Patricia Clay, CIO of Hudson County Community College, on using Laserfiche to guide its digitization efforts, implementing new workflows and streamlining processes to make employees’ lives easier.
A process automation team at Southern Illinois University (SIU) Carbondale’s School of Medicine uses Laserfiche to automate paper-based tasks. According to Jennifer Washburn, IT manager at the SIU School of Medicine, “The demand for services just keeps growing.”
SITUATION
• The university needed to retire a legacy document management system
• Content needed to be migrated to a system that offered information management and process automation
SOLUTION
• Improved information retrieval time and efficiency
• Automated processes accelerated response times and increased transparency
• Enhanced student, staff and faculty experience
The American University in Cairo (AUC) is a leading English-language, U.S.-accredited institution of higher education. With a diverse community of students, faculty, alumni, trustees and supporters representing more than 60 countries, the university prides itself on being a crossroads for the world’s cultures and a vibrant forum for reasoned argument and spirited debate.
While the university is over 100 years old, it has prioritized offering a modern student experience. Its New Cairo campus features a state-of-the-art facility for advanced research, innovative teaching, lifelong learning and civic engagement. Recently, the university’s technology solutions team set out to modernize technology systems and processes to better align with its students, faculty and staff’s needs and expectations.
“Before Laserfiche, we were facing many challenges in managing a legacy content management system,” said Soumaia Al Ayyat, Ph.D., lead applications development analyst at AUC. “We had an overflow of paper-based documents and student records stored in our warehouse.”
The technology solutions team worked with BMB, a Laserfiche solution provider with locations across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, to implement Laserfiche as a modern way to manage information and automate processes campuswide.
AUC outlined its requirements for a new system for managing content. The technology solutions team had the vision to go beyond traditional document management and implement a full content services platform.
“We were looking for a centralized content management system for improving process automation and enforcing governance rules on the content,” Al Ayyat said. The technology solution team selected Laserfiche for its ease-of-use, flexibility and integration capabilities.
The plan was to migrate content from the legacy system to Laserfiche with documents’ respective template fields, and implement access controls and forms-based audit reports of the legacy system’s actions. The team also embraced Laserfiche’s records management capabilities by applying retention polices on the migrated content as well as new content.
“All departments reported a noticeable improvement in retrieval time and efficiency due to the accompanied metadata and proper access rights,” Al Ayyat said, adding that documents for over 25,000 students were successfully migrated. “We’ve saved a great amount of paper, time and budget with Laserfiche records management.”
Once the team had brought content over from the legacy system, they turned their focus to automation for four different user personas: for students, staff, faculty and external users (such as visitors). One of the most pressing needs was streamlining the admissions process.
“Just before COVID-19, the university was transforming into a paperless and cashless campus,” said Mohamed El Fadly, technology solutions director at AUC. “One of its main goals was to enhance and automate the admissions process, so that students could submit their files online and track their documents at any time.”
Before using Laserfiche, students were required to submit around 10 types of documents — including grades, birth certificates, national IDs, photos, etc. — in physical form.
“The Enrollment and Admissions Office was our early adopter of Laserfiche Forms to automate the admissions checklist process,” El Fadly added. The office launched a Laserfiche form that enabled students to submit documents online and routed the information automatically to admissions and related departments for review, approval and follow-up. Students can track the progress of their applications at any time in the process.
Students can also opt to visit AUC’s Student Service Center to submit documents. For in-person submission, students sign a signature pad, whose system is integrated with the Laserfiche form so that it may be stored in the repository for future reference.
An API integration between Laserfiche and AUC’s student information system, Ellucian Banner, streamlines information sharing and the creation of students’ Laserfiche accounts once accepted.
Since the success of the admissions checklist, AUC has also used Laserfiche Forms for a number of other student-facing processes including:
“Any of these automated processes enable students to submit academic and administrative documents online, receive approval quickly and track their status,” said El Fadly. “We’re able to offer these responsive student services because we’re using Laserfiche as a campus-wide solution.”
