In their Own Words....

Fulton County Schools, GA
August, 2003

From:

Rita Gausden

Supervisor, Personnel Records

Fulton County Schools

Atlanta, GA

We maintain approximately 10,000 active files for Administrative/Certified/Classified employees. We also maintain files on all inactive employees from before 1900 to present.  Personnel Records is responsible for the maintenance, release and security of employee personnel files. 

 We handle verification of employment/experience, calculate supplements, determine step placement/salary for certified employees as it relates to outside experience credit /certificates, subpoena/production of document requests, medical information, direct deposit, data entry for all employees into our personnel/payroll system and other duties as related to employee files. 

 With these duties/responsibilities we must access personnel files constantly to provide service to our internal/external customers.  Before we started the optical imaging project, each file had to been accessed manually.  The majority of our files are housed in one central location; however, with space being limited, some files are kept in other locations. All filing was done manually. The scanning process has been a “life-saver” for us.  Now with a “click of a button” all staff in Personnel can access scanned employee records from their workstation.  This has been a much better retrieval process.  Since employees do not have to leave their workstations to pull a record, the efficiency and timeliness has increased tremendously. 

 Some of the comments we hear are:  “This is great”; “We love being able to access the files at our desk”; “This saves me so much time”;  “I can handle a request and not have to wait to get back to the employee”.   “I can’t believe it’s so fast”; “It is so nice to be able to access the information I need”. When a employee calls and needs a copy of something from their file we can handle their request immediately. 

 Even though our office has always been rated high for customer service, this process has led to better/more efficient customer service. We started scanning  personnel files with the 2001-2002 school year (Certified & Classified).  Presently all new hires for the 2001-02; 2002-03 have been scanned and 2003-04 are in the process of being scanned.  In October 2002 we started scanning daily filing. 

 Due to the extremely heavy volume of filing this has been a very efficient process for us.  Contracts/Assignment Notices for 2002/2003; 2003/2004 and Evaluations for 2001/2002; 2002/2003 have been scanned.  Since we have a need to secure/separate medical/legal information from the regular file the different folder types that Winocular provides has been very helpful. We implemented a new scanning process for our Classified Assignment Notices (3,093) in August.

 This new process has saved us days of manually scanning each assignment separately into Employee Records.  With the new software all of the assignment notices were scanned in less than 2 days.  We have  81 boxes of stored scanned records (40 boxes are stored off site at the present time).  With increased volume and no additional staff , Optical Imaging has been wonderful in meeting our needs.  I don’t know how we would have been able to continue with our old processes of manually filing and maintaining records. 

 Accessing a record via Winocular takes seconds, where our old process could take as long as 10-15 minutes or more depending on where the file was stored.  We presently have over 12,000 records created in Employee Records. We average scanning 19,608 pages/documents per month.  Since October 2002 we have scanned 205,894 pages/documents.