New Caney Independent School District’s District-Wide Digital Transformation of Student and Employee Records

New Caney Independent School District, located in the Houston metropolitan area, manages over 15,000 students across 18 schools and facilities. With a growth rate of 7% per year, the district’s enrollment and hiring began rapidly expanding—along with its student records archives, and process and compliance challenges.

When Superintendent Kenn Franklin joined the district, his vision for paperless processes began a five-year plan to completely digitize the district’s records and operations. After receiving a Laserfiche demonstration, New Caney ISD was convinced it could realize this vision through the solution’s robust search, electronic forms and workflow automation.

“Laserfiche is one system with endless capabilities,” said Tammy Yarbrough, records management officer at New Caney Independent School District. “The solution’s user-friendly implementation enabled our small records team to create a searchable, secure database quickly—without investing significant time and resources into learning and training on the system.”

Creating More Efficient Employee Contracts

The district’s initial goal for using Laserfiche centered around updating its HR contract processes. Using Laserfiche Forms, Yarbrough’s team digitized the creation, review and approval of employee contracts, as well as other HR documents like incident reporting, performance evaluations and salary placements. The initiative was a quick win that solidified Laserfiche’s position as a core software system for the district’s administrative operations.

“The deputy superintendent was amazed at the system’s capabilities,” Yarbrough says. “At a meeting about a district issue, he looked at my boss and said, ‘I don’t know what you need to do, but you need to make this ‘Fiche-y.’ We then created a process to help analyze and review the data.”

Digitizing Student Folders Simplifies Compliance

Before Laserfiche, the district lacked a uniform approach to file management. To remedy this, the district digitized over 17,000 cumulative student folders and created electronic folders organized by campus, grade level and student document categories and types.

For both new and archived records, Laserfiche can automatically apply document security by document type and employee role, giving New Caney the ability to assign and track nuanced levels of record access across the district. Additionally, records retention schedules help enable administrators to ensure that student files are destroyed at the right time and help enforce proper compliance throughout the records’ lifecycle.

Yarbrough’s team now uses Laserfiche Forms to build solutions for every student and staff need. Administrators, teachers and staff can also quickly upload documents including new report cards, health forms, attendance notes, athletics physicals and more into the digital student folder. The result is a more accurate, holistic student file that can be accessed on-demand through a web portal.

“With Laserfiche, we will never have lost files,” Yarbrough emphasizes.

Expediting Student Enrollment and Record Transfer

By digitizing student files and forms, the district drastically improved the student enrollment process for both parents and staff. Parents now complete enrollment forms online in the district’s student information system, Skyward, and Laserfiche Workflow automatically files them in the relevant folders in the repository. For returning students, a database lookup populates the students’ information from the previous school year—reducing the number of forms that students and parents have to complete and lessening the document management burden on administrators.

Total enrollment processing time has been reduced by 75%. Additionally, all enrollment forms are available district-wide within 24 hours of submission. Beyond these benefits, the district’s student data is more accurate since Laserfiche eliminated much of the manual data entry and folder creation.

Because all student records are digital, file transfers with other school districts are also expedited. Instead of copying and mailing or scanning an entire paper folder, New Caney ISD created a Laserfiche Form that automatically exports student folders and uploads the files to the Texas Records Exchange, a state-run system for school registrars to electronically request and receive records for students attending Texas public schools. Thousands of pages are transferred seamlessly in just a few minutes.

Benefits
  • The district digitized more than 370,000 HR records, and over 2 million student records and enrollment processes without IT expertise.
  • The district saved over $330,000 by choosing to implement Laserfiche instead of outsourcing records scanning and storage.
  • Student enrollment processing, which formerly took two hours per student, now takes less than 30 minutes, and all forms are available for teachers, counselors and registrars district-wide within 24 hours.
  • Transferring student files from the district’s registrar to state education agencies and other school districts now takes just two minutes instead of 45.
  • Laserfiche has helped the district’s compliance with FERPA and HIPAA regulations, and enabled the district to control and track records access using granular records security.
  • Records retention schedules enable administrators to ensure that files are destroyed on time.
  • Teachers and administrators can now access records from anywhere with an internet connection, rather than being required to physically retrieve documents from a records warehouse.

