School related documents were hard to find, consuming ever greater storage space and slowing down service to constituents.

The Organization: A school district in the Cleveland-Akron area that was formed in the 1950’s after combining two smaller school districts.

The Problem: The administrative staff is required by state regulations to provide records requested to community members in a timely manner. Many of the districts documents are also defined by the state as permanent records and must be kept indefinitely. The district was also running out of storage space (an old elementary school building) to store the hundreds of boxes containing over one million records.

Even worse, there was no duplication of any of the paper files. If a disaster were to strike the storage building–all the data would be lost forever. Finally to top off this set of circumstances the school board decided to demolish the building for safety reasons. The district had to act quickly.

The Solution: We provide a two-part solution to this school districts problem. First, we picked-up all of their documents and converted them to digital images. In doing so we followed the guidelines established by the state to assure compliance with the Ohio Record Retention Schedule. This included indexing the documents so that they are categorized as defined in the schedule so state audits can be conducted more efficiently.

Second, we formed a relationship with the school’s Information Technology Center. This enabled us to provide the district a software application named OnBase. Using OnBase the district can now access and retrieve all of the images scanned.

The Benefits: Community member information requests can be responded to immediately. Each staff member is able to manage a higher volume of service transactions. Physical storage space needs are eliminated. Finally administrative staff members are more satisfied employees by being more effective in their roles.

Next Steps: Now that information is stored electronically the natural next step is to make it available to customers directly through the internet enabling self-service, delivered just-in-time.