How Streamlining Accounts Payable Helped a School District Keep the Focus on Students

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.

Acing Accounts Payable Automation

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.”

Graduating with the Cloud

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.

Building a Digital Future District-Wide

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.”

Request a demo to learn more about Smart Invoice Capture and other Laserfiche Cloud features designed to accelerate how business gets done. 

Scaling Growth: Achieve Administrative Excellence through Process Reengineering

UWO’s King’s University College Increases Student Enrolment and Retention, Enables Remote Work Using Laserfiche

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.

One Solution for Digital Document Management, Electronic Forms and Process Automation

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.”
Student studying on tablet pc

Building a Future-Ready Institution

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.”

Quickly Adapting to Change

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.

Planning for the Future

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.”

Looking to digitize student records and paperwork processing at your institution? Schedule your free demo of Laserfiche for colleges and universities. 

Papua New Guinea Department of Education Streamlines Requisition Management to Enhance Transparency and Accountability

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.

Tackling Complex Processes Through Digital Transformation

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.

One Solution with Benefits Organization-Wide

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.

Read more use cases and learn how Laserfiche Forms can enable your organization’s digital transformation with the ebook, “Getting Started with Laserfiche Forms.”

Chinook’s Edge School Division Expands Outdoor Learning Opportunities with Process Automation

A short drive from the Rocky Mountains and some of Canada’s most postcard-worthy national parks sits Chinook’s Edge School Division. The largest rural school division in the province of Alberta, Chinook’s Edge has an established reputation for staff and student wellness, and is on a mission to engage every student in meaningful learning. Although temporarily put on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic, field trips to the mountains and beyond — with opportunities for world-class hiking, outdoor adventures and skiing — are an integral part of achieving that mission.

With 11,000 students and 43 schools in its division, Chinook’s Edge uses Laserfiche to streamline its field trip management processes, maintaining the integrity of its records as well as supporting its risk management for field trips.

School Division Goes Digital to Improve Risk Management

Parents and guardians voiced their frustrations with the overwhelming amount of paperwork required to provide consent every time a student participated in a field trip, which could be more than 10 times a year per child. The forms included a guardian consent form, medical consent form and health consent form — each of which required duplicate information, such as student name, address and guardian name.

For teachers, the internal request forms to create and plan a field trip were long and detailed. All field trip planning was performed manually, generated mountains of paperwork and required school staff to spend hours of time to coordinate a single trip.

Principals and members of the Chinook’s Edge School Division Board of Education were also concerned about legal liabilities due the rugged nature of numerous field trips and potential natural disasters, as well as a lack of conformity in parent sign-off processes. For example, if a form was forgotten, a guardian might write their consent on a napkin and hand it over to the school. Risk management became an increasing concern, exacerbated by skyrocketing insurance costs.

Chinook’s Edge looked to Laserfiche to automate field trip management, streamline approval processes and enhance the integrity of its records. Jeremy Regehr and his team at Inspiris, a Laserfiche solution provider, developed an end-to-end digital solution that would reduce the work required for parents, teachers and administrators while enabling improved transparency and accountability. All guardian and medical consent forms were consolidated into one user-friendly electronic form, which could be pre-filled for subsequent field trips for the same student. The solution was configured to integrate with Rycor, an online payments software, to simplify payment collection and processing, and PowerSchool, a student information system, to ensure student data is automatically updated.

Digital Transformation Expands Staff Capacity and Student Horizons

In the three-month initial rollout of the new field trip management process, more than 150 field trips had been completed — with over 11,000 students and 18,000 parents or guardians. By the end of the first year of implementation, a total of 758 field trips were processed. The digitized solution with Laserfiche produced 10,697 emails, saving 57,000 pieces of paper. With 70 cases of paper saved, Chinook’s Edge reduced 1,750 kilograms of carbon emissions in one school year.

With much of the workload now completed through an automated process, the division can monitor all trips with just three staff members, who are easily able to do so while fulfilling their other daily responsibilities.

“The new Laserfiche field trip program has been a huge asset to us in the school,” said Leanne Stickland, administrative support in finance for Innisfail Middle School. “It’s quick and easy for both the school and parents. And even better, we don’t have boxes of paper to store at the end of the year.”

