How College of the Desert Modernized Student Forms to Reduce Application Processing Time by 40%

Enhancing Student Success by Digitizing Enrollment and Financial Aid Forms

College of the Desert in Palm Desert is one of the 112 institutions in the community college system of California. With an enrollment of 13,000 students, as many as 20,000 to 30,000 documents are processed annually at the college. Using a paper-based application and filing system, the college was servicing a high volume of commuter students with inconvenient and inconsistent enrollment processes.

“With paper forms, students had to travel up to three hours to submit documents or complete their student files,” says Dr. Annebelle Nery, Executive Dean, Enrollment Services. “Student lines at the counter were very long. Once students got to the front of the line, they were extremely frustrated because we’d either lost their documents or the documents were stuck in processing—but where exactly, we weren’t sure.

Information requests were funneled through as many as five departments in order to compile a complete and accurate student file. Records systems were siloed from the college’s student information system (SIS), and staff members had to search multiple locations to find a complete student file.

Standardizing Records Access Across Campus

To improve operational efficiency, the college  replaced 20 different paper forms with Laserfiche electronic forms that are instantly accessible through a student’s online portal.

Students can now view, complete, sign and submit degree applications, change of major requests and other student forms all from one online portal. Once a form is submitted, Laserfiche automatically:
  • Routes it to required employees and departments for processing.
  • Emails status updates to the student throughout the review process.
  • Attaches documents to the corresponding student file in the SIS.
Associating metadata fields with electronic forms track the exact status of each application at every step of records processing.

Today, every student form at College of the Desert is received electronically through Laserfiche. The college also automated more than 50 business processes, including:
  • Petitions
  • Concurrent enrollment
  • Enrollment verification
  • Name change
  • Request to add a class
  • Information releases

All departments now access and use a centrally managed document management system, reducing overall costs for maintenance and IT support. Staff members aren’t just sharing information more efficiently with students—they’re collaborating across departments to reduce excessive paper volume and needless filing efforts.

Improving Student Satisfaction and Accreditation with Document Management Software

With Laserfiche, the admissions and records and financial services departments now require 40% less time to process applications and petitions. Inquiries from students and lines at the service counters have decreased significantly now that students receive email notifications about their applications.

“The frustrated phone calls from students are down and now we’re getting calls from other departments that want to use Laserfiche,” says Dr. Nery.

These improvements have not gone unnoticed:
  • The college met accreditation standards by being able to offer its main campus services to extension centers and online students.
  • Student satisfaction levels have risen sharply and even the Board of Trustees has complimented the college on its Laserfiche initiative.
  • Recently, the college received the Models of Efficiency Award from University Business Magazine, which recognizes institutions with business savvy and technological expertise.

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

University of Ha’il

University of Ha’il (UoH) was established in 2005 and continues to grow rapidly. A distinguished university in northern Saudi Arabia, UoH’s enrolment has grown to approximately 40,000 students across six campuses located in Ha’il city. The university strives to use technology and innovation to achieve change and success.

“In 2012, the university had minimal e-services implemented,” says Dr. Majed Alhaisoni, the Dean of IT and e-learning, University of Ha’il. “Within a year’s time, we had won multiple awards for our university’s e-initiatives and paperless campus. A large part of our success is due to Laserfiche.”

UoH Chooses ECM over DMS

UoH’s IT department had a strong vision of what it wanted to accomplish. It needed more than just a document management system (DMS) that would store digital documents; it needed a full-featured enterprise content management (ECM) solution that would enable complex digitisation via workflow automation.

After extensive research, UoH chose Laserfiche as its ECM solution. “Laserfiche Workflow was what really stood out for us,” explains Dr. Alhaisoni. “Laserfiche Workflow is robust, efficient, scalable and resilient. It allows us to easily customise document-driven workflows to meet the needs of our university.”

Automating Inter-Departmental Communication

Official communications and the dissemination of information between UoH’s multiple campuses and departments must be done through written and signed letters. Automating this paper-intensive letter system was one of the first projects Dr. Alhaisoni and his team tackled. With Laserfiche Workflow, UoH was able to set up a sophisticated workflow system that automated and digitised this process for more than 97 departments on four campuses.

