Successes - University of Houston - Downtown (UHD)
UHD Manages Rapid Growth More Efficiently Using Westbrook Fortis

The University of Houston – Downtown (UHD) is an educational institution that has experienced rapid growth and evolution since its founding in 1974. The University currently serves over 10,000 on campus students, 25,000 applicants per year, remote learning students and continuing education students. The University has grown from one to 40 degree programs during its 35 year evolution.

The mission of the University is to serve a mobile and largely non-resident student population. Many of the students, who are pursuing their education in the face of work, economic and family pressures, start and restart their education, often with gaps of three to four years.

Challenge
UHD has faced several challenges as it continued to add programs and students. One major challenge was an ongoing lack of available space. A clear target for freeing up space was the various offices and rooms around campus that became archives and storerooms for paper files. A second challenge was the need for speed and flexibility in business functions that were increasingly being slowed by paper-based processes. The need to get student information that was stored centrally to remotely located counselors, who may be having an ad-hoc meeting with a student, for example, presented an increasing challenge. A third challenge was the ongoing requirement to comply with record keeping regulations. These include FERPA, which governs how student records need to be stored, retained, and privacy safeguarded, and the Texas Public Information Act (Government Code chapter 552) which requires that UHD, as a publicly funded institution, makes sure that certain types of information are made available to the public at their request.

Solution
UHD first adopted the Fortis enterprise content management solution in early 2002. The initial implementation at the registrar’s office resulted in an effective online resource containing student records for all current and past students at UHD. The student record system became an indispensable and highly successful administrative system within UHD.

Building on that success, new electronic repositories for financial aid, human resources and the IT support functional areas have been added to the UHD Fortis implementation. At present, a new implementation is in planning for the office of the president. With these five major areas covered, Fortis now provides a broad-based document management backbone to increase student service, improve administrative business processes and safeguard the institution’s knowledge and records.

Student Records
UHD currently serves an enrollment of some 10,000 students at any one time. They are split between a central campus and four remote locations. The registrar and admissions office keeps information on all current and past students, incorporating transcripts, correspondence and applications.

The complete repository of student records, incorporating students enrolled from 1974 to the present, includes over 50,000 student files and 200,000 documents.

Business Challenge: The challenge faced by the UHD registrar’s office is to effectively service current students, prospective students and past students in a distributed and dynamic environment. Four separated facilities are each served by counselors who need to access student records for meetings and appointments. Students at an institution such as UHD often will interrupt their academic program for one to four years, and the registrar needs to retrieve the records of those past students and reactivate them as current student files when the student re-enrolls. Further, FERPA and state legislation require that certain information be kept private, while the student’s basic record needs to be made available to that student on demand.

Business Solution: The University of Houston – Downtown has created a comprehensive student records solution, in which correspondence, admissions materials, transcripts and other counselor and registrar records are kept. These are made accessible to 25 student advisors and 10 admissions personnel through the Fortis desktop and portal. The benefits achieved through the solution include getting rid of hard copy records, which free up both onsite space and reduce offsite records expenditures, the ability to quickly get documents at the multiple administrative and counselor locations and the ability to restart a student quickly and effectively after an absence of 2-4 years. The essential nature of this application throughout UHD was brought home recently when the system was brought down for one day for a major upgrade, and dozens of regular users realized how essential this system had become to providing daily services to students and administrators.

Financial Aid
The financial aid process involves an increasing number of yearly applicants that must be processed within a fixed time period. UHD is anticipating a document load representing over 50% of the total 10,000 active students at any one time. These documents are immediately scanned and placed under a secure repository. They enter into a virtual queue for review and processing. This replaces the current totally hard copy system, in which files were in each aid counselor’s office.

Business Challenge: The key business challenge is handling increasing workloads in a fixed time. Additional key issues relate to the need to ensure security of submitted personal financial information and the need for better management oversight of the process.

Business Solution: UHD financial aid has implemented a process in which all incoming aid applications and correspondence are scanned into the system and electronically queued for handling. All counselors now can query and retrieve files online, giving better flexibility for any counselor to handle any student’s inquiry, providing an improved workflow for handling the time-sensitive applications, and providing management oversight of progress in the workload of applications against deadlines. Personal financial information can now also be guaranteed the level of security and access control required by legislation.

Human Resources
The human resources area at UHD has implemented a comprehensive virtual file cabinet for human resource information.

Business Challenge: The driving factor behind placing the human resources into the Fortis repository was extreme space constraints. With UHD expanding steadily, human resources faced immediate “eviction” from offices housing all human resources files.

Business Solution: HR responded by moving all of their files, comprising personnel files, faculty and staff records, benefits files, payroll records, and grievance files online. The benefits for human resources include secure storage of personal information, ability to rapidly query and retrieve information and above all solving the storage space problem.

Information Technology
The information technology service group at UHD, who implemented Fortis for the registrar, financial aid, and HR groups, saw additional opportunity to build on the success of the Fortis system to meet their own internal records management needs. The IT support group has identified a number of areas in which they can use Fortis to make their group more effective and better service providers. Areas implemented to date include user support (incorporating account application forms, account creation forms, grant of access forms), software licensing certificates, property inventory forms and telephone and cell phone billing records and distribution.

Benefits achieved in the IT support area include accessibility of documents, ability for multiple staff to access the same records concurrently, and the enhanced audit ability of the entire service process.

President’s Office
The UHD office of the President is in the early stages of implementing Fortis for their uses. Major areas that this office expects to see benefit in are major events planning that the office is responsible for on a continuing basis and the management of inbound and outbound correspondence.

Summary
The University of Houston – Downtown has moved rapidly from the effective use of document management in one major functional area (registrar) to a broad institution-wide use of a secure document management repository. The Fortis system gives UHD a means to manage their growth effectively while at the same time improving business processes, improving service levels to students, and securing records with a disaster recovery backup strategy for institutional documents and records.

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