The success of the initial Laserfiche implementation has led to rapid adoption across all the district’s administrative units. The records team is currently working through a three-month backlog of Laserfiche project requests.

“When others see what Laserfiche can do, they want more,” Yarbrough says. “We can provide administrators with immediate solutions to district issues, like employee onboarding, class coding, and enrollment and implement solutions in a matter of days by using forms and document management. When they ask for something, we can drop everything and can fix it quickly with Laserfiche.”

City University, Hong Kong

City University of Hong Kong created a shared services platform for human resources and finance using Laserfiche.

St. Paul’s College, South Australia

Laserfiche helps St Paul’s College automate various student services, saving staff hundreds of hours per year to better focus on value-added activities for students.

My name is Neville Atkinson. I’m the Business Manager at St. Paul’s College. My main responsibility is the financial oversight of the college.

My name’s Ann Haywood and I’m the Assistant Business Manager at St. Paul’s College.

St. Paul’s College is a Reception to Year 12 Catholic boys’ school in the Edmund Rice tradition. We’re part of a Catholic network across Australia of 5,000 staff and we employ around 80 staff here at our College.

What motivates me to come to work every day is the opportunity to help both staff and students access private education when they may not normally be able to afford that. The key bottleneck that we face is the management of any collection of data.

With the introduction of the Royal Commission in Australia, a lot of our student records and staff records need to be kept forever, so previously our system was paper-based and we needed a new platform to be able to retrieve the information in a timely manner.

I first realized that Laserfiche was a good solution for our organization when we began some training, and that was generally because we began to see the potential that the software product had and how we could apply in our situation.

Some of our expectations and goals for Laserfiche were the storage management and retrieval of large amounts of information that we used to hold in paper files. We were also trying to achieve easy searchability and retrieval for those documents.

The other key things that we use Laserfiche for is electronic forms. We’ve automated a number of our forms which means that our staff are able to access those anytime, anywhere and we’ve got a consistent process.

The feedback we’ve had from users about the system that it’s easy to use, the searchability obviously is a great function, and just to have things at their fingertips has been fantastic.

The Laserfiche project has delivered a number of good return on investment outcomes, one of the key ones is that all of our data that we got from our parents used to be keyed in manually and we’ve now been able to automate that process. We estimate that saved us over 200 days of input from our staff.

I see our organization using Laserfiche in the future with integration with our current software product, as well as online forms and the implementation of accounts payable.

Yeah, we’re really excited about the opportunities of using Laserfiche going forward. We’re continuing looking at our systems and processes and we’re hoping by the middle of next year we’ll have all of our documents digitized.

Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District

The school district used Laserfiche to process payroll without any delays during Hurricane Harvey, when employees needed it most.

Learning ARTS

Dedicated to the care of children with autism, Learning ARTS shares data about patients with their parents and behavior specialists in real-time to enhance care and programming, thanks to Laserfiche.

Oakwood University Centralizes Data and Streamlines Processes to Improve Student Outcomes

Oakwood University transformed student services by replacing its legacy document imaging system with Laserfiche to increase efficiency, reduce paper use and eliminate ineffective manual processes. By automating rudimentary processes with Laserfiche, the university has reclaimed staff and student time and redirected it toward student success.

Adopting a Culture of Automation on Campus

Oakwood University is a private, historically black university located in Huntsville, Alabama. The university, which services nearly 1,800 students, aims to provide the kind of education that will prepare students for the workplace. In order to achieve its mission, the university made it a priority to adopt a culture of automation to meet the expectations of today’s tech-savvy students.

“One of the strategic goals that the Oakwood University leadership team has been working toward is developing a culture of automation on campus,” says Oakwood University interim CIO Anthony Walker. “We are actively working to update manual, paper-driven processes. These updates will enable us to operate as efficiently as possible, ensuring the best possible experience for current and prospective students.”

