Pursuing a sheepskin -- at any level -- is hard enough. Paperwork makes it harder. That's as true for the teachers and administrators at universities, school districts and even individual schools as it is for their students.
Imaging helps put an end to the paper chase. Automated forms processing and workflow not only boost the education back office -- they can even improve teaching techniques and provide new opportunities for learning.
New systems transfer the paper shuffle to the computer. This unburdens the staff and faculty. Teachers can concentrate on what they're supposed to do -- teach.
The Poudre School District (Fort Collins, CO) educates roughly 21,000 K-12 students at 43 schools. The district employs nearly 2,500 teachers, administrators and staff.
Add up those numbers. Multiply by the number of records that have to be kept for each student and staff member. (The state of Colorado requires school districts to hold student and personnel files forever.) What's the result? Document management migraines.
Demographics double the challenge. The United States has begun to harvest a bumper crop of kids -- the baby boomers' babies. And like other areas in the South and West, Fort Collins is contending with a burgeoning population. These trends have combined to send the number of school-aged children in the area soaring. Upshot: Rockies-sized mountains of paper to store and increasing staff hours to maintain them.
To relieve Poudre's headaches, Alpharel/Trimco (San Diego, CA 619-625-3000) installed a document-based records management system. [Note: At press time, the vendor was busy changing their name to Altris.]
After considering new warehouse space, the cost of the current warehouse expenses and the salaries for document maintenance personnel, Poudre was able to justify Alpharel's imaging system. They're using the system to replace all their paper and the associated overhead.
"Document management is a demanding requirement that all school districts face," says David Williamson, communications services manager for Poudre School District. "For integrated document management to work here, we needed cross-platform support, workflow, native-language display and storage, two-way faxing and COLD integration. Alpharel had it."
In June 1995, Alpharel installed three of their system components for the district:
QManager, a document distribution manager. Poudre runs all this on an HP 9000 Model G30 server. Four Macintosh scanning stations with Fujitsu scanners capture the images.
The district scans enrollment and scholastic records, along with health and safety information, and merges them into electronic folders. They can enter additional notes with AlphaVIEW to enforce students' fear of the phrase, "This will go on your PERM-a-nent record!" QManager makes sure the permanent record doesn't get lost.
This past summer, Alpharel has continued to up the number of system users. They added two scanning sites. Upgraded software provides the staff with more flexible indexing. It lets them define unique index schemes by application, type of folder and type of document. It also assigns context-sensitive field labels and properties to documents for easy retrieval.
The licensed number of seats doubled when the district brought their financial applications into the fold. Two added scanning sites give the system heavy-duty input and help it keep pace with Fort Collins' booming population.
"It's not like this system lets us do anything we couldn't do before," says Williamson. "We're basically saving more space, protecting our records more securely and retrieving information more efficiently." What more could a district ask for?
American U.
Makes the Grade
The term "higher education" doesn't always jibe with the way institutes of higher education do business.
College students often lose classes or endure long admissions lines due to idiotic bureaucratic snafus.
At least one college is trying to change that -- American University, a private, liberal arts school based in Washington, DC. Established in 1886, the university encompasses the College of Law and the schools of Arts and Sciences, International Service, Public Administration, Communication and Business Administration.
Each year, about 12,000 grad and undergrad students enroll at American. Hossein Modarres, director of systems for enrollment services, said the school wanted to be more efficient and provide greater service to their student body. Also, they wanted to make students happier by lowering tuitions. To do so, they had to cut costs.
Easier said than done. Under the traditional paper-based system, documents were scattered between the Admissions, Financial Aid and Services Buildings. Services staff logged data in the computer, created paper files and ultimately archived them. Clerks had to physically find the paper file in the Services building (two large rooms of archived files and five of current files) and send them to the Admissions building for evaluation.
Financial aid forms took a similar tortuous route. All students who needed financial assistance had to submit a separate loan application, which went to a third location -- the Financial Aid building. Under the paper-based system, this required shuffling through both the admissions and financial aid paper files for each candidate.
"Under the paper-based system, when applicants called to check their enrollment status, our staff noted their particulars and arranged to return the applicant's call," says Modarres. "The staff member then located the file in the computerized index and then searched for the folder, which could be in any of the three buildings. This normally took more than an hour. Then they returned the applicant's call."
It was slow, but relatively simple. American wanted to keep things simple -- but make them faster.
"In early 1995 we looked at imaging solutions, but were put off by their complexity," says Modarres. "We didn't want to build our own custom application in a complex development tool. But at the same time, we didn't want a low-end tool that wouldn't scale up if our needs grew in the future. We didn't need heavy workflow or an in-depth business process reengineering initiative."
In about the middle of 1995, American found what they were looking for. HighView ST, a shrinkwrapped imaging "find-and-file" application from Highland Technologies (Lanham, MD 301-306-8200). "This system was an easy-to-install and easy-to-use production-quality system," says Modarres. "The other 10 systems we looked at either lacked production capabilities or stressed workflow. ST has
superior batch processing, scanning and indexing."
American first installed the system in early December 1995. They needed it up and running quickly, to handle enrollment for the first semester of 1996. They finished installing the system and completed training in less than a month.
The first office to be imaged was Financial Aid. They scanned federal financial aid forms and some of American's own supplemental forms. They've processed more than 50,000 pieces of paper since February.
The images and paper go to an indexing station, where an operator compares the image to the paper original to ensure image quality. Then the operator assigns an index number to both the image and the physical document.
The indexing stations are also mainframe terminals. The form's index number automatically enters the central database, and links it to the student's records. The image goes in the new electronic folder. Image files reside on a subsystem.
"We receive roughly 12,000 applications per semester," says Modarres. "About a third enroll for classes. At the end of each semester, we archive the records of those who haven't enrolled plus the files of the past term's graduates."
Ten people developed the ST system. They're continuing to install the product throughout Admissions, Services and Financial Aid.
The HighView ST System runs against Oracle 7 on a Pentium ProLiant SMP server. The departmental server links 50 Windows 3.1 clients across NetWare 4.1. Three Fujitsu 9037 flatbed scanners attached to 486 PCs handle production scanning. Five RAID subsystems provide 24 GB of online storage. Archive storage is hosted on a 100 CD jukebox.
Today, American's staff handle applicant questions during their calls instead of schlepping to three different buildings to find files. This has resulted in many savings -- including the need to make expensive return calls. Paper records are kept off-site -- another cost saver.
But Modarres and American University aren't done yet. American recently began to batch-scan 10,000 live student financial aid files. Each folder contains up to 150 pages.
They're planing to image-enable the Admissions department in the future. Spring applications began to flood in last month. Usual tallies for these records list 20,000 folders per year. American plans to modify ST to provide two tabs per record, so that financial aid and admissions records are stored in one logical, electronic folder.
"We expect to realize 100% ROI within two years," says Modarres.
Special Workflow for Special Needs
Sometimes paper isn't all that bad. The faculty and staff at The Jacqueline Vaughn Occupational High School don't mind it. Teaching 170 special education students who are termed "educable mentally retarded" is their main priority. That's a far more lofty calling than "reengineering the document management process."
The school provides students with academic classes, on-site career counseling, a full work program and a transition program for independent living after graduation. These programs demand considerable documentation and follow-up.
The school's small population makes collecting and storing documentation relatively easy. As a result, they needed elegant document management. And that's where Workflow's (Niles, IL 847-647-0444) DOC-FLOW system came in.
Installation began in June, 1995. It's almost an imaging system in reverse. Operators enter all data from keyboards. No image capture takes place here.
Every teacher and member of the support staff has a personal computer. These connect to the school's central computer -- and they're all controlled by DOC-FLOW.
They create an electronic folder for each student, staff person, class, employer and project.
Into these folders go dozens of different documents.
DOC-FLOW monitors the flow of work through the various stages of processing and prints three multipage documents. The laser printers superimpose data onto printer-produced forms, which are stored in old-fashioned filing cabinets.
In the past, staff and parents struggled to decipher each other's handwritten documents. This let the odd forged deficiency slip through the cracks. Now they read the correct data in clear ASCII -- at least
until the kids learn to hack the system!
The school's workflow is divided into four areas:
