Contributor: LaTonya Price, Director of Employee Benefits and Compensation, Tarrant County College District
With more than 12,000 personnel files crammed in storage boxes, the Tarrant County College District (TCCD) Human Resources Office knew it had a problem. Simple retrieval was almost impossible, and with a staff and faculty serving more than 50,000 students in the greater Fort Worth area, the avalanche of paper was only increasing.
What started as a simple scanning project to deal with “enough paper to fill up a football field” has evolved into a complete modernization of document management in the Human Resources Department of one of the largest college systems in Texas.
The solution was to pack up the old files and let MCCi scan them into Laserfiche, dramatically improving accessibility and file management and creating a process for adding new employees efficiently, with no paper at all.
The work environment improved as well; stacks of paper throughout the office are gone, and their old storage space is now an executive-level office.
During the process, the staff wondered if there were other ways that Laserfiche could improve their workflow and increase office efficiency. According to LaTonya Price, director of Employee Benefits and Compensation, their first target was the employee onboarding and annual contract processes.
“We were a little greedy when we saw what Laserfiche could do, so we just started asking questions,” she said.
“We have an excellent technical staff, so they knew what the potential was. They were anxious to do things, and I think we challenged them too. The MCCi team helped us pick up the ball and run with it.”
The previous employee hiring and onboarding process included face-to-face sessions held twice a week for new hires, at which a team member would spend 45 minutes with each applicant to complete all the necessary documents, direct deposit forms and retirement paperwork.
“We wanted to have a workflow in which we could complete the onboarding process electronically, the right people in HR could verify it and then it would move on to payroll,” Price said. “The MCCi project management team said, ‘Yeah, we can do that.’ So we gave them our sample form, and they created a form in Laserfiche to create a custom workflow. They put in all the stops to direct people. It was pretty neat what they did to make that happen.”
As exciting as that change was, perhaps the most dramatic improvement for TCCD has been in the process of renewing annual employee contracts. The old process involved the following:
- Printing out contracts and benefits statements on special-order paper for all employees
- Separating the statements by division
- Asking team members to manually proof and assemble a copy for each division: department, employee, and leadership team
- Sending out for approval
- Distributing back to employees
“We have about 2,600 employees with benefits statements and two-thirds of them have contracts,” Price said. “We would separate all those out on a large table with about seven or eight of us, and we would proof them all. Then we would physically send them to the campus president and our vice chancellors, and they would review them before they would trickle back down to their department. The process of tracking and running reports and then turning them back in would often take up to six months. When I came here in 2012, there was probably three years’ worth of contacts that were never filed.”
Today, the team extracts the employee contract list from an excel spreadsheet, which is sent to college leadership electronically for approval. The files upload to Laserfiche, which sends out the contacts to employees, resulting in a 95 to 98 percent return within five days. Contracts that are returned electronically through the system automatically uploads to the employee’s personnel file. What was formerly a six-month process now takes less than a week.
According to Price, the value is much greater than convenience.
One reason it’s important for the contracts to come back quickly is that if someone has a legal issue and they want to see their personnel file, now their file is complete,” she said. “It gives us permission to pay them and make the deposits into the account. Over the course of six months, using Laserfiche and the process MCCI helped us set up probably saved us five months and 29 days.”
Price and her team look forward to utilizing more Laserfiche features in the future.
Based on how MCCi has helped us become so efficient, we now look at all of our processes, whether they’re existing or future, that someone may come to us and say, we want you to take this process on,” she said. “If we can replace it with Laserfiche, that is what we are going to do.”
