Laserfiche | Content Control

Published by

2016

Contents

04 04

ENOC: Fuelling the future

07 10

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AAUJ: Managing Mayhem

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WAFA: Prudent policy

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Saudi Arabian Airlines: Flying high

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Bank of Beirut: Fit for the task

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ENOC

Fuelling the future Recognising the need for less paper-based processes in its operations, Emirates National Oil Company embarked on a journey to implement a new enterprise content management system.

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Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC), a whollyowned entity of the Dubai Government, has been a leading force in the economic diversification and sustainable development of the United Arab Emirates. Operating since 1993, it has over 30 subsidiaries and services thousands of customers across 58 markets.

Providing a host of valuable commodities to a burgeoning region comes with a great deal of complexity behind

the scenes. It’s easy to envisage how a company with such broad operations and so many clients is heavily reliant on smooth business administration, and when any sort of office environment comes to mind, there’s one thing we all think of: paper.

ENOC’s reliance on paper-based processes left the firm facing a number of administration difficulties, not least the sheer volume of physical documents that required storage. In 2009,

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ENOC

ENOC’s IT department has started working with business to implement an effective and efficient document management solution. “We had a room full of files that must have covered around 400 or 500 square feet,” says Abdulmajeed Malek, Director of IT Services, ENOC, says.

“If we received any queries, it would take a lot of time— including the services of two or three members of staff—to come up with the relevant information. If bank guarantees had expired, this caused real problems for us.

Sometimes we would be supplying things without the proper collateral. Processes had to be automated.”

Malek says the initiative to automate processes was driven by business users rather than by ENOC’s IT department. “A host of departments were pushing us for work to be done,” he says. “From an operations perspective, things had to change.” Forms that had to

Abdulmajeed Malek, Director of IT Services, ENOC

be filled in by supervisors, checklists and contract closing documents all generated vast quantities of paper and excess work for ENOC staff. The ability to streamline these processes with the use of technology would be a major timesaver and provide consolidation, a significant benefit for ENOC’s operations.

Enabling growth and process improvement ENOC’s retail department deals with a range of corporate fleets, and has agreements with a number

It had several features that immediately stood out. Its document management features and workflow were concise and userfriendly. It had a good interface for Microsoft technologies including SharePoint, and its integration was built well for an Oracle backend.

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of high profile organisations in Dubai including the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), Dubai Taxi Corporation and Dubai Police. With operations typically running on a credit-based supply, paper documents were rife.

“So many documents needed to be signed, including bank guarantees and supply issues,” Malek says.

ENOC first began investigating enterprise content management for one of its subsidiaries, Emirates Petroleum Product Company.

Like its parent company, the subsidiary faced a lot of difficulties in keeping up with the paperwork that resulted from steady customer growth.

ENOC evaluated a number of vendors, however, Laserfiche was the final choice. “It had several features that immediately stood out,” Malek says. “Its document management features and workflow were concise and user-friendly.

It had a good interface for Microsoft technologies including SharePoint, and its integration was built well for an Oracle backend.”

Laserfiche also came across as an attractive option in terms of value.

“Its TCO made it very easy to justify to senior management,” Malek says.

“It fit the bill commercially and technically.” ENOC leadership made sure that users had the proper guidance and training with the newly reengineered

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ENOC

processes. “Users were obviously used to handing physical documents for a manager’s signature,” Malek says. “There’s always a degree of resistance when it comes to breaking habits.”

The IT department was instrumental in implementing the system, providing the foundation for the electronic repository by converting the backlog of files into the electronic system.

“This could be classed as a growing pain, but a necessary one,” Malek says. “Putting the files

and automating the document approval process, ENOC and its subsidiaries have been able to deliver faster, more streamlined customer service.

“First and foremost, the changes have made a huge difference to our speed of operations,” Malek says.

“The system provides complete visibility to our workflows, which ultimately allows for better decisionmaking.” He estimates that ENOC realised a full return on its Laserfiche investment in just eight months. “By using

First and foremost, the changes have made a huge difference to our speed of operations. The system provides complete visibility to our workflows, which ultimately allows for better decision-making.” into an organized system undoubtedly paid off in the long run.”

Borderless benefits Since implementing Laserfiche, ENOC has seen improvements to its customer service, organizational efficiency and ease of compliance with industry mandates.