“It’s just that easy,” added Susan Roy, FOIP coordinator and treasurer.

The time parents and teachers spend preparing for field trips has been reduced dramatically. What was once eight to 10 pages of paper per trip, per student is now completed via an automatically generated email link. The four hours teachers took to prep for each field trip now takes an average of 30 minutes, and what originally took 30 minutes for parents was reduced to just one minute. All in all, teachers across the division saved an estimated 3,250 total hours, equating to at least $100,000 in cost savings.

Centralizing all field trip information helped teachers identify opportunities to diversify outdoor learning experiences, as well as inspire ideas for new field trips. Laserfiche helps provide oversight for members of the Board of Education, and makes it easy for them to see approvals. On top of that, administrators and teachers use Laserfiche to verify whether all legal and logistical requirements are met and that consent forms are collected before students board the buses. If a natural emergency, such as a wildfire, were to occur, all field trip participant information would be available at a moment’s notice, so that all participants could be easily accounted for and safely evacuated.

Inspiris owner, Regehr, reiterates, “The ROI on the process was as close to instantaneous as you can get. The improvements to efficiency for all teachers and administrative staff was apparent the moment we helped roll out the process— and feedback confirmed that. When I heard the principals exclaim they could sleep at night because they understood the reduced liability, it was obvious to me that the process had already paid for itself.”

Making Honor Roll for Saving Time and Money

Even before Chinook’s Edge set out on the adventure to automate its field trip management process, the organization aimed to streamline processes across the division.

“The finance department had a process to collect eight different documents, twice a year from each of our 41 schools. It was a time-consuming task and often required a staff member to search through emails, open attachments, rename and save files,” says Paul Matsune, core services manager for Chinook’s Edge School Division Technology Services department. Now the forms are easily accessible online for staff division-wide.

The provincial government requires that student report cards are uploaded as individual files, with each student’s unique number. With over 11,000 students, this was a time-intensive undertaking to do several times a year. Laserfiche Forms and Quick Fields — a high-volume capture tool that automates document import, classification and indexing — helped save over 1,000 hours a year for administrative support staff on this task alone.

Other daunting administrative tasks for the Chinook’s Edge People Services team of two have nearly been eliminated thanks to Laserfiche, with automated processes created for personal leave, maternity leave and ID card requests, among others. A dashboard was created for payroll and HR to be notified of employee changes. If a coworker is sick, it’s easy for another staff member to see what tasks need to be done.

The centralization of administrative work hasn’t just saved time across the division, it has also made it easier to reallocate funding and minimize overtime worked. Like any organization on a digital transformation journey, Chinook’s Edge School Division is still seeking new ways to nurture efficiency. For instance, its accounts payable department aims to soon begin using Laserfiche to automate processes such as credit card reconciliation and expense claims.

Laserfiche has touched nearly every stakeholder at Chinook’s Edge, including teachers, staff members, students and families, principals and other division leaders. The optimized processes, improved access to information, reduced liability and increased satisfaction of parents all add up to support the school’s vision to help students achieve success as compassionate and innovative global citizens.

Explore more ways to increase staff productivity, automate processes district-wide and efficiently manage student records by visiting Laserfiche for K-12 Schools and Districts.

Jones College Provides One-Stop Student Services with Laserfiche Cloud

In the past year, Jones College began an initiative aimed at improving the student experience by bringing five previously separate departments (financial aid, admissions, records, recruiting and the student success center) under one umbrella. Using Laserfiche Cloud, the college centralized the five teams’ documents and processes, giving staff and students access to forms and information online, and streamlining key student services.

These digital transformation initiatives have enabled Jones College to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and various government mandates, even as the college saw a 15% jump in enrollment during the summer of 2020 over summer 2019

Moving Enrollment Management to the Cloud

Jones College is a public community college in Ellisville, Mississippi, that was established in 1911.

“As a community college, the impact we have in our society is big — we offer high-quality education at a lower price,” said Paul Spell, vice president of enrollment management. “We’ve been here 100 years, and there have been a lot of changes through the years. We have to continue to show value to students and to our community, and to do that we have to think outside the box.”

