BRAND_NAME_JUSTIFICATION.pdf

Justification for the Laserfiche Document Management System USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) acquired Laserfiche Rio enterprise document management system (DMS). The solution is critical to enabling the successful completion of the agency’s website upgrade, which had been selected as a Secretary of Agriculture’s Signature Process Improvement Initiative to improve web services for users, the underlying IT foundation to better support current and evolving needs, and internal processes to develop and disseminate products. Thus this continues as a critical component of USDA’s IT Modernization and efforts and improving the customer experience.

ERS adopted the Laserfiche DMS to store and manage files outside of the Umbraco web content management system (CMS) in order to improve the website performance. ERS performed market research, a cross‐agency team evaluated various products, and selected Laserfiche as the best solution based on many factors.

The ERS team has been working closely with the contractors to configure the Laserfiche DMS for our needs, and integrate it with the Umbraco web content management system for the Laserfiche document management system and integration. In doing so, there has been a considerable amount of work to create tailored document repositories for our various product suites (notably Publications, including Outlooks; Charts, including Charts of Note; and Data file collections), tailored templates for each of the product suites, and custom workflows. Thus, the system is uniquely positioned to provide the necessary functions ERS requires to fulfill its mission of disseminating economic research to the public. We have no plans to find, acquire, configure, and deploy “replacement” software at this crucial time. Without it, the website upgrade will not be fully functional at delivery and readily useful for further professional development. In fact, without Laserfiche, the entire website is at risk.