ECM helps school district to onboard employees and pay staff even during a hurricane

Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District in Texas has implemented an enterprise content management solution from Laserfiche for employee onboarding and other uses. The school district—the third largest district in Texas with 115,000 students, 86 campuses and 17,000 active employees—onboards around 3,900 employees annually. Of those, 1,500 are onboarded in the period between June and August.

In the past, each new employee spent about 30 minutes filling out an onboarding packet that contained at least 27 pages. Many of the forms requested duplicate information. The new employee brought those documents to a contract signing session, and the HR team collected them in a folder to be manually scanned into Laserfiche. Some of the pages had to be pulled out of each packet and walked over to payroll, where they were stored in filing cabinets. In total, the process took 40 minutes per employee.

The district now has transitioned to Laserfiche Forms and Workflow to increase efficiency and eliminate paper. For new employees, the time to fill out paperwork has decreased 83 percent. For school district staff, the new automated onboarding process is 93 percent paperless and four times faster than the manual process. 

Dava Clark, program analyst at Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, says, “Our students were out of school for two full weeks due to Hurricane Harvey, and this was the first time in Cypress-Fairbanks history that we had to delay the first day of school. One of the things we didn’t want to have our employees worry about was getting their paychecks on time, including our 1,200 new hires who were depending on their first paycheck. 

“Our human resources team and payroll team were able to access the necessary documentation from home within Laserfiche and then route it interdepartmentally to be able to send employees their paychecks on time, which would not have been possible without our Laserfiche implementation.” 

According to Laserfiche, Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District has realized the following benefits from automating the employee onboarding process: 

• The time to fill out new-hire paperwork has decreased from 30 minutes to five minutes.

• The process of sorting the paperwork, scanning it, separating it and walking it to payroll has been decreased from 40 minutes to five minutes.

• Paper use has been reduced by 93 percent, and the district hopes to eliminate paper completely.