As part of the organization’s commitment to providing the best possible experience to students, Jones College President Dr. Jesse Smith looked for opportunities for modernization and new efficiencies. In 2018, the college embarked on a mission to bring together five disparate teams — financial aid, admissions, records, recruiting and the student success center — under one department called enrollment management.

“The goal was to have students go to one admissions counselor who can get their paperwork processed and guide students through the enrollment process in a centralized way,” said Spell. Previously, staff and students had to physically walk paperwork across campus to get it to the right people, which was not only inconvenient and time-consuming, but also introduced the risk of information loss. “To centralize the experience, these five departments had to work together as a team, and Laserfiche really enabled that.”

The college turned to Information Consultants, a Laserfiche solution provider, to implement Laserfiche Cloud and help to map out the newly formed enrollment management department’s processes. Information Consultants was able to implement Laserfiche within a week, as a result of the cloud deployment.

“We chose to use Laserfiche Cloud because we wanted less of a hassle managing servers and software here on campus,” Spell explained. “We don’t have a lot of IT people, and we are always looking to be as efficient as possible. On top of that, we want our staff to be able to access documents from the office or home — or anywhere — easily.”

“The enrollment management department really took Laserfiche and ran with it,” added Pierre Smith, workflow specialist at Information Consultants (ICONS). “Jones College and its embrace of digital transformation using Laserfiche Cloud is proof that a 100-year-old institution can continue to innovate, and deliver a modern experience for staff and students.”

New Opportunities for Efficiency

Initially, the enrollment management department implemented Laserfiche as a digital filing cabinet, and began scanning paperwork into the Laserfiche repository. Staff quickly saw, however, that capturing information digitally from the beginning of the process would eliminate the need for paper and open up greater opportunity for transparency, efficiency and ongoing optimization through business process automation. The COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders further highlighted the need to transition to a more digital workplace.

“Everything was put on hold when COVID-19 hit,” Spell said. “When we were able to come back, we realized that paper processes were just inefficient. We decided to have a ‘digital day,’ essentially a deadline for us to go digital with everything. This was all during the pandemic, and we were able to go digital in about a week.”

Spell introduced Laserfiche Forms to the financial aid team. The team’s responsibilities, including managing processes related to grants, fee waivers, scholarships and other financial assistance programs, made it an ideal candidate for transitioning to Laserfiche electronic forms and automated workflows. Within two weeks, the financial aid team had created more than 30 online forms to replace their paper counterparts, including the form to validate students’ tax status, income verification and others needed to qualify for financial aid like FAFSA.

“For financial aid programs, we need to collect and verify a lot of information, which previously was done manually on paper and could take days to weeks,” said Jones College Director of Financial Aid Kari Dedwylder. “Now, students don’t have to come to the office in person. They can access the form they need and get it filled out in less than 10 minutes. We can also leverage electronic signatures which is helpful since a lot of people don’t have a printer, and verifying information electronically is so easy to get done while also meeting the needs of the college, the financial aid organizations and the federal department.”

The college is also working to digitize the graduation application, a long document which students previously had to fill out and physically take around campus for advisors to sign it. Another opportunity for automation is the process of accepting transcripts, which have traditionally come through the mail or brought in by hand. With a new, automated workflow in Laserfiche, the college can automatically email students to tell them whether they have been accepted.

“Communication with our students is huge, and something we’re always looking to enhance,” Spell said. “Through Laserfiche, we can effectively build communication into our processes without having to manually email each student.”

With Laserfiche helping to centralize information and standardize and automate processes, the enrollment management department now offers a more streamlined experience for students. Meanwhile, Laserfiche has improved accountability and trust among the five teams that were merged to form the department.

“Laserfiche not only helped with digitizing our paperwork and processes, but it’s also helped with our teamwork,” Spell said. “Now, we have processes we can see; we have better accountability.”

Spell estimates that the Jones College’s Laserfiche initiative has saved the institution about $30,000 to $40,000 in staff hours, or about three to four months of work for the department. Over the summer, enrollment was up 15% over the summer of the previous year and — during a pandemic and without adding additional staff — the enrollment management department was able to manage the larger workload due to their efforts to streamline processes using Laserfiche.

