Most people know Gilroy, California, as the ?Garlic Capital of the World.? But city staff in this agricultural epicenter are creating a slightly more technology-focused atmosphere. Thanks to some IT ingenuity?and an integration with document management company Laserfiche? and other line-of-business applications?Gilroy is paving the way for other governments to adopt more citizen-oriented business processes.

With 50,000 residents and 13,000 utilities accounts to service, Gilroy's 300 city staff members confronted a considerable challenge in providing timely service based on accurate information. Staff members? far-too-frequent excursions to the file room were compromising service quality and consuming precious staff resources, they needed an efficient document management system.

?Laserfiche has helped our IT division deploy several cutting-edge technologies already, and I believe that in the coming year, our service offerings will rival those of any city of any size.?

David Chulick

Director of Information Technology

David Chulick, Gilroy's director of information technology, explains the problem: ?We needed a centralized document repository, so staff could quickly gather needed information. We also needed to maintain our records retention policies, some of which are very complex. But most of all, we needed an easy-to-use system that users could adopt quickly.?

Gilroy had already implemented Laserfiche in the city clerk's office when Chulick arrived in January 2004. But under his leadership, new Laserfiche installations?and new business process improvements?are sprouting citywide. Gilroy has gone from one scanning station to nine, and its police, fire, human resources and community development departments all achieve remarkable results with Laserfiche. But it's the finance department's utility billing division that has realized the greatest transformation.

Before deploying Laserfiche, processing utility bill payments was labor-intensive and time-consuming. Clerks first separated checks and remittances, and then manually entered them into Gilroy's financial system. After comparing the checks and remittance totals, they physically rubber-stamped each check and bundled them in stacks of 100 for courier pickup. ?There was so much extra work,? Chulick notes. ?50 percent of the time, some step of the process had a mistake, which was very labor-intensive to correct.?

Gilroy Gardens Theme Park is home to the famous ?Circus Trees.?

Processing 6,000 checks per month using this error-prone method caused the city to hemorrhage time and money. Chulick was determined to stop the bleeding. The only problem? After a six-month search, Chulick found that no existing product could streamline check and remittance processing, increase accuracy and speed collections. So he decided to build one.

Working closely with DataNet Solutions, a Laserfiche reseller and Professional Developer Partner?, Chulick dreamed up the plans for an ideal solution. ?The bank provided a check-scanning utility,? he says, ?but it didn't address remittances, which are half the transactional data. Other systems were cost-prohibitive, and couldn't scale to meet our current and future needs.?

Chulick needed a product that would maintain ?envelope integrity? by securely archiving scanned checks alongside their accompanying remittances as multi-page documents. After six months of development and beta-testing, he achieved the desired result: Checkmation?, an application that automatically scans and processes payments, then stores them in Laserfiche for easy retrieval.

Now, check processing still involves some manual labor: staff have to remove checks from their envelopes and feed them into scanners. But after that initial step, the system verifies?with over 90% accuracy?the customer's bank account number, routing number, utility account number and amount paid. The program then compares that amount to the balance owed and marks discrepancies in red, so staff can quickly identify them during verification. To promote more responsive customer service, the program routes the scanned documents to the Laserfiche repository, then automatically creates WebLink? shortcuts to them, which staff can easily access from the city's financial system.To learn more, please visit http://www.laserfiche.com/news/archives/2008/04/12/gilroy-ca/