The reduced dependency on hard copies has made a whole host of processes much smoother. By digitising customer request documents

Laserfiche to scan and store paper files, we save at least 6,000 hours of staff time a year, which translates to $240,000. We’ve also been able to eliminate $28,800 in paper storage costs per year.”

After the solution was fully implemented, other departments quickly began to take notice.

The HR department was eager to use Laserfiche to enhance operations, and was making full use of the system by 2011. “HR was a major consumer of

paper documents,” Malek says. “Things ranging from degree certificates, employment contracts and photos obviously create a lot of paper.” Soon enough, the Laserfiche software was integrated with ENOC’s Oracle HRMS module, with one button allowing HR staff to easily find their desired transaction on the system.

The procurement department followed soon after, and then ENOC marketing—tasked with managing contracts with international distributors— was quick to avail the service.

Over the years, ENOC has built a strong partnership with Laserfiche. “That’s the mark of its value, that we’ve stayed with them throughout this time and the software continues to evolve with our business needs,” Malek says.

The project has also played an important part of ENOC’s efforts to be environmentally conscious, since Laserfiche saves vast sums of paper, and costs associated with that paper, including purchasing it, ink and printer maintenance.

Malek is also contemplating the possibilities and benefits of expanding ENOC’s application of Laserfiche, saying it could be a platform for further technology implementation including data analytics and process automation. “It’s a very agile tool for us, and gives us the opportunity to introduce a lot of new things in terms of document management,” he says.

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AAUJ

Managing mayhem Struggling to deal with the paper trail left by the 24,000 students to have passed through its doors since 2000, Palestine’s Arab American University of Jenin needed a fresh document management solution. Laserfiche was on hand to provide a series of upgrades to AAUJ’s processes.

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As the first private higher education organisation in the country, Palestine’s Arab American University of Jenin (AAUJ) stands as a pillar in the northern side of the West Bank.

From having 224 students under its tutelage when it

began its journey to now having 9,000 students enrolled at the institution, which boasts 31 bachelors’ and 8 masters’ degree courses – and a post-doctorate course soon to join – AAUJ’s IT demands soon outgrew the resources it had available.

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AAUJ’s “locally developed” systems were unable to solve its archiving and document management needs, Abdelmunem Abuhasan, Department of Planning and Systems Ananlysis Manager, AAUJ, sought a solution that could cut costs and save time in the process. Having evaluated a series of would-be partners, he decided that Laserfiche’s products gave him the best chance of achieving his desired outcome.

In October 2015, Abuhasan and AAUJ signed a partnership with Laserfiche that would transform the university’s taxing registration and admissions processes.

The following month, work began on implementing

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AAUJ

Laserfiche Version 10.

While internal change management procedures were necessary, the product was introduced with minimal challenges.

With Laserfiche Version 10 now successfully implemented, Abuhasan and AAUJ are already experiencing a range of benefits in terms of administrative processes.

The system now is able to extract and save text from admission and registration documents prior to archiving them. “Our employees can now easily search for data in these documents using keywords, as well as making amendments to documents that have been scanned,” Abuhasan says.

He adds that this has provided a huge organisational benefit for AAUJ, along with Laserfiche Forms. “The process of form submission is now standardised across departments,” he says.

“This serves as a huge timesaver.” Abuhasan is also delighted with Laserfiche Version 10’s ease of use.

“The product’s dashboards make it very straightforward to drag and drop information and design forms,” he says.

Abdelmunem Abuhasan AAUJ

Laserfiche has helped AAUJ in their determination to be an institution that puts technology at the core of its inner workings. “We were one of the first universities in Palestine to use IT operations as part of our education process,” says Abdelmunem Abuhasan. IT has become entrenched in the university’s way of working.

Abuhasan explained that one of the key criteria for the solution’s success would be its ability to extract and archive Arabic documents. “A lot of the documents within AAUJ are handwritten in Arabic, so these would have to be supported,” Abuhasan says.

Not only has Laserfiche met their requirements on language, it has also aided Abuhasan in managing the paper trail left behind by

Laserfiche has provided one of the smartest systems we’ve ever used.

some 24,000 students that had passed through AAUJ. “This also included a history of over 1,000 employees who had worked for the university,” he says. “The various departments who had to deal with financial and administrative information were experiencing a heavy workload due to a lack of automated processes. The cost of employing staff to work solely in dealing with admin is very high.”

