Louisiana Legislative Auditors

The State of Louisiana Leverages Lotus Notes for Auditing

The Situation

Louisiana Legislative Auditors (LLA) is a distributed organization, with approximately 170 auditors working in different locations, who are responsible for conducting financial, performance and CPA audits for every state agency in Lousiana. Their legacy system was failing to keep pace with their demands. The upkeep required to maintain that system, its lack of distribution, and its inability to integrate with the Web or their other regularly used applications (Lotus Notes, MS Project, Word and Excel), was transforming it from a tool into a liability.

LLA looked for a new solution they could integrate into their existing infrastructure, the core of which was comprised of Lotus Notes / Domino and DB2, situated on AS 400 Series servers. They wanted the ability to consolidate their systems into a single, distributed system available on line/off line and on the Web. Among the needs they wanted addressed were:

1. Evolving their current paper based system to an online work paper organization, with document workflow, collaboration and management
2. Resource scheduling and management, with tools for vacation and sick leave tracking, employee hiring and change request handling
3. Audit status reporting
4. Improved organizational intelligence with business reports, particularly ad hoc reporting

The solution

In leveraging their Lotus Notes / Domino platform, Tracker Suite provided an easily deployed solution that answered their needs, particularly in moving their labor-intensive paper system to Notes’ inherently versatile document management model. In moving their documents to Lotus Notes, LLA not only improved the organization and accessibility of documents for its auditors, but also improved the security, archiving and tracking of important files.

LLA purchased 4 Tracker modules, which were customized to suit their particular needs.

• Project Tracker - for the management and collaboration of its audit portfolio.
• Personnel Tracker - for resource tracking and improved HR processes such as vacation tracking and management.
• Customer Tracker - for managing relationships with the various agencies LLA performs audit work for.
• The Tracker Data Warehouse - for business intelligence reports about every aspect of its organization and its work, with data collected from the various Tracker databases as well as legacy sources.

The Benefits

LLA immediately experienced the benefits of Tracker Suite. Because it simply leveraged their existing Lotus Notes / Domino platform, it integrated painlessly with their existing system. As Tracker Suite is 100% server based, deploying Tracker Suite across their distributed organization of offices was a matter of sending an email with a hyperlink to their employees. Finally, because Tracker Suite was based on the same messaging system their employees had used for years, the need for training was minimal.

By leveraging their Lotus Notes / Domino investment, LLA had a comprehensive, Web enabled management system which was installed, configured, deployed and adopted across the organization within 45 days. Also, by transitioning from their burdensome legacy system to the much more easily administered Lotus Notes platform, LLA was able to redirect resources to more productive and profitable work.

LLA quickly realized its ROI as Tracker Suite streamlined and accelerated its processes. For example, their historical paper-based audit process involved new audit documents being shuffled among departments in an approval process that could take from 20 to 30 days to complete, all before any real work could take place. With Tracker Suite’s electronic document workflow, LLA has completed 2 paperless audits.

As well as workflow, Tracker Suite also improved the efficiency of LLA’s security model. Previously this was a 2 step process, when a new audit project was initiated, a single directory for the audit files was created and access to it was individually set for each auditor on that project. Using Tracker Suite, when a new audit project is created the creator is automatically granted access to that project folder, and can easily assign team members with access as well.