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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 What began as an effort to replace outdated software resulted in staff and faculty gaining new digital tools and improving the student experience, including reimagining the college’s One Stop student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.”
Planning digital transformation for your campus operations in line with the American Rescue Plan HEERF grants? Join our education IT leadership panels for inspiration!
Located 10 minutes from Seattle, Mercer Island School District (MISD) has a K-12 student population of approximately 4,500 supported by more than 500 staff members. Committed to putting the student first, the school district prioritizes digital initiatives with the goal of creating the best possible outcomes for students and their families. Most recently, the district implemented Laserfiche Cloud to automate its accounts payable invoice approval processes, streamline records management and build toward long-term digital transformation goals. By doing so, MISD has been able to increase efficiency, reclaiming time to focus on serving students and navigate operational challenges, including those brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Established in 1946, MISD consists of four K-5 elementary schools, one 6-8 middle school and one 9-12 high school, with programs combining academics, cultural expression, and athletic achievement.
“The district is regarded for our innovative approach to providing a holistic, well-rounded education to students in the region,” said Tyrell Bergstrom, executive director of finance and operations at MISD. “Our mission, values and vision are really centered on putting the child first while recognizing opportunities for improvement and advancement. One of our long-term goals as a district was to invest in programs and technology to benefit the students and to strengthen our digital capabilities for years to come.”
Aligning with this vision, MISD embraces digital solutions that increase efficiency, while allowing staff to focus on student needs. Recently, the district identified accounts payable invoice approvals as a time-intensive process that could benefit from digitization and automation. In the legacy process, staff relied on paper documents and email communication to obtain approvals and do follow-up. Matching and assembling the invoices, purchase orders and bills of waiting, and then finalizing payment could take more than a week.
MISD worked with Laserfiche solution provider FreeDoc to implement Smart Invoice Capture, a solution that uses machine learning technology to automatically capture information — from any invoice, in any format — that can be used to automatically populate accounting systems or ERPs.
“The school district wanted to improve invoice AP processing in conjunction with a mature enterprise installation of Laserfiche business process automation. Smart Invoice Capture reduces invoice processing time and improves qualitative processing. This adds up to enterprise savings for the school district,” said FreeDoc ECM Consultant Garrett Frix.
“We implemented Smart Invoice Capture and it was night and day,” Bergstrom said. “Smart Invoice Capture scans our invoices, we validate the information that’s been captured, click send — and it’s on its way. We’ve been seeing turnaround times of within a day.”
The new process has eliminated lost and delayed invoices, which previously required a significant amount of time to track down from one of 2,000 profiles in MISD’s database. Staff have also benefited from Laserfiche’s reporting functions and automatic reminders. Smart Invoice Capture is currently being used in three departments and will soon be rolled out throughout the district this year.
“It’s been a huge shift in our ability to be more nimble and spend less time tracking things down,” Bergstrom said. “It’s improved our level of accountability — we can go into the reporting functions within Laserfiche and see what invoices still need to be approved. It’s giving us the gift of time back.”
The school district as a whole has also benefited from digitization and centralization of records as a result of using Laserfiche Cloud. As a public school district, MISD must comply with recordkeeping requirements and manage public records requests — both of which can be challenging with information stored on paper and disparate systems.
“The centralized repository, the increased accessibility and the benefits of the workflows really highlighted what was missing in our organization,” said Bergstrom, adding that the pandemic further accentuated the importance of ensuring remote access to information and processes. “Our ability to store records and quickly search records is going to speed up our response time, and our ability to implement workflows is going to mean that we’re more accountable and we’re more efficient in what we do.”
At the same time, Laserfiche Cloud aligns with the district’s forward-thinking technology strategy. “We chose Laserfiche Cloud as part of our long-range vision and how we want to develop our infrastructure going forward,” Bergstrom explained. “Cloud-based solutions have replaced a large amount of our on-premises server functions. Our share folders are being transitioned to the Laserfiche Cloud repository as well.”
With plans to decommission their existing servers and migrate files to a cloud-based environment, MISD will be able to reinvest server maintenance and infrastructure costs to other programs that provide more benefit to the students.
MISD has started to identify additional processes to optimize using Laserfiche, including key HR activities from onboarding of new staff members to retirement and resignation. Other processes include a student accident reporting workflow and budget requests. “We want to take as many pen and paper forms and requests circulating throughout the district and migrate them to Laserfiche in order to increase accountability and efficiency as much as possible,” Bergstrom said.