In order to transform into a modern campus, Oakwood University assessed its technology and determined that it would need to replace a legacy document imaging system since it lacked the ability to automate processes. The university then turned to Laserfiche to improve efficiency, reduce paper use and eliminate ineffective manual processes.

Streamlining the Graduations Clearance Process

One of the first processes automated with Laserfiche was the graduation clearance process. Like many universities, in order to graduate from Oakwood, students need to obtain graduation clearance. This involves obtaining signatures from their advisor, the registrar and other university staff which previously took months. Students had to carry a paper form to multiple locations around campus to obtain all the necessary signatures. Students would have to start this process months in advance in order to graduate on time.

By redesigning the process using Laserfiche Forms instead of paper forms, Oakwood University reduced processing time from months to just a few weeks and increased transparency throughout the entire process. Additional benefits include:
  • If the students are not cleared, they are notified more quickly so that they have time to take remedial measures and graduate on time.
  • Advisors are not tied to their desks in order to review requests; they have the ability to do everything from mobile devices.
  • Students are notified throughout the entire process, eliminating trips and phone calls to the registrar’s office to confirm the status of requests.

Servicing Students at the Highest Level

Since adopting Laserfiche, Oakwood University has capitalized on an automated approach to student services.

“By leveraging process automation, the university has automated rudimentary tasks, allowing staff members to serve students in a quicker and more efficient manner,” Walker explains.

Some of the student-facing processes that have been enhanced through automation include:
  • General change form: Student requests including those relating to graduation and transcript changes can be submitted online, automatically routed to both administrators and students for review and approval, and filed in a standardized student record structure.
  • Photo ID importing: All new and updated student and employee photos are easily imported into Laserfiche from an external database, enabling seamless sharing of photos across departments.
  • Transcript request and review: Students request transcripts online, and administrators can easily send documents using workflows that automatically handle PDF creation.
  • Grant management: Staff use Laserfiche to increase communication and awareness of available grants, and coordinate the process of gathering required materials for grant applications.

“Oakwood University now has a holistic view of each student’s academic history, allowing professors to create a plan of action based on data if a student starts to fall behind,” says Walker. “This is a critical component in ensuring student success.”

In addition, Oakwood University also provides an opportunity for students to become gold certified in the Laserfiche technology. This training—that would typically cost thousands of dollars for future employers—give students a leg-up in the competitive job market, as well as higher paid work opportunities on campus to support the Laserfiche system.

“Not only is Laserfiche enabling us to provide personalized support and guidance for each individual student, but it’s also allowing us to help students achieve tangible, professional success,” says Walker. “Our mission is to prepare students for their professional future, and Laserfiche is helping us achieve this.”

Lebanese American University Shines with On-Demand Student Services

Lebanese American University (LAU) is an accredited American university operating in the Middle East with two main campuses in Beirut and Byblos, hospital facilities and an academic center in New York. The university consists of seven major schools and 800 faculty and staff serving approximately 10,000 students each year.

To maintain LAU’s status as a leading institution, the organization’s leadership is always looking for new ways to align its administrative services with student preferences, and reduce bottlenecks during busy enrollment and graduation periods.

Forming Digital-First Academic Services

“Students these days are digital natives, and they like to transact with us on their preferred devices, which are their phones,” says Camille Abou-Nasr, Assistant Vice President for Information Technology at LAU. “We needed really to automate all the processes that students carry out with the Registrar’s Office, and to do it in a manner that is plausible and really encourages them to do these kinds of transactions with us.”

Starting with the Admissions and Registrar’s Offices, the university used Laserfiche Forms to provide students with online access to transcripts and academic records. With on-demand digital access, academic advisors across student enrollment, recruitment, advising, student retention, outreach and student aid programs can now immediately review, approve or follow up with students in days instead of weeks.

Moving Towards Campus-Wide Mobility

Due to Laserfiche’s ease of use and open integrative capabilities with core systems like Banner and SharePoint, the university quickly expanded its initial mobile forms solution to other campus departments such as Student Development, Legal and Facilities Management. With a campus-wide solution, the university can truly enable students to submit any academic or administrative form online and get their results quickly.

Mobility has also benefited busy executives in the Facilities Management department, who oversee the numerous campus facilities. They can now use iPads to access and approve budget allocations in Laserfiche while traveling abroad.

“There is one platform where you can do document management, you can do forms, and you can do business process automation,” said Abou-Nasr. “It’s scalable.”

Benefits:
  • Student services, such as course petitions and transcript requests, can be initiated by students at any time via online forms.
  • Students receive immediate updates on their requests from advisors and can track the progress of submitted forms and requests at every step of the review process.
  • The university has greatly reduced the amount and cost of paper storage.

“Through mobility and document management, we were able to achieve our goal to go green, to make our services more accessible and deliver our services in a faster manner,” says Abou-Nasr.

Click here to learn more about using Laserfiche to enhance student services.

Linn-Benton Community College Enhances Student Experience with Streamlined Transcript Evaluations

With over 22,000 students, Linn-Benton Community College is one of the largest community college systems in Oregon.

A growing student population placed increased demands on the college’s Enrollment Services division, which processes around 15,000 applications each year. In order to keep up with the demand, the college needed to expedite transcript review and find an efficient way to inform students about their course options and graduation goals.

Identifying Areas for Efficiency

“Before Laserfiche, it took us about six to eight weeks to complete a transcript evaluation,” says Amy Sikora, Assistant Director of Enrollment Services. “We would get transcripts in from the students, and then they would just sit there unless the student filled out an online request form asking us to evaluate them.

“We had students calling us all the time asking if we received their transcript or if we evaluated their transcript,” Sikora adds. “It was a really clunky process.”

Driving Digital Student Services

The college worked with Laserfiche solution provider CDI to implement a Laserfiche solution for an online transcript evaluation service that:
  • Allows students to instantly upload transcripts and request an evaluation
  • Automatically assigns transcripts to a reviewer
  • Instantly cross-references transcripts with the college’s Banner system
  • Analyzes and automatically emails enrollment criteria to students with further instructions and outcomes

By applying this process to class petitions, transfer credits, course refunds and more, staff can stay in constant communication with students about their options.

“Students are communicated with every step of the way, which is great because it saves us a ton of phone calls,” says Sikora. “Staff like it because it just does everything for them. It helps in many different ways—for students going into special admissions programs, and even bypassing placement testing can be really beneficial for students.”

Benefits include:
  • Students can instantly submit and request transcript reviews online and receive personalized instructions on next steps
  • Average time to review transcripts has been shortened from six weeks to a single week
  • Staff workloads can be reconfigured in real time based on transcript volume and document types

“The goals were to reduce the time that it takes to evaluate transcripts, keep everybody notified and just have the process flow better,” said Sikora. “Laserfiche solved all those things for us.”

St. Louis Public School District Streamlines HR Management

As one of the largest urban school districts in Missouri, the St. Louis Public School District oversees 70 schools and 4,700 employees. For the district’s HR office, transparency and quick communication between hiring and budgeting teams is critical for efficiently allocating staffing resources to classrooms throughout the year.

Reducing the Paper Burden

The district maintains over 4.5 million documents dating back to the early 1900s. To find files, staff previously had travel to a storage facility 10 miles away. This paper-intensive search and retrieval could often delay hiring decisions that require multi-department reviews.

“If the request for a new position involved funds outside of what the district was allocated, the information could really go a million different places,” says Clarissa Buckley, Coordinator for Human Resources Information Systems. “We had almost eight levels of approval built into the previous process that made having a paper form extremely difficult and cumbersome. And we never want to reach a point where we’re asking, ‘Do we let this classroom go without a teacher because we’re waiting on this paper form to get approved?’ ”

Streamlining Staff Requisitions

The district began using Laserfiche to digitally organize its archived and active paper storage, and quickly moved on to automate new hiring, benefits enrollment and other core HR services.

