Suffolk County Community College: Imaging Goes to College

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Suffolk County Community College: Imaging Goes to College

2/27/2003

Gordon E.J. Hoke

Suffolk County Community College (SCCC) (www.sunysuffolk.edu), on the east side of Long Island, had a document issue. Crushing amounts of paper were part of it, but delivering documents to the right location was a major conundrum of its own.

The county stretches some 60 miles from the rural east of duckling fame to the suburban rings outside New York City. SCCC supports three sites: easternmost Southampton, fast-growing Brentwood, and the main campus at Selden. Some departments, like Admissions, are centralized, and their challenge was to deal with an onslaught of paper, making it available and useful. Other departments, such as Staffing, are spread out over the three campuses, and their documents needed to be either triplicated or shuttled from site to site.

Student services—a critical area—also faced serious issues. In past years, students at Southampton and Brentwood had only limited access to schedules, grades, and other records stored at Selden. Even students at Selden had only a single point of access, and they encountered the delays often associated with paper storage and retrieval. For every student, there was a 30- to 50-page folder containing papers of everything from applications and transcripts to discipline and health records. The college kept the papers for six years after students left the college, meaning the document system contained approximately 4,000,000 pages. Growth projections showed a need for storage for another million pages.

The Admissions Department dealt with the most paper. Every year, approximately 20,000 applications arrive from Suffolk County's 70 school districts and beyond, and most arrive between October and March. Although the primary application is a standard form, the addenda come in an array of shapes, sizes, and colors. Parts of each application—such as references, transcripts, and test results—arrive independently and need to be associated with the main application documents.

Discovering an Alternative
Frustration with paper management motivated the college administration to look for an alternative as early as 1995. At one point, microfilm was considered, but when Jack Rice joined the administration as Chief Management Analyst, he brought with him experience in document imaging and laser-disc storage gained at the County Board of Elections. Rice thought the scenario seemed perfect for electronic-document solutions, and following his leadership, the college agreed.

In 1998, the administration established a committee that wrote a Request for Proposals and sent it to 35 vendors nationwide. "We got between six and a dozen serious responses," remembers Rice, "and we narrowed down the field until we took three demonstrations of solutions." The winner was Feith Systems and Software Inc. (www.feith.com) of Ft. Washington, Pa.

Leon Conway, Senior Technical Manager with Feith and project manager for SCCC, notes that Feith's integration features were particularly attractive to the college. "The college has several software applications, using three different database engines. They thought that with their three different databases, image-enabling the existing applications would be a formidable problem. However, our Quick Integrator software was especially appropriate for SCCC. It allows existing applications to be image-enabled in minutes. What database an application uses d'esn't matter."