“When the pandemic hit, we were planning for lower enrollment,” Spell said. “We had transitioned learning to online, and administrative processes were online thanks to Laserfiche. Over the summer, though, enrollment was up while other community colleges have taken double-digit drops. People don’t know what’s going to happen, but the digital processes and automations have taken the burden off of our staff as we navigate these changes.”

Building on a Digital-First Approach for Student Success

The Jones College team continues to look for new opportunities to leverage Laserfiche for business process automation and improved efficiency.

“This is only our first year using Laserfiche, and all I can think about is how much more streamlined we’re going to make these processes,” Dedwylder added. “Right now, we still have some students who are used to the old processes but, being a two-year college, we’ll have new students who will be introduced to the digital forms right away. Our students are going to expect this digital experience.”

Spell already has plans to enhance existing forms with auto-fill functionality so that there is even less manual data entry for students, and to integrate Laserfiche with the college’s other applications including the student information system (SIS). Some future projects that are not student-facing include a Laserfiche form that keeps a log of all of the activities required for student admission, so that admissions counselors can quickly see what a student has completed and what paperwork has been submitted.

“As a community college, the services we offer are incredibly valuable,” Spell said. “Many students are from rural or underserved communities. The main part of our job is people — the technology solutions that can make us more efficient and improve our processes help to keep us focused on that.”

A Quick Shift to Remote Learning

When the COVID-19 outbreak hit the U.S., the team at Linn-Benton Community College sprang into action. To protect the health and safety of students, faculty, staff and community, the college had to get classes online and prepare faculty, staff and students to work, teach and learn remotely. Linn-Benton Community College, which works closely with Laserfiche solution provider CDI, previously used Laserfiche to automate more than 200 processes across campus, but this unprecedented challenge would put the organization’s digital operations to the test.

Using Laserfiche as a key tool for communication and collaboration, the IT team has been working tirelessly to ensure everyone has access to the information, systems and processes necessary to keep business moving at the college, and enable classes for the spring semester to begin remotely April 6.

“Our No. 1 priority is health and safety,” said Michael Quiner, CIO at Linn-Benton Community College. “I know it has been extremely difficult and stressful for everyone, but we can help to protect students, staff and faculty, by having people work from home, and having students learn from home. To be able to use technology to enable that — I think that’s pretty amazing.”

Enabling a Quick Shift to Remote Work and Learning

Linn-Benton Community College serves more than 10,000 students, with almost 600 faculty members, and over 300 staff members. As concerns around the COVID-19 outbreak grew, the college braced for unprecedented change.

“I don’t think anyone’s seen or experienced anything like this before,” said Quiner. “But I believe that the team we have at Linn-Benton Community College is very innovative, and we are used to leveraging technology to enable agility and flexibility.”

On March 19, Oregon Governor Kate Brown issued an executive order to immediately implement measures for significantly reducing in-person operations at Oregon colleges and universities. The order also advised colleges and universities to continue learning and teaching operations, but to shift to remote or online delivery.

The immediate challenge was communication. With staff and faculty working both on- and off-campus, and the situation changing by the day, the college needed to make sure everyone knew where everyone else was, and how to get in touch if needed. The college’s institutional research department quickly created an automated process in Laserfiche that emails everyone employed by Linn-Benton Community College each morning, prompting them to fill out a form to indicate where they were working that day and the best way to get in contact with them. “That information is automatically posted in a web portal so people know how to contact each other,” Quiner said.

Next, to quickly transition everyone to operate remotely, staff needed to request remote access to systems they typically use on campus. “This seems simple, but it’s a big workflow that involves staff who have to install software on people’s machines and staff to provision accounts, and more,” said Quiner. The college again used Laserfiche Forms to enable staff to make these requests digitally, and route them to the relevant parties.

“The main benefit of using Laserfiche has been that we’re able to quickly create an automated process, and have that process save all the necessary documentation, contain all the right information, and be seen by the right people so that we can get these activities done right the first time,” Quiner added.

