Click on image to enlarge.
(left to right) Front row: Al Hermsen, David Brisbois.
Second row: Shannon Ridley, Gabriela Garfield, Kim Bostick, Syed Ali.
Third row: Alexandria Hess, Tina Baskin, Eric Bowman, Dan Walters, Wasif Zaidi, Katrina Cole.
Click on image to enlarge.
(left to right) Seated: Al Hermsen, Tina Baskin, Shannon Ridley, Alexandria Hess, Gabriela Garfield, Eric Bowman.
Standing: Wasif Zaidi, Katrina Cole, Dan Walters, David Brisbois, Kim Bostick, Syed Ali.
Click on image to enlarge.
(left to right) Front: Alexandria Hess, Shannon Ridley, Eric Bowman, Gabriela Garfield.
Back: Kim Bostick, Katrina Cole, Al Hermsen, Syed Ali, Dan Walters, Wasif Zaidi, David Brisbois.
by Leslie Mertz
The Office of Student Financial Aid (OSFA) processes thousands of documents every month, and with paper files, that was just plain inefficient, said OSFA director Al Hermsen. Papers sometimes slipped out of files as employees signed them out and moved them from one desk to another, whole files were occasionally misplaced, and even when the files’ locations were easily determined, employees still often had to run up and down the three floors of the office to retrieve them. “That was the life we were living,” Hermsen said.
Fortunately, that life is becoming a thing of the past. The OSFA and Computing & Information Technology (C&IT) joined forces last fall to convert that mountain of paper into scanned document images that make it simple and convenient for OSFA employees to call up a student’s file with just a few clicks on the computer — and they made the transformation from paper to paperless in just a matter of months.
The impetus for the shift to an imaging system began shortly after Hermsen arrived at Wayne State University in 2007. At Hermsen’s previous position in another university’s financial aid office, they had already done away with paper years before. He recalled, “I knew how well an imaging system worked, and having to go back to paper files was just more than I could bear.”
The wheels started turning in November when Hermsen met with Joseph Sawasky, WSU chief information officer and associate vice president for C&IT. After hearing the problem, Sawasky immediately offered the services of his staff. Hermsen recalled, “They came in with a pretty clear design to help us bring up this imaging system rather quickly.” In fact, it was just four months later, on March 17, that the system was online and working. “I’m quite frankly amazed that we made the switch so quickly,” he said. “We started talking about this in November, and by March it was up and running. We’re using it now to do our verification of financial aid documents.” As of the end of April, he said, “We’re pretty much up to date: 90 percent of the documents are imaged as they come in. As staff become more comfortable with this system, our goal is to image all the documents that come in on a daily basis.”
The new system has definitely had an impact, said Gabriela Garfield, OSFA assistant director and supervisor of the internal processing center. “It has allowed our customer service representatives to easily view student documents without having to actually have a paper file pulled.”
Hermsen agreed. “The number one benefit is the better and more timely counseling of students. It’s better because our staff now have the documents right there in front of them, and it’s more timely because all they do is call them up on the computer and they’re right there.”
Dave Brisbois, director of Document Management and Workflow within the C&IT Enterprise Applications area, gave considerable credit for the fast completion of the imaging project to the OSFA staff. “They were highly motivated. They wanted this to happen, and so we basically provided consulting, direction and a lot of functional leadership. We helped them to identify first what their business processes were, secondly how the product works, and then cross-referencing those two things and working with them on the special nuances they needed from the application.”
The application is called ApplicationXtender (AX), and it links to the Banner® Administrative System through a separate application, called Banner XtenderSolutions. Because of this three-tiered integration, he said, when an employee scans a document into AX, the Banner® System is automatically updated with the information.
Brisbois specifically commended three OSFA staff for their contributions: Hermsen for his leadership and his willingness to allocate the time for his staff to “make it happen”; Garfield, who focused on functionality of the imaging system; and Eric Bowman, then an applications technical analyst, who oversaw hardware and other needs. (Bowman is now IT manager in the WSU Office of the Registrar.) Bowman, Garfield, and Hermsen all praised C&IT’s dedication. Bowman was especially appreciative of the well-thought-out project plan and the experience Brisbois and his staff were able to bring to the effort. “They had already worked with a couple of departments, so when they came to our office, it was fairly smooth sailing,” he remarked.
Added Garfield, “I thought that it was really nice to have the whole C&IT team come in and give us the support that they did. They really did a good job of helping us, and listening to what we wanted to do and some of the ideas that we had. They pointed us in the right direction. It was a really good experience working with them. It also was a good experience for all of us in OSFA, because most of the managers and financial aid officers were involved in planning meetings or testing the new process.”
The key players on the joint C&IT-OSFA imaging team were:
OSFA:
C&IT:
