Suffolk County Community College: Imaging Goes to College
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."
"Feith demonstrated they could fulfill our concept with only minor customization,"
explains Rice. "Their software easily met our initial needs, and they have been
very responsive to our need for tweaks."
Centralization
Feith installed software to operate a high-speed scanner at the main campus,
and SCCC began scanning inquiries from prospective applicants on a day-forward
basis. "We wanted to create a virtual folder that tracked a student from expression
of interest in attending to graduation and beyond," Rice details. "Because it
is electronic, we can include e-mail and faxes without printing. We add placement
tests, counseling notes and recommendations. Now we scan on all three campuses.
The records are stored on a server in Selden, but they are instantly available
at Brentwood and Southampton as well."
Approximately 80 clients are spread across the college, and password security
is defined by job description. For example, only the nursing staff has access
to medical records, and, "only a few eyes can see disciplinary files," states
Rice, "Security is robust."
Staff and students view documents using Feith's WebFDD, which resides on the
server and requires only a browser on a PC—and permissions—to gain access to
the system. The WebFDD software has access to both the database and the document
images. It returns electronic copies of images, and other information, based
on the users' requests.
The document retrieval and viewing process starts in an image-enabled application.
A search there results in the display of student's information. Next, the Quick
Integrator is used to cull screen information needed by WebFDD to locate the
student's document. WebFDD uses this information to retrieve the document image.
The central scanner is now supplemented with six departmental scanners distributed
throughout the college. Scans go to indexing stations and then on to RAID (magnetic)
storage. Rice rejected optical storage, saying the extra cost of the RAID box
was more than justified by the speed of access. When Feith installed their system,
the college already had an effective network and a sophisticated PC installation,
so the total implementation cost was reduced. Using Feith ERM (COLD) capabilities,
materials can enter a student's folder directly from the college mainframe as
well, but 90 percent of the materials are scanned, according to Rice.
The staffing departments at each campus draw extensively on the centralized
records repository for their work. "We have a couple thousand adjunct teachers,"
explains Rice, "and we keep records of who is qualified to teach which classes.
But we used to keep records for each adjunct teacher at only one campus, although
they can teach at two or three. Now any campus can find someone, for example,
who can teach physics, regardless of their ‘home' location."
Practical Benefits
Rice is always looking for ways to use technology to improve the college's functions.
In one case, he led a kiosk project that set up 14 stations where students can
look up their schedules, grades, and other vital information. Rice looks to
Feith to help him get the most out of the document system. "Feith is always
enhancing their product and will push us along."
All of this improvement stemmed from SCCC's information technology department,
but there has been no significant increase in staff size. Rice predicts another
benefit: The space where file cabinets stood will become functional areas that
will save some building construction and renovations. "Now we can store paper
in an unheated building in a remote area with minimal access," he intones. "The
warm areas are for office space. Our in-house architect is looking at reusing
the freed storage space. Central Admissions alone is getting rid of 15 file
cabinets, and longer term, we will get rid of 50 four-drawer cabinets."
Future developments will help smooth out the peaks and valleys of document
processing such as the end of the school year when applicants send in their
final high school transcripts. "The Feith project is a major, substantial part
of our administration," states Rice, "and I see many more projects with them
coming down the pike."
For more information, contact Jack Rice, Chief Management Analyst, Suffolk
County Community College, at [email protected], or Gordon E.J. Hoke, Vice
President, eVisory Consulting, at [email protected].
