LOS ANGELES — If they've got a mind to, members of the Los Angeles Firemen's Credit Union can get records of board meetings back to the CU's original days with a few clicks of a mouse, thanks to some high-end archiving software now deployed at the $750 million institution.
Making those clicks would be a staffer at the 23,000-member credit union using one of a range of imaging, storage and reporting solutions from Hyland Software.
"It now takes us three to five seconds to get what would have taken us three to five hours to find otherwise, and a lot of our older records were stored in a garage that, frankly, was pretty much inaccessible and pretty filthy," says Dan Riggs, IS supervisor at LAFCU (www.lafirecu.org).
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Most of the Hyland software used at LAFCU is part of the company's OnBase suite of integrated enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, which Riggs and his staff find handy since they have to generate 200 to 250 reports a day.
"I can't tell you why we need that many reports, but they cover a lot of areas, including night processing, transaction reports, balancing reports, and, of course, the archiving of all those electronic documents," he says. "Plus the paper ones we scanned that go back to our original days."
Since the credit union was founded in 1935, that's almost 70 years of reports.
"One thing our organization very much prides itself on is its history as the credit union for the firefighters of Los Angeles. And we have that history. It may not necessarily be as critical as other things at times, but we do have easy access to it now," Riggs says.
What's perhaps more mission critical is the Backstop Database Validation Service the credit union also is using from Hyland.
"The Backstop service functions as a kind of insurance policy for us," Riggs says. "We send copies of our backup tapes to Hyland and they verify for us that the tapes are correctly formatted and can actually be used in case of an emergency. Then they go to our regular storage service with Iron Mountain." The Backstop reports also provide detailed analysis of the credit union's database to identify areas of potential concern. The credit union also is using Hyland software to scan vouchers and is planning to incorporate electronic signatures and member inquiry screens in ways that help staffers quickly verify identities at the member-facing level. All this functionality requires tight integration with the core processing system, in this case ULTRADATA. An OnBase module called Application Enabler has a big role in that, says Stephen Comer, credit union industry manager for Cleveland-based Hyland (www.hylandsoftware.com).
Application Enabler "image enables" third-party applications, the company says, allowing users to double-click on specified fields and retrieve related documents from within the OnBase system. "We have about 80 modules, so our customers only need to buy what they're going to use and add more functionality as they grow or their needs grow," says Comer, whose company client list includes about 350 credit unions. "The scalability extends through the entire organization, from HR through the back office and accounting, and the kind of reporting and other functionality you can create is really only limited by your imagination."
Helping to fuel that imagination is a user group of about 100 credit unions who use a Web site, Webinars and other venues to share tips and provide feedback to the company on "what they want to see from us next," Comer says. — [email protected]
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