He also speaks very highly of the support he has received from Laserfiche, saying that his experience as a customer was easy from day one. “Laserfiche is both a vendor and a partner to us; the solution we installed has proven to be one of the smartest systems I’ve ever used,” he says. “The company is focused on ensuring that the user has to go through minimal effort to get things working, and giving you exactly what you want.”

Looking forward, Abuhasan is confident that working with Laserfiche will serve as a springboard for making AAUJ a digitalised organisation with faster business processes.

“My vision is to allow all forms to be submitted electronically through the use of Laserfiche,” Abuhasan says. “I want AAUJ to be entirely paperless in the coming years, with students being able to submit all admission and registration forms online.”

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WAFA

Prudent policy

Recognising the need to reduce its reliance on paper-based processes, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Wafa Insurance opted to deploy an enterprise content management solution to streamline its operations.

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Thousands of pages a day!

How do you fix that? Any agency generating thousands of pages of insurance documents daily is going to face a few challenges if it wants to grow, the greatest being paperwork. That’s the unavoidable truth Saudi Arabia’s Wafa Insurance agency faced in 2012 when it decided it needed to revamp operations to ensure its expansion plans achieve their full potential. Delivering a variety of insurance services across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, including vehicle, property liability and marine cargo insurance among others, the company deals with over 3,500 policies and more than 300 insurance claims daily.

Wafa Insurance was founded in Saudi Arabia in 2008 and began its operations under the name Saudi Indian Company for Cooperative Insurance. In 2012, as the company expanded and fresh strategies in mind, its board of directors decided to rebrand the company to Wafa Insurance. Delivering a variety of insurance services across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the company deals with a lot of paper-based processes.

Since Wafa creates and manages huge amounts of paperwork, its reliance on paper-based processes left them facing a variety of operational constraints and excessive costs. “We issue around 1,400 vehicle and over 2,000 medical insurances per day,” says Riyadh Al-Dakheel, IT Director, Wafa Insurance.

“Aside from the insurance policies and claims that we have to issue and process, we also need to deal with various documents from regulatory

government bodies. The volume of paperwork we have to deal with on a daily basis is massive, and we decided it was time to change our approach in handling all these documents.”

Due to the rising volume of the business, the company decided to switch its legacy systems to newer systems that they deemed to be more effective at the time. In addition, they adopted systems that would accommodate documentations using Arabic.

Al-Dakheel says that a lot of organisations in Saudi Arabia, whether in the public or private sector, are implementing digital and electronic digital services.

“IT plays a very important role in our operations,” he says.

“The government of Saudi Arabia is also pushing forward various initiatives that will see the integration of systems and processes of organisations that are involved in national services.

As an insurance provider, we come under this umbrella.”

Among the company’s many products is medical insurance, which, according to Al-Dakheel, ties in with whole residence registration process implemented by the Kingdom’s government. “A person who’s applying for work or residence visa here needs to apply for medical insurance first,” he

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WAFA

explains. “Once the application has been made, processed and finalised, we need to submit the insurance details and documents to the Saudi Health Council, and then to the Ministry of Interior.”

High costs were among the primary drivers for the company’s decision to opt for a new system. “We were spending around SAR 2.5 million a year for a solution that only provided filing and scanning capabilities. It was too costly, and with the increasing volume of documents we had to deal with, we saw that using this system was no longer viable,” says Al-Dakheel.

In 2015, Al-Dakheel, together with his IT team, evaluated a number of vendors, initiating a rigorous proof of concept (POC) process.

After two weeks of testing Laserfiche’s enterprise content management solution, they concluded that the firm met all of their requirements. “We were able to easily integrate their solution into our systems,” Al Dakheel says. “Moreover, opting for Laserfiche, we only had to initially invest SAR 213,000 ($135,000). We were able to save a lot more money compared to our prior investment of around SAR 2.3 million a year.”

Riyadh Al-Dakheel, IT Director, Wafa Insurance

According to Al-Dakheel, having decided to opt for Laserfiche, the whole implementation process only took around two weeks. “The POC they did help us to fully understand the system, and get a good grasp of how the solution works,” he says. “At the same time, we found that the systems integrator and team Laserfiche were very hands-on in assisting us with all our needs. There’s also a range of fantastic material available online with regards to everything a customer needs to know about the solution.

