Article
IT services cut costs for Loudoun County
Project: Enterprise content management (ECM) system implementation
Jurisdiction: Loudoun County, Va.
Agencies: Loudoun County and the Loudoun County Public School District
Vendor: Long Beach, Calif.-based Laserfiche
Prior to 2007, Loudoun County, Va., didn’t have a standardized approach to document management.
“Departments would go out and find their own itty-bitty solutions,” says Jakub Jedrzejczak, Enterprise Imaging Team Manager for the county. “This approach led to information silos and poor IT support.”
When the financial services department started looking for a replacement for its old document imaging system in 2007, the IT department realized that implementing a true enterprise content management (ECM) system—one that could be used in all county departments—would cut down on the need for support and enable employees across the county to benefit from the ability to digitize content and automate business processes.
After selecting Laserfiche, the IT department presented the possibilities of a the new system to departments that were paper-based, that would see immediate benefits of digitizing. One such department was Family Services, which had a records room that was so full of paper the floors were buckling.
Within one year of the implementation in Family Services, the department had digitized incoming case files to save $50,000 on office supplies alone. By integrating with the department’s fax system and automating the fax distribution process, the department has also been able redeploy one full time equivalent.
“To date, we’ve moved 1,500 active users in 21 departments onto Laserfiche,” says Jedrzejczak. “We’ve also integrated it with 19 other systems and, although we still have a long way to go in replacing old systems, we’ve been able to eliminate about 20 legacy systems so far.”
He explains that one of the biggest benefits of standardizing on one ECM system is “the ability to use the same solution in multiple departments without having to write more code. For example, after we created the fax system integration for Family Services, we were able to roll it out to other departments very quickly—in days, not weeks or months.”
