With the advent of the New Year, many of our clients review their enterprise content management system to ensure that they are using it to its potential. Over 2020, we’ve discussed on this blog and demonstrated on our webinar series ways to increase the value you get from Laserfiche. Here are a few ways we suggest you leverage your system:
Make sure you are on the latest version of the product and query your users’ satisfaction- The beginning of the new year allows agencies to evaluate their ECM and discern if it still meets current business needs. For example, consider conducting a user or manager survey asking if they can find documents easily. Is sharing documents easy? Are the departments (who have Laserfiche) actively using the product? Perhaps you need more users. Are they leveraging metadata in template fields, for that matter, are they using templates? We’ve created some reporting for clients. We take a 4 pronged approach to advising on your system, including population, consistency, searchability, and usability.
Clean up your repository- Now is the time to potentially re-engineer your naming conventions to ensure they are logical and consistent. For browsing purposes, check to see if your folder structures are logical. Finally, audit your templates to ensure that they are based on essential and unique information and﹘most importantly﹘to confirm you are using templates.
Rethink metadata- Course correcting metadata is probably one of the most efficient ways to make your system more powerful, speed up searches, and set yourself up for success with automation. Surprisingly, the biggest issue with metadata that we unearth is that often a large percentage of documents are not assigned templates, and/or the template fields are not completed or don’t require the “right” data. Selecting the right metadata can be tricky and often requires review as a part of your SOP.
Get training- If you are a CPS VIP client, training is a part of your package, so please take us up on it! Also, we are augmenting our training efforts with a video series that you’ll find on our website.
Optimize your processes- One of the most valuable, yet often underutilized functionalities of Laserfiche is Laserfiche Workflow. We’ve been converting clients from email and manual processes for a few decades now so we are very experienced. It may sound obvious but automating manual processes provides you the opportunity to free up staff from tedious tasks and refocus them on more important work. In addition, another benefit of automation is predictability, control, and consistency. Automating tasks that are part of your compliance framework (such as records management) ensures your results are correct and auditable. Also, you're exposing any sensitive information to fewer human eyes, helping you keep this data more secure.
Right-size the number of Laserfiche licenses- It’s quite likely that as time has marched on, you’ll want to change or adapt some of your system’s functionality. Especially as operations become more efficient or adding headcount. As you anticipate growth, please discuss with us any additional add-ons you might require. It’s normal that after a year of realizing the benefits of ECM that you’ll want to tweak processes and utilize it in more areas of your operation.
If you are a Laserfiche VIP client and you’d like us to perform an audit of your system, please let us know.