“Laserfiche’s ease of use and integration capabilities with our core systems like Banner and SAP enable the university to quickly extend its workflow and online forms solution capabilities to other campus departments, including the Registrar office, the Provost office, the security office and the Controller office,” said El Fadly.
For faculty and staff, AUC has automated processes that previously required many manual, repetitive tasks and physical copies, including:
Visitors to the campus, too, use Laserfiche as part of the visitor request process. Once a request is submitted, Laserfiche generates a QR code with dynamic information extracted from the request form, which is presented at the entrance gates. An integration with the CodeREADr app enables security guards to scan the codes with the app and record check-in and check-out.
“These modern, automated processes have enabled AUC to manage increased information flow without additional burden on students, faculty and staff. Adopting Laserfiche in the Enrollment and Admissions office has led to the migration of over 1 million admissions records and the processing of over 320,000 records in two years, while AUC has also managed over 350 School of Continuing Education petition submission, 1,000 visitor requests and nearly 200 clearance requests in the same amount of time. Additionally, the use of Laserfiche aligns well with AUC’s sustainability goals. “We’ve eliminated the use of millions of paper documents,” Al Ayyat said. “Laserfiche has helped us to achieve our paperless goal and go green.”
Today, the technology solutions team continues to optimize operations and digitize more departments’ content. The team has more than 20 business processes in their queue for automation.
“The smart process automation in Laserfiche and its capabilities to design very complex processes facilitated the improvement of AUC’s internal processes and enhanced the student experience,” said Al Ayyat. “Laserfiche provides efficiency via intelligent forms with the proper workflow and the proper repository access rights. The smart reporting and analytics of Laserfiche empower the stakeholders in monitoring and identifying process bottlenecks. Overall, Laserfiche enables us to offer our services more quickly and with greater accessibility.”
SITUATION
• Complex processes surrounding procurement, service requests and other business needs lacked consistency and oversight.
• The organization sought a solution to automate business processes and streamline them for staff.
RESULTS
• Automated solutions accelerated key workflows including the timesheet process, which was reduced from one week to less than a minute.
• Digitization and automation initiatives supported staff satisfaction, new hybrid work models, interoperability and compliance across the organization.
SIU Medicine is a publicly assisted medical school and clinical practice with more than 2,000 providers, researchers and staff members across the state of Illinois. Additionally, SIU is home to a world-class scientific research facility. The facility’s more than 100 active projects complement the institution’s mission of optimizing the health of the people of central and southern Illinois through education, patient care, research and community service.
SIU’s multi-pronged approach requires complex business processes for procurement, service requests and other everyday activities. The organization has been using Laserfiche for digitizing records for the past 10 years, partnering with Laserfiche solution provider TKB Associates. Recently, SIU found a need to modernize processes and expand use of Laserfiche to include Laserfiche Forms and workflow.
“[We saw] an opportunity to get executive buy-in and automate processes like online timesheets,” said Jennifer Washburn, IT manager at SIU Medicine. “And since then, we’ve had people lining up and really wanting us to tackle their projects.”
Today, the organization has embraced process automation across departments, leveraging Laserfiche as a capture, decision-making and workflow engine. With streamlined processes and automated records management that reclaims time for employees to focus on more value-added work, Laserfiche supports the organization’s goals, enabling SIU to sustain high employee and patient satisfaction.
Like healthcare IT teams across the country, SIU Medicine’s Process Automation Team has navigated three significant challenges in recent years:
The Process Automation Team’s commitment to continuous improvement has been a boon to the organization’s ability to respond in innovative ways.
“Laserfiche allowed us to tackle problems and solve them in ways that I don’t think would have been possible otherwise,” said Jennifer Washburn, IT manager at SIU Medicine.
To support hybrid and remote staff, the organization started by automating the timesheet process with Laserfiche Forms.
“Laserfiche Forms allowed us to help our staff continue to do their jobs from wherever they were,” said Washburn. The team created electronic forms and associated workflows for different types of timesheets in various employee categories.
“SIU’s timesheet process was reduced from 1 week to less than a minute.” align=”left”>The difference in the automated process was significant. “Previously, the manual processes could take a week or longer,” Washburn said. “Today, it takes less than a minute.”
This initial automation project also sparked a shift in which many departments began to see real value in digital transformation.
The selection of timesheets for a pilot was also strategically successful for the Process Automation Team. “Not only was it a huge efficiency gain for us, but it also introduced every single member of our workforce to Laserfiche Forms,” Washburn explained.
The Process Automation Team has continued to take on new projects with the goal of enhancing the employee experience and empowering users to do the work and research that supports the organization’s mission. Meanwhile, Laserfiche tools like electronic forms, automated workflows and electronic records management also support compliance with internal and external requirements, as well as users’ ability to access data across different systems.
SIU Medicine has automated both simple processes such as animal requests — enabling researchers to request animals for research projects, with streamlined approvals and documentation— and more complex workflows that are used organization-wide.
For example, purchase orders are now on Laserfiche Forms. What was once a manual process that involved PDFs being emailed or paper forms being passed from desk to desk is now completely digital and automated.
“We created a Laserfiche form that pulls budget purpose numbers and auto-populates the necessary information from another system, which then brings in the fiscal officer that’s responsible for that budget number,” said Mike Overmeyer, data architect at SIU Medicine. The automated system also helps employees by auto-routing POs that may need to go to multiple officers, or that are rejected by one or more officers. “We also give purchasing the ability to run POs by IT or an administrator, if they need to. It’s conditional, and we’re not putting the onus on the employee to make those decisions or execute those manual tasks that can end up causing delays.”
Washburn said that budget purpose numbers are housed in a separate, legacy accounting system that can be leveraged via lookups from Laserfiche Forms. “Users enter a number and it all pre-populates. They click submit and it’s near instantaneous getting to the next person. The end users are amazed that they can do all of this in one place.”
Feedback has been so positive that the project was expanded to include purchases that are made through state procurement cards. “The intent is now to use it for everything that gets purchased for the school, from paper towels and office supplies to computer or laboratory equipment,” Washburn added.
SIU also used Laserfiche to expedite the collection of patient information when a local healthcare provider retired. “There was a local practice where the provider retired, and all of their patients were transitioned into our practice,” Washburn explained. “We had to collect release of information notices, so we quickly deployed a Laserfiche form to streamline that process. Our clinical staff just had to enter the patient’s health record number. Our system integrates with our practice management system to pull everything automatically, which significantly reduced the time it would have taken manually.”
SIU Medicine’s IT department also stood up its own Laserfiche-powered system for entering requests. Employees fill out an electronic form to request a variety of IT services, including reports, software installation, or even new processes through Laserfiche Forms. “Prior to using the forms, we would get requests that were very unstructured, and there might be a lot of follow-up questions to find out, for instance, what reports someone needed, or what we could to do provide support,” said Jeff Wilson, IT director at SIU Medicine.
Other processes that the organization has transformed using Laserfiche include:
SIU leverages Laserfiche’s robust records management capabilities on a daily basis for compliance with industry and state requirements. All forms and information generated from Laserfiche processes are saved and managed in the Laserfiche repository, supporting information governance practices at SIU.
“We have well over 2 million documents in our repository,” said Washburn. “If there’s not an existing folder structure for the area that we’re working in, Laserfiche Forms can create it dynamically. We make sure that everything lands in Laserfiche at the end of the day.”
Finally, the organization’s digital efforts have extended beyond process, productivity and compliance improvements, into staff resilience and satisfaction — which has been invaluable in the current healthcare climate. “Working in healthcare, there’s a lot of pressure and demand, so we are constantly thinking about how our staff is doing and what we can do to make the experience better,” Washburn said. “SIU’s executive leadership has emphasized that staff are more contented in their roles when they feel supported and know what they can expect from their leaders. In the most recent employee satisfaction survey, we were rated highest in staff understanding of their roles and responsibilities, and we ranked steady in satisfaction.”
The technology team at Bergen Community College (BCC) began an extensive digital transformation journey when faced with a situation familiar to many IT departments: A legacy system was approaching end-of-life. The college took this seemingly mundane circumstance, however, and embraced it as an opportunity to support organization-wide goals to reimagine core systems, services and processes by implementing Laserfiche. What began as an effort to replace outdated software resulted in staff and faculty gaining new digital tools and improving the student experience, including reimagining the college’s One Stop student services center to be both more efficient and more accessible.
Bergen Community College—an accredited, two-year community college—initially began a search to replace a legacy document management system and ultimately found a platform for content management, electronic forms and business process automation in Laserfiche.
“We have a modest-sized IT team, but we don’t have many programmers; we are more business analysts,” says Nishika Gupta, managing director of records and information management at BCC. “So we were looking for an out-of-the-box solution that we could implement without much coding. And it had to integrate with everything else, our student information system, our sign-on system, our ticketing system, all of that. And for record-keeping, we wanted Department of Defense 5015 certification, to know that the system security is robust.”
Since implementing Laserfiche, the college has digitized and automated more than 80 processes in order to enhance the student and staff experience campuswide. And because Laserfiche is a low-code solution, BCC has not had to increase the size of its IT department.
When the college made a multimillion-dollar investment to redesign its student services center, the One Stop, the team also took the opportunity to assess the complete student experience across all One Stop services. “The results yielded a significant number of new automated processes leveraging Laserfiche which reduced student foot traffic upwards of 50%,” says Ron Spaide, BCC’s chief information officer. “This allowed for One Stop staff to focus on high touch student support services, such as student advising and counseling, by redirecting staff resources to these critical areas.”
One student-centric process that was is re-engineered with Laserfiche was in the testing department, which streamlined the process for students to bypass the requirement for a placement exam to enroll in certain classes if they met specific criteria (such as a previously earned degree in that particular field). Rather than require students to physically gather all of the paper documents that prove they have met the criteria, students can now submit documentation in just a matter of seconds from wherever they are.
BCC also used Laserfiche to digitize the grade change process, which now lives online through a digital form. Off-site faculty can easily access and amend students’ grades without delay. In addition, Laserfiche enables staff members to track faculty turnaround time and send reminders as needed, all while simultaneously keeping students updated.
Prior to adopting Laserfiche, “Everything was manual,” explains Lisa DiGaetano, assistant director – One Stop/Enrollment Services. “[There was] constant scanning of documents. With Laserfiche, everything is contained and accessible, for reference, to investigate a problem, or to do anything. It’s just an amazing improvement.”
The dual enrollment program for high schoolers taking BCC courses used to require the aspiring students to gather up and submit a stack of paperwork, including parental and high school counselor permission forms. Now the entire process takes place online, with automatic routing to each party that needs to sign off, and then to the registration department and bursar. Instead of calling to inquire about progress, anxious students or parents can check online at any time.
“As a whole, our organization’s goal is to ‘Reimagine Bergen. This means reimagining how we use technology and reimagining the student experience. To support this, we are dedicated to implementing solutions that our students are comfortable using. Millennials use technology in every aspect of their lives. For that reason, it’s important for us to leverage technology that expedites student-facing processes in order to meet their expectations.”
— Nishika Gupta, Managing Director of Records and Information Management at Bergen Community College
At certain times of the year, BCC receives as many as 6,000 forms per month, which equates to significant time and cost savings for the organization. On the back end, the data that the Laserfiche platform collects allows BCC to keep improving. And a culture of continuous innovation is growing stronger across the campus.
“Student Services is our biggest user of the of Laserfiche,” Gupta adds. “But it’s permeated across almost every area of the school. Our tenure-track faculty members are using it for their submissions. Our foundation department uses it for scholarship applications. Our testing center uses it for registration. IT uses it for requests to access a shared drive or update a mailbox. And we’re currently building an invoice-approval process.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the BCC team was responsible for distributing emergency financial aid grants to students as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF).
In order to streamline the application process and simplify it for both applicants and the financial aid counselors who were tasked with reviewing applications, the college created a Laserfiche form, which students could access online. It outlined criteria for student needs and enabled students to check the status of their request online, removing hurdles that otherwise may have existed with a more manual, paper-driven process. By the fall of 2021, the college had received 13,000 forms submissions through the electronic process that streamlined the delivery of three rounds of HEERF grant money to students in need.