Because letters could be circulated to as many as 20 different departments, Dr. Alhaisoni notes that “there was a high probability of losing documents when everything was paper based. We lacked transparency and efficiency. It was hard to keep track of the status of letters, whether or not they were being reviewed or if they’d been approved.”

Before implementing Laserfiche, Dr. Alhaisoni worried that designing a workflow system to meet all of UoH’s technical needs would be a long and tedious process. However, he soon discovered that Laserfiche Workflow made the process easy. “Building with Laserfiche Workflow is really as simple as drag and drop!” says Dr. Alhaisoni. “We were able to develop our workflows without any issues or technical errors.”

With 700 users and a high circulation rate, scalability is essential for UoH. “Currently, we have found that no matter how many people are working, how many letters are being sent and received, or how big the letters are, it doesn’t slow down, freeze or create any errors in our system. Everyone can efficiently work in real-time,” explains Dr. Alhaisoni.

Managing Change at the University

Changing the perception of the end-user can be a large obstacle when implementing a new technology. As Dr. Ahaisoni says, “Even with the best system in the world, if you are unable to deploy and implement the system properly, get the users involved and trained during deployment and change the perceptions of the management team itself, the system will collapse and people will go back to doing work in the traditional way.”

To ensure successful deployment of Laserfiche, the IT team at UoH spent a lot of time on due diligence and getting the management team’s support for transitioning to a paperless environment. Thus, when Dr. Alhaisoni’s team presented the ECM project to the president of the university, it gained his full support. “The president announced that his own office would be the first to use the new paperless system—that he would stop receiving any paper letters and his office would only be sending letters electronically,” explains Dr. Alhaisoni. “It was the tipping point for getting everyone else on board.”

Dr. Alhaisoni and his IT team were then responsible for carrying out a university-wide training plan. “We taught trainers, leaders and deans how to properly use the system,” he says. “With these preparations, we were able to expand the training very quickly and efficiently throughout the campus.”

Through UoH’s successful approach to change management, physical letters do not have to be hand delivered across departments and campuses, since this process is now automated in real-time. Mail clerks that used to deliver letters all day have been redeployed to perform more efficient and meaningful tasks for the university.

“Our users are excited to use Laserfiche, to turn it on and see if there are new items in their inbox every day. They want to be a part of this,” explains Dr. Alhaisoni.

Going Mobile

With its Laserfiche reseller, Integrated Solutions for Business, UoH built a web interface to enable mobility and flexibility across the university. End-users access the web-based portal as they would access any website—without the knowledge that Laserfiche is integrated as the back-end control centre. This minimises the burden on end-users and simplifies IT’s work in managing users’ needs.

“Work is no longer limited to just the office; we can work from anywhere now. Our interface is compatible on any mobile phone. All the actions I can do on a computer at work, I can do from my phone. It’s become a lot more convenient and a lot more efficient,” says Dr. Alhaisoni.

The Future of a Digital Campus

When asked about the future of UoH, Dr. Alhaisoni says, “We want to continue to optimise mobility with every workflow and form. We are also working with the Ministry of Education to demonstrate our system and hopefully our solution can benefit all universities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), based in Austin, helps develop the state’s higher education plans, approves degree programs and provides advice on education activities to the State Legislature and Governor’s Office.

Central to achieving THECB’s mission of promoting access to quality higher education is its Loan Program Operations (LPO), which disburses state financial aid funds to Texas universities and assists with student loan collections and litigation for the State Attorney General’s Office. As the gatekeeper for state-appropriated financial aid, LPO handles more than 1.5 million documents each year—a number that’s grown steadily as cuts to state scholarship funds have driven more loan applications to the department’s College Access Loan and B-On-Time incentive programs. In 2011 alone, the agency disbursed over $143 million worth of funds to students.

“For cases that go on to become loans, it’s a very paper-intensive process,” explains Debbie Whitis, Manager of LPO Operational Support Services. “Every single piece of information related to a student loan, from electronic applications, paper sources and screenshots, must be documented and archived according to state retention guidelines.”

Although LPO had a document management system in place, the legacy system couldn’t handle the high-volume processing needed to handle the growing volume of loan applications. As a result, it needed rebooting at least eight times a day.