At the same time the college was managing the enormous shift, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA or Act) was passed, requiring certain employers to provide employees with paid sick leave or expanded family and medical leave for specified reasons related to COVID-19. From the passage of the act to the time when organizations were expected to comply was very short.

A cross-departmental team from human resources and IT quickly tackled the challenge and created a work process which has seven unique forms, six decision points, and 16 process tasks. This was made available to college employees inside of 48 hours.

“Laserfiche allows us to keep the college in compliance during a fast-moving situation while dealing with constantly shifting requirements, interruptions, and urgent priority requests,” Quiner added.

Additionally, Linn-Benton Community College modified an existing Laserfiche Form to track the equipment being loaned out to staff and faculty, and enable people to request other equipment they might need. “Before, we were just using this form for staff to request if they needed something new,” Quiner said. “We adapted the existing form so that we could track loaner equipment, and we can still see what additional or alternative support our staff needs.”

Accelerating Transformation

The rapidly changing COVID-19 situation continues to pose challenges for all organizations that are transitioning employees to work from home, and working to standardize and digitize business processes to enable business continuity.

“While this has been extremely difficult for everyone, Laserfiche is helping make an impossible task possible,” Quiner said of the experience.

And while student, staff and faculty health and safety remains the college’s top priority, Quiner explained that the organization’s digital transformation efforts will continue.

“Transformation is the idea that we can use technology tools to better leverage our staff’s time,” he said. “We’ve only started to transform. There are so many exciting things — for example, robotic process automation — that we’re dipping our toes into, that will take a lot of the repetitive work from our staff so we can concentrate on supporting each other and supporting our students.”

Future plans include automating time sheets, and employee onboarding and offboarding processes. Quiner is also interested in working with other community colleges in the region to share data and collaborate on processes, so that the larger community of educational organizations can build on each other’s success.

“We’re saving a huge amount of our staff’s time — and not just IT staff but college staff, too — by using business process automation, and moving documents to the right location using Laserfiche Forms,” said Quiner. “Tools like business process automation and RPA can help us get away from chasing down forms or responding to emails, and enable our staff and faculty can do what they were hired to do, which is to make better people, better families and better communities through education.”

Download The Ultimate Guide to Business Continuity Planning for tools and strategies to keep your business moving in times of uncertainty.

American University of Beirut Uses Laserfiche to Take Fundraising to New Heights

In January 2017, the American University of Beirut (AUB) launched the most ambitious fundraising campaign in its region’s history. AUB needed to streamline and automate many key business processes, including gift processing and donation management. Using Laserfiche to automate many of the manual tasks involved with receiving gifts and acknowledging donors, the university has made the process faster, more transparent and more efficient, while also helping to keep any confidential information secure.

Supporting BOLDLY AUB

Founded in 1866, the American University of Beirut (AUB) is a private, independent institution of higher education. Lauded as a transformative leader in academia, the university has substantial impact on the region and the world—from its graduates’ contributions to the active research, community outreach and medical care the institution provides. In order to continue attracting top scholarly talent, enhance its current programming, and build and maintain world-class facilities, AUB launched BOLDLY AUB—the university’s largest-ever fundraising campaign—with the goal of raising $650 million in five years.

Along with an influx of donations, AUB also anticipated an influx of the paperwork related to those donations. The university needed a way to efficiently process and track funds, and thank donors, even when the volume increased dramatically.

AUB’s Advancement Services department is responsible for receiving and processing gifts, as well as acknowledging donors. Before implementing Laserfiche, this entire process was manual and paper-driven, requiring multiple photocopies for staff review, and additional copies for a master file. Once gifts were reviewed and approved, the gift processing team would issue an acknowledgement letter to the donor, which also must be reviewed by multiple people before finally being mailed to the donor.

The AUB team knew that the process had to change: Advancement Services receives an average of 5,000 donations per year. The tasks involved with processing each gift and acknowledging their donors could take anywhere from seven to 10 days per donation. At the same time, all of the hard copies required by the paper-based process resulted in the use of around 40,000 pieces of paper per year.

Automating for Efficiency and Achieving New Goals

Using Laserfiche, AUB re-engineered this process by creating a workflow that allowed the university to digitize donation information and automate many of the tasks involved. Now, information about gifts is automatically sent to the relevant reviewers. Managers and their staff are able to track the documents throughout the entire process, increasing accountability.

