A Community Action Agency in Maryland was eager to have the public apply for Energy Assistance online.  But, the state was not ready.  Tired of waiting, one agency stepped out on their own.

We helped create the state EA form using Laserfiche Forms and published a link to the form on the agencies site.  Below is what their new paperless form looked like.   If you would like to read more about this go to http://hemingwaysolutions.net/maryland-energy-assistance-forms/

Read about our Laserfiche paperless solution for Community Action Agencies

Paperless Energy Assistance Application Process Using Laserfiche

http://hemingwaysolutions.net/wouldnt-it-be-great-if-you-could-help-your-staff-and-at-the-same-time-help-your-community/

Companies typically misfile up to 20 percent of their records – thus losing them forever.
-ARMA International

$14,000 worth of productivity is lost per worker per year due to their inability to find the data they require to do their job.
-IDC Canada

A study conducted by The Delphi Group in 1999 found that 90% of typical office tasks still revolve around the gathering and distribution of paper documents. While 15% of all papers are lost, 30% of our time is used trying to find these lost documents. Companies on average spend $25,000 to fill a typical four-drawer file cabinet, $2,000 to maintain it each year, and over its life-span, a single sheet of paper ends up costing an average of $30.
-Delphi Group

US companies spend approximately $20 on labor costs in order to file a document, $120 on the labor required to find a misfiled document and $220 to reproduce a lost document.
-Coopers & Lybrand

For companies that manage their own files, employees spend between 20-40% of their time searching for documents manually.
-Coopers & Lybrand

90% of documents that are consulted daily are handled without any appropriate management.
-Coopers & Lybrand

For lost documents, companies pay a cost of searching, 6 times the value of the original document.
-Coopers & Lybrand

Companies that need to redo documents pay 11 times more than the cost of the original document.
-Coopers & Lybrand

Out of all documents generated, up to 7% are lost.
-Coopers & Lybrand

Employees spend more than 50% of their time searching for information.
-Coopers & Lybrand

Paper files are doubling every 3.5 years.
-Coopers & Lybrand

The average document is copied 19 times.
-Coopers & Lybrand

Each day one billion photocopies are made
-AIIM, Forrester, Star Securities, US Department of Labor

Their workload was increased from 12,000 applications to 22,000.  For the past 5 years they had 25 to 30 staff members to process 12,000 applications.  Normally, to process 22,000 applications, you would need 46 staff members.

We implemented Laserfiche workflow and they were able to process the increase with less staff.

Read More

Community Action Partnerships Improve Crisis Response Time by Automating Application Processing

Special to the Philanthropy Journal
By Tim Wacker

The Minnesota Valley Action Council (MVAC) lists a car leasing business and a farmers market among its many innovations to assist the needy in south-central Minnesota. But it is recent innovations in the agency’s information technology department that staff now include among their most successful efforts in the same cause.
For several years the MVAC’s IT department used a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system to convert paper files into digital images for ease of access and storage. But staff knew the software could do more to help them better serve their clients.
Much more than a simple tool for document scanning and storage, ECM software has the ability to automatically move digitized documents throughout an organization, automating the flow of information to rapidly get the right information into the right hands.

