Large Employer Eliminates Paper Chaos
With 4,500 active employees and about 2,000 student employees at Clemson University, Lucy Arthur, Director of Database and Records Management in Clemson's HR department and her 36 employees have their hands full. They maintain permanent personnel records including applications, personnel action forms, retirement information, correspondence, and leave without pay. They are also responsible for retirement, insurance, compensation, payroll, and employee assistance forms for current employees as well as all other employees who have ever worked at the century-old university. Growing stacks of HR files threatened to overrun the entire department, and accessing them was becoming increasingly difficult.
Like many universities and businesses, Clemson maintained a permanent microfilm archive. By the mid-1990s, the microfilm camera purchased in 1975 was becoming unreliable and hard to maintain. Once the microfilm was developed off-site, employees would have to review it to make sure that all of the images were clear and re-shoot those that were not - a time-consuming process. Retrieving paper documents in response to a request from the employee or the administration was also time-consuming and affected customer service. When the HR department was moved to a smaller location in the late 1990s, employees were literally running out of room to work. "After the move, our records room was two-thirds the size I thought it would be, and all we could keep in the room were active files," recalls Ms. Arthur. "We were running out of space really fast and our files were really full. We had no room to put any more file cabinets. We wanted to be able to image all documents into a single personnel file, sort them any way we wanted to, and not have to wade through files anymore."