City of Lakewood, CO

2020 Digital Transformation for the Police and City

The City of Lakewood, CO has been an ECS customer for several years after selecting through an RFP process to support and maintain their Laserfiche implementation. The City has been heavily involved in developing Laserfiche Workflow, Forms and Forms Processes to replace manual processes that were slow and inefficient. In 2020 based on a newly passed State law, one of the Forms they developed was a Police Department Contact Form.

The City conducted an intense development process on the Police Department Contact Form, which went live after the July 4^th weekend.  The City PD Agents were trained on how to use the process and things are going along smoothly. Walter Jauch, Records Analyst for the City, created the form and a report in Laserfiche Forms for the staff to use. The Form and Report will provide ability to download in .CSV or XLSX formats every field in the form to produce whatever the Dept. of Justice will require of them.

Here is a step-by-step description and requirements of the process:

• Agent inputs the dynamic form based on how the contact progressed.
• Agent receives email notification with the ability to request their Supervisor make a change, if necessary.  Supervisor has 48 hours (excluding weekends) to use Laserfiche Forms Supervisor’s Inbox (or the link forwarded by the Agent in email) to make the necessary changes.
• If no change is needed, it is automatically saved to repository after 48 hours (excluding weekends).
• PD Command did not want a review of every form, or even the Supervisors notified via Laserfiche forms of every contact form created, so we did not use the standard notification functions in Laserfiche Forms.
• Input of form should be able to take place via workstations in PD records area, their secure laptops in their cars, or any City authorized device behind our firewall.
• Form had to be dynamic, quick, and easy to understand and use

According to Walter Jauch, Police Department Command is happy with the process so it seems to be a success.

Another department in need of electronic process improvement is the City’s Liquor Licensing.  Their idea is to improve the process using Laserfiche Forms to expand the records keeping system they have. While no longer storing paper in file cabinets they still need something more automated so that their Liquor Licensing clerk can keep up with all the license renewals, new licenses, and the necessary records keeping, including scanning. Walter developed a folder structure and scanned all the records they had. They plan to have barcode sheets with metadata and folder information. Using Quick Fields and Workflow would be a great way for their Liquor Clerk to keep up with the processing and could place barcode sheets at appropriate places in the stack, scan it all at once, and let Laserfiche do the work automatically.

Another example of how they automate is with updated W4 files. Since the W4 records are kept in the HR repository in Laserfiche, they wanted a workflow to pull user completed PDF versions from their accounting software and file them in the LF employee records folders. We setup Quick Fields Agent to import the files from the network, auto recognize the documents, and file them in the needed folders.

“I am happy to share as I think Laserfiche is a great product, but sometimes is not known to other entities for its capabilities.  I am continually amazed that the product does just about everything asked of it and it seems the developers anticipate the needs of the users pretty well.  It is very robust, too”, he added.