University Staff Present Document Workflow Processes at National Conference

Four University of Arkansas staff members were invited to present at the national Alliance 2016 Oracle conference in Seattle this month on subjects related to their experiences with ImageNow, the university's document management system.

Enrollment Services staffer Cliff Murphy, senior associate director for operations and information, and Office of the Registrar's Robin Carr, associate registrar, records, presented "Faster Decisions, Faster Admissions" about their experience using ImageNow to capture transcript data.

Graduate School and International Education's Nick Daehn, director of SIS support, and LeAnn Suggs, assistant director of SIS support, gave two presentations: "Applicant Center," about a new link within UAConnect that allows prospective graduate and international students to view uploaded documents from ImageNow, and "Checklist-Driven Document Uploads," about a new document upload process.

ImageNow replaced emPower in July 2015 as a universitywide tool for securely storing and retrieving electronic documents. Documents stored in the system can be routed through simple or complex workflows to manage approval or business processes. The work being presented at Alliance 2016 represents new concepts and processes being developed by University of Arkansas staff working with ImageNow that create efficiencies and streamline workflow.

Prospective graduate and international students, for example, benefit from a new self-service information hub that was the subject of Daehn  and Sugg's presentation. It allows students to view communications sent from UAConnect as well as documents they uploaded. Faculty use the same process when they are evaluating applications to retrieve student uploaded documents from ImageNow.

"Our graduate and international student application review process used to take six to eight weeks during the busy season," Daehn said. "With the help of ImageNow and the document upload process, it is now a process of just two to five days."

Similarly, Enrollment Services can now process an undergraduate prospective student's application in less than two weeks due, in part, to the processes Murphy and Carr discussed in their presentation about capturing transcript data.

"ImageNow has been a game changer for the Division of Enrollment Services, especially in admissions, financial aid, and the registrar's office," said Suzanne McCray, vice provost for enrollment.  "Just two years ago, it sometimes took as long as two months to process applications that arrived during the busy season. Now we are now able to respond with an admissions decision in less than two weeks even when we are reviewing thousands of applications."

Faster scholarship processing is also part of the streamlined application process. The Academic Scholarship Office and the Office of Financial Aid is able to process a higher volume of forms in ImageNow over the course of a day than they ever could using emPower, said Garrick Hildebrand, senior associate director; "ImageNow has made processing scholarships in our workflow more efficient."

In fact, the Office of Financial Aid has quantified increases in productivity. Using ImageNow has streamlined document processing by 30% or more, in addition to about a 60% time savings in front-end efforts to retrieve paper documents in what is now a more paperless environment, Michelle Doise, business analyst, explained.

"Processes are more efficient, cost savings are continually being recognized and productivity has increased," she added. "Paper and ink usage costs have decreased, and some staff in our office have reported up to a 70% time saving in imaging tasks alone through improved search capabilities, ease-of-use for processing documents in workflow and increased paperless functionalities."

In addition to streamlining the document upload process as part of the admissions workflow, the Graduate School and International Education is also scanning old paper documents, such as admissions, administrative, and faculty/student records into ImageNow. "The advantage is we can now search for documents based on the metadata, and they are automatically purged at the end of a set retention period," said Mark Larmoyeux, director of technology; "I believe there have been meaningful improvements in productivity."

Human Resources also uses ImageNow to organize documents. "The paperwork that we scan is now more organized, and it is easier to locate documents for employees," Alesia Wells, computer support specialist, said.

HR has created a workflow document for processing paperwork, and ImageNow has streamlined the process, Wells added. "With ImageNow, we can put 'post-it' notes electronically on documents. This eliminates the problem of copying and scanning documents with actual 'post-it' notes on them that cover up parts of the document information. This is much cleaner and saves time searching for information that was covered up."

As departments across campus have migrated to ImageNow, the benefits of saving time, effort and resources by using more modernized processes also benefits the tax payers and citizens of Arkansas.

"We are now able to process applications for admission more quickly and more accurately for new freshman and for transfer students," McCray said. "ImageNow allows us to provide better service to students, to their families and counselors, and to staff on this campus who are working with them.  We are partnering with IT Services and ImageNow to develop additional transcript reading aids for our office as well."