As part of HEERF, higher education institutions were also granted funds for operational needs. In order to determine how the college would use the operational dollars, BCC also utilized a Laserfiche form to collect feedback and receive proposals from internal stakeholders. As with all financial decisions, the organization aims to ensure that all processes and outcomes are easily reviewed in the case of an audit.
BCC’s work with Laserfiche during the pandemic gave the organization the confidence that its automated processes could be rolled out on a much larger scale. But scaling up did not mean increasing costs — in fact, quite the opposite.
“We’ve saved the college 20,000 hours, at a minimum, just by automating processes that used to be manual. That’s upwards of $750,000, probably approaching $1 million dollars by now, in hard cost savings.”
— Ron Spaide, Chief Information Officer at Bergen Community College
BCC continues to pursue the vision to “Reimagine Bergen.” This includes simplifying processes to support a one-stop-shop experience for students, increasing effectiveness of personnel, and retaining the student-centric focus.
“Laserfiche was a great fit for Bergen Community College’s needs since it enabled students to better manage their academic progress,” said Zaheer Master, president of Accelerated Information Systems, the solution provider that implemented Laserfiche at BCC. “Bergen Community College’s innovative use of technology demonstrates a commitment to its students and its vision. The college turned a search for a new system into an opportunity to enhance the student experience.”
“Everyone is happy with our Laserfiche solution, especially our students. The transparency and collaboration that the system provides has been well received, and we look forward to expanding our use throughout the college.”
— Nishika Gupta, Managing Director of Records and Information Management at Bergen Community College
To learn more about how Laserfiche drives digital transformation, schedule a consultation today.
Colegio Alemán Alexander von Humboldt A.C. is a network of three German-language schools based in greater Mexico City. Serving 3,000 students, the organization is one of the largest German educational institutions outside of Germany. In order to serve its growing student body, the organization found the need to reimagine the ways in which it provided core student services, such as enrollment, re-enrollment and scholarships.
The Colegio Alemán team seized the opportunity to digitize and automate key processes using a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system, which enabled them to create electronic forms to capture student information digitally, and automate workflows to streamline document processing. The team started by creating a better experience for students and their families with the re-enrollment process, and has since built on their success by continuing to optimize and automate other key activities throughout the organization.
“We’ve experienced many benefits from automating our workflows using Laserfiche, we’ve found that what we need to do, we can do in the Laserfiche platform.”
—Victor Valverde López, technology manager at Colegio Alemán
After managing many time- and resource-intensive re-enrollment cycles, Colegio Alemán Administrative Manager Ema Medina brought a challenge to the organization’s leadership: “We couldn’t continue the way that we were doing the re-enrollment process,” Medina said. “Parents had to come to the school with lots of paperwork, documents that we needed signed, and in the best-case scenario, it would take an hour or more to get through with all of the steps involved.”
The Colegio Alemán team worked with Apoint Mexico, a Laserfiche solution provider, to implement Laserfiche with the goal of reimagining re-enrollment as a digital, automated process that would save time for parents and administrative staff. In the new process, a Laserfiche form collects the necessary information from parents — because this is the re-enrollment process, parents only need to confirm and update information as needed. They can review the contract with the school, provide an e-signature and even pay tuition with the new Laserfiche-powered automated process.
“One of the most important parts of our Laserfiche implementation was the ease of integration,”said Valverde López. “It was easy for us to integrate our Laserfiche process with our ERP, Intelisis, which enabled us to streamline the activities — from inputting student information to payments. And with records management, our documents are organized and classified in such a way that it’s easy for administrative staff to find information.”
When COVID-19 hit Mexico in 2020, the Colegio Alemán team was grateful to have a process in place for parents to re-enroll their students online. Now that the staff has returned to the office, however, parents still prefer the online process. “For me, the biggest benefit has been the improvement in our customer service,” Medina said. “The parents are very happy with this process and they tell us all the time. And having all of our documents in a digital platform — it’s such an important tool.”