Staff requisitions are now completed in hours, with all involved parties able to share information and collaborate on decisions. “Laserfiche helps everyone stay on track,” Buckley says. “We can always see and monitor where our requisitions are caught up in the process.” Instant information access also means the HR department can better service teachers and staff with timely W2s, emergency information, student transcripts and more.

Benefits include:
  • 80 percent of the district’s HR active records and historical archives have been digitized
  • HR documents are instantly accessible, where previously staff needed to wait 48 hours to retrieve a file from a storage facility
  • Staffing requisitions are completed in three hours instead of three weeks

“Our teachers are beginning to see when they bring other records to us, not only are we able to receive that information and quickly digitize it, but we’re also able to retrieve it for them if needed in the future,” Buckley says.

Texas A&M University System: Shared Services for Increased Efficiency

Texas A&M University System is one of the largest university systems in the United States. Coordinating, managing and archiving documentation is an intensive task for such an organization—yet the university system has found an efficient way by offering Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) as a shared service through its central IT office.

One of the university system’s members, Texas A&M AgriLife, adopted Laserfiche in 2008. Texas A&M Health Science Center (TAMHSC) followed shortly after. While the individual deployments cut paper-related costs, saved filing cabinet space and secured content in repositories, the university system as a whole was not leveraging those benefits across the entire institution.

Texas A&M University System’s central IT office was determined to break down silos through implementing a shared services model, so that all schools and departments could efficiently leverage ECM knowledge and resources, and eliminate the need for individual departments or schools to purchase their own software.
Texas A&M Health Science Center adopted Laserfiche ECM in 2008 to streamline contract management.

Implementing a Shared Service

While individual schools and departments within Texas A&M University System had implemented Laserfiche for various reasons (AgriLife sought secure storage for records after enduring a flood, fire, collapsed roof and hurricane; TAMHSC wanted to combat costly contract management inefficiencies and eliminate file cabinets), users experienced similar benefits: increased efficiency and accuracy, improved records management, reduced costs and business continuity.

Texas A&M University System’s procurement office provides shared services so that schools and departments can share documents, file structures and workflows, building on each other’s efforts. Shared services also consolidate IT functions from several system members to one location, reducing costs and time spent on maintenance.

To that end, in 2010 a committee selected Laserfiche as the preferred vendor for a new shared ECM system to avoid hardware and software purchases at the department level, reduce costs by eliminating redundant systems and make it easier to share data, file structures and workflows between schools and departments.

“By providing a feature-rich implementation at an affordable price point, Texas A&M is able to make available economies of scale and document sharing that individual departments could not approach by themselves,” explains Judith Lewis, Senior IT Manager at Texas A&M. “This is value delivery at its best.”

In addition to accomplishing the original goals, the shared system provides:
  • Consistent framework to support compliance
  • Risk mitigation through disaster recovery capabilities
  • Ability for different departments and system members to leverage the cumulative accomplishments of their colleagues
  • Internal and remote access to electronic documents
  • Reduced printing and physical paperwork, minimizing requirements for physical file space

Two other campus-wide communities in addition to central IT are intimately involved with the Laserfiche shared services offering: a steering committee of senior management representatives who evaluate and promote best practices and appropriate conventions for Laserfiche; and a user community of practice that provides input and training for the end-user community.

Other customers of Laserfiche shared services include the Texas A&M University Office of the President, Prairie View A&M University and Texas A&M University – Kingsville.

Laserfiche automatically classifies reports and their contents, facilitating easy file management and the ability to search through keywords to retrieve information. Account processing and purchase processing are faster and records management is more efficient and secure, allowing Texas A&M to adhere more closely to state compliance requirements and institutional procedures.

“In addition to the Laserfiche talent, our IT department brings a broad skill base to support a shared services offering,” Lewis adds. “From application development and administration, risk and policy assessment and project management to networking and infrastructure services, our IT department is able to provide the level of support that an enterprise shared service demands.”

Interested in learning more about how higher education institutions use a single ECM system to manage information across multiple administrative departments? Click here to download a free strategy paper from the Center for Digital Education, “Adopting Enterprise Content Management with Shared Services.”