Additionally, because Laserfiche automatically names and files documents into a repository, staff can more easily locate records when they are needed. Documents are no longer misplaced, and the entire process has been streamlined.

The time needed to process a gift and issue a letter has decreased to just two days. Employees in charge of gift processing now save two to three hours’ worth of manual work, resulting in nearly $30,000 in savings. As a result of implementing Laserfiche, staff members spend less time on manual tasks and have increased the university’s donation processing capacity.

AUB has also reduced paper use by 75 percent, further helping the university reduce costs and its environmental impact.

As a result of the successful workflow automation in the Advancement Services office, other AUB offices have begun using Laserfiche solutions at various levels as the primary content services tool. As the institution continues to digitize and automate processes, it will continue to serve students and further AUB’s mission of providing excellence in education in the Middle East and beyond.

Modernize your campus for student success through secure records management and process automation. Click here to learn more.

How Keller ISD Streamlined Bullying and Harassment Investigations with Laserfiche

Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Joe Griffin, CTO, Clint Mehta, Systems Integration Architect, Dustin Blank, Assistant Superintendent of Student Services, Joseph Baker, Area Director of Student Services and Laura Lockhart, Area Director of Student Services, Keller Independent School District

Keller ISD serves more than 35,000 students across Tarrant County, Texas, and employs more than 4,000 staff members. Like other school districts, Keller ISD must keep students safe and manage bullying and harassment allegations while staying in compliance with federal reporting regulations.

Federal law requires an investigation of bullying and harassment allegations to be completed within 10 business days of its submittal. Keller ISD’s previous manual process made it hard to process incident reports, complete investigations within the time frame, and hold participants accountable

The district has completely streamlined this process using Laserfiche Forms.

Allegation Forms Can Be Submitted Anonymously Online

Allegations can now be reported through an electronic form on the district and campus websites. The form submitter can choose to remain anonymous.
The Allegation reporting form is linked from the district’s website.

If the submitter knows the names of the students involved, he or she can input them into the form. Otherwise, the submitter needs to provide a thorough description of the incident and students in order to help identify them so the incident can be investigated.
The Allegation reporting form is filled out electronically.

Once the form is submitted, it is sent to the principal of the campus on which the incident occurred. The principal can choose to investigate this allegation or delegate it to an assistant principal or other campus administrator. The campus administrator reads through the allegation and, when ready to start the investigation, clicks the Create Investigation button at the bottom of the form.
The campus administrator clicks the Create Investigation button to start the investigation.

This action triggers a Laserfiche Workflow which launches the Investigations Forms process. This process is automatically assigned to the campus administrator and appears in their Forms Inbox as a new task. The campus administrator also receives an email about this task. To make filling out this form easier, the Investigation form has many fields prepopulated with data gathered during the Allegation process.
Workflow launches the Investigations process in Laserfiche Forms.

The Investigation form contains a long checklist of items that need to be completed as part of the investigation. The campus administrator inputs the student ID numbers of any students involved, which prepopulates many of the form fields. If an allegation is submitted verbally or in a method other than the Allegations form, then the campus administrator launches the Investigation form directly and fills out any of the fields related to the initial allegation.

Each incident is assigned a unique allegation incident number in order to make reporting easier.
Bullying and harassment investigations are managed through the Investigation form.

The form walks the campus administrator through the whole investigations process through a series of checklists. There is also a section in the form to describe actions taken in response to the investigation. Some of these actions include, but are not limited to:
  • A separation of the target student and perpetrator student.
  • Appropriate counseling provided to the target student.
  • Additional staff training.
  • Changes in student schedules.

Once the form is submitted, it is routed to the student services department. An employee from that department reviews the information in the form and, if more information is needed, can send it back to the campus administrator.
The Investigation form includes a section for actions taken in response to the investigation findings.

Once the investigation is finalized, the form is submitted and saved in the repository.

Built-In Timers Ensure Process Completion and Federal Compliance

Timers have been built in throughout the process in order to ensure that every investigation is completed within 10 business days, as specified by law. After five days, the campus administrator and student services department are notified that they have reached the halfway point in the process.

