The Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System (LACERS) is using Box to modernize an 80-year-old government agency, transforming paper-based processes into streamlined digital workflows that cut training time, consolidate hundreds of forms, integrate e-signatures, and preserve decades of institutional knowledge.
LACERS has a critical mission: administering health and retirement benefits for more than 200,000 civilian city employees. For over 80 years, the agency has been a bedrock of security for its members.
But as the world went digital, LACERS found itself anchored by decades-old, paper-based processes. Chief Information Officer Vikram Jadhav was tasked with leading a large-scale digital transformation to bring the agency’s operations into the modern era and ensure it could serve its members efficiently and securely for decades to come.
Here’s how they did it.
Key AI transformation metrics
6-8 months reduced to 2-3 months for new employee training time by using Box Hubs
170+ active paper forms to be consolidated into ~20 intelligent digital forms with Box Forms
30 minutes of manual labor saved per task by using AI-powered data extraction
80-page paper retirement application fully digitized on the Box platform
Lost in a maze of siloed paper
LACERS was drowning.
The agency managed over 500 different forms, with 170 in active use, creating a complex and cumbersome experience for both members and staff. Information arrived through multiple channels — email, fax, traditional mail, and more — creating workflow chaos that led to documents being saved on personal desktops and siloed drives, and teams performing duplicate and even triplicate work without realizing it.
This fragmented information created significant business risks. An organization using legal opinions and precedents dating back to 1932 was constantly at risk of giving inconsistent advice to members, and the process was inefficient and just plain frustrating for employees. “The soul-sucking aspects of the job,” says Jadhav, “are when you’re just typing in last name, first name, address, over and over.”
The soul-sucking aspects of the job,” says Jadhav, “are when you’re just typing in last name, first name, address, over and over.
And these problems were only going to be worsened by the coming “silver tsunami” — a projected loss of 60% of staff to retirement over the next five to seven years, which threatened a massive drain of institutional knowledge. “We’d been planning for this change, and we started with content because it is the most tactile and it’s the thing that everybody touches,”says Jadhav.
The right platform for a unified, digital-first future
To move beyond expensive, heavily customized legacy systems that resulted in vendor lock-in, LACERS needed one all-inclusive platform that could serve as the central hub for all content and workflows. Jadhav looked for a partner with a credible and compelling product roadmap that could grow with the agency’s needs: centralizing content, streamlining processes, capturing decades of institutional knowledge, and ultimately, creating a more efficient and rewarding work environment for employees.
After evaluating the market, LACERS chose Box. “I wanted something that was all-in,” Jadhav explains. “I wanted a roadmap that I could believe in that would service our needs and begin chipping away at the myriad contracts that we were holding.” That roadmap began by focusing on the core of the problem — content — by adopting a suite of Box capabilities:
- Box Sign replaced costly pay-per-envelope e-signature solutions with an integrated tool
- Box Hubs + Box AI became the foundation for a new intranet and departmental portals, centralizing work, creating a single source of truth, and leveraging AI to answer questions and generate new documents based on agency content
- Box Consulting analyzed and mapped workflows, identifying critical areas of inefficiency and duplication
This phased approach allowed LACERS to build momentum and prove the value of a unified content strategy before tackling more complex business process changes. “Box Hubs was essential,” Jadhav explains, “because it was really the first domino to fall in a larger vision of how we actually do business and how we want to work.”
And ultimately, that vision revolved around people.
Need for speed: accelerated onboarding and more with Box Hubs and Box AI
The timing of LACERS’ transformation turned out to be critical. The organization onboarded Box just two weeks before work-from-home orders hit in 2020; this fundamental shift from siloed, paper-based work to a transparent, digital-first culture helped the agency transition seamlessly to remote work.
The “aha” moment came with the implementation of Box Hubs for employee training. Previously, new hires faced a six-to-eight-month training period using paper binders. By building training portals in Hubs, LACERS could provide instant, on-demand access to manuals, procedures, and expertise, cutting the onboarding time by two-thirds or more.
Once our staff could not live without Box, and they realized how much better their work experience was, that opened up the doors to so many other use cases — things like retirement application portals, taking an 80-page paper document and digitizing it inside Box.
Hubs has also transformed how leadership operates, enabling executives to ask plain-language questions and get quick, citable answers.
“By consolidating everything into Hubs,” Jadhav says, “ we’re using Box AI now for things like generating a single report by pulling key parameters and citing other reports from across our organization. It’s really being felt at the executive levels, in both time savings and visibility.”
“Once our staff could not live without Box, and they realized how much better their work experience was,” he concludes, “that opened up the doors to so many other use cases — things like retirement application portals, taking an 80-page paper document and digitizing it inside Box. We’re also looking at how to safely leverage AI for our most tedious work.”
Winning hearts and minds, and creating a foundation for the next 80 years
Building trust started with a focus on convenience. By first digitizing content — the one thing every employee touches — LACERS made work simpler and more accessible, with the ability to work from anywhere during the pandemic being one of the most powerful proof points. As employees saw the direct benefits in their day-to-day tasks, from document retrieval to collaboration, adoption soared. The success of the training hubs solidified this trust by showing staff how technology could empower them with knowledge — an essential cultural shift that paved the way for the agency to review and modernize every part of its operation, from contracting to member services.
With Box AI, LACERS has transformed from a lagging, analog organization into a future-focused, digital-first agency.
Part of that universal modernization meant building on LACERS’ initial success by moving to Box Enterprise Advanced. LACERS is now leveraging Box Forms to consolidate its 170 active paper forms into approximately 20 intelligent, dynamic digital experiences. With Box AI, the team is unlocking insights from decades of institutional knowledge, ensuring consistent guidance and quality control for everything from board reports to member inquiries.
The journey has transformed LACERS from a lagging, analog organization into a future-focused, digital-first agency. “The rewarding aspects of the job are when you get to actually engage with people and solve problems,” Jadhav concludes. “It’s like: how do we make work rewarding and beyond the paycheck? That’s how you get retention and so much more.”
Read more about how LACERS uses Intelligent Content Management from Box to modernize its agency.
