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.”

An Effortless New Hire Process

The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office transformed its Human Resources division by shifting from paper-based methods to become a digital agency using Laserfiche software. The digitization initiative increased efficiency, time management and accuracy, revolutionizing the ways in which the Sheriff’s Office stored documents, communicated within its department, and implemented its onboarding process with new employees.

Seamless Recruiting Tools

The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office is a local law enforcement agency based in central Florida. The agency is the largest and chief law enforcement agency in the county, with 850 employees within the department.

Before Laserfiche, the agency grappled with a diminished amount of storage room and needed a more effective solution for managing documents. Interdepartmental communication problems led to delays in the application process and, at times, lost documents when paper forms were mailed.

The agency first turned to Laserfiche to create a pre-employment application that is accessible to the public through the county’s website. The initial results were staggering, with application intake tripling from about 50 applications per month to now as many as 150 per month.

“We’re facing a nationwide shortage of police officers,” said Haylee Glasscock, Human Resources Technician, Osceola County’s Sheriff’s Office. “Making our application easily accessible online has helped with our recruiting efforts and was a good move for our agency. The application is extensive—it used to be 25 paper pages. With Laserfiche, we now can host recruiting fairs since the online application allows people to apply right then and there. Other applicants may apply via a secure link. In 2012, we had 446 paper applications. In the first year we had Laserfiche, we had 1,305.”

There are multiple job application forms the agency utilizes depending on the applicant, including a criminal history version which is longer compared to one created for recent graduates planning to move into the role of a deputy.

“With paper applications, people would leave fields blank; we had to call them to come in and fill out the information,” said Glasscock. “Now we no longer have incompletes and it saves us time. We can also have people upload files, photos of tattoos, and more—all within the application.”

After an applicant applies online, Laserfiche’s business process automation capabilities allow the agency to perform a paperless background check and file sign-off through its chain of command. Laserfiche simultaneously sends automatic email notifications to keep the applicant updated on the review process—a game-changer compared to years past, when updates on the Review Board date were sent through the mail.

Effortless New Hire Process

Once the application process is complete and an applicant receives an offer, the Sheriff’s Office uses Laserfiche to onboard new employees with digital forms. Laserfiche enables chain-of-command administration staff to sign off on specific files using conditions in a workflow. Relevant personnel say whether the file looks acceptable, and if so, it moves on to the next person. The process is smooth, accurate and far less time-consuming than the previous method of filling out a handwritten form as the official offer document with the salary and start date included.

The Sheriff’s Office’s Human Resources division is now a paperless environment thanks to implementing Laserfiche software. All employee personnel and medical files are stored in the repository and are easily accessible to HR staff. Additionally, Laserfiche has been integrated within the agency’s personnel management system. The software automatically pulls an employee’s information from the personnel management system, including his/her ID number, and completely fills out the template information—improving speed and accuracy.

“We like that information is accessible at our fingertips,” said Glasscock. “The training department now has one full-time staff assistant and a part-time student. They’re able to quickly find documents, email them to deputies if needed, and they’re easily viewed. Having those training files not in boxes anymore really helps them.”

The Sheriff’s Office also digitized the employee transfer form. Laserfiche automatically routes the form to the appropriate reviewer within the agency. The form has been further simplified by the use of variables, look-up tables (integrated with the organization’s computer-aided dispatch software and active directory), as well as field rules.

“Our recruiting department uses Laserfiche every day and a couple of agencies have reached out to me to see if we can share our process with them,” added Glasscock.

Since turning to Laserfiche, the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office has become more productive, effective and efficient. The agency digitized and secured more than 2,500 employee personnel files using Laserfiche software. Moreover, all new hire files are created digitally. The agency can process and prepare files for approval much faster, and automated email notifications mean that staff no longer need to call other departments as frequently to follow up on forms.

The agency realized an initial savings of $2,000 by eliminating supplies for new employee files, as well thousands more in departmental time-savings. Beyond cost savings, the Sheriff’s Office opened the door to a more digital, automated agency. By implementing innovative solutions like its Laserfiche digital records management program, the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office fosters a culture of efficiency and agility to better position the agency for success in a competitive hiring market.

AFP Crecer, El Salvador

My name is Carlos Ramos. I work for AFP Crecer as the digitalization manager.  AFP Crecer is one of El Salvador’s largest fund management firms.  We manage the pension funds for about 1.7 million affiliates. Our mission is to guide our clients as they save for an important life change: retirement. We’re working on growing their savings, so that when they retire, they’ll be able to continue providing for their family and themselves.

From a technological standpoint, the biggest challenges that we faced was having a document management system that would be flexible, that would allow us to have quality control for our stored information, and also streamline the digital capture processes to serve our customers in a more efficient manner through our channels. We evaluated several tools and Laserfiche was the one we liked the best.

Somehow, we discovered that document management goes beyond just digital archiving. We’re giving the opportunity to all of our client representatives to access information in a timely manner. Thanks to Laserfiche, as a tool, we’ve been able to change our processes. We were able to shorten processes that took five days to three days. We reduced processes that took 15 days to just five days.

Using the product has opened up additional improvement opportunities. It is not only about archiving digital documents, but also having the necessary documents throughout our key business processes. In addition, the use of electronic forms allowed us to reduce our use of paper. We were using around 650 packs of paper, which equals about 350,000 sheets of paper per year.

