The Move to Etrieve
Harrison County Schools continued to find new ways to expand their adoption of ECM, further reducing their reliance on paper forms and manual approval processes. Driven by their desire to continue creating new efficiencies, Harrison County Schools began looking into the latest generation of Softdocs’ ECM offerings, Etrieve.
“Many of the new things we were asking about doing weren’t possible with Doc e, but with Etrieve we’d be able to do all of them,” said Todd Poole, technology director. “We wanted to do more with forms on our own. We wanted to do more outreach to parents and to collect key information that way. We’re in the process of doing all that now with Etrieve.”
Etrieve introduced new functionalities to the paperless routing capabilities that first attracted Harrison County Schools to Softdocs’ offered ECM solutions. Featuring a graphical workflow designer, Etrieve facilitated easily built and maintained workflows that were much more versatile and robust than previously allowed. Migrating to Etrieve also enabled Harrison County Schools to create parallel workflows, allowed content to accumulate by creating rules-based workflow suspensions and permitted PDFs or other documents to be integrated directly into their workflows. Not only are the automation of complex workflows simplified, but Etrieve greatly increases workflow visibility.
Seeing Etrieve’s potential for growth into new departments and different uses, Harrison County Schools opted to recreate all their existing Doc e forms and processes in Etrieve to help facilitate a quicker launch and less potential for employee confusion. Looking back, they now encourage other schools to take a slightly different approach.
Hinkle explained, “When we first implemented Doc e Fill, we tried so hard to mimic our existing paper forms so our employees wouldn’t become confused with the transition to electronic forms. Then, during our migration to Etrieve, we had everything automatically migrated over. In hindsight, I probably would have gone form to form, choosing what was most important and changing some things to make everything simpler in Etrieve…Our forms (in Etrieve) don’t have to look like our paper forms used to–they can be better.”
In other words, the migration process from Doc e to Etrieve allows institutions the opportunity to examine and potentially streamline their current processes and forms to aid in the creation of new efficiencies.