Township of West Goshen, Pennsylvania - Laserfiche Installation Profiles - document management solutions from General Code; document imaging software; records management; indexing; electronic documents

It is a Friday afternoon and a resident of your community walks into the municipal office building requesting a copy of a road opening permit. You pull open the overstuffed file cabinet drawers, and after 20 minutes of searching, realize it is not there. You glance around the office on a few desks, hoping it may be in plain sight. No such luck. You make a few phone calls, but no one seems to know exactly where that permit is at the moment. Sound familiar?

The Township of West Goshen, located in Chester County, Pennsylvania, encountered problems like this nearly every day. That is, until the Township installed a Laserfiche® electronic document management system from General Code.

Sandy Turley, an administrative assistant for the Township, indicated that prior to Laserfiche, employees would search by hand in file cabinets for the needed information.

Not only was it very time consuming, but quite often they did not always know where the information might be located and associated data might be filed separately.

With Laserfiche, Turley praises the system's ease of use. "It is always in front of you on your computer, and with the search feature, users can access all associated information in one search using keywords."

The Township stores a variety of documents in the system, including road opening permits, administration files, audit files, CAD files from the Engineering Department, Building Official's files, Planning Commission minutes, Board of Supervisors minutes, legislation, and more. The Administration, Finance, Engineering and Building Departments use the system regularly, and Turley notes that interdepartmental searches are far easier and more efficient than ever before.

Here at General Code we realize that converting to an electronic system after years of digging through file cabinets can be quite a change. For that reason, we work with our clients to ensure that users receive all of the training and support necessary to install, implement and maintain the Laserfiche system.

During training sessions, General Code instructs users on everything from what type of documents to include to the numerous search capabilities of the system. The training addresses common concerns such as how to change passwords or scan in old and fragile documents. Security for sensitive documents is also discussed, as is document retention schedules, guidelines for structure development, scanning methods, document annotation tools, templates, e-mailing documents, and more.

"Training and support is excellent, General Code is always available to answer questions and is responsive to our requests," Turley said. "The training session I attended was very well presented."

Now when residents walk into the municipal offices searching for records, they no longer have to wait impatiently while employees dig for the hard-to-find documents. The Township professes that there is no way they could return to the former filing cabinet system and highlights the convenience of Laserfiche as a tool they have come to rely on heavily.