South Plains College December 28, 2011
Posted by FileBound in Document Management Industry, FileBound Document Management Success.Tags: 21st Century, accounts payable, AP, content management, digital document, document storage, ecm, education, enterprise content management, Organization, paperless, Productivity, Solutions
trackback South Plains College, located in Levelland, Texas 30 miles west of Lubbock Texas, opened in 1958 and has grown to serve over 15,000 individuals a year. It is a comprehensive, two-year community college providing educational programs that span the arts and sciences, technical education, continuing education and workforce development. SPC has two extension centers in Lubbock that are located at the Reese Center and the Byron Martin Advanced Technology Center. Additional extension centers are maintained in Plainview, Muleshoe and Denver City.
South Plains College benefited from a FileBound solution, primarily in its Financial Aid and Admissions offices. With more than 1.5 million documents now securely stored in FileBound, the college plans to expand the solution to new departments.
The Problem:
The Admissions/Registrar Office were handling the Admissions documents and maintaining the Student Records for a continually growing number of students. In 2004 they were handling a variety of forms, but mostly paper documents that came in via mail, Fax, Email, or were simply hand delivered.
The manual routing of documents caused many delays due to misplaced or lost files and documents. The serial workflow process caused long cycle times in completing the Admissions process, and the inability to quickly locate student files resulted in slow response to telephone or personal inquiries for information.
The archive document storage vault was nearing capacity and filing documents required a special process utilizing personnel that were busy with other tasks. This meant it might take days or weeks to complete the filing of new documents to active files stored in the vault and retrieving files was a task that could often take 10- 30 minutes or longer. Additionally, from a disaster perspective, these stored paper documents presented a major risk, and recovery of the documents from a disaster would be impossible.
The Financial Aid Office had similar problems with their student aid documents causing similar delays in getting students financial aid decisions finalized. Their storage of paper documents also presented a disaster recovery risk.
Additionally, since these offices are not co-located there were delays and document duplication when common documents were needed by the both offices. Also, the student files were not accessible from a single place, each office had their own files.
Further complications arose as SPC began providing the same services at the Reese Center located 30 miles away.
The Solution:
FileBound provided the capability to create a common location for storing student information making this information available to all locations, all users concurrently. The FileBound data capture flexibility provided a perfect mechanism to handle the diverse needs of the Admissions/Registrar Office, the Financial Aid Office, and the Reese Center.
The documents could be captured immediately upon receipt and added to the student files in FileBound. In the Admissions and Financial Aid offices, a capture process was established to minimize the amount of manual data entry required allowing those scanning the documents to input the key index field only and then route the documents to data entry personnel who setup the student in the Student Information (SI) system, then the other index fields were extracted from the SI application and automatically imported to the FileBound system to complete the student file setup in FileBound. This allowed all student files to be setup essentially concurrently with the SI data entry.
The FileBound direct capture capability allowed clerks to scan paper documents immediately to the student file from their workstation. The only additional cost to SPC was the cost of desktop scanners for each clerk and the reduction in processing time easily justified this cost. FileBound’s Imaging system provides two methods for direct capture to the student file either via the viewer or directly from the desktop via the Integration Kit.
Documents received via mail or faxes are scanned using the FileBound Data Manager scan module. This allows the mail clerk to scan multiple documents at one time, index the documents using the key index field, and then upon upload of the documents to the FileBound ECM, they are automatically filed to the appropriate student file. This eliminates the extensive delay associated with manual filing and also allows the documents to be routed via workflow when there is a processing step required.
Documents in the archive files were also scanned via the Data Manager scan module, and indexed using barcode cover sheets developed for each file. This process allows multiple files to be simultaneously scanned, automatically indexed, and uploaded to the FileBound ECM system. This process allowed SPC personnel to capture approximately 100,000 student files retained in the vault in about 6 months time, and completely eliminate the storage of paper documents in the vault.
FileBound Results:
The SPC FileBound ECM currently contains over 1.5 million documents and the Admissions/Registrar and Financial Aid Offices continue to expand their utilization of the FileBound capabilities utilizing the FileBound Importer Pro module to directly import the growing number of electronic documents they now receive thus eliminating any manual data entry.
The utilization of the FileBound system has grown to include Purchasing, Accounts Payable, and the warehouse receiving area. Also, since FileBound provides for Unlimited users at no added cost, many student advisors are now provided access to the student information they need to assist students as they develop their course plans each semester.
The Future:
- Expanded utilization into new areas (Housing, Human Resources, etc.)
- Initiate use of FileBound’s e-form capabilities to transition from paper forms and web based PDF forms to HTML or XML forms providing the capability to complete forms on-line and automatically file them in the FileBound Content Management System.
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