Enrolling at a university is difficult. There are a lot of forms to fill in. This is especially true if you want financial aid. While there's no easy way to fill in the forms, Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale is using imaging to store and access these forms.
Keeping track of several million forms is difficult. But it's crucial when you have 20,000 students on campuses around the world. In 1993 Nova Southeastern University realized they had a problem and turned to imaging to solve it.
Imaging worked. It not only reduced costs and increased efficiency, it gave them more space. They eliminated an entire room full of filing cabinets.
"Students are not always the most organized people in the world," says Jorge Pujols, Nova's manager of desktop computing services. "They sometimes change their courses and they pay for classes with a variety of different credit cards and payment options.
"While this can sometimes be confusing, it doesn't usually cause problems until something goes really wrong.
"Then all hell seems to break loose. Trying to find their file could be difficult if it wasn't filed where it should be. This used to happen often because a department could be using it.
"The file could also be in transit or sitting on someone's desk waiting for action to be taken. If they had enrolled a few years ago and were coming back, their file could also be on either microfilm or microfiche.
"Finding out something simple took anywhere from five minutes to two hours if their file was on the college campus. If it wasn't and a full-scale search of the repository was needed, they might have to wait for a couple of days for an answer.
"In 1993 we knew their was a better way and looked at imaging. Cost was our major concern. Ron Black in Information Technologies got together with Jeff Schneider in finance, Geri Castora in financial aid and Stan Cross the registrar and managed to organize funding. Several systems were evaluated before we decided to go with UNIsearch in early 1995 from Com Squared (Atlanta, GA 770-263-5300). Our major concerns were flexibility, compatibility with our existing systems and future expandability. UNISearch offered us all of this and more.
"UNIsearch went live in June 96. We started imaging copies of student enrollment forms. We didn't do any OCR or ICRing of them. We kept the forms as they were before they were converted to electronic format. They're indexed by Social Security Number, term, input date, type of form and by person inputting the form."
The forms are scanned on one of several Gateway Pentium 133 PCs with 16 MB of RAM, 4 GB of storage and viewed on 20" Gateway monitors. Nova has four scanners, two Bell & Howell 6338 high-speed duplex scanners, a Fujitsu scanner and a Minolta DS2130 scanner. Printers are Hewlett-Packard Laser Jet 4 and 5's.
These are networked to the university's two Sun computers, an UltraSparc and a Sparc5 with 64 MB of RAM 16 GB of online storage. They have two Hewlett-Packard 5 1/4" optical drives, an 80FX (with 32 discs) and 40FX (with 16 discs).
"When a student comes in with a question we can usually give them an answer within 15 seconds," says Elaine Poff, Nova's assistant university registrar.
"This is either printed, faxed or answered by looking at the screen. Students no longer have to stand around waiting for a response. They're in and out in minutes.
"Our cost is much less in both time and money. Students love it because they can spend more time studying. We no longer waste hours searching for documents."
UNIsearch was originally bought to save time with enrollments. It's since been expanded into other areas including course grades. "If we have a question about a specific class or professor, we can get all the grades instantly," says Poff.
"In the past we had to get the class list and manually compile the information. We now have more information."
Nova is making the biggest savings in the financial aid area. "Before we installed the system we had a room with 25, five drawer filing cabinets," says Grace Salas the assistant director of financial aid.
"We did a backfile conversion and converted 1.5 million documents for 15,000 students. Each file was 200-300 pages. Now when a financial aid counselor needs information, they get it in 20-40 seconds -- instead of hours or days."
The total investment is difficult to work out because things were bought in stages. Phase one cost Nova between $70,000 and $80,000. Pujols says their investment at this point comes to more than $250,000.
"Our concern was giving our students immediate answers to their questions, not reducing our costs or generating a high return on investment. We've done this, and saved money. The project has been very successful.
"Com Squared have been really great to work with. Their tech support is wonderful. If we have a problem with the system, they take control of the system remotely from Atlanta. This means we don't need a fulltime person to manage the system.
"Installing the system in stages was the right thing to do. It let us learn about imaging as we went. We didn't have to make any dramatic changes to the way we did business overnight. We were able to do it when we had the time.
"I'm very happy with both the system and the support Com Squared have given us. I'd recommend them to anybody looking to upgrade their paper-based systems."