The district’s digital transformation is enabling a more strategic approach to operations and time management, considering how solutions can increase operational efficiency for staff members and improve the experience for students and their families.
“Laserfiche provides our staff with transparency, accountability and efficiency,” said Bergstrom. “Our district’s effort to become more technologically advanced and innovative in our processes is really an effort to help us be more thoughtful about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. And the more efficient we can be in our processes means we can spend our time finding ways to improve the educational environment for our students.”
Colleges and universities have always been at the forefront of imagining change. And King’s University College, an affiliate of Western University Canada, is no exception — having leveraged technology to navigate shifts in learning, culture, technology and student expectations, the college has relied on student success as its guide.
In recent years, the college recognized a need to become more digitally driven to improve collaboration across departments and provide more responsive services to students. Using Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) to digitize student forms and automate business processes in various departments across campus, King’s University College completely changed the way that departments communicate with each other and with students. This digital transformation prioritized student needs over time-intensive paperwork and manual processes. With the increased efficiency, King’s continued to provide excellent service to its applicants while managing a 49% increase in applications. In addition, King’s recruited more qualified students by increasing its admission requirement from 75% to 79%. With the higher average, more students were successful and retention increased over all years.
Founded in 1954, King’s University College prides itself on maintaining internationally recognized academic programming, comprehensive student services and outstanding faculty, all while keeping class sizes small so that students receive the best possible education. In 2011, King’s began to look for a system to digitize student files, giving the departments a better way to manage student information and align the student experience with the world-class education for which the college was known.
With the help of Ricoh Canada, one of the college’s workplace technology solution providers, King’s University College implemented Laserfiche, starting in Enrolment Services.
“The initial idea was to have files stored electronically,” said King’s University College Associate Registrar Tracy Cunningham. “Although our campus is fairly compact, many of the student service departments are spread throughout different buildings. There was a lot of singular paper files moving between one office or another, making it difficult to track down at times.”
More departments — including academic counselling services offered by the Academic Dean’s Office — soon followed, digitizing their student files as well. The electronic access was a boon to King’s efficiency and reduced the risk of lost documents while en route to other buildings or departments. With institutional records newly digitized, staff looked for more ways to deliver a more modern, streamlined experience to students.
After attending the Laserfiche Empower conference, a group of King’s department leaders were inspired to explore the functionality of Laserfiche Forms. With Ricoh’s help, and over the span of just a few months, Enrolment Services was able to replace all paper admissions forms with electronic ones created in Laserfiche, and eliminated manual routing and other repetitive, manual tasks using Laserfiche business process automation.
“Everything is managed electronically in Laserfiche,” said Admissions Coordinator and Liaison Robin Ellis. “Admissions letters are automatically sent out to the student and all documents are archived in Laserfiche. We’re also able to go back and audit the workflows, to see what actions were taken and when. We saw what was possible at the conference, and just kept coming up with more ideas from there.”
“The King’s team has had a clear vision for using digital transformation to enhance the student experience since they began working with Ricoh Canada over five years ago,” said Eric Fletcher, VP of Marketing for Ricoh Canada. “Their initiatives have since gone beyond storage and retrieval, and we have been excited to partner with them to implement innovative electronic forms, online student services and integrations that give King’s students and employees access to the data and processes they need to be successful.”
Since COVID-19 forced many organizations to shift to remote work, King’s has found further value in Laserfiche beyond improved efficiency.
“We ended up exceeding our enrolment goal this year, and I honestly don’t know how we could have managed admissions through a pandemic — with everyone working from home — without Laserfiche,” said Ellis. “We couldn’t have timed it better. The admissions form went live this year, and we were able to use it for this fall semester.”
“In March, our whole world changed — we were at the peak of our admissions cycle when we suddenly had to do everything online,” added Cunningham. “Fortunately, we put our summer academic orientation — which all our first years go through — online. We created one-on-one course counselling sessions allowing new-to-King’s students the opportunity to meet with a counsellor and follow along on a Laserfiche form as we went through it with them. Copies were automatically emailed to students and routed to their folders. Having all these Laserfiche processes in place helped us provide a user-friendly experience for students. The feedback of students was excellent. Our personal approach online was supported by the Laserfiche form as well as the fast delivery of their registration and timetable documents.”