Within three days of the allegation submission, both the victim’s and perpetrator’s parents are automatically notified of the ongoing investigation, as per federal reporting regulations.

Administrators can use the Forms Operational Report to track the status of all investigations and make sure that none of them fall through the cracks.
The Operational Report displays the status of all investigations.

Reporting on the Data Helps Administrators See Incident Patterns

Data obtained through the Forms process is also used to create an annual overview report, which breaks down the allegations per campus based on type, location, protected class/group, etc. This report helps each campus identify any trends and leads to ideas on how these incidents can be mitigated.

“We want to address the root cause, not just the outcome. A thorough investigation helps ensure that both the victim and perpetrator get the required help they need. After all, they are bullying or harassing for a reason,” says Laura Lockhart, area director of student services.

An unintended benefit of creating an electronic allegation reporting form and embedding it on the website is that there have been many more incidents reported. In the past, incidents would go unreported because it was difficult to submit an allegation to school administrators. With more data available from which to draw conclusions, the school administrators can get a wider view of the harassment and bullying problems and come up with more effective strategies to address underlying issues.

How Southwestern College Uses Laserfiche Forms for Academic Planning and Scheduling

Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Donna Harrington, CTO, Southwestern College

Located in Santa Fe, NM Southwestern College is a small, private graduate school offering degrees in Counseling, Art Therapy/Counseling and Art Therapy for Clinical Professionals as well as specialty certificates for ongoing professional development. A non-profit school that is one hundred percent dependent on tuition, the college accommodates an average of 200 students each term and graduates around 60 students a year.

Southwestern College is open for classes five days a week all year and rarely closes for holidays, and with only three classrooms, the college registrar faced challenges of needing to maximize facility use while meeting the needs of the students to fulfill all of the classes needed for their degree.

According to CTO, Donna Harrington, “Getting students to their graduation date is like a juggling act of epic proportions. We don’t want a student close to the end of the program find that a class that they need for graduation won’t be available for two years. For very specialized schools like ours, a solution like Laserfiche was the only way to do this accurately with less human capital.”

The college’s former academic planning and scheduling process, which was done using pen and paper and the occasional spreadsheet, was extremely manual and time-consuming. Looking to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the process, the college implemented Laserfiche Forms.

Laserfiche Forms is the Solution

Laserfiche Forms has become the one-stop-shop for managing student course loads and course planning. All of the tasks are performed from a central Menu page.

Each option launches a separate Forms process. Some of the options are tasks such as degree planning or student status change while others are reports such as student list by course and class list by quarter.

The Degree Review by Course Number form works as follows:

  • The director of student services enters the student’s ID number and plan type.
  • The rest of the form is populated with information about the student’s courses with each year having a different tab in the form.

The Degree Review by Course Number form.

Certain form data is populated from a database.

When a student is planning their courses, he or she meets with the director of student services who walks the student through the proposed plan. If the student decides that their course load is too intense during one quarter, then classes are easily removed or added. Sometimes, the student’s plan has to be modified midway through their degree for reasons such as an unexpected leave of absence. This form allows these changes to be made easily.

Reports are generated by looking information up in the Populi student information system. Reports can be filtered by information such as course numbers. Each report can be either saved to Laserfiche or emailed. These reports created allow the director of student services to predict course load for the next academic year. For example, it is possible to see the number of students in part one of a particular course, therefore it’s easier to predict the number of students in part two of that same class next quarter.

Reports are generated from information stored in the student database.

Simplified Planning for Student Success

The Laserfiche Forms solution has transformed the way the college handles planning for the next academic year. In addition to time savings for staff, the college has achieved better support for students and more flexibility to accommodate their needs.

“We can actually predict our course counts for the upcoming academic year based on the planner information that is in the Laserfiche solution. My CFO about fell out of her chair when she could click a button and see with a level of accuracy how much revenue we could expect over the next year so that we can budget. This has changed our lives,” says Harrington.

Information about student enrollment in specific courses is displayed in another form.

Learn more about how Laserfiche electronic forms and process automation drive student success.