1,000 Accounts, $1B AUM, 8 Advisors, 21 Employees, 2 Days, 1 System

Implementing Laserfiche made Palladium’s breakaway more palatable. Now it’s helping shape its business processes for the future.

July 30, 2010

When six portfolio managers left their former firm and formed Palladium Registered Investment Advisors in 2008, it gave them the opportunity to break away from their paper-based office.

As Jennifer L. Litchfield, IT Manager at Palladium, remembers it, onboarding more than 1,000 accounts all at once left almost no time to learn a new electronic document management system in their new Norfolk, VA, offices—even as the need to implement one to ensure the breakaway firm could hit the ground running was clear.

“We added $1 billion in assets under management within three months, so we needed to have everything come together very quickly,” Litchfield recalls. Experiences from a prior firm had proven how cumbersome and costly paper was, from the staff effort to file and find information to the yearly accumulation of paper that took up valuable—and expensive—space. “We used to have six or seven employees spend two full weeks every year just merging each client’s file with the historical files, purging information where appropriate, and making room for the next year’s paperwork,” she says.

As owners of their new firm, Palladium’s principals knew that the right technology would make a long-term difference. “We wanted to start off our new company with smart decisions when it came to technology and electronic document management,” Litchfield says. “We made decisions that required upfront commitments of time and money, but produced ongoing savings of both.”

“We needed it to be user-friendly, customizable to our needs, and manageable on-site.”

The search for a document management system began with three criteria in mind—and one given: value. “We needed it to be user-friendly, customizable to our needs, and manageable on-site,” Litchfield explains. “Cost is always a consideration, so we were looking for a balance between use and cost while considering long-term scalability.”

Litchfield was referred to Laserfiche through the Advent Users Group, a resource made up of companies that use the portfolio management products from Advent Software. John Caso, solutions consultant at Laserfiche reseller One Source Document Solutions, Inc., showed Palladium how Laserfiche:

• Enabled users to process and store documents according to customizable template fields.
• Offered multiple searching options using those templates as well as full-text keyword searches.

Litchfield invited users from each department to the demonstration for their feedback. Each, she says, agreed Laserfiche was the most user-friendly solution they’d looked at...

To read the full article, follow this link:  http://www.laserfiche.com/news/archives/2010/07/30/palladium/