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Truckee Meadows Community College, Nevada - Truckee Meadows Community College (TMCC) is the fastest growing college in northern Nevada. The college serves over 12,000 students with programs leading to associate degrees and certificates in more than 40 academic and occupational areas.
TMCC's Financial Aid Department (FA) stores about 14,000 hardcopy files, and processes approximately 7,000 new applications a year. FA workers were running out of space to house all of the files when they were told their office might be moved, resulting in the loss of their file room altogether. Since they are required by the U.S. Department of Education to keep files for four years (sometimes longer depending on a specific regulation) they knew converting to an electronic file system would save both time and money while serving their students better. The question was which electronic file system to choose.
Same Problem...Times Two
While FA was researching electronic alternatives to paper, another department was already using a document imaging system. The expectation was that FA would adopt the same system. "We found the other department's system to be, 'clunky,'" says Sharon Wurm, Assistant Director, Financial Aid Department.
Wurm continues, "Our Director of Information Technology Operations (ITO) found ViewWise from Computhink at a tradeshow. ITO set-up ViewWise on our server to Computhink's specs and everything worked fine. After some trial and error, we were able to adjust the security controls to match our needs. Both departments now use ViewWise."
The New Workflow Process
With 22 licensed users, ViewWise is now an integral part of FA's record keeping procedures. The ViewWise integrated document management system is utilized as an ongoing work-in-process system, where files are built electronically; capturing scanned documents such as copies of tax forms.
To begin the Financial Aid application process, students go online to the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) and complete an eight-page application. TMCC then imports the application information from the DOE system once a week into the TMCC mainframe system.
Next, the student goes online to the TMCC website to fill out an Activation Form. The Activation Form is then delivered to the FA Dept in the form of an email. FA imports the email Activation Form into ViewWise. This begins the lifecycle of an applicant's file. All E-files are stored according to academic year, exactly like their old paper-based filing system. Files are indexed by name, Social Security number, and award year for efficient retrieval.
Braving the Back-file
In 2004-2005, FA has decided to go completely paperless. Every file from this current year forward will be stored and available for electronic retrieval. TMCC has also initiated the scanning of old paper files into ViewWise, for archival purposes, because as Wurm puts it, "It's frustrating to have to look for a paper file".
ViewWise Benefits
FA personnel like the ease and intuitive appeal of the ViewWise secured archival retrieval system. The learning curve is short and the time to retrieve a file as well as the number of misplaced files has been dramatically reduced. Stephanie Costigan, FA Administrative Assistant, took the initiative to delve deeper into ViewWise and customize it to make it match FA's needs even better.
Says Costigan, "When we moved from paper files to electronic files, people were concerned that they would actually lose paperwork. However, since installing ViewWise, nothing has ever happened that couldn't be resolved quickly."
Costigan says she relies heavily on some of the standard features of ViewWise. "We do some double-sided scanning, some batch scanning and some individual scanning," she explains, "Features like despeckle, deskew (both automatic and manual) and anything that makes a scanned file legible is critical to us." The feature Costigan uses most is the Sticky Note tool for when things need further explanation. She likes this tool, because the note floats above the image, allowing complete viewing of the underlying document.
ViewWise also enables FA to cut/copy pages from a file in one year and paste them into next year's file. That way, a student file exists in every year and selective paperwork can be advanced to the current year's file.
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