King’s benefited from having implemented digital solutions for admissions before the pandemic hit, however, staff continue to find new uses for Laserfiche even as employees continue to work from home, and faculty and students have transitioned to remote learning.
For example, Information Technology Services (ITS) used a Laserfiche form to securely distribute account information for a recently rolled out VoIP-based phone system, to avoid having to email individual passwords to staff. In addition, the ITS team was also able to quickly deploy a form that gave instructors a central place to sign up for webinars on pedagogy and curriculum when professors were faced with moving their courses online within days as a result of COVID. Pulling from the college’s authentication system, users are verified before they get access to these forms.
“Being able to authenticate makes a big difference that has saved ITS a lot of time,” said Systems Analyst Sheldon Lopes.
Other student-facing processes that have been transformed by Ricoh and Laserfiche include scholarship applications, which previously required students to conduct research scattered in different databases and submit duplicate paperwork if they wanted to apply for multiple scholarships. Today, an integration with Western University’s PeopleSoft ERP system enables the enrollment management team to manage the flow of information and pre-populate Laserfiche Forms with existing student data. The form creates a centralized experience for students to search scholarships by keyword, returning the scholarships for which the student is qualified. If the same information or documentation is required for multiple scholarships, the student only needs to enter or upload it once, and it is routed to the relevant scholarship applications. Once a decision is made on the scholarship, the integration enables an immediate update to the student’s information in PeopleSoft.
“This form is phenomenal, and really easy for students and staff,” said Ellis. “Laserfiche automatically sends scholarship information to the student finance office, and students can be automatically emailed if they receive a scholarship. It’s been a win-win for everyone.” With the new scholarship form, the number of student applications skyrocketed. In the past, King’s had difficulty having students apply. With this new success, King’s will look to Laserfiche to find more ways to automate the process.
Leveraging the Ricoh team’s knowledge and experience with Laserfiche has made a significant impact in how students interact with King’s, which may be most evident in the academic counseling department.
“We had students emailing our team with academic questions — and oftentimes they would email many members of our team with the same question,” said Academic Data and Operations Coordinator Thomas Gray. “As a result, response times were slow and inquiries were difficult to track.”
The academic counseling team worked with Ricoh Canada to develop an inquiry submission form in Laserfiche. Now, students submit the form with their question and it is automatically triaged to a specific team member based on student information in King’s student database that is automatically populated in Laserfiche Forms.
“This enabled us to manage the workload and improve our student service,” Gray added. “King’s also has students from across Canada and around the world. We found that international students can connect to us and communicate seamlessly through Laserfiche Forms.”
The academic counseling department also collected and analyzed process information and reporting dashboards created using Laserfiche Forms to inform decision making. They were able to identify certain inquiries as more common than others, enabling them to better allocate resources toward responding to those inquiries. The team also noticed the times during which students preferred to contact them, and as such adjusted the department’s hours to better accommodate student schedules. The impact of insuring that inquiries are only received once, and immediately are directed to the right person was huge. The change in office hours was applauded publicly by the King’s University College Student Council as a result of the students’ appreciation.
King’s use of Laserfiche and Ricoh team support has facilitated a campus-wide digital transformation, which aims to enable King’s to adapt and respond to change, facilitate ongoing improvement and maintain the flow of communication.
“Digital transformation is letting people break down the digital siloes that they didn’t know existed. We know that we have one true data source, and we can truly share information. We’ve seen a reduction in error rates that comes with data entry, and don’t have to worry about what information is the most updated.”
—Manager of Infrastructure and Digital Pedagogies David Thuss.
“It helps us communicate as a campus in real time,” added Cunningham. “Laserfiche has helped us function faster, more collaboratively, and has positively affected our student retention.”
Since 2012, King’s has increased its applications, its admissions average and its student retention. The shining achievement is an increase of 15% in student enrolment this year in the midst of a pandemic. With the majority of universities in the region seeing a decrease in enrolment and many smaller institutions (like King’s) facing financial difficulties including deficits and staff reductions, King’s has been able to achieve significant milestones through its Laserfiche initiatives, Ricoh partnership and digital transformation efforts.
“We are constantly looking to support students in a way that’s more efficient so we can focus on program planning or retention work,” said Gray. “We can use our time more wisely, and do more meaningful work. This meaningful work creates an enriching experience for all of our community-students, staff and faculty.”
The Papua New Guinea Department of Education (DOE) created a completely digital Requisition Task Management System using Laserfiche Forms. Modernizing the formerly paper- and manual task-driven process was a significant step in the department’s digital transformation journey, which expedited purchase requisitions and shortened the time it took to get approval to purchase essential supplies, services and resources for the department.
“As we are such a large organization, processing claims and funding requests was formerly a highly manual and time-consuming process,” said Papua New Guinea DOE Assistant Secretary Thomas Podarua. “Laserfiche is a valuable technological tool, helping us take control and streamline our many business processes so that we can dedicate more resources to addressing the education needs of the nation.”
Since implementing Laserfiche, the DOE continues to digitize and automate additional business processes, reclaiming time for staff to focus on the department’s mission of improving the quality and participation in the educational system at a national and local level.
The DOE initially implemented Laserfiche in 2019 as its primary document management system. As the organization looked to modernize core business processes, DOE information communication technology and procurement staff learned that Laserfiche Forms could help streamline and simplify some of the DOE’s most complex business processes, starting with purchase requisitions.
Prior to implementing Laserfiche, purchase requisition applications were paper forms passed between department heads to higher officials for review. Covering a wide range of parameters and categories, these forms served the entire organization, reaching the highest authority of the DOE for final approval and sanctioning of funding claims. The approval process often took several months and could take up to a year due to a dependence on paper and manual tasks. Additionally, the risk of the paper forms getting misplaced or incorrectly filed was high, and individual requisitions were impossible to track with very little capacity for follow-up by the original requesting officers.
The DOE worked with its Laserfiche solution provider, Digitec ICT, to develop the new Requisition Task Management System with the goal of digitizing and automating requests submitted from various organizational units.
“This was a very complicated business process involving a number of claims categories, with a different workflow for each one,” said Podarua. “We needed a single system that was granular enough to handle these complexities for the entire organization on the front end and back end.”
All employees can now submit purchase requisition applications through a Laserfiche electronic form. Once submitted, requests are automatically routed to the relevant business unit based on variables such as different claims categories. Requisition applications are reviewed, approved or rejected by the relevant personnel, and all documentation is managed in the Laserfiche repository.
The DOE took its digitization efforts further by automating the correspondence request process with Laserfiche Forms. Previously, correspondence requests often took months to complete and were difficult to monitor, requiring a substantial amount of paper. A dedicated Laserfiche Forms process captures a wide range of details related to correspondence, including relevant dates, responses and personnel involved, to optimize how each case is monitored and tracked, sending automated notifications to project managers upon completion of every major task. Checks for approved claims are also issued through a dedicated Laserfiche Form, creating an end-to-end request and approval solution for the department’s needs.
Since deploying the new Requisition Task Management System, the DOE has taken a major step in its digital transformation journey. In addition to modernizing the experience for staff who no longer need to complete and submit applications on paper, the DOE improved accountability: Deadlines are assigned to each task, and the original requester can now monitor the status of their requisition application. The DOE built on the success of its first Laserfiche Forms process by digitizing correspondence requests, and now issuing checks for approved claims through Laserfiche. Instead of taking months to resolve, correspondence requests can now be processed within two weeks.
The DOE’s Requisition Task Management System also generates automated reports that the DOE can use to evaluate the progress of tasks between departments, identify bottlenecks and make strategic decisions about process tasks and resources. The organization is developing automated business processes using Laserfiche to streamline and manage school registration, query management for instructors and for duty travel requests.
“Digital transformation is especially important for organizations in the education sector which often face underfunding and understaffing obstacles,” said Nirmal Singh, CEO of Digitec ICT. “The ease of implementation and flexibility of the Laserfiche system really helps streamline costs and productivity while supporting the broad educational efforts of the DOE.”
The DOE continues to optimize its processes and find new areas for digital transformation. To date, the organization has significantly reduced the turnaround time for requisition tasks, with most requests processed within a month. This has enhanced interdepartmental collaboration, improved project management organization-wide and saved valuable time and resources, which the DOE can redirect toward its commitment to improving the quality and delivery of education throughout Papua New Guinea.
