LifeSpire: Building a Community Through Data and Document Management

Watch to learn more about LifeSpire's business technology partnership with Cobb. Transcript available below.

Below is a transcript of the video.

Robert Wilbanks, Vice President of Information Technology at Lifespire

Cobb has worked with LifeSpire as they've grown and added communities and provided copier and document management support over the years. And done it dealing with a non-profit, which is important. 

Robert
I'm Robert Wilbanks, Vice President of Information Technology at LifeSpire. LifeSpire is a group of retirement communities that service about 1400 residents. My role in IT is to manage all technology infrastructure for the organization. I help bring innovation to make processes smoother and do things that will help our residents. 

Robert
We have at least 50 copiers spread out in our five communities and our home office. Those five communities are spread out between Newport News, all the way out to Lynchburg, the Roanoke area, and up to Culpeper, and then here in Richmond.

Robert
Usually, one of the first things I do when I go into an organization is look at the current service contracts and the partners that we use. Cobb was one of the few that I didn't want to make any changes. They had been very conscious of the way that LifeSpire works over the years, and made sure that they were providing what services were needed and not too many. 

Robert
All the communities were submitting invoices in boxes from the communities to the Home Office for processing. We reached out to Cobb and explained what was going on and they came back with a really good solution to automate our ability to process invoices from all five communities into the central location. 

Robert
The biggest thing about going to document management using M-Files through Cobb was the ability to get invoices paid on time. So instead of having to scan documents and process documents, the invoices, now we've got them, they come into an A.P. email address and the M-File system processes those documents themselves to the point that we're just approving them.

Robert
All of the communities have commented about how much they love using M-files as opposed to the old process, the manual process. They had other duties. Now they were able to do that, and we were slower about having to hire more people, so it has saved technically five FT’s across the board. 

Robert
It started out it was just, you know, for the invoicing. And it's when we were trying to solve that problem that we saw the potential for these others. So we reached out to Jill at Cobb. I had them come in and do a full presentation as if we had never seen the product before. So we brought in some of our new management that didn't know we even had it. And so they did a full presentation. This is what we have, you know, this is what it can do. We know some of the stuff that you want us to do with this, and we can do that. But what problems are you trying to solve? And even in that meeting, they were able to say: this is how it can work for that, and this is how it can work for that. So I'm excited by what it'll be able to do for these other departments down the road.

Robert
And so now we're starting our next phase. The new residents, to be able to sign their documentation on an iPad that creates a PDF that will go through, and IRIS will scan it and do the OCR on it. And then it will be filed so that it can be searched multiple different ways and it can be associated with other documents for that resident.

Robert
I have a history of using different OCR softwares in the past and I know what kind of benefit it's going to have when it starts rolling throughout the organization and is being used in different departments. 

Robert
We also rolled out paper cut through Cobb so that we could manage the use of our documents and the security of our documents. We rolled it out separately at each community, you know, one at a time. Cobb was onsite doing training and providing documentation on the day of the rollout so that everybody was prepared and people could understand how to use it. They were real good about making sure we had all the information we needed in advance so that we could prep the communities for it and then we'd be able to support them. When that time came.

Robert
By using PaperCut we were able to go to a default, black and white so that you have to choose to color print. So overall it is less expensive. We also have the time out. Believe it or not, we found a lot of times where people will print a big document that maybe they really didn't need and they'll forget to go and release it – because they really didn't need it, and then it’ll just time-out and just disappear so it'll never get printed. 

Robert
By going to the E-Fax system, the electronic faxes send to a group mailbox of a select number of people that have access to it, and they get the document. So it's always secure. It also overall saves us money. It is less expensive for that account than it is for an analog line at a community in multiple locations in the community. 

Robert
And one of the things that we discovered recently is it also solves problems because we can get new lines faster than ordering a copper line, a Verizon line, or something, and have it brought in. We can request a new E fax number, electronic fax number, and have it, you know, in a day. With a community that we recently acquired, we got to the point where they all of a sudden needed another fax line. So we said, “Hey, let's take care of that right now.” So in one day, they had a new fax line. 

Robert
Anytime we've reached out for training on a specific way to do something, Cobb has always been very helpful in providing that. 

Robert
I would use Cobb over all the other service providers for copiers and for document management that I've dealt with, either here on the East Coast or even on the West Coast.