On average, the agency was losing 19 cumulative hours of staff time across its departments every day—wasted effort that cost the LPO $76,000 each year and generated customer dissatisfaction.

“If a debtor called to inquire about their loan status and the system was down, we couldn’t give them a real-time answer,” explains Whitis. “Staff still had to manually fill in field classifications, and our process wasn’t very transparent.”

Stretching the IT Investment

LPO began searching for a new enterprise content management (ECM) system that would cut out inefficiencies and save staff time. When reseller MCCi showed the organization Laserfiche Avante’s flexible, customizable administration and workflow tools, the agency was convinced that Laserfiche could easily reduce its bottlenecks, track documents throughout the loan record lifecycle and make information readily accessible to many different users at once.

Whitis was impressed that so many of Laserfiche’s key functionalities aligned with LPO’s checklist of requirements, including Laserfiche’s ability to:
  • Monitor activities occurring within the department in real-time.
  • Support a complicated routing structure for LPO and provide transparency at each step of the loan process lifecycle.
  • Generate performance quotas and productivity statistics.
  • Offer snapshot printing, scanning and conversion of diverse content formats.

Even with this wide range of features, Laserfiche still offered an affordable price point. “Laserfiche was the most cost-effective solution and best value we found,” says Whitis. “When you’re paying with tax dollars, value is important.”

Furthermore, Laserfiche’s ease-of-use ensured a smooth implementation when turnover in LPO’s IT department reduced the project’s technical support. Using Laserfiche’s free user education materials along with her knowledge of ECM system implementation, Whitis was able to teach herself the ins and outs of the entire Laserfiche system.

“I was able to learn the system simply by using the white papers, customer presentations and everything else that is available on the Laserfiche Support Site,” explains Whitis. “The information really is readable and digestible for Laserfiche users.”

Eliminating Redundancies and Building Transparency

Armed with these education materials, Whitis started the implementation by sketching her ideas for improving the loan process out on paper. She then brought those ideas to life using the Laserfiche Workflow Designer, a business process configuration tool, to build complex, automated document routing and archiving procedures and data queries to third-party systems.

In total, Whitis created 29 different workflows that process and route the diverse types of content the department receives, streamlining many steps in daily activities, especially for the agency’s Operational Support Services (OSS) department.

Some of the benefits realized include:
  • Enhance information capture. Using Laserfiche Snapshot, a multi-functional document capture tool, the department can capture and record all loan documents like IVR (interactive voice response) payments, call sheets and loan changes directly from third-party systems, such as the agency’s Loan Management System, in a central repository.
  • Streamlined payment processing. For captured documents like checks, Laserfiche Workflow uses information on the check to query client data like social security numbers from the agency’s other databases and links that information to the check. Workflow then routes the document among the necessary departments at each step of payment review and processing.
  • Transparent records management. To archive a document according to litigation requirements, Workflow extracts information such as the borrower’s last name from the document, and automatically creates the proper retention folders for the document.
  • Centralized control. In the Laserfiche Workflow Administration Console, an advanced performance and reporting interface, Whitis can now monitor all system activity in real-time and research bottlenecks affecting the productivity of the team.

By automating and centralizing information access with Laserfiche, the agency can now process documents within a matter of milliseconds versus hours. Laserfiche Snapshot alone has helped the OSS department reduce its document processing times by up to 24 hours and eliminate 66% of its staffing expenses, a total of $15,000 in savings.

With Laserfiche Workflow, LPO can ultimately ensure that every step of the loan record cycle is transparent and that documents are saved in a searchable format, even as multiple users interact with the document.

“Changes to the document remain consistent no matter where the document goes,” says Whitis. “I love the fact that I can go into the Workflow Designer and find exactly where a document is. We can resolve an issue in a matter of minutes or within a couple of hours. Before, it was just a shot in the dark.”

Gaining Enterprise-Wide Buy-In

LPO managers and directors also love Laserfiche’s time-saving reporting tools. Prior to Laserfiche, managers could spend two full days compiling statistics about their teams’ productivity and quotas for the Assistant Commissioner of Business and Support Services. Using Laserfiche Audit Trail, an enterprise risk management tool that tracks user activity, managers can now generate performance reports on their staff with the click of a button.