They are always within reach whenever you need any kind of assistance.”

Today, Al-Dakheel says that the company is enjoying the benefits of agile processes brought by the Laserfiche solution. “It has enabled us

The data management workflows we have implemented with Laserfiche allowed us to maximise our time, increase productivity in the workplace and have enabled us to save around SAR 2.5 million per year.

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to reduce the paper products we have to deal with, as we can scan and digitally archive all our documents,” he says.

“Its document management features and workflow were concise and easy to use.

Recently, we’ve also availed the Laserfiche version 8, which features a special tool that lets users reduce the sizes of scanned documents. This feature enables us to maximise our storage as well.

“The data management workflows we have implemented allowed us to maximise our time, increase productivity in the workplace and have enabled us to save around SAR 2.5 million per year,” he adds.

After the solution was fully implemented, Al-Dakheel and the other members of senior management, noticed the increase in productivity within their workplace. “Various functions of the company have remarked how efficient and easy the new system is – especially the claims department. They had to deal with a whole process of filing claims reports, reviews, audits, payments and approvals.

Hearing that they were able to reduce their workload through the Laserfiche solution is a testament to us making the right choice.”

Al-Dakheel adds that they are very satisfied with the Laserfiche solution, and the service that the company provides. “Currently, everything is going smoothly with the changes, and we are looking at working more with Laserfiche in future projects.”

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SAUDI ARABIAN AIRLINES

Flying high Saudi Arabian Airlines has recently adopted Laserfiche as its ECM platform to keep content management simple, and to keep up with the increasing demands of users.

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As one of the top airline carriers in the Middle East, Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia) flies to 57 global destinations, operating a fleet of 120 aircraft, with domestic flights reaching 27 destinations within the Kingdom.

With offices in four continents, Saudia had previously worked with multiple document

management systems, which eventually led to the company experiencing a variety of information discrepancies.

In order to address this, Saudia adopted Laserfiche as its enterprise content management (ECM) platform, facilitating collaboration across multiple offices. Given the competitive landscape of the airline industry, it was

crucial for Saudia’s IT team to move beyond traditional ECM solutions, which could not provide any additional value other than just simple indexing and retrieval capabilities.

By deploying Laserfiche across the enterprise, Saudia’s IT team has simplified document archival, search and retrieval, reduced document processing

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SAUDI ARABIAN AIRLINES

and approval times, and maintained compliance with aviation industry requirements for pilot and flight attendant procedures.

“With the massive number of transactions and documents we deal with, Laserfiche has helped to improve work efficiency and expedite documentation follow up,” says Abdulmonem Fallata, Manager of Integration and Web Competency at Saudia.

Abdulmonem Fallata, Manager of Integration and Web Competency at Saudia

With the massive number of transactions and documents we deal with, Laserfiche has helped to improve work efficiency and expedite documentation follow up, Prior to the implementation of Laserfiche, Saudia had a number of both in-house and off-the-shelf products in place, but none of them could address all of their IT needs.

“Each product had pros and cons, so we wanted to find a single product that served all of our business units,” explains Fallata.

“We had been encountering problems with support from the vendors for tools, as well as problems with capacity.

In fact, the IT team had been encountering many challenges with the existing solutions. We had to go out

into the market and see what was available, so we went to a pilot project with several products, and one of the major ones was Laserfiche.”

Since its implementation, Laserfiche has had a significant impact on both end-users and Saudia’s management.

“Even our executives need to use it in order to retrieve documents and contracts, so they use it regularly on a daily basis,” explains Fallata. “If the product were to go down, we would be in big trouble.”

Saudia’s CEO, Saleh bin Nasser Al-Jasser, is said to

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have felt the benefits of the Laserfiche implementation, according to Fallata. He says, “Our CEO’s office receives the heaviest amount of documents – ranging from the different business units to letters from customers. It became too much of a task to follow up on everything manually, so what happens now is these documents are archived, and the office then retrieves them, following up using Laserfiche. It has become their number one product on a day-to-day basis.”

Looking ahead, Fallata’s goal is simply - “expansion, expansion, expansion,” he says. At the moment, their international network, encompasses flights across the GCC, to Europe and North America, and the religious market, with passengers arriving for Hajj. The company is currently looking to extend its reach to South America and to additional flights in the Far East.