The MVAC knew exactly where to start with its automation efforts: the agency’s Energy Assistance Program. Every week case workers had to drive client funding requests from nine branch offices to agency headquarters, adding hours to the time it took to process applications. The new software allows paper-based files to be scanned into branch office computers and then instantly forwarded as electronic documents over a password-secure Internet portal to certifiers at agency headquarters.
The success of that effort inspired the MVAC to automate other manual tasks involved in client assistance requests. For example, the software now automatically returns incomplete applications for correction and forwards completed applications to certifiers and the state’s disbursement system.
Finished files are automatically archived in a filing plan and folder structure designed to meet the MVAC’s needs. Whereas it used to take days and sometimes weeks to process client energy assistance applications, this task is now completed in hours. And when applicants are faced with having their heat or lights shut off for nonpayment of utility bills, the increased efficiency can save much more than time.
“The 2014 winter was particularly bad,” says MVAC Energy Assistance Coordinator Pamela Wild. “We’re able to respond to emergencies a lot more quickly now. Through the automations we’ve built into our system, the status of files can be tracked in real time. There’s no more waiting and wondering when an application might be, or has been, approved. That’s a big help to folks in crisis situations.”
Similarly to the MVAC, the Community Action Partnership of Ramsey and Washington Counties was also using its Laserfiche ECM system solely for electronic records storage and retrieval before Catherine Fair, the agency’s Director for Energy Assistance, decided to automate some of its paperwork handling. A few months later, Fair was able to reassign 1.5 staff positions previously designated to organizing and archiving paper records in filing cabinets. Now, those staff are working directly with clients instead of merely handling their paperwork.
“There is virtually no chaos in our offices now,” Fair says. “Nobody is looking for information, it’s all right there. My staff is able to instantly access files regardless of who last worked on them.”
Fair’s agency serves the Twin Cities area and has one the largest clients loads of the 25 different Community Action Partnerships in the state. The MVAC, on the other hand, serves one of the least populous regions of the state and processes client applications completely differently. Yet both are realizing enormous time savings through their automated approach to document processing, pointing to perhaps the greatest advantage of all from embracing ECM, according to Fair.
“Each agency can automate these processes in ways that mimic how they did things on paper,” she says. “It makes the transition to paperless technology so much easier and we all realize the same time savings and improved efficiency despite doing things differently.”
There is more than time being saved, Fair says. ECM allows staff supervisors to more easily find and address bottlenecks in application processing within the various departments. By tying into the state’s assistance request payment system, Fair’s department can now determine exactly when a check has been cut. That allows her to assess her department’s application turnaround time, a huge help when the nonprofit’s operations are being audited, she says.
The operational improvements in Fair’s department attracted the interest of the agency’s Human Resources and Job Services departments, which are now automating their document management processes. The successes at both agencies are attracting the interest of Community Action Partnerships elsewhere in the state, with 11 of them now working to automate document processing throughout those organizations.
As new clients install the software, Laserfiche is also working with existing clients to build electronic forms that eliminate the need for clients to fill out paper versions of forms that must then be scanned into the ECM system—allowing these agencies to be completely paperless from the very start of the application process.
Beyond increasing the amount of work done, the use of ECM software also improves the quality of that work, Wild says. Handling documents often leads to mishandling them, particularly when different staff are working with multiple paper copies of the same applications. ECM eliminates all that, greatly improving the accuracy of the information in those records, she says.
Having the applications in electronic form also allows staff to work from home or via mobile device by accessing the documents through a password-secured Internet portal. That helps enormously during Minnesota’s notorious winter months, Wild says, when many staff cannot make it into the office. Perhaps most important, ECM frees staff at all levels of the organization to do the one job they all share: help the needy.
“It has helped us all to be more responsive to our clients,” Wild says. “It means we can spend more time working with our clients and less time working with their papers.”
http://hemingwaysolutions.net/community-action-partnerships/_

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Tim Wacker is a technical writer for NBN Communications, a Massachusetts-based writing services and market research company.

The original article can be found here: https://pj.news.chass.ncsu.edu/2015/07/20/improve-crisis-response-time-by-automating-application-processing/

Here is a simple way to determine the right next step in your process:

http://hemingwaysolutions.net/where-are-you-at-in-your-progress-to-go-paper-less-and-become-more-efficient/

Here is a picture I took today on my way to a business meeting.  It reminds me that using Laserfiche would help avoid a disaster if something like this happened to us.  See http://larry-phelps.com/floods-in-missouri for more info on floods and how to be prepared.

Yes according to some industry experts, your staff is currently wasting 40% of their time doing this one thing.  What is it?  Read the following article to find out.

http://hemingwaysolutions.net/what-one-thing-do-you-need-to-know-to-make-your-organization-more-efficient/

I was asked by a good client to help him find a paperless solution to replace a legacy system they had.  I was flatter that he had the confidence in me to do such an important task.  But, I was also afraid.  I didn’t know much about paperless technology and I didn’t really know how to begin.

I did have experience helping pick other software applications.  I knew that I needed a process.  Here is how I developed a process to evaluate and select a paperless solution.

http://hemingwaysolutions.net/10-easy-steps-to-pick-an-ecm-solution/