Total Community Options Foundation

A new office facility was going to help the Total Community Options (TCO) Foundation consolidate the dispersed operations of its affiliated companies. But TCO also wanted to streamline daily operations. Using a KnowledgeLake solution, the company digitized millions of paper documents, making them available on a SharePoint intranet. The result is a reduction in physical space needed for paper documents, faster access to important files, and more efficient workflows for employees.

Total Community Options (TCO) is the parent company of several organizations that provide in-home services and medical care programs to older adults in the Denver metropolitan region. The companies—including Total Longterm Care, Long Term Care Options, and Seniors! Inc, help senior citizens stay as healthy as possible so they can continue to live in their own homes and communities. The companies provide services such as in-home personal care, adult daycare, support for caregivers, and transporting seniors between their homes and adult daycare and health centers.

In an effort to streamline its business operations, TCO managers made a decision to consolidate disparate offices spread throughout Denver into a single new facility. In conjunction with the move, TCO evaluated different aspects of its business processes to find areas that could be improved. One result was a decision to convert rooms full of paper documents into digital documentation.

"We wanted to implement an e-document system with the goal of becoming paperless before the move," says Terry Anderson, Chief Information Officer for TCO. "We knew that becoming paperless would improve our workflows by making it easier to find documents, and it would reduce or eliminate the need for all the physical storage space that used to be needed for business documents."

Working with Solve IT, a Denver-area technology solutions provider, TCO decided to deploy a KnowledgeLake enterprise content management (ECM) solution that integrates with TCO's Microsoft SharePoint intranet. 

"There was another company that initially piloted an e-document solution, but it did not work as anticipated," says Anderson. "We brought in KnowledgeLake and Solve IT, and were impressed. Their offering fit our philosophy of building a document management system on our existing Microsoft platform, and it provided the capabilities to convert a large number of paper documents into digital files."

Working with Solve IT, TCO deployed several KnowledgeLake products, including:

• KnowledgeLake Imaging for SharePoint, an enterprise-scale solution for searching, viewing, securing, routing and annotating documents.
• KnowledgeLake Capture, which converts high volumes of paper documents into electronic format as they pass through the company's scanners.
• KnowledgeLake Connect, which lets employees scan, upload, index, and search through documents in SharePoint from within commonly used software, including their Microsoft Office software programs.

Digitized documents are hosted on the SharePoint intranet, with a Microsoft SQL Server database serving as a repository for long-term storage and for storing document-specific metadata. The scanning of paper documents began in late 2009, with the company using Fujitsu 6100 series PC-based scanners, Fujitsu 6600 series production scanners, and Fujitsu 6010NS network scanners for document capture. By the end of September 2010, the company had scanned nearly 2 million paper documents, making them available on the intranet.

Deploying a KnowledgeLake ECM solution on the Microsoft SharePoint intranet is helping TCO achieve its goal of leaner, more efficient operations in its new facility. The ECM solution enables a streamlined office-worker business model by reducing demands on physical space. It helps deliver a better work environment for remote and mobile workers, who can now access vital business documents more easily than in the past. The KnowledgeLake software also provides greater control with centralized scanning and management of important business documents.

Helps Enable a Streamlined Business Model

The KnowledgeLake solution is helping TCO maximize the usability of physical space at its new facility. "The move is more than just relocating people," says Anderson. "It is a significant re-design of our office-worker model. The KnowledgeLake ECM solution helps by allowing us to put hundreds of thousands of paper documents online, which means we can house and support existing business functions and office personnel using fewer square feet of real estate. The result is lower costs of operation and increased collaboration."

Easier Access for Remote, Mobile Workers

Along with freeing up space that would have been consumed by paper documents, the KnowledgeLake ECM solution is helping TCO implement more flexible processes for everyday work activities. "The vast majority of staff will not have pre-assigned work spaces or dedicated equipment," Anderson says. "People arriving at the new facility will find an available work space, log into the computer and phone at that position, and use it as long as they need it and then log out when they leave for the day. The KnowledgeLake ECM solution assists this model because people can log onto the intranet and quickly find the documents they need to do their work regardless of their location, instead of being forced to look for and retrieve paper-based files. It delivers enormous flexibility."

Centralized Control of Documents

The KnowledgeLake solution will not only help with the new flexible seating model for employees, but will also allow the company to move away from dedicated, PC-attached scanners as the primary method of scanning. Centralizing the scanning process will help create more uniform information attached to digital files. "Other means of document capture and conversion to electronic form—and more capture of documents originally in digital form—will be introduced and extended," says Anderson. "We anticipate that this will help us gain more control over the processes involved in putting documents on our intranet."