swiftly enables construction work to get started faster, property documents to be recorded in a timelier manner, and things like grant applications to be submitted sooner.
The use of Laserfiche also allows Human Resources to work more efficiently when information is requested. A major plus to using Laserfiche for the City of Sugar Land is the increase in confidentiality for their records, and the ability to maintain records according to a retention schedule.
