Manatee County School District
Manatee County School District
How a Florida school district transformed records management
with fi Series scanners.
Kristi Miller is the Supervisor of Property Records and Records Management for the Manatee County School District. The records manager is responsible for a startling ten million student records.
The Florida Gulf Coast district educates over 50,000 students, from elementary schools to community college. With so many records to manage, Miller and her staff continuously struggled with paper work.
When a student requested a copy of their records, Miller and her staff had to sort through endless stacks of boxes to find the paper record. The paper-based system caused numerous problems, from time sucking filing and retrieval steps, to longer record availability wait times.
Added to that, Florida state law requires that a student’s official records be transferred within three days for school transitions.
All that frustration springboarded Miller to seek an effective solution, despite the enormity of the undertaking.
With the support of her management and IT teams, Miller decided on a mix of scanners from Ricoh.
They chose a Ricoh production scanner as their solution, opting for the fi-7600 scanner. Ricoh production scanners can process thousands of papers a day with uninterrupted workflows. Documents and records can also be filed in secure centralized storage.
The first stage was a daunting prospect: The team needed to scan and archive the ten million existing student records in boxes and boxes of storage.
In order to effectively handle the logistics of scanning such a large volume of records, Miller laid out a plan for digital transformation.
- She created a scan team that could travel to all 54 school sites.
- The team engaged the school staff at each site to prep and organize paperwork, removing staples to speed-up the process.
- They scanned all boxed paper records into a centralized, cloud-based repository.
With the process in place, Miller and her team launched “scan days” at every school site. With high-speed fi Series scanners and just ten people on the “scan team,” the group managed to complete the entire process in just under 14 months. In most cases, the work took one to two days at each school site.
“Ease of use has been a big win for us. Being able to use the product plug-and-play basically has been great…and it's been very easy to use,” Miller says.
Once they scanned and digitized all the archived records, school sites and the records staff implemented the new digital workflow. All new paper forms and records are immediately scanned and digitally organized. Now, all 54 schools in the Manatee County District have two to three Ricoh scanners on site. The district can easily digitize and process records at every school, completely transforming processes for more ease.
The district saw multiple benefits right away. They were able to recover useful physical space across sites, even expanding key spaces for student-centered activities.
Time is no longer wasted combing through stacks and pallets full of boxes in storage rooms. No more going off-site to retrieve records. With the new digitizing system in place, the district staff can quickly process record requests.
The records department and stakeholders across the district can access files and records instantly. Using a few keyword tags, they can locate any record in their cloud storage. Gone are the days of missing records, making paperwork processing efficient for staff—and more helpful for students.
Finally, the new system is particularly useful when the school must provide records for an external audit. Scanning and storing files has optimized the process.
Product Features
Because of the volume of files that each school is required to handle, they chose a model from the Ricoh fi Series family of production scanners. Ricoh production scanners excel at optimizing and scanning big batches of documents, often in a central location.
- Fast, double-sided scanning speeds of up to 100 pages per minute
- 300-page automatic document feeder (ADF) equipped with easy-alignment guides
- Integrated batch tray for convenient document preparation
- Integrated TWAIN and ISIS driver connectivity for compatibility with hundreds of scanning software solutions
fi-7600
The scanner system has had such a positive impact on their work, saving time, money, and frustration. The district’s next step is to expand its scanning system to other departments, such as Human Resources.
Miller undoubtedly supports the predictability and ease, “No one has to go to a file room for records that may or may not be there,” she confirms.