This School District Brings Hiring Process under Control with BPM

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By Linda L. Briggs

With 18,000 students and 2,000 employees, Ohio's Lakota Local School District is the largest suburban school district in Ohio, encompassing 46 square miles and 22 buildings.

Despite the size of the district and the number of employees, Lakota relied on a paper-based system to manage and track some 3,000 temporary workers yearly. The so-called "supplemental" employees, hired each year as needed for specific jobs, range from assistant coaches to theater directors to assorted other staff.

The Problem

"Tracking the paperwork for all of those [contracts] was…, well, the word 'nightmare' comes to mind," said John Laws, director of information technology at Lakota. Moving the paperwork through the system often took weeks, with little chance for users to see the status of their hiring request.

The situation spurred Laws, who had worked with a business process management system at another company, to look for a BPM solution for the school district. "I knew a little bit about what I was looking for," he said, because of his past experience with a BPM suite. "But I couldn't find anyone in education who really had one."

The Search for a BPM Solution

The district began its search for a BPM product through a technical consulting company. Over three months, the consultants helped develop an initial analysis, then proposed building a custom solution. Although the three-month analysis was helpful in getting crucial stakeholders at Lakota interested and involved in the process of selecting an appropriate tool, Laws said, the price for the custom solution made it untenable. "[They] came back at four to five times what we thought we'd have to pay for it. That… killed it right there."

But the initial analysis had helped Laws develop a specific set of needs: He wanted a Web-based solution rather than client-server technology that he would have to install and manage across the district's 22 buildings. He also wanted the solution to be flexible enough that he could use it for other purposes.

He also realized that his IT staff wouldn't be the principal users of a BPM product; rather, the solution needed to meet the needs of users such as school principals, athletic directors, secretaries, HR staff and treasurers, who would make up the product's day-to-day users.

Then Laws happened to meet a Seapine Software representative, who listened to the challenge Lakota faced, took away papers and hand drawings from a skeptical Laws, and returned in two weeks to give a product demonstration that thoroughly convinced the selection team that Seapine's nPath could solve the district's problems. When the Seapine representative presented a mockup of the workflow, Laws said, "Everybody's eyes just about popped out of their sockets. It was just what we had been talking about, [and] it was visually… very manipulate-able and changeable."

In addition, the price came in at less than half of the proposed custom system. Convinced of a quick return on investment, management gave the OK. "I've had to sell a lot of other things to the district," Law said, "but this one, I really didn't have to sell very hard once they saw it."

BPM in Action A supplemental employee at Lakota must go through a series of approvals in order to be hired; the steps depend on the position, contract and other factors. Lakota School District uses the Seapine nPath system to track and automate that workflow, formerly handled through paper documents called "green sheets" that physically crept through the system. Each supplemental employee application must pass through a series of checkpoints; approvals can be done through a secure Web interface. The system can set up triggers to send email to the appropriate contact for approval at each step in the process. One huge advantage of the new system: Someone who has requested a supplemental employee can check at any time where in the process the potential new hire is.

Configuration and Training

It took the district four to five months to customize and configure the product to its needs, working with end users, the district's internal IT group, and Seapine engineers. Most of the time was spent on configuration, not integration, and most of the hours were Seapine's, Laws said. "We defined the processes up front, did the workflows, and brought all the major players together on three or four occasions for just a few hours at a time." Lakota went live with the solution in late spring 2006, and now plans to roll it out elsewhere in the district to manage other business processes.

Configuring the product consisted of making Seapine work with a student information system from Sungard called Pentamation, which runs on an Informix database and, Laws said, has a somewhat challenging interface. His original plan was to connect to Pentamation using ODBC drivers, but he ran into difficulties and decided instead to import data directly for now, using tab-delimited files. He plans in the future to move to a SQL back end database, which will allow the district to set up a more sophisticated native integration in Seapine.

User training on the browser-based system consisted of two sessions of three hours total, Laws said. Seapine staff helped the district put together documentation for the training programs, customized to specific education needs. Even difficult users, Laws said, left the training ready to use the product.

How nPath Works

One of the most useful aspects of the Seapine product, Laws said, is the visual elements it uses in tracking workflows. Keeping track of the various types of supplemental employees and how each should be treated during the extensive hiring process is complex, so presenting users with a visual method for tracking the process was extremely helpful. In some ways, users were sold on the system simply through its graphical, easy-to-understand interface. "When we showed it to [users], they just got it," he said. "It just made sense."

Business users like principals and administrators could visually follow a path showing what steps each employee application would need to go through. "It just made it tremendously easy and intuitive for [users] to understand the processes they were going to go through," Laws explained.

Although the district has yet to complete its first hiring cycle using the new product, Laws said the return on investment is already clear to him: "For us, the process just flat-out wasn't working before, and now we know it's going to work, and work well." In short, a hiring process that once took days or even weeks for each employee, Laws said, has now been reduced to hours.

Useful Links

Lakota Local School District
http://www.lakotaonline.com/

Seapine Software's nPath
http://www.npathbpm.com/

Sungard Pentamation
http://www.pentamation.com/

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