SUSTAINABILITY by Linda Ding T
he Texas A&M University System is one of the largest systems of higher education in the nation, with a statewide network of 11 universities, seven state agencies and a comprehensive health science center. Texas A&M System members educate more than 120,000 students and reach another 22 million people through service each year. With more than 28,000 faculty and staff, the A&M System has a physical presence in 250 of the state’s 254 counties and a programmatic presence in every one. In 2011, externally funded research expen- ditures exceeded $780 million to help drive the state’s economy.
Te College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas
A&M University, Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Services were first to recognize the need to adopt paperless business processes. After a rainstorm flooded one of its document storage facilities, a fire hit another AgriLife location and a roof collapsed at a third, it became clear that paper documents are a vulnerable medium, and digitizing them was an im- portant step in guaranteeing their long-term preservation. To solve these problems, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&M University, Texas A&M AgriLife Research, and A&M AgriLife Extension Services banded together to implement a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) software system in 2006. Since then, they have:
• Eliminated 58 overnight mail deliveries per week • Eliminated the need to make 23,335 copies per week • Freed up more than 1,350 square feet of space by removing file cabinets
• Saved more than 8,000 staff hours spent on filing per year
• Eliminated the need to print 200,000 pages per year
USING ECM SOFTWARE TO STREAM- LINE CONTRACT MANAGEMENT Based on Texas A&M AgriLife’s success in adopting paperless business processes, several other A&M System members followed suit, including the Texas A&M Health Science Center (TAMHSC), which adopted Laserfiche in
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TODAYSCAMPUS.COM
The Path to Paperless
2008 to automate business processes including accounts payable and contract management. Kristin Nace, Assistant Vice President for Fiscal
Services and Budgets at TAMHSC, explains how this approach has transformed contract management. “In the past, contracts were mailed from across Texas from all of our regional locations to our central contract office in College Station. Tose came to us in paper, and we required a paper transmittal sheet to be attached to each one.”
Once a contract arrived, that paper was physically
routed through up to six different offices for review. After that, it was physically routed for signature. Once signed, it was finally mailed to the other contracting party. “Once the contract was returned from the contract-
ing party, we were able to store it in a file cabinet in our contract management office. However, we found out subsequently that the auditors would appreciate it if each of the regional offices had a copy of the contract they were being held to, so we needed to fix this problem.” By digitizing and automating this process, TAMHSC
saves money in mailing and couriering costs. It also saves a great deal of time because the software automatically routes contracts to as many as six different offices for simultaneous review. Te contract office stores the final, signed contract in a central document repository so that all the relevant parties at TAMHSC have access to the contract, “thereby making the auditors happy,” says Nace.
OFFERING ECM AS A SHARED SERVICE By 2010, nearly 1,200 staff throughout the Texas A&M System were using Laserfiche, including Texas A&M Uni- versity-Kingsville, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and Texas A&M University’s Department of Entomolo- gy. Te A&M System’s Office for HUB & Procurement Programs, which is responsible for procuring goods and services at the best value, began to encourage the A&M System to treat ECM as a shared service so that system members could piggyback on each other’s efforts. According to Judith Lewis, Senior IT Manager of
IT Solutions and Support, Computing and Information Services, Texas A&M, “By 2009, the Campus Document
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