Their decision to go paperless with ECM was driven not by cost or budget issues, but by the desire to grow their business, tame a paper monster that was consuming every available square foot of office space, improve customer service, and keep up with a rapidly-changing financial planning industry.
In their view, they had no choice as to whether to go paperless with ECM. They must go paperless if you want to survive and thrive in the financial planning industry. They were slowly becoming buried in paper, running out of space and spending valuable time looking for missing files. And as their investment business grew, their paper mushroomed, due to trade confirmations and quarterly investment statements. When their broker-dealer conducted our annual audit in 2004, it took a long time to find required forms. That’s when they knew they had to make changes.
At Texas Christian University’s annual student job fair, Blake Woodard was manning a booth when he ran into a local Laserfiche reseller.
“I had looked at several systems,” Woodard says, “but Laserfiche offered us the greatest flexibility to work like we always had, only using enterprise content management files instead of paper. Laserfiche used TIFF files instead of proprietary file formats and used SQL as its underlying database, which gave us the ability to move our data to a different system later if we needed to. Also, the SQL platform is scalable as our electronic storage needs grow.”
Woodard Insurance purchased enterprise content management software and installed it immediately. Transition to the new system was relatively quick, given that there was an existing document management system in place, just not a digital one. Client securities files had been moved from paper file folders to three-ring binders with topical dividers and, when it came time to implement a digital solution, this interim step made the process much easier.
Where the old paper files were in strict chronological order, the topical divisions in the client binders made organizing Laserfiche’s filing structure much simpler. “We immediately began writing scanning procedures that covered the naming, indexing and location of each document in a binder,” says Woodard. These flexible procedures are updated and refined as employees encounter new situations or better ideas.