As a global airline with offices worldwide, one of the company’s main aims is to try and accommodate Laserfiche across the entire business. Fallata also envisages a completely paperless system in the near future. “It was a vision of ours which was discussed around seven years ago to help save the environment.

I’m not completely satisfied by it, but we will reach it soon,” he says.

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BANK OF BEIRUT

Fit for the task With 63 local branches and 24 more spread across four continents, Lebanon’s Bank of Beirut was challenged with coping with the huge quantity of documents involved in its daily operations. As the bank sought to provide faster, more accurate and secure services, it opted for an enterprise content management solution that would streamline business processes.

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As one of the top commercial banks in Lebanon, Bank of Beirut (BoB) has been offering its wide-ranging expertise and services since 1973, offering a full range of retail, commercial, corporate, trade finance and global markets banking services.

As BoB continuously expands its local and international operations, reaching the UK, Germany, Australia, Nigeria, Ghana, Cyprus, Sultanate of Oman and the UAE, customers are increasingly demanding speedier processing and response times. Utilising mostly manual and paper-

based processes, every branch of BoB was burdened with piles of physical documents for a variety of transactions every day.

To ease these pressing issues, IT Development and Maintenance Manager Josephine El Koreh and her team decided to invest in an enterprise solution that would help manage critical documents and streamline processes across BoB’s operations. “We did our market research and looked for vendors who were offering data management solutions,” she says. “During the course of our search, we met with a

Laserfiche partner who was based in Beirut and who we already had a rapport with.

They introduced Laserfiche’s document management solution and we found that the capabilities of their system matched our needs.”

In 2013, BoB first implemented Laserfiche across its 60 local branches and then to its operations outside Lebanon, which took two months. “Laserfiche’s local team was very handson and supportive throughout the whole process of implementation. They provided us with ample assistance in migrating all

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BANK OF BEIRUT

of our archived documents into the new system and integrating all other IT systems to it. Upon deploying the solution across all branches, we then rolled out the solution to all offices including our headquarters.”

She adds that today, BoB is seeing numerous benefits from Laserfiche.

“Productivity within the workforce has also improved as we have managed to eliminate the manual and paper-based processes the employees have to perform.

Each document is scanned and stored electronically.

Employees can now easily access the data they need in just a matter of seconds.”

The bank’s customer service has also improved after Laserfiche had been fully implemented.

Employees can now quickly provide the information needed by customers.

“Through the solution, we were able to centralise the archiving system so people wouldn’t need to go through multiple records to get the information that they need,” explains El Koreh. “This then enabled us to speed up the validation process of every transaction. The new system is also very secure as it has a role-based access control. At the same time, we made sure that all relevant divisions can still access the data pertinent to them so as to not disrupt business continuity.”

Dealing with a variety of confidential information such as customer data, account details and passwords among others, El Koreh says that arguably the biggest challenge they had in the past was security. “Since we had to handle several sensitive documents manually, transporting and storing them were very risky as there’s always a possibility that they end up in the wrong hands.” By then, El Koreh had recognised that they had made the right choice in modifying BoB’s processes with Laserfiche to overcome the challenges faced by their employees.

Prior to Laserfiche implementation, El Koreh mentions that storing files and documents – and retrieving them at a later date – was also tricky. “We were spending a lot of hours making copies of client files and loan inquiries, and weren’t able to respond to our customers’ request for transaction copies in a timely manner,” she says.

“Our employees had to search for the files manually, which was a laborious task and a waste of our time and resources. These were very tedious tasks for them and constituted about 60 percent of their workload per day. Business continuity was also being significantly affected due to the lack of accessibility to the documents we have on file.”

While they have experienced numerous gains

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Josephine El Koreh, IT Development and Maintenance Manager, Bank of Beirut

and minimal hassle in the implementation of Laserfiche, El Koreh highlights that deploying the solution called for a significant organisational and cultural shift within BoB. “Everyone within the company needed to cope with the change and learn the ins and outs of the new system. We had to ensure that everyone who would be using the solution was kept up to speed. Fortunately, Laserfiche has been very supportive from the getgo and helped us conduct on-the-job training for our employees. We also issued a user guide to assist them in how they can best utilise the system.”

Moving forward, El Koreh states that as the bank continues to expand its operations and introduce new technology, they are definitely open to incorporating the Laserfiche solution to wherever it may be relevant.

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