When Australian health industry superannuation fund, MAP Funds Management (MAP), went to market for a new document management solution, they found the answer to their legislative compliance and online document storage requirements in a Ricoh Laserfiche solution.

For several years, MAP had recognised the value of an online document storage and retrieval solution and in 2005 had moved forward with the implementation of one such system.

Unfortunately, while the system’s vendor sold it as a complete document solution, MAP soon discovered it was little more than a centralised storage point for digital documents.

MAP Network Manager Evan Paynter explained, “We ended up with a big bucket of documents with no OCR [Optical Character Recognition], workflow or strong document management capabilities,” he says. “Pretty soon it was often a case of people saying: ‘I don’t know where to store this document, so I’ll just push it somewhere into the document management system.’”

Having made the decision to evaluate other document management systems, MAP set out with the goal of identifying a solution that would afford it a flexible business tool that could be used to support all areas of the business.

“When Ricoh presented a Laserfiche-based solution, it had everything we were looking for,” Paynter said. “It had the open standards that would allow easy data exporting and integration with other systems, as well as OCR and workflow features that were sorely missing in our old system.

“More importantly, it had the support of a team of Ricoh software specialists who had a depth of knowledge well beyond what we could have hoped for,” said Paynter.

According to Paynter, the use of Laserfiche workflows is particularly important to ensure legislative compliance with regard to financial documents. “Ricoh has worked with us on establishing a foundation for workflows that help us meet our compliance requirements,” he said.

“Backed by VERS [Victorian Electronic Records Strategy] certification, our customers can have the utmost confidence that Ricoh’s Laserfiche solution meets both national and international Government standards for document archiving,” said Kathy Wilson, General Manager, Business Solutions & Production for Ricoh Australia. “Laserfiche includes tamper-proof security to guarantee electronic document integrity while maximising productivity of staff by integrating with our customers existing business systems.”

Having broken free of proprietary lock-in, as was the case with MAP’s legacy system, the company is moving forward rapidly to take full advantage of the Ricoh solution’s open architecture and adherence to industry standards, especially in the use of programming and scripting tools.

“The simple fact is that we have, at last, a very powerful and flexible document management solution that’s more than just the software. It’s the expertise we get from Ricoh that helps us exploit the real potential,” said Paynter.