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With the help of Canon's eCopy software, this pioneering American university leads by example when it comes to efficient paper-less processes.
At a Glance
The Challenge
The Solution
The Results
At a Glance
Carnegie Mellon University
Industry
Teritary Education
Geographies
Pennsylvania, USA
Canon Products Used
eCopy
Carnegie Mellon is a national research university of about 7,500 students and 3,000 faculty, research and administrative staff. Since its founding in 1900 by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, Carnegie Mellon University has been a pragmatic institution, adapting rapidly to change.
The University is comprised of seven colleges and schools, and its position of leadership in the arts and in technology is unusual in higher education today. To maintain its position, Carnegie Mellon strives to be at the forefront of new uses of computing in education and is a recognised technology pioneer.
The Challenge
Tom Joyce, Senior Software Engineer in Carnegie Mellon's Administrative Computing & Information Services group, was looking for a better way of handling the massive amounts of paper-based information produced by a large university.
"Basically we were paperbound. We needed to find a way to update our document flow to a more digital approach. We also wanted to be able to incorporate optical character recognition into the process to optimise scanned documents and make them more useful," he says.
In addition to converting more paper documents into digital form, it was critical to be able to effectively manage the growing number of documents created as a result of this migration to an electronic system.
The Solution
To begin with, we worked closely with Joyce to determine the most effective way to meet the University's wide variety of needs.
Many of the University's departments already had Canon imageRUNNER iR5000s in place for departmental printing and copying, so it made sense to work with those departments to equip the existing iR5000s with eCopy software.
Joyce had already installed eCopy in several departments with good success. "Risk Management, the Office of Sponsored Projects, Human Resources and Facilities Management have all implemented eCopy. Each of these departments has become more efficient as a result," he says.
Risk Management, for example, uses eCopy to scan all insurance certificates and policies into the University's document management system. The Office of Sponsored Projects uses eCopy to securely and efficiently manage correspondence, contracts and proposals associated with millions of dollars worth of grants and contracts.
Human Resources uses eCopy to digitise and manage employment documentation, resumes and benefit forms. And Joyce's own department, Administrative Computing & Information Services, finds eCopy an effective way of sharing design specifications with its internal customers for information systems projects it undertakes at the University.
The Results
With Carnegie Mellon's distributed computing platform, the University's data resides on a number of different systems. Joyce sees the opportunity to use eCopy as a 'document on-ramp' for University requirements as wide ranging as accounts payable, activities of the Alumni Office, Oracle financials and many more.
While the University is in the early stages of implementation, Joyce has found eCopy to be easy to use with a small learning curve, and once users understand the value of replacing paper in filing cabinets with electronic documents in an easily accessible document repository, they are extremely eager and creative in the way they use the system.
Joyce is spending time educating new departments in an effort to make the University more productive and less paperbound, and is receiving an excellent response from his user base as a result. "For the departments that are utilising Canon multifunction devices, there is nothing on the market that does a better job of colour compression than eCopy ShareScan. This will become increasingly important to us as users implement more colour-enabled applications moving forward."
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