“Today, parents don’t have to physically go to the school to re-enroll; they don’t have to print a single page. They can do the entire process from their house, from their offices, wherever they are. It takes about five to 10 minutes — the contract, the payment, everything. It’s saved us time and money, but the most important thing is that our parents are happy because they don’t lose one to three hours doing this process.”
—Victor Briseño Candela, CFO at Colegio Alemán
The parents and employees’ satisfaction with the new re-enrollment process led the Colegio Alemán team to continue digitally transforming other student-facing processes. Naturally, the new student enrollment process was a prime candidate for automation. “The new student process is very important,” Briseño Candela explained. “Today, we have an enrollment form for new students, so parents can give us information, all the documentation, and it’s all saved in the Laserfiche repository.”
Additional processes that the Colegio Alemán team have automated include:
“Any school district or network of schools operates with a lot of different systems. Laserfiche has helped us to pull information from all of these systems that normally operate independently, so that we have more visibility into the data that we have.”
—Víctor Valverde López, technology manager at Colegio Alemán
The team at Colegio Alemán continues to automate processes and move toward a digital-first approach to student services. As Colegio Alemán started with more student-facing processes, the organization’s future plans include assessing back-office processes for additional efficiencies.
“Ultimately, we want to implement a dashboard for our process data in Laserfiche,” Briseño Candela said. This will enable even more optimization moving forward, allowing the organization’s leadership to identify process bottlenecks or spot trends that can help them make informed decisions when resource planning.
“A lot of our current Laserfiche processes are communication between the school to our different publics — our parents, our associates, our teachers,” Briseño Candela said. “The next step is to use Laserfiche for our internal processes, to be more efficient in our day-to-day work. It’s our social responsibility not to print so much paper. And it is also our responsibility to be efficient with our time to support the people working in administration, as well as the parents. We want to create a good experience for everyone involved.”
To learn more about how Laserfiche drives digital transformation, schedule a consultation today.
Hudson County Community College automates and accelerates business processes while enabling access for students and staff to information from anywhere.
Hudson County Community College is located in Jersey City, New Jersey, right across the water from New York City. Serves about 8000 students a year with about 600 staff and family members. They have an award winning library and a nationally ranked culinary program with amazing kitchens set up for students and the chefs. The school experience with Laserfiche has been a breath of fresh air.
Currently, Hudson’s using it on a few different areas. The biggest area is financially because students submit a lot of documents for financial aid. So the financial aid office, we really focused on getting up and running right away. And then we branch branched out to COVID vaccination tracking for employees and staff. Hudson wanted to track employees and staff that and received the COVID vaccination and reached out to Trisha for ways to be able to track that and attach it to records to make it easier for everyone, not just submitting it, but having to track it.
And Laserfiche was the first response, one for security purposes and confidentiality for those submitting it, and then ease of use So reached out and we had that up and running in a week and a half and we rolled it out to users, adding the participants emailed them and it went into the repository and got access. And so far it’s been a pretty seamless process with them being able to connect it to people’s records.
Enter the information in colleague and information system and then look up if there are any issues. So it’s been a great resource having that ability for them to submit the vaccination forms and see it in college for human resources. The turnaround on this vaccination form was just incredibly fast from its perspective. I want you to be able to access what you need to from anywhere, and that’s totally possible with Laserfiche
So some of the challenges that Hudson has faced was obviously with the pandemic, the shift to remote workforce and the general use of paper and getting people away from that sort of area and being able to get people to understand how easy it is to use a paperless process so that as everyone returns to campus, we maintain that paperless process and keep moving forward.
Laserfiche is making the school more productive and more efficient, which helps in any departments, so we really appreciate that
In the spring of 2020, in response to COVID-19’s impact on student communities across the country, institutions of higher education were tasked with distributing emergency financial aid grants to students as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (also known as the CARES Act) Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) and Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) Fund. As soon as the team at Texas A&M University-Texarkana was notified of the rescue funds, they gathered a committee to develop an awarding process. This process included collecting applications aligned with the fund’s student eligibility criteria and tracked information for compliance requirements.
“We got a lot of applications; there was so much need,” said Kathy Williams, vice president for student enrollment, engagement and success. “We wanted a fast and fair way to collect applications and distribute the funds, and so we built the application in Laserfiche.”