To bring managers and staff up to speed on Laserfiche, Whitis committed to several onsite demos and trainings on searching, reporting and data capture.

“People here had been married to our old system for the duration of their careers,” notes Whitis. “But when they saw Laserfiche’s capabilities compared to our old system, they were impressed. They really took ownership of the software in their daily processes when we gave them a voice in how it works.”

This ownership translated into greatly increased staff productivity, especially during peak processing seasons. Even though the number of loan applications has increased by 12% since LPO started using Laserfiche, the agency has decreased its error rate to a mere two percent with the system. In just the first year of using Laserfiche, LPO estimates that it has reduced about 30% of its overall operating expenses.

In the future, the department plans to expand its Laserfiche system to handle the litigation documents it files with the state court. Using Laserfiche Quick Fields, a high-volume indexing tool, LPO will automate the costly, time-consuming manual indexing of legal files.

Whitis says that what makes Laserfiche so attractive to state agencies—and other organizations—is its flexible architecture. From document capture to automated workflows to reporting, Whitis praises how easily Laserfiche has accommodated LPO’s evolving business needs.

Schools Turn to Technology to Save Money

Related to lower revenues from what has been called the Great Recession, many states have cut funding to both K-12 and higher education, and even as the economy recovers and some of that funding is restored, education funding is still behind where it was before the recession. Consequently, schools are turning to technology to help them save money.

For example, 48 states—all except Alaska and North Dakota—are spending less per student on higher education than they did before the recession, with the average state is spending 23 percent less per student than before the recession, according to the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities, a Washington-based think tank focused on state and federal budget priorities.

In this cost-cutting environment, here are seven ways that schools are turning to technology to save money.

Reducing printing and paper use: A number of the “101 Smart Revenue Generators (and Money-saving Ideas)” from University Business involve eliminating paper processes for finance tasks such as employee reimbursements and refund processing, and introducing paperless alternatives such as electronic billing for tuition and online class registration. Document management can also help reduce paper use in accounts payable, as well as limiting printing in general. “If all entities that did business with the University of Houston System (UH) were paid via ACH, the university could save $100,000 per year,” notes UH president Renu Khator. Not only does this save money on printing supplies, postage, and paper, but it also can lead to the next item on our list…

Streamlining business processes: Some schools are hiring business process specialists to look for ways to make procedures more efficient. “The savings realized through the work of an analyst can more than pay for themselves,” reports eSchool News, especially when combined with a switch to electronic processes. Examples of processes that could be streamlined include purchase orders, payroll, and maintenance requests.

Special-purpose applications: Some schools are finding that they can save money through the use of applications intended to help them better manage food services, room use, utilities such as heating/cooling and electricity, textbooks, and school buses.

Everybody into the pool: Some districts save money by implementing shared services, pooling resources and having a single source for cloud technology, other IT services, and even administrative services such as secretarial.

Reducing the cost of communications: Schools can save money over the traditional phone-on-every-desk system. They can do this using technologies such as unified communications, voice over internet protocol (VOIP), and Skype, and business processes such as centralizing the purchasing and setup of communication technologies, According to eSchool News, 54 percent of school IT executives said the top benefit of unified communications was reducing operating costs, followed by increased productivity (50 percent) and more reliable communication (44 percent). In addition, some schools are finding that these technologies mean they can put a phone in every teacher’s room, which improves security.

Saving on computers: In some cases, schools are replacing computers because they were using Windows XP and were concerned about security risks now that Microsoft has stopped supporting that operating system. Some schools, such as St. James Catholic School in Gulfport, Miss., are taking the opportunity to move to Chromebooks, which are no-frills notebook computers that cost $200, as compared to a traditional desktop running Microsoft Windows, which generally cost about $1,000. Other school districts are saving money by buying refurbished computers instead of new ones. Refurbished computers can cost as little as one-third of new computers, eSchool News reports.

It’s true that investing in technology can result in some upfront expense, but in the long run, it can save on operational costs. Best of all, it can result in better educated students—and that’s the best investment of all.