Migrating 100-Year-Old Documents to the Cloud & Reinventing Business Processes
Waldheim Cemetery is a 250-acre Jewish cemetery in the Chicagoland area that’s been in operation since 1873. Imaging Office Systems first started working with the cemetery around 2010 by migrating their paper-based internment and ownership records to microfilm, and the relationship has continued ever since.
The Challenge
Waldheim Cemetery isn’t just large—it’s complex with over 300 individual sections, and each of those sections has its own set of books documenting ownership and burial records.
“The space that all those books took up, and the time it took to go through them page-by-page was huge. Also, all the books were organized differently. Some were organized by location while others were indexed alphabetically,” said Deborah Maropoulos, who’s served as office manager for the cemetery for 21 years.
With some records still in their original paper form and some in microfilm, it was important for Maropoulos to work with a partner she could trust to migrate the data while taking care of the originals.
How Did Waldheim Cemetery Benefit From Its FileBound Implementation?
“It’s very simple to use, and I’m not a very computer-savvy person, so if I can do it, anyone can do it. I needed a little backup for the first month, but after that, it was great. The Imaging Office team provided great service.”
“We’re now planning to use FileBound for our payroll department to set up a new system to cut down on the payroll-related paperwork. I’m always finding new things to add to FileBound.”
Deborah Maropoulos
Office Manager, Waldheim Cemetery
The Solution
Imaging Office Systems migrated records from both paper originals and microfilm to a new FileBound database.
“We don’t like touching our original documents very much because some of them are over 100 years old, and the paper’s delicate, and with FileBound, we don’t need to touch them anymore—they’re all tucked away in a safe place,” said Maropoulos.
The main driver to FileBound wasn’t just access issues; it was also about disaster recovery. Now, if anything were to happen to the physical infrastructure at the cemetery, the records would be safe and secure, stored digitally in offsite cloud servers.
“With FileBound, everything’s at our fingertips, and it just makes everyone’s life around here much easier and more efficient. We don’t waste as much time gathering the books from other locations, and we can get a lot more done in a day” said Maropoulos. “Before FileBound, I’d have to spend 45 minutes to an hour to go grab the mapbook, find the page, draw it out the diagram on my paper internment forms, print it out, and send it over to the funeral home. Now, I just email that information directly from FileBound to the funeral director.”
“Because we’re a cemetery, we always have to have someone on call after hours. Funeral directors still want to call us after hours for a funeral that’s going to take place tomorrow, and what used to happen is we would have to come back into the office—sometimes 9:30 p.m. at night. Now everything’s on FileBound and accessible from anywhere, whether we’re at home or on vacation or anywhere.”
The Bottom Line
Imaging Office Systems provided a powerful, yet flexible cloud-based FileBound solution that made it possible for workers to be more productive, and the solution can grow and evolve with Waldheim Cemetery’s needs as they continue to change…and as technology changes in coming years.
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