As a result of the university’s efficient process, Texarkana was the first university in the A&M System to award the funding received from the state of Texas’ allocation of CARES GEER State Grant, at a time when students needed it most. “With Laserfiche, even after diligently triple checking the components, it took me only two to three hours to get the process off the ground,” shared Williams.
Texas A&M University-Texarkana is a public university that is part of the Texas A&M University System. Set in northeast Texas, the four-year college prides itself on its close-knit academic community, and outstanding faculty and staff who provide first-rate education in a nurturing, student-oriented environment. In March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the state, the university made the decision to finish out the spring semester with online classes to protect the health and safety of students, faculty and administration.
The Texarkana team soon found that the impact of the pandemic would go beyond requiring their community to work, teach and learn remotely. Stay-at-home mandates exacerbated students’ financial instability across the country. When the Texarkana team learned they would receive CARES Act funding to distribute to students, they knew they had to move quickly.
“The A&M System office wanted to know our awarding strategy and plan,” Williams said. “So we put together a committee immediately, came up with a plan, sent it to the system office and they got back to us quickly. We jumped right on it.”
The Emergency Aid Grants Awarding Committee identified various potential areas of need, including for books, rent, transportation and more; they also defined parameters for eligibility, and developed a process for verifying student information against the university’s student information system (SIS), Ellucian Banner. Laserfiche Forms enabled them to customize an electronic form that students could access online. Students used the form to select relevant needs categories and eligibility information — such as whether they qualified for Title IV funds — and provide written context around their financial situation if they wanted to when submitting their information. The university also created formulas that determined how much money each eligible student would receive.
Texas A&M University System leadership approved the awarding process, and the university invited, via email, 1,188 eligible students to apply for CARES Act HEERF through the Laserfiche form.
“Students could submit the form, and provide supplemental information if they needed, and it was all saved in our Laserfiche repository,” Williams said. “Student information was easily verified against our student information system. Everyone who applied and qualified was able to get access to funds.”
In addition to being easy to use, the electronic form provided a transparent and accessible way to communicate categories and eligibility with students.
“We wanted to treat everyone equally,” Williams added. “We wanted to make categorization and how much money people would receive clear.”
The A&M System office initially planned for the university to award 30% of the funds in the spring, 20% in the summer and 50% in the fall, however, Williams explained that they received so many applications that they decided to revise that plan.
“After we received all the applications, we told the system office and they knew that these students needed the money now,” Williams said, noting that the university’s electronic form and efficient processing supported its ability to assess needs quickly. “We awarded 50% of the funds in late April/early May, and then 50% in the late September/early October.”
Beyond being a fast and fair way to determine eligibility and distribute funding, Laserfiche provided the Texarkana team with a way to create a secure and efficient process that standardizes and tracks the applications, adding accountability to all activities. Ultimately, the university awarded over $762,000 — its full HEERF student allocation — to 467 students, which is published on the organization’s website for transparency. The university used Laserfiche Forms’ built-in analytics and reporting capabilities to collect the data used for filling out expenditure reports tied to the funds.
“The system office audits different departments from the campuses,” Williams added. “Last year, our financial aid office and the CARES Act process were audited. We got a clear result.” Soon after the first round of CARES Act funding, additional funding from Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSAA), a regents’ grant and the GEER State Grant were made available. Fortunately, the Texarkana team had already built out a Laserfiche form and process for fund distribution.
“We copied the CARES Act application and modified it,” Williams said. “In the fall, we were able to award the money from the A&M System Regents and the state, all through one application.”
With additional funding being made available through the American Rescue Plan, the university will repurpose its Laserfiche form again, while implementing digital transformation initiatives critical to navigating the post-COVID recovery era for higher education.
Texas A&M University-Texarkana was ultimately one of the first schools in the state of Texas to get the GEER State Grant rescue funding out to the students who needed it.
“It was because of our Laserfiche process,” Williams said. “It was really efficient. All the folks on the committee had input into the process, and we were able to help our students without spending, what I envision, probably weeks to create a process.”
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