Meeting Compliance Requirements with Laserfiche
Established in the 1950s, Otay Water District has helped transform the District’s 125.5 square mile service area into a brilliant blend of diverse environments. The District serves approximately 230,000 customers by purchasing water from the San Diego County Water Authority.
In 2016, the District began looking for a document management system to replace the one they were currently using which did not have all the necessary features the District required including workflow processing and document maintenance which are vital for a public agency. After evaluating several options, the District chose Laserfiche because it “simplified the content discovery for our staff while providing flexible and appropriate levels of security”, explains Michael Kerr, IT Manager for the District. “Additionally, the district chose Laserfiche due to its combined ease of use, ability to deliver content and documents related to our organizational process, and cost.”
ECS installed a Laserfiche Rio system with 100 Named Users and Weblink with 25 retrieval users. The initial implementation also included the migration of 384 GB of data and documents stored in their HP Trim system over to Laserfiche. Since the initial implementation, the District has purchased 15 additional user licenses and the SDK (Software Development Kit) to provide integration capabilities with business applications.
“Laserfiche simplifies our content management lifecycle concern. As a public agency we are required to maintain a much disciplined retention catalog identified with California Public Records Act. Laserfiche assists in keeping track of our documents thus aligning with the State’s compliance standards,” Michael stated. Laserfiche enables the District to mitigate exposure to risk and litigation by providing policy management, process automation, and document transformation.
The District has experienced some cost savings with staff’s ability to manage digital assets more effectively and the capabilities to include document scalability, security, and overall manageability. These features are invaluable to the District.
Future plans for the District involve integrating Laserfiche with their existing technology infrastructure. “One of our main objectives in the near future will be to integrate many of our current solutions with Laserfiche thus being able to utilize content access across all support business applications,” Michael said.
When beginning a Document Management project, the District recommends the following:
- Ensure that your organization fully understands the compliance process prior to implementation and deployment.
- Leverage organizational change management practices.
- Develop an implementation plan and stick to it.
- Create a defined collaborative, motivated, and cross-functional team.
The ECS team of experts provided project management, implementation, and support during and after the implementation. “The ECS team was really engaged and receptive to our needs. Although our initial requirements grew, the ECS team was patient and understanding. They conducted many site visits to ensure that we were on the right track with our requirements,” said Michael. “Great effort overall; customer service was exceptional, and communication was outstanding. The ECS team went above and beyond in understanding our needs and met them successfully.”
