Turn on the Power with Agile ECM

In December, 2008, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, launched Renew Virginia, a year-long series of legislative and administrative actions promoting renewable energy, creating green jobs, and encouraging preservation of the environment. A noble goal, indeed, and as many such initiatives are, typically more challenging to realize than decree. Environment preservation is on everyone’s mind today, and rightfully so. As we consider that the world is now home to over 6 Billion people, we must all be mindful of shared resources.

One of the key environmental areas that governmental agencies, in particular, can focus on is the reduction of paper in their processes. Over the past 10 years, many of these organizations have embraced the idea of moving away from paper, and have implemented document management systems, which allow paper to be stored in electronic format for ease of retrieval and sharing without the creation of additional paper. Many have even taken the additional step of ‘digitizing‘ or converting their older, historical paper and microfilm records to digital formats, and have been able to ‘recycle’ the vastly expensive space they were previously using to store these documents.

One of the most overlooked areas of significant improvement, however, is the point at which citizens actually interact or interface with these agencies. Currently, many of the Commonwealth’s municipalities have gaggles of necessary forms posted on their respective websites for citizens to find, print and complete on their own with no employee interaction. This is a step in the right direction, but somewhat limited in it’s efficiency and ‘green’ power. For instance, if I want to have a garage sale in my hometown of Chesapeake, I can go to the city website, pull up the permit form, fill in the required fields (all good so far…) but THEN, I have to print the form (waste of paper and ink), write a check (waste of expensive paper and ink), and either drive to the Commissioner of Revenue’s office (waste of gas and time) or mail it the the COR’s office (waste of envelope, stamp and post office gas and time). Once the Commissioner’s office receives my permit request and check, the paper form (which started out as an electronic document) now has to be digitized and entered into their document management system for approval and archiving. The check also has to be deposited (and someone must verify that it clears…) The inefficiencies are monumental!

Doesn’t it make much more sense to eliminate the waste that occurs between the original electronic form on the website and the completed electronic form and deposit in the Commissioner’s system? A cursory review of the City of Chesapeake‘s online forms page shows over 140 forms! How much paper, gasoline and manpower could be saved by eliminating the ‘waste’ in this process? Multiplied by the number of municipalities across the Commonwealth?

So, congratulations to many of the Virginia Governmental agencies that have adopted electronic content management systems…you are halfway there. You’ve ‘greened’ the back-end of your process. Let’s begin to focus on the front-end going forward, and a “Renewed Virginia” reality can be much closer for all of us. For more information on this idea, visit our website at http://www.unitysystems.biz

The Laserfiche 8 product suite has just received the highest-possible Five-Star rating from Buyers Laboratory, Inc. (BLI). The report focused exclusively on our current Laserfiche 8.1 product suite, and highlighted Laserfiche 8.1’s ease of use and administration, scalability, intuitive interface and possibilities for integration

“Laserfiche 8.1 is a robust, scalable document management solution that offers a broad range of functionality, along with impressive ease of use and ease of administration,” said BLI Assignments Editor George Mikolay in the report. “The platform’s modular capabilities make it suitable for companies of any size, as it can scale easily from just a few users in a single workgroup to thousands of users across an enterprise.”

“Laserfiche’s open architecture allows for easy integration with both software and hardware manufacturers,” the report said, adding that “the intuitive Workflow module features an easy-to-use [graphical user] interface that allows administrators to build complex workflows for users.”

Click here to download the entire report.

Unity Business Systems has been a top 10 Laserfiche Reseller for over 10 years. Please contact use to receive more information on the Laserfiche suite of products at 757-223-5908 or visit our web site for more information on Unity Business Systems.