We’ve been working with Laserfiche for about 10 months and the experience has been fabulous. Now we have more visibility and we can do more complex searches and reports. Throughout our journey, we learned that things that we imagined and believed couldn’t be done with a software can be done with Laserfiche.

Time savings, reduction in costs, and an easier capture and digitization process. A client file took close to 100 days from its creation until it was ready for record archiving. Now it only takes two days for the client file to be archived. We get notifications if we made an error or notifications if image capture was successful.

With Laserfiche, and where I see future opportunities, such as analyzing our processes to identify those we can automate, what documents are required for those processes, and not only opportunities to automate them, but also to completely redesign them, and see how we’re doing things now and how we can do them tomorrow.

We must remember that we work and are dedicated to serve our clients’ needs. Financial needs with regards to pensions, and for them it’s very important to get speedy service, and that’s why Laserfiche has been a fundamental part of that.

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.

Kensington Mortgages Automates Core Business Processes to Elevate Customer Experience

Kensington Mortgage Company implemented Laserfiche organization-wide and integrated it with multiple line-of-business applications.

My name is Farid Amin. I am a Solutions Architect at Kensington Mortgages. In my role I design, develop and implement to automate business processes across the operational areas using enterprise-level robotic and business process automation software tools.

Now in our 25th year, Kensington Mortgages is UK’s leading non-bank specialist mortgage provider and We manage over 11 billion pounds in assets. We have over 500 employees throughout the country, predominantly at our head office in Maidenhead.

In 2012, we needed to replace our aging document management system. It was becoming slow and unreliable. The core weakness of the system was that the historical documents were stored in a huge jukebox of some 250 optical discs run by a robotic arm and a subset of DVD drives.

As we grew, we had more documents to manage. We also had changing regulations, which meant we Needed access to those documents very, very quickly while we had customers on the phone. Therefore, we had to replace our system that would cater for our business needs.

Laserfiche fulfilled these requirements and we had foresight that its rich functionality of its various components could be utilized in other use cases and could be expanded across the business in later years. Today, we have over 56 million documents spanning over 7 terabytes of network storage.

We have 300 users that utilize Laserfiche day-in-day-out to serve and manage our accounts. The users’ feedback has been very positive. Laserfiche just runs in the background, unassumingly, and therefore as far as they’re concerned, it’s a system available all the time for them to carry out their work.

In 2016, we expanded the use of Laserfiche to business process automation and it has been a resounding success. Today we have business processes automated not just in servicing, but in finance and sales.

In 2019, we implemented our document online project. This has allowed our customers to view their documents online. We developed, in-house, a microservice using the Laserfiche SDK, which allows those customers to view their documents directly from the repository.

So here’s a system that has a use, but has got a whole lot of other tools that could benefit any organization. So Laserfiche has been in production for over 7 years and has provided service to us with stability and integrity.

Sky Telecommunications Digitally Manages Employee Files and HR Processes

Serving 25,000 employees across the UK and Ireland, the telecommunications company’s HR department has sped up its processes and easily maintains its employee files.

My name is Nicola Doherty. I am the head of HR Administration at SKY. SKY are a media organization based in the UK and Ireland that provide direct home TV services for our customers. We have in the region of twenty-five thousand employees across the UK and Ireland and over 10 million customers. So, the HR admin function is responsible for, what it says on the tin really, HR administration for all of SKY’s employees.

We were taking back in-house some HR administration work that was previously delivered by a third party. For us to be able to do that. we had to look at, you know, how efficient we are in terms of our resources and our ability to deliver the service. So, it was at that point that we made the decision that we were going to upgrade the Laserfiche product that we had in place to Laserfiche Rio. We had a long-standing relationship with them with Laserfiche and through the conversations that we’d had with our sort-of partners we knew that there was more that we could get to enhance the product and its kind of ticked the boxes off of what we needed at that point in time of what we will need in the future. So, all of our employee files at Sky are held on the Laserfiche Rio product We use it to maintain, update employee files and to apply any rules that we need to arrange deletion for example.

We are a large organization that’s sort of diverse in terms of our structure and so that the Laserfiche product helps us to keep our sales organized. We use it for things like subject access requests that we get from employees. So, the new product has actually helped us with that process as well. For me, from an HR operations perspective, we never stand still so we’re always looking at better ways to do things. Whether that’s through automation or whether it’s just be more efficient at what we do. And, so I think Laserfiche as an organization it fits in with that.

The return that I see that we get from the Laserfiche product, the enhanced product, is that we are able to deliver our processes and quicker than we could before and that’s in relation to things such as subject access requests through new processes such as bar coding and in naming convention of files. There’s less human intervention in our processes so that the HR admin teams are able to file more and do it quickly and which is better than what we could do before.

The advice I would give to future Laserfiche users is and to keep things simple to give yourself enough time and to use the expertise that’s on offer. I think that the place it would end I was as always you know looking towards the future to see what other enhancements there might be further down the road. But we’ve got a really robust product in place now which is great.

Jabal Omar Development Co.

By automating its processes and implementing e-forms, the real estate developer has simplified project documentation and approvals, saving both time and money.

MauBank Ltd

One of Mauritus’s leading banks enhanced the customer experience by transforming the account opening process using Laserfiche Forms and an automated workflow.

Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group’s Digital Transformation

Laserfiche’s digital transformation model helps Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group go above and beyond by digitizing and streamlining the claims process so customers have the confidence to do more.