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Located in the middle of California's San Joaquin Valley, Fresno County comprises over a million citizens and about six million square miles of incorporated cities and smaller communities. The Fresno County Assessor-Recorder's (ASR) Office is responsible for the appraisal and valuation of all secured and unsecured property within the county, resulting in business processes that have generated over 4.5 million paper documents on file in the Real Property division, and an additional 1.2 million paper documents in Business Property.
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By 2004, handling all that paper manually had become so inefficient that the ASR Office's Property Transfers Division was five months behind in processing documents, illustrating just how antiquated, inflexible and relatively unresponsive policies and procedures had become.
This led to the implementation of a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system in 2006. Utilizing Quick Fields to intelligently capture and process years of tax documents previously stored on microfilm, the impact was sweeping and immediate. Using Web Access, staff could now find and complete the review process without being tethered to their desks. Property transfers that took five months to process now only took 15 days. Reviewers could also stamp documents using electronic annotations. "On average, search and retrieval time per employee used to be two hours a week. Now, it's less than 25 minutes a week," says Vito Filippi, Systems and Procedures Analyst.
Quick Fields finds vroom for improvements
In fact, Filippi says, applying ECM to the ASR Office's operational framework exposed just how much more room there was for improvement. "We realized our people were supporting the processes instead of the processes supporting the needs of the department," he explains. Between budget cuts, consolidation and attrition--from over 200 staff in 2008 to what would become its present 149 employees--the loss of institutional knowledge underscored the siloed, disconnected nature of how business was done, especially as the demand for services increased.
A Laserfiche upgrade in 2009 introduced the expanded capture functionality of Quick Fields--and a closer look at the status quo. "When we moved from Laserfiche 7 to 8.1 [in 2009], the enhancements to the Search function and Quick Fields capabilities--because that's what we use the most--really were the catalysts that got us asking 'How can we improve our processes?'" says Filippi. "The templates and ability to run batch sessions overnight had such an impact on how we were indexing that we began to analyze what we were doing in the first place.
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