Four years ago, a student’s call to the registrar’s office at Kansas State University resulted in a multi-step process.

Step One: Put the caller on hold, and go to a room with 40 file cabinets and fetch the student’s file.

Step Two: Back at his or her desk, shuffle through many papers in the file looking for the one pertinent to the phone call.

Step Three: Take care of the matter. Place the file in a ‘re-file box.’

Oops! Sometimes the file that someone is seeking in the file cabinets is still in the re-file box. There’s no way of knowing, so add Step 1.5 during which the un-alphabetized re-file box is searched. Meanwhile, let’s remember that the student is still holding on the phone.

“We were doing everything by hand,” explains Associate Registrar Michael Crow. “So, around 2001 we decided to look into imaging.” That’s how the KSU Registrar’s Office, as well as three other campus departments, became pilot testers for a university-wide implementation of Perceptive Software’s ImageNow product.

Dennis Cunningham

ImageNow is document imaging with higher education intelligence. “We handle what we call the ‘unstructured data’ that supports their student information system,” explains Dennis Cunningham of Perceptive Software. “For every student record that the university tracks, there’s a manila folder somewhere with letters, forms, e-mail correspondence, Word documents, Excel files. The variety is infinite, and it’s staggering how much critical data is still on a piece of paper somehwere. We provide instant single click access to those documents.”

Crow explains further, “All of our employees who use the system have dual monitors so they can display the SIS system on one monitor and the ImageNow application on another, and work back and forth.”

Some 250 universities use ImageNow, which starts at $25,000 for small deployments and ranges in price by the number of users and selected modules. “The fact of the matter is that schools move around a tremendous amount of paperwork to support admissions, financial aid, registrar, human resources,” says Cunningham. “We make sure those documents are imaged and organized and accessible to the desktops of appropriate personnnel.”

The move from paper to digital took KSU about a year and half. They hired eight graduate students to scan all the files with some quality control. They purchased better quality scanners to maintain accuracy. After two digital back-up cycles, all the paper documents were shredded. They were able to create a new office in the space formerly occupied by forty file cabinets.

“We believe that ImageNow paid for itself in less than three years by reducing office supply costs and eliminating the inefficiencies of paper,” says Crow. If you count the man-hours traipsing back and forth to the file cabinets, the savings and efficiency soars.”

“My job is easier,” says Mike Morrell, a peer advisor in the KSU financial aid office.

Note: Article reprinted from November 2006 magazine.